“A Much Less Safe Neighborhood”: The NRA And The “Wave Of Fear” Prevails In Colorado
In the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, several states took action in the hopes of preventing future gun violence. States like Delaware, New Jersey, and Connecticut each passed meaningful measures over the objections of far-right activists and the National Rifle Association.
So too did Colorado, where memories of the massacre at an Aurora movie theater were still fresh when the violence in Newtown occurred. Though the state has traditionally been resistant to gun reforms, lawmakers and Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) approved new measures in March to expand background checks and restrict high-capacity magazines — policies that even conservative Supreme Court justices have said are constitutional.
But the NRA and the right decided these efforts to reduce gun violence cannot stand, and they launched the first-ever recall elections in Colorado history. Yesterday, their gambit worked.
Two Colorado legislators who supported stricter gun control laws lost their jobs on Tuesday in an unprecedented recall election that became the center of the national debate over regulating firearms.
Senate President John Morse and Sen. Angela Giron were both defeated, the Denver Post reported, in the recall effort.
They’ll both be replaced with Republicans allied with the NRA, but this will not affect partisan control of Colorado’s state Senate, where Democrats will maintain a narrow majority.
Morse, a former police chief, was slated to leave office next year anyway, making his recall election more symbolic. Giron, first elected three years ago, has vowed to continue to find ways to serve her community.
Morse said last night, “We made Colorado safer from gun violence. If it cost me my political career, that’s a small price to pay.”
Let’s pause for a moment to ponder how remarkable it is that a respected lawmaker’s career had to end because he approved legal measures intended to prevent gun deaths.
The NRA, it’s worth noting, originally sought five recall elections against Democrats, but in the other three cases, the right-wing group failed to gather sufficient petition signatures.
But what, ultimately, was the point? If control of the state Senate was not at stake, Morse was retiring next year anyway, and the gun reforms aren’t going to be repealed anytime soon, why bother with multi-million-dollar recall elections with no precedent in state history?
The answer, of course, was that the NRA and far-right activists want to send a message to policymakers everywhere: efforts to prevent gun violence will end your career, too. Watch on YouTube
Indeed, the right has been quite explicit on this point. My colleague Laura Conaway posted this item a few weeks ago, featuring remarks from a local recall proponent.
For those who can’t watch clips online, the man in the video, Jon Caldara of the Colorado Independence Institute, argued:
“If the president of the Senate of Colorado, who did nothing except pass the laws that Bloomberg wrote, gets knocked out, there will be a shudder, a wave of fear that runs across every state legislator across the country, that says, ‘I ain’t doing that ever. That is not happening to me. I will not become a national embarrassment, I will not take on those guys.’ That’s how big this is.”
The goal of the NRA and its allies, then, was to create “a wave of fear.” Yesterday, they convinced just enough Coloradans who found this message appealing.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 11, 2013
“The Story Bigots Hate”: A Clinic In Empathy, A Good Woman Without A Gun Stops A Bad Guy With A Gun
We rarely hear the tales of school-shooting heroism directly from the heroes, tragically, because the heroes rarely live to tell them. Dave Cullen’s haunting “Columbine” tells the poignant story of computer teacher Dave Saunders, who was shot while shepherding his students to safety and died after the students worked hard to save him. After the Sandy Hook shootings, the courage of principal Dawn Hochsprung and teachers like Victoria Soto broke our hearts – but we heard them from survivors and friends and family, because the women were among Adam Lanza’s victims.
That’s part of what makes the story of Antoinette Tuff so compelling – but only part of it. Tuff is, of course, the bookkeeper at Ronald McNair Discovery Learning Center in Decatur, Ga., whose work talking shooter Michael Brandon Hill into surrendering to police Tuesday was captured live on a stunning 911 tape that’s gone viral. The fascination at the heart of Tuff’s tale, the reason it’s riveting, is the way she used compassion and empathy to disarm a mentally ill man intent on killing. “Was the potential there to have another Sandy Hook? Absolutely,” the local police chief told reporters as he praised Tuff.
In this story, the only thing that stopped a bad guy with a gun was a good woman with a heart. Or to entirely rewrite Wayne LaPierre’s dumb Manichaean NRA propaganda: The only thing that stopped an emotionally damaged, despairing and unloved young man with 500 rounds of ammunition was a compassionate woman sharing her own story of damage and despair, and telling him she loved him.
Oh, and then there’s this: As we try to recover from the unnecessarily polarized aftermath of the Trayvon Martin killing and George Zimmerman’s acquittal, it’s worth noting that Tuff is a black woman who helped save a young white man from harm at the hands of police. Of course the race-baiters at Fox News, who were so agitated about the crimes of young black men a few weeks ago, have hardly rushed to emphasize that a young white man opened fire at a predominantly black school – let alone that he was helped to save his own life by an African-American woman (for example, check out how they approach these facts here).
Hill, a mentally ill 20-year-old, seemed convinced the police would kill him because he shot at them, and he might have been right. But Tuff tells him she’ll protect him by telling them he hasn’t hurt her, and he didn’t actually hit anyone he shot at.
“He thought it was over for him because he’d already been shooting at police officers,” she told a local Atlanta television reporter. “I told him, no, that I would allow them to know that he hadn’t hurt anyone.”
As the 911 tape begins, we hear Hill shooting outside, as the dispatcher tells a terrified Tuff to try to get somewhere safe. But when Hill comes back into the school, Tuff begins telling police outside, and the 911 dispatcher, that the cops should “back off” and not enter the building. At first she calls Hill “sir,” until she switches to calling him “baby,” which is when the momentum shifts and she seems to have a chance to save him from himself. Tuff tells the dispatcher that Hill told her “he should have just gone to the hospital instead of doing this, because he’s not on his medication.”
Gradually we hear her convince Hill to let her help him surrender safely to police.
“I can help you, you want me to talk to them? Let me talk to them and let’s see if we can work it out so you don’t have to go away with them for a long time … I can let them know you have not tried to harm me or do anything with me.” When he interrupts her to say he’s already shot at police, she reassures him, “That doesn’t make any difference, you didn’t hit anybody.”
Then she turns to the dispatcher and begins to negotiate with police. “He didn’t hit anybody, he just shot outside the door,” Tuff tells the woman. “If I walk outside with him, they won’t shoot him? … He just wants to go to the hospital … Can you talk to the police and let them know he wants to go outside with me?”
In the midst of all this she soothes Hill by telling him parts of her own story. “Don’t feel bad, baby, my husband just left me after 33 years … I tried to commit suicide last year after my husband left me. But look at me now, I’m still working and everything is OK.”
On the 911 tape we listen as Tuff calmly negotiates taking away Hill’s guns – “Put it all up there,” she tells him — and supervises him lying on the floor to surrender. “Tell me when you’re ready, then I’ll tell them to come on in,” she says. She directs the dispatcher, “Let him drink his bottle of water. Don’t come in shooting at anything, they can come on in, and I’ma buzz them in.” Then she’s back to soothing Hill.
“I’m gonna sit right here so they’ll see that you didn’t try to harm me … It’s gonna be alright sweetie, I want you to know that I love you, it’s a good thing that you did giving up. Don’t worry about it, we all go through something in life. You’re gonna be OK.”
Only after the police come in and arrest Hill without incident does she tell the dispatcher, “Let me tell you something, baby. I’ve never been so scared in all the days of my life. Oh, Jesus.”
“But you did great,” the dispatcher tells Tuff, speaking for all of us. “You did great.”
She did more than great. There won’t be an Antoinette Tuff to save us from every school shooting – we need tougher gun laws and better mental health care too, and even then, people will find guns and do bad things. But Tuff gave a clinic in empathy, and the way that trying to connect with the pain of another person, even someone scary and dangerous, can save lives. (She credits her pastor with teaching her to “pray on the inside” when she’s anxious.) Tuff protected her students, but she also protected Hill from himself, and from the police – and she did it with love.
I can only pray that a white woman faced with a heavily armed, mentally ill young black man would have done the same thing. There’s a reason it’s Antoinette Tuff Day all over social media. We need her right now.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, August 22, 2013
“Gun-Crazy Business Models”: Beretta USA Teaches Us How Not To Run Your Corporation
We often think of business leaders as hard-nosed pragmatists, guided by dollars and cents with little regard to emotion. But the truth is that corporate executives are human just like the rest of us. They can be as irrational as anyone, and frequently make business decisions on the basis of things like spite.
So it is that the gun maker Beretta USA has decided against expanding operations into West Virginia, despite heavy lobbying from state officials, because, as the Charleston Gazette reports, “they say Sen. Joe Manchin’s push to expand background checks makes the state less stable for their business.” Perhaps the folks at Beretta don’t quite understand what a senator does, or how laws passed (or in this case, not passed) by Congress actually work. If Congress were to pass a background check bill for the country, it wouldn’t make the state of West Virginia any more or less “stable” for the gun business than any other state.
And after all, business is booming. It isn’t that more Americans are buying guns (gun ownership is on a steady long-term decline), but that those who do own guns are buying more and more of them. That’s why companies like Beretta have forged such a close alliance with the National Rifle Association. The NRA tells its constituents that the country is about to descend into a Mad Max-style apocalypse and that politicians will be confiscating their guns any day, so they rush out to buy more, and the gun manufacturers reap the profits.
A new background check law might help keep guns out of the hands of some people who shouldn’t have them, but it probably wouldn’t hurt Beretta’s bottom line one bit. They’re in a business that has gone nowhere but up. Nevertheless, like other gun advocates, they want to think of themselves as oppressed, kept down by mean politicians in their crusade for liberty. But wherever they decide to move those couple of hundred jobs, they’ll be just fine.
And by the way, in the six and a half months since the Sandy Hook massacre, roughly 5,600 Americans have been killed with guns.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 1, 2013
“The Status Quo Is Unacceptable”: It’s Time To End The Imposed Ignorance Of Guns And The Harm They Do
A revealing thing happened in the grief-filled days that followed the massacre of helpless children and their teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT.
Virtually every conversation about gun control, about any possible remedy for gun violence, hit a roadblock. We just didn’t know a lot about the guns circulating in America.
How many guns are in the U.S.? We don’t have reliable figures.
Is there a connection between gun violence and the depictions of violence in video games and movies? Studies on that issue are few and inconclusive.
Just how do guns wind up in the hands of the mentally ill or the criminally minded? To answer that, we’d have to do a better job of tracking guns used in crimes.
This national ignorance is the cover under which the gun lobby hides. Its denialism and simplistic wishful thinking — the solution to mass shootings is more “good guys with a gun” — thrives and holds sway because we have failed to study the problem and base our policy decisions on a sound basis: evidence.
Things may be about to change. A new report pushes us one step closer to treating gun violence as a public health issue. If allowed to gain traction, this change in attitude will have huge consequences.
The report was issued by a panel of experts called together under executive order by President Obama after Newtown killings. The Institute of Medicine and National Research Council assembled the panel and has set priorities to focus research.
Obama is asking for $10 million in the 2014 budget to fund research. Time will tell if Congress has the backbone to follow through. It has folded before.
Money for such research was halted in the mid-1990s under pressure by the National Rifle Association. Ever since, we’ve been stumbling along as a nation, racking up more than a quarter-million deaths by gunfire in the last decade alone.
Because we haven’t gathered a great deal of data on how guns are used in America — for self-defense, in crime, in suicides — we have permitted all sorts of magical thinking.
Hence, some have argued that the solution to mass shootings is to get rid of “gun-free zones,” which (they reason) create easy targets for killers to seek. Then there’s the argument that simply giving children more education about gun safety will lessen their chances of playing with a weapon. What does the evidence say? Well, studies conflict. More and better research would help assess policy proposals.
The president’s panel has selected five areas for focus: the characteristics of gun violence, risk and protective factors, prevention and other interventions, gun safety technology, and the influence of video games and other media.
The aim is not to take guns away from people. It’s about making gun ownership and use safer. It’s about respecting the lethal nature of the weapons enough to reduce accidents, suicides and gun use by the untrained and criminals.
The report took pains to address the fear of creating any sort of national database for gun ownership, a favorite bugbear of gun-control critics. It notes that “anonymized data should be used to protect civil liberties.”
In fact, more and better information could decrease the gulf between those who see gun ownership as an absolute and integral American right and those who regard guns as a serious public health problem. The two points of view need not be mutually exclusive.
Think about the great benefits to American society that have come from efforts to change attitudes about road safety, as well as improvements to roadway design. Countless lives have been saved by a process that began after the federal government began thoroughly studying car wrecks.
By understanding better how people were being injured, both government and industry could make sensible changes. Some key changes were instituted by law, such as speed limits and seat belt usage. Some were safety design changes initiated by manufacturers. After all, protecting the car’s “precious cargo” is a great selling proposition.
Wouldn’t the same argument appeal to a responsible gun owner? This model is less likely to be used by a child or stolen and used by a criminal due to biometrics.
We didn’t confiscate people’s cars. We simply mitigated the injury and loss of life they caused.
As the debate about funding research into firearms goes forward, note which organizations and politicians fight mightily against it. It will speak volumes.
The status quo is unacceptable. And those who fight research and understanding will be telling us that they are satisfied with the way things stand.
By: Mary Sanchez, The National Memo, June 24, 2013
“Another Kid With An AR-15”: Yet, Washington Has Given Up On Gun Control And Doing Absolutely Nothing
The scene described by eyewitnesses and authorities is one out of a video game: Suspected shooter John Zawahri turned the beachfront Southern California community of Santa Monica into a battle zone for 15 minutes Friday afternoon, cutting a bloody swath through a mile of the city as he shoot at cars and passersby with abandon after killing two family members and burning down their house. NBC News:
As firefighters first arrived at the scene to extinguish the blaze, the gunman carjacked a vehicle being driven by an adult woman and threatened to murder her if she didn’t drive him to the nearby college campus, Santa Monica Police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks said Saturday.
The gunman demanded the woman stop at various points along the mile-long ride so he could fire indiscriminately at passing cars, police said. He shot at a woman driving past the scene of the carjacking, wounding her, and later sprayed bullets at a public bus, shattering glass and injuring three people.
As they approached the SMC campus, the shooter fired at Carlos Navarro Franco while he sat behind the wheel of his SUV, which spun out of control and careened into a wall…[he] died instantly.
And yet, the scene is all too quotidian and real. It follows a familiar script: A young man — Zawahri’s 24th birthday would have been on Saturday — who suffered from emotional and psychological problems — he was previously hospitalized for mental illness — wielding an AR-15 rifle — the same gun used at Sandy Hook and Aurora and Oregon and countless other shootings — to kill innocent people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In this case, five dead, including the gunman, and at least four others injured.
The parallels with alleged Newtown shooter Adam Lanza go even deeper. Zawahri’s parents were divorced and he lived with his mother, whom neighbors desired as a “lovely woman…with a crazy kid.” “John had a fascination with guns,” a friend told the Los Angeles Times. “We were all worried about it.” And, like Lanza, he shot his parent before launching his rampage.
Maybe it’s because the shooting was overshadowed by blockbuster revelations about government spying, or maybe we’ve finally exhausted our ability to care about these tragedies after so many, but the shooting hasn’t earned anywhere near the attention of other mass sprees. Or maybe it’s just too difficult to dwell on — and no political leaders have an interest in drawing attention to it — since Washington has all but abandoned any attempt to reform gun safety laws.
And this case should show just how badly those laws need reform. Zawahri should have been stopped at least twice over from accumulating his stockpile, thanks to both his mental health problems and California laws that generally prohibit the purchase of assault weapons. Critics will undoubtably say the fact that he wasn’t stopped shows the opposite — strict gun laws don’t stop shootings — but both prohibitions are fraught with glaring loopholes, as this incident and too many others have shown. Guns can be lightly modified to flout legal definitions of assault weapons, or purchased online, or bought through private sales in other states to skirt all regulations. They can even be assembled from parts kits purchased online with zero government oversight, as Bryan Schatz did just a few miles from Santa Monica for a Mother Jones story.
But more importantly, background checks are supposed to stop people with mental illness from purchasing weapons, but problems with coordination between states and the FBI have meant that this often doesn’t happen. And it’s too easy to avoid a background check all together. These are exactly the kinds of loopholes that reforms want to close.
Others will say that armed bystanders could have stopped the shooting, but this argument fails basic tests of logic, history, and science. Armed civillians rarely, if ever, stop gunmen, and occasionally injure other victims in the melee by accident. And if guns laws are worthless because some people won’t follow them, as the NRA and its comrades like to say, then by that logic all laws, from speed limits to prohibitions on rape, should be thrown out because people keep finding ways to break those too.
Maybe guns don’t kill people, as the bumper sticker says, but tell me that Zawahri would have killed as many people with a knife instead of a semi-automatic assault rifle. And if it can happen in restorty Santa Monica, a community best known for being the backdrop for hundreds of movies and the subject of several hit songs (and, disclosure: this hometown of this writer), or white collar Newtown, Connecticut, it can happen anywhere.
We’ll probably never be able to stop all gun crimes, but throwing up our hands and doing nothing to at least try isn’t the answer.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, June 10, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 