“Breaking The Power Of The NRA”: President Obama Just Identified The One Thing That Could Make Real Gun Reform Possible
In the latest iteration of what has become a thoroughly awful and depressing ritual, President Obama came to the White House press room last night to offer his comments on our latest mass shooting. It was an extraordinary statement in many ways, most of all because Obama, ordinarily so emotionally controlled, did little to hide his anger and disgust. When he began to talk about the politics of guns, he put his finger on something that hasn’t gotten too much attention as we’ve debated this issue.
If you listen to liberals talk about guns these days, what you hear more than anything else is a combination of despair and resignation: we get massacre after massacre after massacre, and we never do anything about it. The closest we came to passing some reasonable limits on the ease with which people can obtain deadly weaponry came after the Sandy Hook shooting, when the Manchin-Toomey bill died after failing to overcome a Republican filibuster in the Senate. And if we can’t pass something like universal background checks when 20 elementary school children are gunned down, when could we?
If the answer is ever going to be something other than “never,” it may require breaking the power — both real and assumed — of the National Rifle Association. And Obama may have identified the only way that could happen. Here’s part of what he said yesterday:
And what’s become routine, of course, is the response of those who oppose any kind of common-sense gun legislation. Right now, I can imagine the press releases being cranked out: We need more guns, they’ll argue. Fewer gun safety laws.
Does anybody really believe that? There are scores of responsible gun owners in this country – they know that’s not true. We know because of the polling that says the majority of Americans understand we should be changing these laws — including the majority of responsible, law-abiding gun owners.
There is a gun for roughly every man, woman, and child in America. So how can you, with a straight face, make the argument that more guns will make us safer? We know that states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths. So the notion that gun laws don’t work, or just will make it harder for law-abiding citizens and criminals will still get their guns is not borne out by the evidence….
This is a political choice that we make to allow this to happen every few months in America. We collectively are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction. When Americans are killed in mine disasters, we work to make mines safer. When Americans are killed in floods and hurricanes, we make communities safer. When roads are unsafe, we fix them to reduce auto fatalities. We have seatbelt laws because we know it saves lives. So the notion that gun violence is somehow different, that our freedom and our Constitution prohibits any modest regulation of how we use a deadly weapon, when there are law-abiding gun owners all across the country who could hunt and protect their families and do everything they do under such regulations doesn’t make sense.
So, tonight, as those of us who are lucky enough to hug our kids a little closer are thinking about the families who aren’t so fortunate, I’d ask the American people to think about how they can get our government to change these laws, and to save lives, and to let young people grow up. And that will require a change of politics on this issue. And it will require that the American people, individually, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican or an independent, when you decide to vote for somebody, are making a determination as to whether this cause of continuing death for innocent people should be a relevant factor in your decision. If you think this is a problem, then you should expect your elected officials to reflect your views.
And I would particularly ask America’s gun owners — who are using those guns properly, safely, to hunt, for sport, for protecting their families — to think about whether your views are properly being represented by the organization that suggests it’s speaking for you.
What Obama seems to want to do is drive a wedge between America’s gun owners and the NRA. Is that possible? Maybe, but it would certainly be difficult. What we can say for sure is that nothing would be more terrifying for the NRA.
The NRA’s power is complicated, but it depends on everyone assuming that that power is enormous, which in turn depends on the idea that they represent all of America’s gun owners. That Manchin-Toomey bill in 2013 was a rare case of a gun control bill actually coming up for a vote, but most of the time, what happens in Congress is that such legislation not only doesn’t get debated, it never even gets written in the first place, because everyone assumes it’s futile. The NRA would kill it, so why bother?
Thus it is that the group exercises a kind of passive deterrent power, a power they never actually have to use. When they do try to use their power — in elections — they’re actually not that successful. People believe that having the NRA against you is a guarantee of defeat, but the evidence actually shows that it doesn’t make much of a difference. When Republicans have a good year, like in 2010 or 2014, the NRA rushes out and says, “That was because of us! You’ll lose if you don’t oppose all gun laws!” But when Republicans have a bad year, like in 2008 or 2012, the organization doesn’t say anything, lest anyone realize that most of the candidates they supported in close races lost.
And Obama is absolutely right when he says that the NRA does not represent the views of all American gun owners. The organization is opposed to most regulation of guns and gun purchases, yet gun owners as a whole are supportive of many kinds of limits. For instance, polls have shown support among gun owners for universal background checks to be over 80 percent (see here or here).
It’s in the NRA’s interest to have everyone believe that there are only two kinds of opinion on this issue — that all Americans are either gun-grabbers or NRA supporters who think no limits should ever be placed on gun purchases. It’s one thing to understand that’s false, but it’s something else to convince politicians that they can take the position most of their constituents take without significant political risk. But it hasn’t really been tried on a large scale. While Democrats in the past have certainly made the point that the NRA is much more extreme than the typical American gun owner (and even, in some cases, more extreme than their own membership), there’s never been much in the way of concerted efforts to organize and heighten the visibility of gun owners who reject the NRA.
There’s a related but distinct problem, which is that opposition to any and all gun legislation has now been written into Republican DNA as firmly as support for tax cuts or opposition to abortion rights. Any Republican who gets elected to Congress, or even the state legislature, is almost certain to take the doctrinaire NRA position on gun legislation. The overwhelming majority of the Republicans in Congress who killed Manchin-Toomey didn’t do so grudgingly or out of fear. They did it because they actually believe that enacting such a law would be a terrible infringement on all our freedom.
Nothing is permanent in politics, though. It’s possible that over time there might be more Republicans elected who take the position that you can respect the basic right to own a gun but not sign on to the NRA’s deranged vision of a society where everyone is armed and the answer to the fact that mass shootings occur in America at a rate of about one per day is to put more guns in more people’s hands in more places at more times. It’s possible that everyone could come to see the NRA as a radical group with bizarre and dangerous ideas supported by only a small minority of Americans, and the most politically advantageous position for a Republican to take would be stop well short of where the NRA is on this issue.
It’s possible. But getting there won’t be easy.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, October 2, 2015
“The Byproduct Of A Tragic Myth”: You Don’t Need That Gun For Self-Defense
One of the most important pieces ever posted at Politico Magazine was written on January 14 by Evan DeFilippis and Devan Hughes. Titled The Myth Behind Defensive Gun Ownership, it’s worth revisiting again:
What do these and so many other cases have in common? They are the byproduct of a tragic myth: that millions of gun owners successfully use their firearms to defend themselves and their families from criminals. Despite having nearly no academic support in public health literature, this myth is the single largest motivation behind gun ownership. It traces its origin to a two-decade-old series of surveys that, despite being thoroughly repudiated at the time, persists in influencing personal safety decisions and public policy throughout the United States.
There is nothing beyond anecdotal evidence and one very flawed study suggesting that defensive use of firearms has benefits that outweigh the obvious societal drawbacks. The conclusion to the article needs to be ingrained into the DNA of the gun control debate:
The myth of widespread defensive gun use is at the heart of the push to weaken already near catatonic laws controlling the use of guns and expand where good guys can carry guns to bars, houses of worship and college campuses—all in the mistaken belief that more “good guys with guns” will help stop the “bad guys.” As Wayne LaPierre of the NRA railed in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun.”
But the evidence clearly shows that our lax gun laws and increased gun ownership, spurred on by this myth, do not help “good guys with guns” defend themselves, their families or our society. Instead, they are aiding and abetting criminals by providing them with more guns, with 200,000 already stolen on an annual basis. And more guns means more homicides. More suicides. More dead men, women and children. Not fewer.
In the latest mass shooting in Oregon, of course, the “good guy with a gun” hypothesis fell on its face. Just as the potential “good guy with a gun” in the Gaby Giffords shooting came very close to firing on the wrong man and thankfully kept his weapon in check, an armed veteran in Oregon also wisely chose not to fire his gun lest he cause greater danger to himself and others.
There is no reason to believe that guns serve much if any social benefit beyond a few news stories now and again that are massively promoted by the gun lobby to further entrench the myth of effective self-defense.
Comedian Jim Jefferies also exploded the “self-defense” myth in a blisteringly funny and effective 3-minute bit:
But sadly, the same false arguments will continue to be used by gun proponents, in the same way that false arguments about climate change, taxes and abortion are consistently used no matter how often they’re debunked. The American right has gone so far off the rails that reality is no longer a relevant boundary on discussion. As with supply-side economics, the benefits of gun culture are taken not on evidence but on almost cultic faith by the right wing and its adherents.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Wasington Monthly, October 4, 2015
“Americans Are Paying The Price In Blood”: Guns Kill People In The US Because We Pervert The Second Amendment
America’s gun violence, like our grief in Oregon, seems to know no bounds, no limits, no end. The reason is deadly simple: our very lives are chained to a constitutional amendment that is willfully misinterpreted by many and perverted by gun rights advocates for political ends.
That sullied amendment is the United States constitution’s Second Amendment which states, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The gun industry and its supporters have turned that simple statement into a clever marketing tool, and Americans are paying the price in blood.
On Thursday, Roseburg, Oregon – a three-hour drive south of the Oregon’s largest city, Portland – was rocked by a deadly mass shooting that wounded seven people and took the lives of 10 others, including the gunman. Students were in classes at Umpqua Community College when a 26-year-old gunman shattered their world when he opened fire on them. They are, sadly, not unique: hardly a week has passed in the last three years without a mass shooting.
For 15 years, Ceasefire Oregon has fought the gun lobby – and people like Douglas County sheriff John Hanlin, the gun rights advocate who is investigating this latest shooting – and worked to pass reasonable, effective gun laws.
Hanlin is one of many who claim that the answer to gun violence is to help those who have mental health problems while the rest of us stock up on guns and ammo. Hanlin, gun extremists and groups like the National Rifle Association have scapegoated people with mental health problems for years – but they know that such people are far more likely to be victims of violence than the perpetrators of it (and far more likely to kill themselves than other people).
Gun rights advocates also claim that we need more guns to protect ourselves from gun violence. But with 310m firearms in the US, and despite the fact that one in every three Americans owns guns, more guns are not making us safer.
After the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, we at Ceasefire Oregon worked with Moms Demand Action, Everytown for Gun Safety, Gun Owners for Responsible Ownership, the Brady Campaign and the Oregon Alliance for Gun Safety to pass a background check law despite opposition from a few Democratic legislators and a few Oregon sheriffs, including Hanlin. And, after years of work, Oregon finally passed a bill requiring background checks for almost all gun sales last spring.
But gun violence is a cancer in our nation and, just as no single drug will cure all cancers, no single gun law will cure all gun violence. Rather, we need comprehensive, effective legislation and caring, courageous leadership to change both America’s laws and Americans’ views on guns and gun violence. Too often, gun control advocates hear that nothing can be done to change things in this country, but that’s just not true.
Gun violence prevention researchers and advocates know that we can reduce gun violence by passing effective, common-sense laws, like background checks for all gun sales to stop criminals and those with demonstrated mental health issues and histories of violence from buying guns. Waiting periods between the time of gun purchase and possession can provide purchasers with a cooling-off period to help deter homicide and suicide. Instituting gun violence restraining orders can reduce violence by allowing family members and law enforcement to remove a gun from a loved one who is exhibiting warning signs of violence.
We can require – or at least heavily incentivize through liability statutes – that firearms be kept secured at all times with trigger locks or in a safe. We can reduce gun trafficking by allowing people to purchase only one gun per month. We can reinstate the federal assault weapons ban to ban the purchase and possession of high-capacity magazines and assault rifles, which are not necessary for the most dedicated home-defender or hunter.
And Americans can refuse to support lawmakers of any party who do not support “gun-sense” laws – like background checks, higher standards for gun ownership and funding for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms – at the ballot box. We can challenge all 2016 presidential candidates to issue a plan to cut gun violence by 50% before 2020 (the final year of the next president’s first term in office), and Ceasefire has done so.
We are citizens of a great nation, but our children, our mothers, our fathers and our friends are being mowed down, fed to the gun industry’s insatiable appetite for profit. Our founding fathers wrote the Second Amendment to protect our country. Now we must protect our country from those who pervert the Second Amendment.
We know this can be done. We know this must be done. Our national nightmare of paying into the gun lobby’s profit machine must be brought to an end.
By: Penny Okamoto, The Guardian, October 2, 2015
“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
“Gun Control Is Political”: So Is Refusing To Address The Politics Of Gun Violence
After the 24-year-old television reporter Alison Parker and her 27-year-old cameraman Adam Ward were killed while on camera from a lake outside of Roanoke, Virginia on Wednesday morning, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, somewhat predictably tweeted that “[w]e must act to stop gun violence, and we cannot wait any longer” and Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe called for new gun control measures in the form of background checks .
The conservative response to Democrats’ anodyne reactions is even more predictable: it’s wrong, they say, to “politicize” individual acts of firearm violence. But gun violence in the United States has everything to do with politics – and we should be talking more, not less, about the impact of America’s failed gun policies on victims and their families and communities.
It is true – as apologists for the status quo will be sure to point out – that it is impossible to know whether today’s murder specifically could have been prevented by a more stringent gun control regime, let alone by one characterized exclusively by background checks. But on a more systematic level, the result of our lack of substantive, internationally comparable gun control is entirely clear: the US is not only an international outlier in its lack of gun control, it is also a massive outlier in terms of firearm violence. The ease of access to firearms clearly causes large numbers of unnecessary deaths by homicide, suicide, and accident.
Thus, the staggering human toll of gun violence in the US is not just a random coincidence; it is the result of political choices.
Which policies could reduce the huge number of mass killings in the US are not a mystery: after 35 people were killed in Tasmania in 1996, Australia’s conservative government enacted sweeping gun control measures. The result was that both homicides and suicides by gun were immediately and sharply reduced, and there have been no mass killings in the country since. Conversely, there have been 885 mass killings in the United States since December 2012, when a gunman killed 20 elementary school students at the Newtown Elementary School in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.
Identifying the policy changes that could reduce American firearm slaughter is easy, of course – and figuring out a politically viable way of getting these policies enacted is another matter. Even if the 2008 Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v Heller declaring an individual right to bear arms in the 2nd Amendment were to be overruled by the same court, the political obstacles in the path of meaningful gun control are formidable. Isolated state and local measures aren’t meaningless, but there are distinct limits to how much they can accomplish. Tough federal gun control measures could make a big difference, but passing any such measure through both the House and a Senate that massively over-represents small, rural states with a disproportionate number of gun-owners would be impossible for the foreseeable future.
The lack of congressional reaction to the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012 is instructive on that point. Even very modest, overwhelmingly popular gun control measures, involving background checks and controls on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, failed to pass a Democratic Senate and, even if they had, they would have had no chance of passing the House of Representatives. Australian-style gun control is not coming to the US anytime soon, especially with support for gun rights only growing.
But gun control isn’t the only way to address gun violence, and Parker and Ward are not even its typical victims. Even had Parker and Ward’s killer not turned his gun on himself, there would have been an intensive investigation into their deaths, and the sure-to-have-been apprehended killer would have faced some measure of justice.
Consider, though, the situation 280 miles northeast of Roanoke in Baltimore, Maryland. The horrifying death of Freddie Gray in police custody has highlighted the violence committed by police against Baltimore’s African-American citizens, but what the police have failed to do for the community is also important to understanding how gun violence typically plays out in America. So far in 2015, more people have been killed in Baltimore (population 620,000) than in New York City (population 8.4 million). The more than 200 murder victims in Baltimore receive much less attention from either the investigating authorities or the media, and the vast majority of those victims are poor and African-American. Indeed, the horrifying spike in homicides has been met with a weak response by the police: the clearance rate for murders is less than 40%.
A lack of federal gun control is certainly a large part of the problem of the toll of gun violence. But other policies and social conditions – most obviously high levels of economic and racial inequality – also play a major role, and both are also the result of political choices.
As the journalist Jill Leovy explains in her new book Ghettoside, poor African-American communities in many American urban areas are simultaneously over- and under-policed: they are on the one hand subject to routine harassment, detention, and imprisonment for minor offenses but, when it comes to serious violent offenses committed against poor African-Americans, the reaction by the state and the media is too often apathetic or ineffectual. Most victims of gun violence will never make international news, and their deaths will almost never result in calls for more gun control – let alone the kind of gun control that would reduce the number of guns in the hands of Americans, which is the only tried-and-true method for reducing gun violence.
The American epidemic of gun violence has not been “politicized” by those who seek to alleviate it. It is and always has been an inherently a political question, as is what we’re going to do about it. The answer, at least for now, seems to be “nothing”. But it doesn’t always have to be.
By: Scott Lemieux, The Guardian, August 26, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 