“Discrimination Lapel Pins”: These “Religious Freedom” Bills Are The New Stand-Your-Ground Laws
Awaiting signature on the desk of Arizona Governor Jan Brewer is a bill that might be the most insidious attack on LGBT rights to ever pass both houses of a state legislature. SB1062 would allow anyone—be it an individual, association, partnership, corporation, church, religious assembly, foundation, or other legal entity—to deny services to others simply by asserting their religious beliefs. Interpreted broadly, the bill could override many equal protection clauses in Arizona law, including civil rights: A restaurateur could deny service to an out-of-wedlock mother, a cop could refuse to intervene in a domestic dispute if his religion allows for husbands beating their wives, and a hotel chain could refuse to rent rooms to Jews, Hindus, or Muslims.
Republican legislators have made the intended target of the bill clear in their statements, repeatedly citing a New Mexican photographer who was sued when he refused to shoot a lesbian couple’s commitment ceremony. They claim the bill’s detractors are exaggerating its possible effects and are demonstrating hostility towards people of faith. But there is ample reason to believe that a law like this would open the door to discrimination. Once laws are passed, people who may otherwise be afraid of engaging in questionable behaviors may feel emboldened to do so. Moreover, these laws will likely be used by juries as legitimate reasons to dismiss cases against future defendants—after all, the law is the law.
The perfect case in point for all of this? The stand-your-ground laws which have been enacted in several states across America.
These laws were ostensibly passed to protect citizens from criminals by removing the need to retreat or escape when attacked, the rationale being that criminals would think twice knowing that their victims could legally defend themselves with proportionate force. And yet SYG defenses have been used with alarming frequency, and in scenarios unimaginable when these laws were passed, including by drug dealers and gang members. States which have enacted SYG laws have seen an 8 percent rise in “justifiable homicides,” possibly indicating that those with knowledge of the law are willing to take chances in situations where the law might apply.
Furthermore, SYG defenses are shockingly successful. Seventy percent of people who have invoked the defense have avoided prosecution. In fact, SYG laws seem to have tilted the odds in favor of the shooter: In states that have it, 13.6 percent of homicides have been ruled justifiable, while in those that don’t, only 7.2 percent have been deemed such. Unsurprisingly, the success of a SYG defense has a decidedly racial bias—white-on-black killings are far more likely to be deemed “justified” than any other kind.
What does this all mean for bills like SB1062? Granting people the legal right to invoke religious beliefs to justify their right to refuse service will embolden many people who might have otherwise been afraid to do so. Moreover, the defense could end up being a largely successful one. Certainly jurors who might already be biased will be unafraid to side with the defendants, but even those who might not agree with the law will be hard pressed not to accept its validity; should a defendant make a somewhat rational case for why their religious beliefs would be violated by providing these services, the jurors would be forced by the law to acquit. The law would not only provide cover to judges and juries who might otherwise harbor sentiments against the defendants for whatever reason, but would even compel those who aren’t biased to rule in favor of the accused parties.
Many have compared these laws to the gay propaganda bill that passed in Russia last June, some expressing dismay that such laws could be enacted here in America. In the sense that the Russian law seems to have emboldened many Russians to hunt down LGBT people (a law recently passed in Nigeria seems to doing the same thing), it’s not hard to draw the same conclusions here. These Republican legislators claim to want to protect people of faith, yet they did not invoke a single legitimate instance where a person’s freedom of religion is compromised by having to serve others. Purporting to be against discrimination, these lawmakers are trying to use the victim card against the very people they want to discriminate against. Yet there is a tacit social contract we all sign in pluralistic societies: Even when we do not agree with everyone’s beliefs or lifestyles, we still agree to treat each other fairly.
There’s something vaguely desperate about these laws, the last gasp of a cause aware that it’s dying. They are unlikely to pass constitutional muster; they hardly seem to be trying to do so. In all likelihood, Brewer will veto SB1062. As law, it would not only cause a ridiculous pileup in the courts but could tear at the social fabric of the state, exposing certain prejudices that best remain hidden—the landmines are too numerous for the governor to risk so late into her term. Still, this will hardly be the last we hear of these dubious “religious freedom” arguments. Every step in the civil rights movement was met with resistance. Now that the push for LGBT rights has gained such momentum, the backlash will only get stronger.
By: Eric Sasson, The New Republic, February 24, 2014
“New Study Makes The Case For Gun Control”: The Strongest Evidence We Have That Background Checks Really Matter
During last year’s battle over gun control, the pro-gun side did more than passionately invoke the Second Amendment: They claimed that gun control doesn’t work. Sometimes even the reformers, surveying the limited impact of legislation from the 1990s, feared the same. But a new study on universal background checks makes the strongest case yet that the policy saves lives. “This is probably the strongest evidence we have that background checks really matter,” said Philip Cook, a gun expert at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy.
The study, from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, found the murder rate in Missouri jumped 16 percent—an additional 55 to 63 murders a year—after the repeal in 2007 of a state law that required anyone purchasing a handgun to obtain a permit showing they had passed a background check. (Though federal law mandates background checks by licensed dealers, private dealers don’t have to perform them in all but 14 states.) “This study provides compelling confirmation that weaknesses in firearm laws lead to deaths from gun violence,” said Daniel Webster, the study’s lead author, in a statement.
Since this is only a single study, “it’s just suggestive,” warned David Hemenway of Harvard’s School of Public Health. It is “another piece of evidence that is consistent with the bulk of the literature, which shows where there are fewer guns, there are fewer problems… But you want eight more studies that say background checks really matter.”
And the study isn’t perfect: Missouri also enacted a “stand your ground” law in 2007, creating some challenges in disentangling the effects. But Cook said he is confident that background checks played a major role because the authors tracked an increase in guns that went directly from dealers to criminals—exactly the scenario background checks are designed to prevent. The study also notes an uptick in guns “purchased in Missouri that were subsequently recovered by police in border states that retained their [permit-to-purchase] laws.”
The findings at least begin to fill a gap in the research that last year’s debate exposed. Mayors Against Illegal Guns, Michael Bloomberg’s gun control group, found that the shortage of data stems from a shortage of funding—especially federal funding. In 1996, the National Rifle Association and the gun lobby pushed Congress to eliminate the $2.6 million appropriation that underwrote the Center for Disease Control’s research on firearm injuries. President Barack Obama ended the funding freeze last year, and Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Research Program at the University of California, Davis, told NBC that private funding for gun research has also spiked with the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and other high-profile acts of violence.
So why hasn’t the new finding gotten much attention? “I don’t mean to diminish the value of the study, but I don’t think it could have made a difference last year, and I don’t think it will now,” said Tom Diaz, a former policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center. He called the finding “very clear,” but added: “The debate is just unhinged from the facts.”
As the study notes, 89 percent of Americans, and 84 percent of gun owners, supported universal background checks in 2013, before this study bolstered the argument for them. But that’s just one more reason for Congress to pick up the issue again—that, and a new analysis last week which found there have been 44 school shootings since the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
By: Nora Caplan-Bricker, The New Republic, February 19, 2014
“Gun Crazy In South Carolina”: America’s Next Top Shooting Gallery
Is South Carolina America’s next O.K. Corral?
If that sounds like an exaggeration, then take a look at the radical, pro-gun proposal just endorsed by Governor Nikki Haley, the Tea Party favorite who is running for reelection this year, after a tumultuous first term. Crafted by state Senator Lee Bright of Spartanburg, one of Lindsay Graham’s opponents in the GOP Senate primary, the “Constitutional Carry Act” would eliminate the state’s permit and training requirements for citizens who want to carry guns.
That’s right: If you were a resident of South Carolina and wanted to carry a weapon—concealed or otherwise—then under this law you could. No classes, no tests, no background checks, no questions. I have no problem with guns—I grew up in a gun-owning household, and I’ve used firearms myself—but this is insane.
Sen. Bright, explaining the proposal, told The State newspaper that the Second Amendment “gives Americans the right to carry firearms without any government restrictions.” Permits, in other words, are unnecessary. And Governor Haley, offering her take, told reporters that “criminals are dangerous,” and that she thinks “that every resident should be allowed to protect themselves from criminals.”
Because this bill lowers the barrier to owning a firearm in South Carolina, there’s a good chance it would spark a measurable increase in gun ownership, as well as guns owned per person. And while someone, somewhere, might stop a crime with their firearm, it’s far more likely—in the absence of any kind of safety training or background checks—that this law would exacerbate accidents and violence involving guns, to say nothing of boosting the export of firearms to other states, where South Carolina is a national leader—the state has the sixth highest rate of “gun exports,” i.e., guns sold legally in South Carolina that are later used in crimes in other states.
Yes, Vermont has a similar law on the books, but it doesn’t have South Carolina’s terrible reputation for gun violence. Haley’s state is the seventh-deadliest for gun crime, with 5 gun murders for every 100,000 people in 2010, compared to the national average of 3.6 per 100,000. Overall, from 2001 through 2010 there were 5,991 people killed by guns in South Carolina. Law enforcement officers are especially vulnerable—between 2002 and 2011, sixteen law enforcement agents were killed by guns, the fourth worse rate in the nation.
Worse, South Carolina is the fourth worst state in the country on the rate of women murdered by guns—64 percent above the national average—and it ranks second-worst on the rate of women murdered by men in domestic violence incidents. In half of those crimes, guns were used.
When you also consider that South Carolina has a “Stand Your Ground” law that—like Florida’s—is a boon to the trigger happy, then—if this bill becomes law—you have a recipe for even more gun violence in the name of “stopping criminals.”
Now, if you see the Second Amendment as inviolable—a sanctification of our supposedly God-given right to firearms—then I doubt this weighs on you. Senseless death is just the price of freedom. For the rest of us, however, the prospect of a fully armed state—where guns flow freely and the law is biased toward shooters—is terrifying.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The Daily Beast, February 13, 2014
“Racial Fears, Gun Fantasies, And Another Dead Teenager”: Real Action Hero’s, Standing Between America And Disaster
Among the arguments I’ve made about the troubling aspects of American gun culture is the way so many gun owners have in their heads a dangerous fantasy about what the world is like and what role they play in that world. The people I’m talking about, the ones who think it’s terribly important that they be able to bring their firearms into any store or coffee shop or church they might visit, believe that every moment of every day in every place they go is nothing more than a violent situation just waiting to happen. Will they be there to stop a mass shooting at the Safeway? Will they be walking down the street and come upon a group of heavily armed thieves taking down an armored truck? Will they encounter an al-Qaeda strike team at the Starbucks, and this 50-year-old insurance salesman with a concealed carry license will be the only thing that stands between America and disaster? They sure seem to think so.
Is that all gun owners? Of course not. It’s not even most gun owners. But it’s lots of them, and I think it comes through in the case of Michael Dunn, the Florida (of course) man who got into an argument with some teenagers outside a convenience store over the teens’ loud music, and ended the argument by firing 10 shots into their car, killing 17-year-old Jordan Davis. This case includes some rather remarkable statements about black people from Michael Dunn, which we’ll get to in a moment. But I think it’s the way race and the gun owner’s fantasy come together that produced this tragedy.
The basic facts are that Dunn and his fiancée pulled into a convenience store, where she went inside and he stayed outside. Dunn then got into an argument with four teenagers in another car over the volume of the music they were playing; the argument escalated, and eventually Dunn took out his gun and fired ten shots, killing Jordan Davis, one of the teens. Dunn claims that he saw a shotgun, or maybe a pipe, emerge from the teens’ car, so he had no choice but to defend himself. No such gun or pipe was ever found. That part of his story was also contradicted by his fiancée, who testified that afterward he said nothing to her about them having a gun. Dunn also says that Davis got out of the car and approached him, but that part of his story was contradicted by the medical examiner, who testified that Davis’s wounds were not consistent with someone who was standing up, but rather appeared to have been sustained while he was sitting in the car.
I can’t say with certainty what happened that day. As a liberal, is my bias to believe the gun-toting white adult was at fault and not the dead black teenager? Yes it is. But there are some good reasons to think that when Dunn got into an argument with a bunch of black kids over their music (“rap crap,” as he called it during his testimony yesterday), he was particularly inclined to assume they’d try to kill him at any moment, because that’s how those people are. While in jail awaiting trial, Dunn wrote letters to his family that said, among other things, “It’s spooky how racist everyone is up here and how biased toward blacks the courts are. This jail is full of blacks and they all act like thugs.” When he says “racist” in that letter, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t talking about bias against black people. He also wrote, “This may sound a bit radical but if more people would arm themselves and kill these **** idiots when they’re threatening you, eventually they may take the hint and change their behavior.”
That doesn’t sound like a man who’s “crazy with grief,” as he testified he was over the shooting. But it gets worse. On a web site set up by Dunn’s supporters, the defendant writes this:
I am sorry for the tragic outcome of that night in Jacksonville and the loss of Davis’ son [sic]. But I would offer that, rather than rail against the “Stand Your Ground” laws, people take a look at the violence and lifestyle that the “Gangsta Rap” music and the ‘”thug life” promote. The jails are chock full of young black men – and so are the cemeteries. Gun laws have nothing to do with it. The violent sub-cultures that so many young men become enthralled with are destroying an entire generation. Root cause analysis says to correct the behavior. The black community needs to do a better job of selling worthwhile role models. Most importantly, young men need to know that they are not just risking jail time when they threaten the lives of others… they’re risking their very own lives.
Just to repeat, this is something Michael Dunn himself wrote. How is it possible to read that as anything other than, “That n***er had it coming”?
There was another detail of his testimony yesterday that stuck out to me. This is from the New York Times report:
As the Durango backed up quickly to elude the gunfire, Mr. Dunn stepped out of his own car, dropped to one knee and fired more volleys to thwart any ‘blind fire,’ or wild, random shooting out the car window, he said.
At that point, he said, his mind was on his fiancée, Rhonda Rouer, who was about to walk out of the convenience store. ‘I did it in my panicked state,’ he said, of the later volleys. ‘I was worried about the blind firing situation, where they would shoot over their heads, whatever, and hit me, or hit me and Rhonda.’
So the car is pulling away to elude his gunfire, and Dunn immediately considers the “blind fire” scenario, just like he’s read about in his gun magazines (or somewhere, anyway). He drops to a stable firing stance, then pumps shot after shot into the car. He saved the day—he’s not a 47-year-old software engineer, he’s a real action hero!
Gun owners argue that carrying a weapon makes you less likely to escalate a confrontation, since you know it could turn deadly. And I’m sure that for many of them, that’s true. But for others, after spending all that time at the range, after all the fantasizing about the day when they get to act out the things they’ve seen on screen, when a confrontation happens, instead of doing the things smart people do to make violence less likely, they think Bring it on. I’m ready. So when you get into an argument with some black kids about loud music, you’re sure that at any moment there’s going to be an exchange of fire, because those thugs probably brought a shotgun down to the convenience store, and you’d better fire first. Some guy won’t stop texting during the previews of a movie, and gets pissed when you tell him to stop? Better have your hand on your weapon just in case, and when he throws popcorn at you, you shoot him in the chest. That’s what a man has to do.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 12, 2014
“The Proximity Of Firearms”: People Are More Likely To Kill When They Have A Gun
Even though there is steadily accumulating evidence of the futility of criticizing the gun culture, certain episodes prod me to go there. One of those occurred last week, when an unarmed man was shot dead after assaulting a fellow movie patron with, ah, popcorn.
This particular incident wasn’t one of those that dominate newscasts, that summon President Obama to a press conference, that propel some members of Congress to insist on tighter gun control laws. It didn’t pack the awful, gut-wrenching punch of the Newtown, Conn., massacre, in which 20 young children and six adults were gunned down by a psychopath.
The power of this recent episode lies in its more mundane nature: Person with gun gets angry, loses control and shoots an unarmed person. It’s a more common occurrence than gun advocates care to admit.
And it contradicts several of the gun lobby’s central arguments because it demonstrates that the proximity of firearms can change circumstances. It undermines that dumb and overused cliché, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” That may be true, but people are much more apt to kill when they have a gun.
As it happens, this shooting occurred in Florida, where an ill-considered “Stand Your Ground” law has prompted many a trigger-happy bully to pull a gun and shoot a stranger (or, sometimes, an acquaintance). Curtis Reeves, 71, has been charged with second-degree homicide in the death of Chad Oulson, 43, on Jan. 13, according to the Tampa Tribune.
The newspaper reported that Reeves got angry because Oulson, who was sitting in front of him, was using his cellphone during previews before the film Lone Survivor started. Reeves, after asking him several times to stop, went into the lobby to complain to a theater employee about Oulson — who was apparently communicating with his child’s babysitter.
When Reeves returned, the two again exchanged words, and Oulson reportedly showered Reeves with popcorn. Reeves drew a .380-caliber handgun and shot Oulson in the chest. Oulson’s wife was wounded because she reached for her husband as the shot was fired, the Tribune said.
You know how the gun lobby always insists that the antidote to gun violence is to allow more properly trained citizens to carry guns everywhere — inside nightclubs and schools and churches? Well, Reeves could hardly be better trained in the use of firearms. He’s a retired Tampa police captain and a former security officer for Busch Gardens.
Reeves had a permit to carry a concealed weapon. (The chain that owns the movie house, Cobb Theaters, says its policy bans weapons.) Few gun owners would know more about gun safety. But that hardly helped Reeves control his temper.
Human beings have a limitless capacity for irrational acts, bizarre confrontations, moments of utter craziness — and that includes those of us who are usually mature, sane and rational beings. If we allow firearms everywhere, we simply increase the odds that one of those crazy moments will result in bloodshed.
The Violence Policy Center (VPC) notes that 554 other people have been killed since May 2007 by people licensed to carry concealed weapons in incidents that did not involve self-defense.
“The examples we have collected in our Concealed Carry Killers database show that with alarming regularity, individuals licensed to carry concealed weapons instigate fatal shootings that have nothing to do with self-defense,” said VPC Legislative Director Kristen Rand in a statement on the center’s website.
The facts notwithstanding, the National Rifle Association and its allies across the country are busy pressing friendly legislators to expand the wild frontier and permit firearms in ever more venues. The Georgia General Assembly, for one, is considering a measure to allow guns on the state’s college campuses.
That’s a recipe for more stupid confrontations like the one that has landed a retired police officer behind bars, charged with homicide, and a husband and father dead.
Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, January 18, 2014
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