“If Sandy Hook Is ‘Bearable’, What Is Not?”: Congress Trembling To The Call Of The NRA
You frequently find fortune cookie aphorisms, yes, but it’s not often that you find searing insight within Twitter’s 140-character confines. Which is why a June tweet from one Dan Hodges — his profile describes him as a British political commentator — stood out.
“In retrospect,” wrote Hodges, “Sandy Hook marked the end of the U.S. gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”
You may cringe to hear the nation’s response to the December 2012 massacre of 20 young children — six adults also died — at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, described in that fashion, but you can’t deny the brutal truth of the observation.
After Sandy Hook, President Obama called for new legislative initiatives, saying, “Surely we can do better than this.” Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter said, “We need action.” Rep. John Larson said, “Politics be damned.” Parents of one victim walked the halls of Congress carrying pictures of their dead son and beseeching lawmakers to look, even as polls showed nearly 60 percent of Americans wanted stronger gun laws.
And nothing happened. In deciding between its children and its guns, America had decided the loss of the former was, in Hodges’ chilling word, “bearable.”
The memory of it haunts a Sunday interview CNN did with Andy Parker, the father of Roanoke, Virginia, TV reporter Alison Parker, who was murdered live on camera last week by a hateful and deranged man named Vester Flanagan. In vowing to commit his life to achieving sensible gun control, Parker said a number of striking things.
“I’m telling you,” he said, “they messed with the wrong family.”
“I’m going to be working on this for a long time,” he said. “I know that this is not a sprint, it’s a marathon.”
He acknowledged that we have seen many “tipping points” where guns are concerned: the shooting of a congresswoman and her constituents at a supermarket, a mass murder at a movie theater, the Christmas season butchery of schoolchildren in Newtown. “But,” he said, sounding like nothing so much as a father who very much loved his daughter, “I think people recognizing who the victim was and what she represented and how kind and sweet and innocent she was, I think this time it’s going to be different.”
It’s always going to be different. But it never is.
With all due deference to a father’s incalculable sorrow, the likeliest outcome here is that the murder of Alison Parker and her colleague Adam Ward and the wounding of local official Vicki Gardner will join the long line of tipping points that didn’t tip and turning points that didn’t turn. Which is why Parker’s words inspire no great hope, but only break your heart.
The sad thing is, there is no — repeat: no — inherent or insoluble conflict between the desire of some of us to have access to guns for sport and self-defense and the desire of others of us to keep dangerous people from possessing those weapons. Decent, moderate people, working from both sides of the question, could probably hammer out ideas to safeguard both imperatives in an afternoon.
Problem is, gun owners’ interests are represented not by decent, moderate people, but by the NRA, an extremist gang for whom even the most modest regulation is a brick in the road to tyranny. So long as the NRA has such an outsized voice in this debate, so long as politicians, unencumbered by conscience or vertebrae, tremble to its call, and so long as many of us are silent and supine in the face of that obscenity, Hodges is correct. And we are doomed to a future of frequent, predictable and preventable tragedies some of us will mistake for freedom.
It makes you wonder. If that kind of thing is really “bearable” then what, pray tell, is not?
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo
“America Moving Farther Apart”: Hillary Clinton Probably Can’t Get Gun Control Passed. But She Should Talk About It, Anyway
Hillary Clinton is talking about guns, and everyone seems surprised. After all, doesn’t she know the issue is a sure loser for Democrats?
The truth is quite a bit more complicated than that — in fact, pushing for measures like expanded background checks is likely to help Clinton in the 2016 election. But if she’s going to promise to make headway on this issue, she needs to offer some plausible account of how as president she could make real progress where Barack Obama couldn’t.
Let’s address the matter of the gun issue’s political potency first. As is the case on so many issues, the Republican position is more popular when the questions are vague, while the Democratic position is more popular when the questions are specific. If you look at polling on guns, what you see is that the country is split pretty evenly on the broad question of whether gun laws should be more strict or less strict. But particular measures to regulate guns get much more support, especially universal background checks, which as many as nine out of ten Americans endorse.
At some point in this discussion, someone will always say: “But what about the NRA? They’re so powerful!” The NRA’s power is real in some ways and illusory in others, and it’s important to understand which is which. When it comes to lobbying, the NRA is indeed hugely powerful. It has the ability to stop any legislation on guns, often before it even gets written. But elections are an entirely different story. Almost all the congressional candidates who win the NRA’s supposedly coveted endorsement are Republican incumbents from conservative districts who win their elections by huge margins. When Republicans have a good election, as they did in 2014 and 2010, the NRA rushes to reporters to claim credit, saying the election proves that voters will punish any candidate who isn’t pro-gun. But when Democrats have a good election, as they did in 2012 and 2008, the NRA is strangely silent.
Gun ownership has been steadily declining since the 1970’s, and guns are more concentrated among voters that Democrats already won’t win and don’t need. For instance, according to the Pew Research Center, whites are twice as likely as Hispanics to own guns. If winning over Hispanic voters is the sine qua non of a Republican victory, advocacy for loosening gun laws isn’t exactly going to be part of a winning formula for the GOP. The person most likely to be a gun owner is a married white man from the South — in other words, probably a Republican.
When people argue that Hillary Clinton shouldn’t touch the gun issue, watch out for comparisons to how Bill Clinton did in the Electoral College, because America’s political geography is very different than it was two decades ago. For instance, I guarantee you that Senator Joe Manchin will at some point loudly advise that Clinton needs to tread carefully on guns if she’s to win his home state of West Virginia like her husband did twice. But the truth is that Clinton is probably not going to win West Virginia no matter what she does, and she doesn’t need to. Barack Obama’s two comfortable Electoral College victories were built on combining Democratic strongholds in the Northeast and West with the more liberal states in the Midwest and the fast-changing Southwest, where Hispanic votes are key. Clinton will almost certainly seek to assemble the same map — and it’s one where advocacy for the more popular gun restrictions will help her, not hurt her.
Still: if Clinton says it’s vital to enact universal background checks and other “common-sense” gun laws, she has to explain how she’s going to do it. Let’s not forget that in the wake of the horrific Newtown massacre, a bipartisan measure to expand background checks failed to overcome a Republican filibuster in the Senate, falling six votes short of the 60 it needed. If a bill that had the support of 90 percent of the public couldn’t make it past congressional Republicans just after 20 elementary school students had been murdered, how is Clinton going to convince them to vote for whatever she proposes?
But talking about gun measures in the presidential campaign could still have a practical impact, by elevating the issue and thereby making it more likely that more gun laws might be passed on the state level. And that’s where all the action has been of late: since the Newtown shooting, there have been dozens of laws passed at the state level on the subject of guns, and they tell a story of red and blue America moving farther apart.
In Red America, one state after another has passed laws to expand who can get a gun and where you can take it. Last year Georgia passed a law allowing people to take guns into churches, government buildings, and bars. “Stand your ground” laws have proliferated in Republican-run states (despite the fact that research indicates that they increase the number of homicides).
Meanwhile in Blue America, dozens of laws have been passed to rein in guns. Legislatures in states like California, Maryland, and Connecticut expanded background checks, restricted access for those with mental illness or domestic abuse convictions, and made it harder to get assault weapons. In 2014, voters in Washington state passed a ballot initiative mandating universal background checks by a wide margin.
So when we talk about the gun issue, we have to keep three things in mind. First, the kind of restrictions Clinton is proposing are hugely popular. Second, there really are two Americas when it comes to guns. And third, one of those Americas has the ability and the desire to stop any gun legislation in Congress. If Hillary Clinton has a plan to deal with that last reality, it would be interesting to hear.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, July 10, 2015
“The Right To Be Free From Guns”: Those Who Want To Live, Shop, Go To School, And Worship In Gun-Free Spaces Also Have Rights
Advocates of a saner approach to guns need a new strategy. We cannot go on like this, wringing our hands in frustration after every tragedy involving firearms. We said “Enough” after Sandy Hook. We thought the moment for action had come. Yet nothing happened. We are saying “Enough” after Charleston. But this time, we don’t even expect anything to happen.
What’s needed is a long-term national effort to change popular attitudes toward handgun ownership. And we need to insist on protecting the rights of Americans who do not want to be anywhere near guns.
None of this should mean letting Congress off the hook or giving up on what might be done now. So kudos to Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Pat Toomey (R-PA) for saying on Tuesday that they are looking for ways to bring back their proposal that would require background checks for gun sales. In 2013, it failed to get the needed 60 votes and won support from only three Republicans besides Toomey.
Lest anyone doubt that gun-control measures can work, a study released earlier this month by the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University found that a 1995 Connecticut law requiring a permit or license contingent on passing a background check was associated with a 40 percent drop in gun homicides.
But as long as gun control is a cause linked to ideology and party — and as long as the National Rifle Association and its allies claim a monopoly on individual rights arguments — reasonable steps of this sort will be ground to death by the Washington Obstruction Machine.
That’s why the nation needs a public-service offensive on behalf of the health and safety of us all. It could build on the Sandy Hook Promise and other civic endeavors. If you doubt it could succeed, consider how quickly opinion changed on the Confederate flag.
My friend Guy Molyneux, a progressive pollster, laid out how it could happen. “We need to build a social movement devoted to the simple proposition that owning handguns makes us less safe, not more,” he told me. “The evidence is overwhelming that having a gun in your home increases the risks of suicide, domestic violence, and fatal accidents, and yet the number one reason given for gun purchases is ‘personal safety.’ We need a public health campaign on the dangers of gun ownership, similar to the successful efforts against smoking and drunk driving.”
The facts were on the side of those who battled the tobacco companies, and they are just as compelling here. When we talk about guns, we don’t focus enough on the reality, reported in the 2015 Annual Review of Public Health, that nearly two-thirds of the deaths from firearms violence are suicides. Yes, people can try to kill themselves with pills, but there’s no coming back from a gunshot to the head. Those in the throes of depression who have a gun nearby are more likely to act on their darkest impulses.
Nor do we talk enough about accidental deaths when children get their hands on guns, or what happens when a domestic argument escalates and a firearm is readily available. The message is plain and simple: Households that voluntarily say no to guns are safer.
“The best way to disarm the NRA rhetorically is to make the Second Amendment issue moot,” Molyneux said. “This is not about the government saying you cannot own a handgun. This is about society saying you should not have a gun, especially in a home with children.”
Molyneux says his approach “does not imply giving up on gun control legislation.” On the contrary, the best path to better laws is to foster a revolution in popular attitudes. And this approach would finally put the rights of non-gun owners at the center of the discussion.
“Those of us who want to live, shop, go to school, and worship in gun-free spaces also have rights,” Molyneux says. “In what way is ‘freedom’ advanced by telling the owner of a bar or restaurant they cannot ban handguns in their own place of business, as many states now do? Today, it is the NRA that is the enemy of freedom, by seeking to impose its values on everyone else.”
The nation could ring out with the new slogans of liberty: “Not in my house.” “Not in our school.” “Not in my bar.” “Not in our church.” We’d be defending one of our most sacred rights: The right not to bear arms.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post; The National Memo, June 29, 2015
“When A Hobby Verges Upon Obsession”: Veronica Rutledge And America’s Gun Cult
That Idaho mother shot to death by her two-year-old son in a Walmart store? Judging by Veronica Jean Rutledge’s biography, you can be just about certain that she’d driven to the store wearing a seatbelt, with her little boy buckled carefully into his car seat.
By all accounts, Rutledge, age 29, was that kind of mother: loving, diligent and careful — an entirely admirable young woman. In the aftermath of the tragedy, photos of her shining face are almost unbearable to contemplate.
A high-school valedictorian, Rutledge graduated from the University of Idaho with a degree in chemistry. She was a promising research scientist at Batelle’s Idaho National Laboratory, working on reducing the toxicity of nuclear waste.
It would appear to follow that her child’s home environment was carefully childproofed, with household poisons stored safely away and dangerous objects placed out of reach. Rutledge probably would never have dreamed of letting her son play outside unsupervised, nor left him alone in the bathtub.
And yet she carried a loaded semi-automatic handgun in her purse on a post-Christmas shopping trip and left it unattended in a shopping cart, where the child took it out and somehow pulled the trigger.
Rutledge died instantly there in the electronics aisle.
Very likely her son is too young to understand or remember what happened, although it will shadow his life forever.
In the immediate aftermath, Terry Rutledge, Veronica’s father-in-law, gave an ill-advised interview to a Washington Post reporter expressing anger that anybody would use the tragedy “as an excuse to grandstand on gun rights,” as the article put it.
“They are painting Veronica as irresponsible, and that is not the case,” he said. “… I brought my son up around guns, and he has extensive experience shooting it. And Veronica had had handgun classes; they’re both licensed to carry, and this wasn’t just some purse she had thrown her gun into.”
Oh no, it was a designer item produced by an Illinois firm called Gun Tote’n Mamas with a zipped compartment for carrying a concealed handgun — given to her as a Christmas present from her husband.
Nevertheless, Rutledge made an incomprehensible blunder, and it cost her life. The blunder, as I see it, of carrying a loaded handgun — with a chambered round, no less — as a kind of fashion accessory, a totemic item signifying her cultural identity.
Her close friend Sheri Sandow explained that for all her academic accomplishments, Rutledge was “as comfortable at a campground or a gun range as she was in a classroom.”
OK, fine… but why Walmart? Not because she was fearful, Sandow explained.
“In Idaho, we don’t have to worry about a lot of crime and things like that,” she said. “And to see someone with a gun isn’t bizarre. [Veronica] wasn’t carrying a gun because she felt unsafe. She was carrying a gun because she was raised around guns. This was just a horrible accident.”
Indeed, she needn’t have felt unsafe. The most recent homicide in Blackfoot, Idaho, where the family lived, was six years ago.
The scientist in Veronica Rutledge, had she allowed herself to think about it rationally, would have understood that the pistol in her purse was far more dangerous to her and her child than any external threat. As an NRA adept and a big fan of the Guns.com website, however, she evidently become so habituated to carrying a gun around that she quite forgot she had it.
By itself, there’s nothing inherently objectionable about target shooting, a harmless pastime like bowling or golf. I own a target pistol myself, and take it out sometimes to plink aluminum cans. I also own shotguns, although I no longer hunt.
But when a hobby verges upon obsession, you’re talking about cultlike behavior. Spend a few minutes browsing around Guns.com and maybe you’ll see what I mean. Current features include Kid Rock’s gun collection, and the effects of shooting a giant Gummi Bear with a 12 gauge.
Cool!
In a recent New Yorker article, Adam Gopnik explained the political psychology of guns. The great majority of Americans agree that there should be sensible limitations on the possession and use of tools whose function is killing, “while a small minority feels, with a fanatic passion, that there shouldn’t. In a process familiar to any student of society, the majority of people in favor of gun sanity care about a lot of other things, too, and think about them far more often; the gun crazy think about guns all the time, and vote on the issue with fanatic intensity.”
Hence handguns as costume jewelry, totems signifying one’s membership in the NRA tribe. Terry Rutledge, however, can rest easy. If the 2012 Newtown, CT massacre failed to bring reform, his daughter-in-law’s death won’t change anything significant.
Except possibly the behavior of anybody tempted to pack heat around little children.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, January 7, 2014
“An Ounce Of Courage”: We Need To Talk About Guns, Whether The NRA Likes It Or Not
The medical community has been no match for the National Rifle Association for decades. By the time Congress leaves town for the holidays, we’ll know if senators have shown an ounce of courage or if the NRA has bagged one more trophy. Either way, we won’t get the high-stakes discussion we need about guns.
At issue is the fate of Dr. Vivek Murthy, nominated over a year ago to be surgeon general but consigned to limbo due to his completely unremarkable view that gun violence is a public health problem. Murthy’s pre-nomination Twitter feed attests to his passion for the tighter gun laws that he, like most doctors, believes would cut down on deaths and injuries. But if Murthy lands the job, don’t expect him to talk about any of that. He told a Senate committee in February that he wouldn’t use the post as a bully pulpit for new gun laws.
So much for the surgeon general’s role as “the nation’s leading spokesman on matters of public health.” And so much for standing up to the NRA.
The group blasted out of the box charging that Murthy supported “radical gun control measures” and would use the office of surgeon general to advance “his pre-existing campaign against gun ownership.” Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, an ophthalmologist and 2016 presidential prospect, said Murthy would attack the constitutional right to own firearms “under the guise of a public health and safety campaign” and said he would try to block his confirmation.
The 2014 campaign, with its band of skittish red-state Senate Democrats vulnerable to NRA attacks, put Murthy’s future on hold. His pivotal moment — vote? no vote? failed vote? — has finally arrived, and it happens to coincide with the Dec. 14 anniversary of the murder of 26 children and educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The juxtaposition is illuminating.
One rap against Murthy is that, in Paul’s words, he would encourage doctors to “use their position of trust to ask patients, including minors, details about gun ownership in the home.” To which I say, if only. If only the health professionals who examined and treated Adam Lanza had asked him and his mother those questions and managed to get that home arsenal out of reach before he went on his Sandy Hook rampage two years ago.
Paul also said he was concerned that Murthy considers guns “a public health issue on par with heart disease and has diminished the role of mental health in gun violence.” But in a lengthy study of Adam Lanza’s “psychological deterioration” released last month, Connecticut’s Office of the Child Advocate said repeatedly that guns are the critical factor in mass shootings.
“The conclusion that access to guns drives shooting episodes far more than the presence of mental illness is inescapable. Those countries that have tight gun controls in general experience less overall gun violence and have fewer episodes per capita of mass shootings,” the authors wrote. They said mental illness “plays only a small role” in mass murder while guns, “especially assault weapons with high-capacity magazines,” play a “ubiquitous role.” Widespread access to such weapons and ammunition “is an urgent public health concern,” they wrote.
Medical professionals agree. The American Academy of Pediatrics website lists eight priorities in its federal advocacy section, and No. 1 is “Keeping children safe: Gun violence prevention.” Banning assault weapons is the top item on its state advocacy page. The American Medical Association favors an assault weapons ban and closing loopholes that allow gun buyers to avoid background checks.
Gun safety activists marked the second anniversary of Sandy Hook by releasing a study that found at least 95 school shootings in 33 states have occurred since that tragedy. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) called Congress “complicit in these murders if we continue to sit back and do nothing to reverse this trend.”
There was never a more complicit moment than in April 2013, four months after Sandy Hook, when the Senate tried to pass a bipartisan bill to require background checks online and at gun shows. Supporters needed 60 votes to break a filibuster, and only mustered 54.
Under Senate rules for nominations, Murthy needs only 51 votes. If he prevails, he told senators he’ll focus primarily on obesity, “the defining challenge of our time.” In other words, he’d be another Michelle Obama, who chose obesity as a worthy but relatively non-controversial First Lady cause. He wouldn’t be another C. Everett Koop, the Reagan-era surgeon general who crusaded against tobacco and mailed sexually explicit AIDS information to every household in America.
Restraint could get Murthy confirmed. To make real progress against gun violence, he’d need to channel Koop.
By: Jill Lawrence, The National Memo, December 11, 2014
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