“Anyone Is Qualified Until Proven Otherwise”: Concealed-Carry Crazy; What Gun Lobbyists Mean When They Tout ‘Gun Safety’
Anyone who has paid even casual attention to pronouncements from the leadership of the National Rifle Association knows that they do not place a particularly high premium on facts or the truth. And while the news media get a passing grade for challenging the NRA on some of its most preposterous claims – the Obama administration is in cahoots with the U.N. to confiscate everyone’s guns — the gun lobby has largely gotten a free ride on gun safety.
Setting aside the fact that the NRA’s general legislative agenda is antithetical to the idea of public safety, consider CEO Wayne LaPierre’s claim that “no other organization in the world has spent more millions over more decades to keep Americans safe.” To many Americans, the NRA’s “family friendly” image rests on the safety and education efforts that are an integral part of its promotion of a culture of guns. These include everything from the “Eddie Eagle” coloring books it disseminates to school children, telling them to call an adult if they find a gun, to multiple courses on the safe use of firearms. The NRA calls itself “the world’s leader in firearm training,” and it may well be.
Yet it has never advocated any serious requirement that gun owners acquire even a modicum of proficiency in the actual handling or use of a firearm before being allowed to purchase one — because that would be “gun control.”
Every state in the union requires that a driver demonstrate some ability to keep a car on the road before receiving a driver’s license. But there is nothing in either federal or state law that requires an individual to have any knowledge of how to use a firearm before acquiring a single gun or a small arsenal. And it’s highly doubtful that the NRA’s eight-hour “Basic Pistol Shooting Course” or its “First Steps Pistol Orientation” class does much to prepare someone for a real-world armed confrontation.
The NRA’s position on gun safety really boils down to this pearl from LaPierre: “The presence of a firearm makes us all safer. It’s just that simple.”
Of course it’s never that simple. Ask the parents of the eight-year-old girl killed last week in Jefferson County, Tennessee, by her 11-year-old neighbor who used his dad’s 12-gauge shotgun to shoot the girl after she refused to let him see her puppy. Or ask the boy’s father if that shotgun made anyone safer.
Thanks to the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in 2008 in District of Columbia v. Heller, it is now the right of every American to keep a gun in the home for self-defense, even if that weapon is more likely to be used in an accidental shooting, a suicide, or a domestic dispute. Encouraging untrained citizens to keep a firearm at home for their personal safety is one thing; but a major thrust of NRA lobbying for the past two decades has been to enact concealed-carry laws that send those same untrained, armed citizens into the public square — to schools, college campuses, national parks, restaurants, the workplace, and on public transport, including Amtrak trains. And that’s where any claim by the NRA to champion public safety really falls apart.
The NRA may talk about “responsible” gun ownership, yet it gleefully helps to arm people who have demonstrated neither the skill to use a weapon in a high-stress situation (or any other circumstance), nor any knowledge of the laws pertaining to the use of weapons. Nor does the NRA seem to care about the mental stability of those who carry concealed weapons. As far as the NRA is concerned, anyone is qualified to carry a concealed until proven otherwise. In 2011, LaPierre told the NRA’s national convention: “Every American wife and mother and daughter, every law-abiding adult woman should be trained, armed, and encouraged to carry a firearm for personal protection.”
Today, every state in the union has enacted a concealed-carry law. Most, sadly, follow the NRA model, including few if any training requirements or provisions that restrict permits to those citizens with a demonstrated need.
So in Virginia and Iowa, blind people can obtain concealed-carry permits. In Virginia and several other states, residents may qualify for a concealed-carry permit by completing an online “course” that is virtually impossible to fail. I qualified for a Utah concealed-carry permit – which would allow me to carry a concealed weapon in fully 35 states because of state “reciprocity” laws — by listening to a six-hour lecture at a Maryland rifle range where I was required neither to pass a written exam nor to fire a single bullet. The overwhelming majority of states also have no requirement that concealed-carry permit holders demonstrate any facility in the use of a firearm. In 18 states where live-fire training is mandatory, standards for passing are extremely weak, based on target shooting scores, which have little correlation to using a gun in a high-stress combat situation.
A Department of Justice study of local law enforcement training back in 2006 found that police departments required a median 60 hours of firearms instruction. Better than 90 percent also required some training in simulated stressful conditions and in night or reduced light conditions. But you won’t find any requirement of that sort in state laws for concealed-carry permits. Unlike police who are frequently required to undergo some sort of re-qualification program, few if any states require concealed-carry licensees to demonstrate any sort of competence to use guns over time. Some states automatically grant concealed-carry permits without any classroom or live fire training to anyone who has served in the military. Although concealed-carry licensees were never intended to replace police or to undergo the same training as police, a little training couldn’t hurt.
Thirty years ago, hardly anyone anywhere in the U.S. could legally carry a concealed weapon. By the early 1990s, promoting concealed-carry had become one of the NRA’s top legislative priorities. By the beginning of 2012, the Government Accountability Office estimated that 8 million citizens had obtained concealed-carry permits. Two years later, the decidedly pro-gun Crime Prevention Research Center estimated that at least 11 million Americans could legally pack heat when they walked the streets.
The NRA thinks this is a sign of great progress because all of these secretly armed, wannabe Rambos will come to the rescue of fellow citizens in distress and make the bad guys more wary of committing crimes. But do most Americans really feel safer with 11 million largely untrained would-be “law enforcers” on the streets?
Even with the best training, studies show that police have a very hard time hitting their intended targets. New York City’s Police Department has some of the best-trained officers in the country. But when 12 Brooklyn cops opened fire on a fleeing gunman last month, only one of 84 shots fired hit the suspect. In 2013, police in Times Square opened fire on a man after he reached into his pocket for what the cops thought might be a gun. Three shots were fired. One round hit a 54-year-old woman in the knee. Another grazed a 35-year-old woman’s buttocks. None hit the suspect.
A RAND Corporation evaluation of NYPD firearm training between 1998 and 2006 found that the average hit rate in gun fights was about 18 percent. Where there was no return fire, the hit rate went up to 30 percent.
Given this not-so-great record for the best-trained police, what should the public expect from wholly untrained civilians?
Earlier this week, a 47-year-old woman with a concealed-carry permit reportedly fired three shots at an SUV leaving a Home Depot parking lot in Michigan after witnessing one of the store’s security guards chasing two shoplifters who jumped into the vehicle.
Thanks to the NRA, we can all look forward to more illegal shootings like that one, by self-appointed citizen “police” who are unlikely to hit anything — except an innocent bystander.
By: Alan Berlow, The National Memo, October 10, 2015
“Emotional Distress And Mental Anguish”: Cleveland Cops Involved In 137-Shot Barrage Claim They’re Victims Of Discrimination
Nine of the 13 Cleveland police officers involved in a 137-shot barrage that left an unarmed black man and woman dead after a high-speed chase in 2012 filed a lawsuit last November claiming that they were treated too harshly and discriminated against by the police department in the aftermath of the shooting.
Michael Brelo, the white officer acquitted on Saturday of manslaughter charges for the shooting, isn’t involved in the lawsuit. The nine other officers, eight of whom are white and one of whom is Hispanic, claim the Cleveland Police Department treats non-black cops more harshly than African-American officers when they use force against black suspects, Cleveland.com’s Cory Shaffer reported.
“The City of Cleveland, through the other named defendants, and the other named defendants in their individual capacities, have a history of treating non-African American officers involved in the shootings of African Americans substantially harsher than African American officers,” the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit complains that the nine officers have been placed on restricted duty for far longer than the traditional 45 days following a police shooting, preventing them from earning overtime pay and forcing them to conduct “boring, menial tasks.” This, the lawsuit says, has impaired the officers’ pay and reputation and caused “emotional distress and mental anguish.”
The city denied all the allegations of discrimination in a response reported by the Cleveland Scene’s Doug Brown in January. There has been little movement in the case since then.
The lawsuit drew almost immediate criticism when it was filed in November because it felt so tone-deaf to critics of police in Cleveland and across the country.
“Yes, Cleveland police officers involved in killing two unarmed people are saying that extra long ‘gym duty’ because of their roles in a shooting incident resulted in ’emotional distress’ and ‘mental anguish,'” the Cleveland Scene’s Doug Brown wrote at the time. “Not that they killed people, but because of gym duty.”
Over the past year, the Black Lives Matter movement rose to national prominence as several police killings of black men and boys highlighted racial disparities in police use of force, including the deaths of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
But police officers, backed by their powerful unions, have by and large rejected this type of criticism. Not only do many cops and their supporters deny claims of discrimination, but they also worry that the increased scrutiny will make it more difficult to use force in scenarios that call for it, potentially putting officers and others in danger.
The disagreement has led some police officers to lash out. In New York City, after Mayor Bill de Blasio said he taught his biracial son to be careful around police, the city’s officers appeared to protest through weeks of a “work slowdown” in which they purposely reduced their activity and carried out fewer arrests.
The lawsuit from the nine Cleveland officers is another example of cops attempting to turn the criticisms around. Instead of acknowledging the disparities in the criminal justice system and the many contributing factors, these officers are saying that it’s actually they who are the victims of systemic discrimination.
By: German Lopez, Vox, May 24, 2015
“A Hideous Indifference To Lives Wrongly Taken”: Cops Who Let Their Unarmed Victims Die Should Be Punished, Too
The police killing of Eric Courtney Harris, who was shot to death in Tulsa by a 73-year-old “reserve deputy” who had meant to tase him, raises several baffling questions. Why was Robert Bates, an elderly insurance executive who served one year as a police officer back in the 1960s, involved in a dangerous sting operation? Why are amateurs apparently allowed to buy their way into the Tulsa force? Why was this pseudo-deputy allowed to carry a gun? And how could he confuse it with a Taser?
To be sure, these questions require answers. But the video of the killing, which was recorded by an officer’s body camera, raises an equally important question that applies to a number of high-profile police killings of late: Why didn’t the cops help Harris after he was shot?
In the video, Harris is shown talking to police about the gun sale they’ve arranged. When he realizes that he’s being ambushed, Harris runs, and from the officer’s body-cam we see him taken to the ground. Bates announces he is going to tase Harris. We hear a gunshot, and then Bates, realizing that he has just executed an unarmed man, apologizes: “Oh, I shot him. I’m sorry.”
Harris is incredulous. “He shot me!” he says. “Oh my God!” But the officers, instead of suddenly springing into action to help the dying man, begin to swear at him. “You fucking ran!” shouts a cop. “Shut the fuck up!” Harris moans that he is losing his breath, to which an officer replies: “Fuck your breath.”
“Fuck your breath” is a telling reply to the “I Can’t Breathe” slogan adopted in the wake of Eric Garner’s chokehold killing by a New York cop. It reflects a hideous indifference to lives wrongly taken, and it’s not just a lone officer in Tulsa: after the Garner protests, NYPD officers counter-protested with “I can breathe” hoodies.
That indifference is reflected not just in their words, but their actions. In several recent videos of police killings, officers fail to provide medical attention to the victims they’ve wounded. Instead of switching from crime-stoppers to caregivers the moment a suspect is injured and harmless, as any compassionate human being would do, officers often either berate the suspect or stand idly by as the victim dies.
After Cleveland police officers shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice, they spent their time handcuffing his terrified sister. (This type of neglect is apparently not uncommon for Cleveland police; they have been the subject of dozens of civilian complaints for instances in which they made injuries worse or refused to let the injured go to hospitals.) The Garner video drags on for minutes after his final “I can’t breathe,” the officers standing around while Garner lies motionless on the ground. And Michael Slager, the South Carolina officer who shot Walter Scott in the back, handcuffs the dying man instead of trying to help him.
There may be a temptation to blame these incidents on rogue or incompetent police officers. After Slager was charged with murder, the North Charleston police union said it wouldn’t tolerate officers who “tarnish the badge,” and Mayor Keith Summey said, “When you’re wrong, you’re wrong. And if you make a bad decision, don’t care if you’re behind the shield or just a citizen on the street, you have to live by that decision.”
But the more of these videos that emerge, the less believable the rogue theory becomes. After all, consider the behavior of the actual cops surrounding Robert Bates, the Tulsa reserve deputy, after his fatal mistake. He’s facing a manslaughter charge, and surely he deserves to be punished. What his colleagues did, though, was far more cold and intentional. Those who shoot the unarmed may be negligent killers or murderers, but those who stand idly by while the victims die might as well be accessories after the fact.
By: Nathan J. Robinson, a PhD Student in Social Policy & Sociology at Harvard University: The New Republic, April 15, 2015
“Obama Loves America, But Not The One Giuliani Does”: Clearly Part Of The Permanent Conservative Strategy Of ‘Otherizing’ Obama
Rudy Giuliani oversold it, naturally. In an attempt to save America from the grip of a president who’d already been in office for six years, or perhaps just desperate to get back into the headlines, the former New York mayor and presidential also-ran said Wednesday, “I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.” And then, to make matters worse, he insisted his remark wasn’t racist because Obama “was brought up by a white mother, a white grandfather, went to white schools, and most of this he learned from white people.”
“This isn’t racism,” he added. “This is socialism or possibly anti-colonialism.”
On the list of hateful things uttered about Obama by his political adversaries, this one is near the bottom (and that’s saying something). After all, Giuliani wasn’t questioning Obama’s parentage, nationality, sexuality, or his children’s behavior. By comparison, simply saying the man doesn’t love America seems tame, merely a softer brand of birtherism (a line of attack Giuliani once rejected). It’s clearly part of the permanent conservative strategy of otherizing Obama, of which birtherism was one of the most openly racist examples.
The irony, of course, is that Obama’s childhood and family background perfectly fit the conservative fantasy that Giuliani promotes. Obama was the child of an immigrant and a woman from the heartland, raised partly by a grandfather who helped liberate a Nazi concentration camp while serving our country and a Rosie-the-Riveter grandmother who worked on the Boeing assembly line during World War II. By any Norman Rockwell-ish estimation, that’s about as American as you get.
As a New York Daily News editorial put it:
It is impossible to say which is more appalling:
Giuliani’s willful ignorance of Obama’s heritage (his grandfather served in World War II while his grandmother worked on a B-29 assembly line); Giuliani’s division of the country into right-thinking Americans (Republicans) and unworthy others; or Giuliani’s sense that he had hit on a winning political tactic in poking the hornet’s nest of haters.
And yet, we should not be so surprised; this is what Giuliani does. Rather than seek to mend the racial division during David Dinkins’ term, Mayor Giuliani saw an opportunity, instead antagonizing the city’s communities of color. He charged William J. Bratton, the police commissioner then and now, with implementing the ineffective and unjust “broken windows” strategy. And we can’t forget his unflinching support of the New York Police Department in the wake of abuse after abuse—when police sodomized Abner Louima with a broomstick, and when they gunned down unarmed black men like Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond. Now, with words like these about the president, Giuliani is trying to create racial divisions on a national level.
But if we simply dismiss Giuliani’s latest remarks as a joke and then move on, we’ll miss an opportunity ourselves. His words were “un-American” in the sense that they were an ad hominem attack on a sitting president. In another sense, though, they were quintessentially American. Our country’s history is full of agents like Giuliani who provoke racial strife and spew stereotypes that benefit the privileged class. Obama wasn’t raised with the same kind of “love of country” that Giuliani was because the president grew up as a member of a group whose social mandate from birth, for survival’s sake, is to engineer change in a society—to correct the very systemic disadvantage that Giuliani is desperate to save.
Giuliani is probably right: Obama doesn’t love America, not the one Giuliani does. But the inverse is true, too: Giuliani doesn’t love America, not the one Obama is trying to build.
By: Jamil Smith, The New Republic, February 20, 2015
“Ending Police Brutality Isn’t Up To The Communities”: Want To Stop Police Brutality? Start Disciplining Officers
As they strive to solve the public crisis of police use-of-force incidents, illuminated again by the deaths of several black victims last year, officials from the White House on down have coalesced around “community policing.” When it comes to influencing the national conversation on a local issue like this, it doesn’t get more official than the U.S. Conference of Mayors, or USCM. The non-partisan organization is comprised of more than one thousand mayors representing the nation’s largest cities. Its mission is to shape national urban policy and the positions adopted at their annual meeting are distributed to the President of the United States and to Congress.
On January 30, the USCM released a report on strengthening “police-community” relations in American cities. The six-page report came full of recommendations for everything from “youth study circles” to new equipment. The report was completed with the help of a working group of police chiefs, including Philadelphia Commissioner Charles Ramsey, the man appointed by President Obama to chair his Task Force on 21st Century Policing in response to rising unrest around around the issue of police brutality.
Absent from their suggestions, however, was a single mention of officer discipline.
A full page is dedicated to the imprecise goal of “Addressing Racial and Economic Disparities and Community Frustration with and Distrust of Governmental Institutions.” The use of “distrust,” however, is disingenuous. While black citizens do report having less confidence than white ones in police, the overwhelming majority—more than three-quarters—report having some to a “great deal of confidence” in police. Trust isn’t the issue here.
What the #BlackLivesMatter protests made clear is that communities of color are increasingly fed up with the over-policing of our neighborhoods, extrajudicial killings of unarmed black people and the failures of the justice system to hold killer cops accountable. To ignore those complaints and suggest that the issue is merely one of distrust is dishonest, and it evades the very obvious fact that police brutality is a national problem that persists, in part, because cops can get away with it.
I’ve commented before on “community policing,” but it’s worth noting again how troubling that term is. “Community policing” reframes the conversation around police reform from one that addresses police brutality to one that addresses the relationship between law enforcement and communities of color, as though they’re mutually combative. The relationship between the two isn’t the issue. It’s the manner in which law enforcement relates to communities of color that’s proven deadly, time and time again.
Comedian Chris Rock provided an apt analogy for this during his recent New York Magazine interview.
“If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, ‘Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.’ It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner.”
Similarly, ending police brutality isn’t up to the communities that are brutalized. It’s up to the cops.
Now, the USCM report is not all bad. Its call for independent investigations of deadly police encounters is a substantive step. It makes helpful nods toward improving hiring and training practices. However, the report’s failure to get serious about police reform and combating police abuses and to instead focus on “relationships,” while politically convenient, doesn’t begin to solve the problem. The report fails, for instance, to address the systematic failure of police departments nationally to discipline officers who are found to have inappropriately engaged citizens and used excessive force.
Take the New York Police Department, for example, the nation’s largest. It is often at the forefront of innovation in the field. But, when it comes to disciplining officers for misconduct, the NYPD fails miserably. Just last year, the department decided not to discipline 25 percent of the officers who its Civilian Complaint Review Board found guilty of committing misconduct. A WNYC report also found that the NYPD fails to drive out cops who present red flags for abuse.
Within policing, too-frequent charges of “resisting arrest” by cops is a red flag for excessive force. The logic is that an abusive officer will be more likely to cover up excessive force with the excuse that a suspect resisted arrest. But WNYC found that just five percent of officers who’ve made arrests since 2009 accounted for 40 percent of the charges of resisting arrest. They even discovered one active officer to have made more than 50 charges. Does the community just need a better “relationship” with this cop who curiously finds himself in these sorts of situations time and time again?
Coincidentally, just last week, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton asked New York lawmakers to raise resisting arrest from a misdemeanor to a felony. That is an alarming claim, given how and why Eric Garner was choked to death on Staten Island by a police officer in July. Like the subsequent deaths of John Crawford III in an Ohio Wal-Mart, Tamir Rice near a Cleveland community center, each incident was avoidable and not one of their killers has been brought to justice. Another one that qualifies is the November shooting death of Akai Gurley in a Brooklyn housing project stairwell; we learned Tuesday that the officer involved was indicted Tuesday on several counts, including second-degree manslaughter.
There’s a suite of reforms, from recruiting to data collection, that need to be made throughout the nation’s police departments, and strengthening discipline measures must be central to any proposal that seeks justice for victims of police brutality and to prevent future tragedies.
First, police departments must do a better job of actively ferreting out bad cops. Using early warning systems that trigger an intervention process when an officer has an excessive number of use of force complaints against him, or has filed a certain number of resisting arrest charges, is a start. Departments also need central databases that collect information on police conduct from various sources, so that an officer’s complete record can be compiled and viewed. Police departments must also make it a priority to maintain their integrity by investigating citizen complaints swiftly, impartially and with transparency. Independent, civilian-led complaint review boards are essential in doing that work.
Finally, the decisions of civilian review boards should not just serve as recommendations for discipline, but should be a determining factor in it. That is, in effect, the only way to hold police officers directly accountable to the communities they serve.
“Community policing” sounds good. As proposed, it will probably be more politically expedient than substantive change in policy, but we cannot fix our deadly system of policing without addressing officer discipline. There must be measures in place to make cops think twice about pulling the trigger. It’s a matter of accountability, but also of life and death.
By: Donovan X. Ramsey, The New Republic, Fbruary 12, 2015
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