“An Inept Congress”: Two Years After Aurora, Where’s The Gun Reform?
It’s been two years since the tragic Aurora, Colorado theater shooting, which killed 12 people and injured 70. But although many politicians, including President Obama, vowed that the nation would finally do something to strengthen gun regulations, Congress still hasn’t passed a single gun control law since. In fact, Congress hasn’t passed any major gun reform since 1994’s Assault Weapons Ban, which expired 10 years ago.
That doesn’t mean that nothing has changed, however. Months later, after the Newtown elementary school shooting in December 2012, the president set up a task force to address the issue. He promised to send Congress proposals for strengthening gun control, and he urged lawmakers to ban assault weapons, pass a universal background check law, and limit high-capacity ammunition clips.
He then signed 23 executive orders into law in January 2013. These included reducing barriers to background checks, researching the causes of gun violence, and improving mental health services. As Forbes explained at the time, “It does not appear that any of the executive orders would have any impact on the guns people currently own – or would like to purchase – and that all proposals regarding limiting the availability of assault weapons or large ammunition magazines will be proposed for congressional action.”
In other words, Congress still needed to act. In April 2013, the Senate voted to expand the background check system, a reform that 90 percent of Americans supported. But the amendment failed to to gain the 60 votes it needed to advance, due to pressure from the National Rifle Association and the lack of support from some red-state Democrats such as North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp.
President Obama called the vote “a shameful day in Washington.”
Obama took two more executive actions in August 2013. He banned military weapons that the United States had sold or given to allies from being imported back into the country. These weapons, however, are rarely used at crime scenes.
The president also attempted to close a loophole that allows felons and anyone else who can’t legally purchase a gun to register firearms to a corporation. The new rule requires anyone associated with that corporation to go through a background check. But that rule only applies to guns regulated under the National Firearms Act, which only regulates very deadly weapons such as machine guns.
Meanwhile, Congress still hasn’t passed any major gun legislation. The only step in the right direction was in May 2014, when the House passed an amendment that would increase funding for the country’s background check system.
In June, 163 House Democrats wrote an open letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), asking him to allow a vote on legislation to address gun violence. If he doesn’t allow a vote, it could resurface as a major issue in the midterms.
Even though there hasn’t been substantive national action to reduce gun violence, some states have taken gun control into their own hands.
Colorado’s state legislature passed laws that required universal background checks and limited gun magazines to 15 rounds of ammunition. Two Democratic state senators were recalled shortly thereafter, in an effort that was heavily supported by the NRA.
New York also passed new gun control and mental health laws. Other states have improved their background check systems, limited magazine capacity, and worked to prevent the mentally ill from accessing guns.
According to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, 64 laws have strengthened state gun regulations since the Newtown shootings, and 70 laws have weakened them.
By: Rachel Witkin, The National Memo, July 18, 2014
“Punish Them At The Polls: President Barack Obama Is Right, We Should Be Ashamed Of Gun Violence
We should be ashamed of the shooting after shooting on our streets and in our schools. We should be ashamed that Congress sits on its hands and does nothing to curb the slaughter.
That was how President Barack Obama characterized the issue of gun violence in a discussion with Tumblr founder David Karp the other day, and the president got it exactly right.
Eighteen months ago, 20 children were murdered in a grade school in Connecticut — and nothing was done to expand background checks or limit weapons clips. Since then, there have been 74 shootings at schools — the latest this week in Oregon left two dead and one wounded — and still nothing is done. And that’s just schools; that doesn’t count the shootings in theaters, temples, churches and incidents such as the recent Las Vegas spree that left two police officers, a Walmart customer and the two shooters dead.
And now, with the defeat of the No. 2 Republican in the House, Eric Cantor, the chances of anything getting done are even slimmer. Cantor, a Virginia Republican, who some critics said was too soft on defending gun rights as well as immigration reform, lost in a stunning upset to a tea party candidate in a GOP primary Tuesday. His defeat likely will both embolden the tea party wing of the Republican Party and make any remaining establishment Republicans more cautious. That means little action on issues such as gun control and immigration reform.
“The country has to do some soul-searching on this. This is becoming the norm,” Obama said Tuesday. “Our levels of gun violence are off the charts. There’s no advanced developed country on Earth that would put up with this.”
Yes, mental health is an issue related to violence, and we have to find better ways of dealing with it. But other countries have people with mental illnesses and don’t have shootings on this scale. As Obama said, “The United States does not have a monopoly on crazy people.” Yet “we’re the only developed country” that repeatedly has such terrible acts. “There’s no place else like this,” the president said.
This does not mean the end of the Second Amendment. We can respect gun and hunter rights and still curb gun violence. Australia has done it. Other countries have done it.
It’s fear of the political clout of the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers that is the biggest factor in Congress’ failure to act. Obama also noted that although polls show that a majority of Americans support steps to control guns, they don’t feel passionately enough about it to punish lawmakers who disagree. “Until that happens, sadly, not that much is going to change.”
Obama called the failure to achieve reasonable gun restrictions the biggest frustration of his presidency. It should be the biggest frustration for all Americans. Voters need to not only support tighter gun control; they need to get angry with politicians who refuse to act. And then punish them at the polls.
By: Milwaukee Sun Journal, Opinion, June 12, 2014
“In What Kind Of Society Do We Live?: Pediatricians Take On The NRA Over Gun Safety
For the past three decades, the American Academy of Pediatrics—some 62,000 members strong—has been an outspoken voice on the issue of gun control, a position that has landed it on the NRA’s (admittedly very long) list of enemies. In 1992, the AAP issued its first policy statement supporting a handgun and assault weapons ban, making it the first public health organization to do so, and it has long recommended that doctors talk about gun safety with parents. Since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, the AAP has stepped up attempts to educate parents about gun safety around children.
But as the fight over gun rights grows ever more virulent at the national level, the AAP and individual doctors have quietly begun to take a softer stance on the issue, turning their focus to peddling realistic policies rather than clinging to a hard-and-fast no-guns line.
On a recent Sunday in April, 70 doctors and scientists associated with the AAP filed into a convention center in Vancouver to discuss firearm injury prevention. Presenters clicked through PowerPoint slides highlighting topics such as risk factors for gun injuries, popular gun-safety myths, and stats on suicide and homicide due to guns in the home. “The issue of guns really follows directly from all the concerns we have about injuries in general. This is one kind of injury that endangers the health and life of kids,” said Dr. Robert Sege, a Boston Medical Center pediatrician, who gave a presentation on how to talk about guns with parents.
The AAP’s outgoing president, Thomas McInerny—who made the Sandy Hook massacre a call to action for gun safety during his one-year post—sat in the audience. While the AAP has been advocating for an end to gun violence for some 30 years now, the shooting in Newtown shocked the nation and galvanized the AAP’s doctors to redouble their efforts in support of new gun-control measures. Newtown pediatrician Laura Nowacki lost eight of her patients in the massacre at Sandy Hook. “I’ve never spoken to the media until all of this happened. But I really believe I have to stand up. I have to use my voice,” she told the AAP News in June.
Several more Newtown victims were patients of Dr. Richard Auerbach; he’d held two of them in his arms in the delivery room where they were born. Auerbach, along with other pediatricians, wrote to Congress last year in support of an ultimately doomed measure to ban semiautomatic assault weapons brought by Senator Diane Feinstein, a California Democrat.
“These guns, these bullets blew open these children’s heads, their bodies, their limbs,” Auerbach wrote. “In what kind of society do we live, whereby these weapons are needed to defend and protect?”
For its part, the National Rifle Association (NRA) says pediatricians have no business talking about gun laws. “The AAP has a long history of advocating for gun control measures that a majority of the American people have rejected time and time again,” says NRA spokesperson Catherine Mortensen, citing in particular the Eddie Eagle GunSafe Program, which it says has been used to teach gun safety to over 27 million children since 1988.
“The fact is, no one does more to promote gun safety, education, and training than the National Rifle Association,” Mortensen says. “And if these pediatricians want to help us promote that message, we would welcome their membership in the NRA. Dues are 25 dollars a year.”
An estimated 20,600 people under the age of 25 are injured by a gun every year and 6,570 die, according to the AAP. Guns kill twice as many in this age group as cancer, five times as many as heart disease and 20 times as many as infections. By 2015, guns are expected to surpass motor vehicle crashes as a cause of death for young people, according to the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.
In the year after Newtown, six states—California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey and New York—passed comprehensive gun safety laws. Gun rights groups immediately mounted challenges and have countered by lobbying for and passing legal expansions of gun rights. Most recently in Georgia, the governor signed what detractors call the “Guns Everywhere” Act allowing licensed gun owners to carry their weapons in public places, including schools, churches and bars. The NRA called its passage a “historic victory for the Second Amendment.”
In the last year and a half, states have been duking it out in a sort of tit-for-tat legislative pattern—the number of state laws strengthening firearm regulations (64) is close to the number weakening them, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, an advocacy group that tracks state gun laws. The largest gun-rights expansion efforts were concentrated in the South, while the coasts passed stronger gun control laws.
Meanwhile, even as fewer Americans choose to own guns—the share of households with a gun has dropped to about a third down from half in the 1980s, according to the Pew Research Center—public support for the regulation of firearms also seems to be down. In the 1990s, support for stricter gun laws hovered between 60 and 78 percent. More recent polling shows fewer than half of Americans think gun laws should be more strict, down from 58 percent from a survey given just after the Newtown shooting.
Because of this public reluctance, the AAP has started to focus on how to realistically reach parents in red states as well as blue—and to soften some of its language on gun control. The most recent policy statement affirms that “the most effective measure to prevent suicide, homicide, and unintentional firearm-related injuries to children and adolescents is the absence of guns from homes and communities,” but no longer calls for a total ban on handguns, instead advocating for “the strongest possible regulations” for their use.
Likewise, pediatricians and gun control advocates have tempered their message—and they say the less controversial efforts are working.
For pediatrician Claudia Fruin, telling parents not to keep a gun in their home is unrealistic, especially in Utah where she practices and is part of the AAP leadership. The conservative state was named the fourth-best for gun owners by Guns and Ammo magazine last year partly due to laws allowing firearms on school grounds.
“There needs to be a compromise. Otherwise we’re isolating people and they’re just pissed off at us,” Fruin says. In January she founded Bulletproof Kids, a public service campaign that advocates for the secure storage of firearms. The group—whose motto, “Owning a gun is a right. Protecting children is a responsibility” was created to be distinctively Second Amendment-friendly—partners the Utah chapter of AAP with law enforcement and businesses including gun shops like Doug’s Shoot’n Sports and “Get Some” Guns and Ammo as well as Liberty Safe, a safe manufacturer, on the safe storage of guns in the home, an issue Fruin says is “hopefully the one thing we can all agree on.”
Fruin says although she was unable to secure a partnership with the Shooting Sports Council (the Utah equivalent of the NRA accuses her of having a political agenda), most parents have been receptive, wanting to know how they can get their hands on a biometric safe. And other states have reached out to Fruin for advice on replicating the program.
In West Virginia, where pediatric resident Lisa Costello notes that one out of every two homes has a gun, similar local efforts are underway to promote firearm safety from the pediatrician’s office.
Costello is one of the chairs for the P.A.V.E. campaign (Pediatricians Against Violence Everywhere), a one-year advocacy effort focusing on firearm injury prevention by the special arm of AAP for pediatricians-in-training.
The operation encourages the 13,000-member group to mobilize on gun safety at the clinic, the community, and the state and federal level, as well as on social media.
“I see this in my clinic, we see this in our emergency rooms, in our inpatient wards, in our ICUS. We see these children and families impacted by firearms. That’s why we’ve been motivated to focus on this issue,” says Costello, who for her part counsels parents on firearms and injury prevention.
“My parents are very receptive to the issue of firearm injury. They appreciate that as a pediatrician I’m concerned for my patients’ health and safety,” Costello says.
Most recently, the NRA and the AAP have been embroiled in a very public legal feud over the rights of doctors to talk with parents about gun safety. In 2011, Florida Governor Rick Scott signed a NRA-sponsored law that forbade pediatricians from asking about guns in the home. A federal judge later struck down the law as unconstitutional and a decision on the state’s appeal is pending. The NRA has sponsored similar legislation in at least five other states—Alabama, North Carolina, West Virginia, Minnesota, and Oklahoma.
AAP guidelines urge pediatricians to counsel parents during checkups about the dangers of allowing kids to have access to guns. About half of all AAP pediatricians say they recommend the removal of handguns from the home, according to a national survey of AAP members.
There’s also the issue of funding for federal research—of which there has been almost none. Even after President Obama lifted the long freeze on gun research—lobbied for and won by the NRA in 1996—Congress still has yet to appropriate the $10 million in funds promised to the CDC for gun research, an amount that even if released would be too little for quality research, according to pediatricians I spoke with. But the amount isn’t likely to matter. As a researcher who spend over $1 million funding his own work put it, “Hell will freeze over before this Congress gives them [the CDC] money.” Moreover, the long moratorium has resulted in a paucity of qualified experts to research firearm injuries.
Despite the challenges, or motivated by them, pediatricians say they’ll continue to push for more research and a change in policy that will make children safer. As for the opposition, doctors insist the tide is turning.
“The NRA’s influence has peaked. Surveys of NRA members show that they’re a little tired of their leadership,” pediatrician and AAP meeting presenter Dr. Sege says. “And in general, pediatricians are never really that far ahead of American families. There are 60,000 of us and we see almost every American child almost every year. If the pediatricians are strong on this issue, it’s hard for me to believe that there will be such a discrepancy over what we believe and what the families we care for believe.”
By: Brandy Zadrozny, The Daily Beast, May 15, 2014
“NRA Finally Meets Its Match”: Why Richard Martinez Should Have Them Shaking
Richard Martinez’s son Christopher was among the six college students murdered this weekend in Isla Vista, California. It’s impossible to fathom the grief that Martinez must be experiencing right now, and the simple fact that he is upright and mobile is an act of tremendous courage. Which is precisely what makes everything else that he has done in the days since he lost his son all the more astounding.
From his first public statement — a blistering and emotional indictment of “craven” politicians who refuse to act on even moderate gun reform — to the tribute to Christopher he delivered Tuesday before a crowd of thousands, Martinez has been willing to show his raw and devastating grief to the world. He has made himself the gnarled and anguished face of our broken system — the lives that it takes and the lives that it ruins. His vulnerability and righteous, focused anger is unlike anything we’ve seen in response to a mass shooting.
And it should scare the shit out of the National Rifle Association, the gun lobby and the cowardly politicians who use these deadly weapons as literal and figurative political props.
It isn’t just the force of Martinez’s emotions or political conviction that make him powerful. He is currently shouldering the unimaginable grief of being yet another parent who has lost yet another child in yet another mass shooting. He has seen this happen before, he knows the political script that’s already playing out. He has listened as gun apologists — time and again — urge the nation not to “politicize” a national tragedy out of respect for the families, and then watched them turn on these same families in order to protect our deadly — and immensely profitable — culture of guns. And he’s using it. All of it.
Days after 26 people were murdered in Newtown, Connecticut, Wayne LaPierre denounced gun reform advocates for “exploit[ing] the tragedy for political gain.” Months later, Sarah Palin echoed the sentiment. ”Leaders are in it for themselves, not for the American people,” she told a crowd that summer, before effectively declaring how proud she was that her son Trig would grow up in a country where men like Elliot Rodger and Adam Lanza can buy guns and hoard ammunition without authorities batting an eyelash.
Martinez may be the single most powerful force we have against this kind of slithering political cowardice. He’s already familiar with the political dirty tricks and knows where the conversation will eventually turn — that the pro-gun crowd is going to come out hard against him, just as they have turned on other parents and survivors. “Right now, there hasn’t been much blowback from the other side,” Martinez noted during a Tuesday interview with MSNBC. “But I anticipate that once my grieving period is over, the gloves will come off. I don’t think it’s going to be easy. They are going to try to do to me the same thing that they’ve done to all of these people. But I have a message for them: My son is dead. There is nothing you could do to me that is worse than that.”
I can’t imagine a more direct rebuttal to the LaPierres and the Palins in this country. To the ridiculous rifle-holding Mitch McConnells and every other ludicrous coward currently walking the halls of Congress and state legislatures across the country. These are the people who — as Martinez has made explicit — are responsible for these terribly predictable and preventable tragedies. Because they have the power to implement sensible reform, but instead stand by and do nothing while more people die every single day.
Martinez also knows that while it’s the public’s job to hold our leadership’s feet to the fire, he’s not the one responsible for having all the answers. “Where’s the leadership on this? We elect these people and we give them power, and it’s just outrageous,” he said during the same interview. “My son just died a few days ago, and you expect me to have the answers to these questions? There are people out there who have the answers. Why isn’t our leadership rounding these people up?”
But Martinez’s grasp of the issue puts most of our elected officials to shame. “When you asked me about solutions, here’s what I’ve learned,” he explained. “This is a complicated issue, but there’s a certain commonality between these events. Typically, all of these incidents involved […] mental health issues, gun violence and violence against women. These three problems are almost always combined.”
Like other parents whose lives have been upturned by gun violence — women like Lucia McBath, the mother of Jordan Davis, and Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin — Martinez recognizes and is naming the pattern of violence in the most public way imaginable. But while Congress has so far been wildly successful at shutting down gun reform efforts, parents like Martinez, McBath and Fulton — who are electrifying the national conversation and building solidarity among other families forever changed by rampant access to deadly weapons — may be impossible for them to ignore. They are the most powerful messengers we could ask for.
Martinez is brave, destroyed, weeping, loud, furious and unpredictable in his grief. He is channeling all of that with a singular focus: Change. Or as he said that first day, introducing himself to the world as the grieving but determined father of Christopher Michaels-Martinez: “Not one more.”
“For me to live with this and honor his memory, I will continue to go anywhere and talk to anybody for as long as they want and are willing to listen to me about this problem. I’m not going to shut up,” he said Tuesday. He really seems to mean it.
By: Katie McDonough, Assistant Editor, Salon, May 29, 2014
“The NRA Has Declared War On America”: A Bleak Vision Of Exaggerated Dystopianism In Service Of Sedition
As the annual meeting of National Rifle Association members started here this weekend, the gentleman seated next to me said to settle in: “It’s mostly administrative stuff. We vote on things.” He paused for emphasis: “It’s the law.”
He’s somewhat mistaken, of course. The NRA doesn’t have any state-mandated obligation to hold an annual meeting. What’s more, the NRA has very little respect for the law. A half an hour later, at that very meeting, NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre exhorted the crowd to a morally obligated vigilantism. He drew a vivid picture of a United States in utter decay and fragmented beyond repair, Mad Max-meets-Hunger Games, divided by Soylent Green:
We know, in the world that surrounds us, there are terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels and car-jackers and knock-out gamers and rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping-mall killers, road-rage killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids, or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that sustains us all.
LaPierre’s bleak vision is exaggerated dystopianism in service of sedition, a wide-ranging survey of targets that put justice against the intrusions of the IRS on a continuum with (as an advertisement he ran during his speech put it) workplace “bullies and liars”.
Talk about mission creep. At its convention in 1977, the NRA rejected its history as a club for hunters and marksmen and embraced activism on behalf Second Amendment absolutism. Rejecting background checks and allowing “convicted violent felons, mentally deranged people, violently addicted to narcotics” easier access to guns was, said the executive vice president that year, “a price we pay for freedom.” In 2014, 500 days after Newtown and after a year of repeated legislative and judicial victories, the NRA has explicitly expanded its scope to the culture at large.
The NRA is no longer concerned with merely protecting the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms – the gun lobby wants to use those arms on its fellow citizens. Or, as the NRA thinks of them: “the bad guys”.
It is useless to argue that the NRA is only targeting criminals with that line, because the NRA has defined “good guys” so narrowly as to only include the NRA itself. What does that make everyone else?
“I ask you,” LaPierre grimaced at the end of his litany of doom. “Do you trust this government to protect you?”
This is not one of the items the membership voted upon. Indeed, Wayne LaPierre’s confidence in making this question rhetorical is one of its most frightening aspects, though of course it’s his prescription that truly alarmed me:
We are on our own. That is a certainty, no less certain than the absolute truth – a fact the powerful political and media elites continue to deny, just as sure as they would deny our right to save our very lives. The life or death truth that when you’re on your own, the surest way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun!
You cannot defend this as anything other than the dangerous ravings of a madman. LaPierre’s description of the world is demonstrably untrue, and not just in concrete, objective terms. To cite just one example: crime rates in the US have been falling for 20 years – a statistic that some gun rights advocates brandish as proof of the selectively defined cliché, “more guns, less crime.” Just as troubling is LaPierre’s internal inconsistency about what it means for NRA members to be “on their own”.
He rattled the audience with a listicle of abuses of power that included Solyndra and and Benghazi (those are Second Amendment issues now, I guess!), but consoled those gathered with the factoid that there are 100m gun owners in America – a third of the country. He railed against “the elites'” rejection of the NRA’s “more guns in schools” solution to Sandy Hook, but reassured his listeners that “city after county after school board after statehouse” adopted the strategy anyway.
You cannot have it both ways. You cannot be both winning and losing, alone but united, the minority but the majority. It is almost (almost!) as if Wayne LaPierre intended to mislead his audience with this whiplash oratory, intended to dizzy them into acceptance of his underlying message, which is almost disappointingly mundane: give us money. Give the NRA money. Give us money so we can create the legal environment that allows gun manufacturers to make more money so that they can give us more money.
Conspicuously absent from LaPierre’s list of grievances was any serious consideration of the economic system that might have a role destabilizing the society for which he pantomimes such concern. He referenced losing jobs to “hypocrites”–the kind of immediate and tangible grievance about which one can imagine an immediate and tangible retaliation. (And one of the reasons waiting periods for gun ownership are such a good idea.) He did not indict the powerful machinations of capital and power that limit people’s ideas about their future to only the immediate and tangible, the system that has turned the gap between rich and poor into an ever-widening gyre. (If there’s an apocalypse coming, look in that direction.)
The members of the NRA who cheered LaPierre, I’m quite sure, don’t think that they’ve turned against their country; they believe the country has turned on them – a distinction that the seceding states of the south made as well, but the distinction only really matters after the war is over and someone gets to write the history.
I could scare you with a sketch of what America might look like in a world where LaPierre’s urging leads to concrete and lasting political change. I think it would be grim and dangerous, though not as dangerous to LaPierre’s allies as it would be to everyone else. But that dystopia is beside the point, because I don’t believe LaPierre and his cronies actually want an armed uprising, or complete political supremacy. Arms dealers are never interested in victory, just eternal war.
On some level, the NRA is correct when it turns the problem of gun violence into the schoolyard litmus test of good guys and bad guys. Maybe firearms, as objects, aren’t the problem, or they’re not the problem with the NRA. Anyone backing with full faith the argument made by LaPierre likely made up their minds long before they ever stepped on a target range or fired a round. The problem with the NRA lies with the people who lead it.
I was somewhat undercover at the convention this weekend. And being among people who believe they are surrounded by other members of their tribe does mean that they say things they might not otherwise say – but to be unguarded, to be vulnerable, doesn’t always reveal the worst in people. It can reveal the best.
I’m not sure if I opened any door other than the one to my room the entire weekend. People smiled and scooted over to make room on seats. Strangers said “howdy.” I was instructed in the proper stance for shooting a Glock by a former police officer that saw my interest (and ignorance): “Just so you don’t look like a beginner once you get to the range.” One middle-aged woman let me take a picture of her garter belt holster, an act of the kind of stunning bravery and intimacy one usually only sees on the battlefield.
And throughout, I marvelled: these are friendly, apparently prosperous people, surrounded by physical evidence that their belief system is thriving – Over 9 Acres of Guns and Gear! – both economically and culturally. Why are they so incredibly frightened?
I sat in on a lecture on home defense, expecting a more localized version of LaPierre’s speech. (HOME INVASIONS!) But the instructor was impressively subdued and sober about his subject, emphasizing that he taught defense, which ideally does not include using a gun. Evasion is an honorable outcome, he told us. Have a safe room. Know the routes out of the house. “Legally and morally,” he said, “Shooting someone is always the last resort.”
Afterward, I told one of the sponsoring company’s instructors how impressed I was by the conservativism of the presentation. I admitted I hadn’t expected that; I thought anyone teaching a home defense workshop would probably rattle off as many scary scenarios as possible. He disagreed. People who are really paranoid about home invasions aren’t going to take a class, he observed. They’ll just buy a gun. “And who knows if they ever learn to use it.” If they do take a class, he continued, they won’t absorb the lessons very well – they’re too busy being afraid.
“Of course, there is such a thing as just the right amount of paranoia,” he smiled. “But any instructor who tries to scare people into taking his class is just trying to ramp up business … or pump up his ego.”
I don’t think he realized he was describing the business model that surrounded us that very minute.
By: Ana Marie Cox, The Guardian, April 29, 2014
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