“The Problem, Folks, Is The Guns”: Wayne LaPierre Is A Perfect Example
In the aftermath of the massacre of first-graders at Sandy Hook elementary school, right-wing defenders of unregulated guns have gravitated to a common alibi: The problem isn’t guns; it’s mental illness. If only society kept better track of crazy people and kept weapons out of their hands, we could prevent more episodes of armed mayhem.
Senator elect Marco Rubio has spoken of the need to “keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill” and dozens of Tea Party Republicans have echoed the same talking point. The always predictable Charles Krauthammer wrote: “While law deters the rational, it has far less effect on the psychotic. The best we can do is to try to detain them, disarm them…. there’s no free lunch. Increasing public safety almost always means restricting liberties.” And the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, in additional to calling for an armed guard in every school, urged an “active national database of the mentally ill.”
Oh my, where to begin? Mental illness is just now starting to become less stigmatized. If we create an even more Orwellian society in which anyone who has ever sought treatment for emotional problems ended up in some national database, you can just imagine what that would do to people’s willingness to seek help. Surely it is better to end the easy purchase of combat weapons than it is to keep a record of everyone in America who might hypothetically go on a rampage.
Surveillance as a substitute for gun control is no idle threat. In the age of anti-terrorism, courts have already permitted the National Security Agency to troll among otherwise confidential records—everything from cell phone and computer-information trails to bank and insurance company records. The Fourth Amendment, which usually requires a warrant for invasion of privacy, has been simply waived. If the justification is preventing “terrorism”—and surely shooting up a classroom is a kind of terrorism—the NSA could create a database in which half of Americans are classified as potential mass killers.
Isn’t it better to just get rid of the guns?
For now, privacy protections such as The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPPA) make it illegal to disclose medical records, and mental-health treatment has an even higher standard of privacy protection. But it would be child’s play for the NSA to ignore these privacy protections, as it has others.
A second irony: The very right-wingers shedding crocodile tears over the need to focus on mental illness rather than gun control are the same people who have shredded public budgets that support treatment of the mentally ill. No area of public spending has been cut more deeply.
In Portland, Maine, a pioneering psychiatrist named William McFarlane has devised a strategy and outreach protocol for dramatically reducing the incidence of psychosis. The research of Dr. McFarlane and his colleagues demonstrated that it wasn’t the condition of schizophrenia per se so much as it was the devastating experience of a mental breakdown that disabled young adults and put them into the permanent status of the emotionally impaired.
Dr. McFarlane and his team devised an early outreach and prevention system called the Portland Identification and Early Referral program (PIER) that made use of community education. Teachers, counselors, clergy, youth workers and young people themselves were encouraged to be alert to patterns that might indicate future risks of psychosis. Dr. McFarlane’s main intervention was family education and early counseling, supplemented where necessary by medication.
Many teenagers who were loners or were haunted by delusional thoughts, seeing the educational materials “self-referred.” They would come into the PIER office saying, “that sounds like me.” In Portland, the predicted incidence of hospital admissions for psychotic breaks was reduced by between a third and a half.
McFarlane’s breakthrough was hailed as the most important insight about how to reduce the devastating effects of severe mental illness in decades. With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the approach was expanded to several other cities and states. But in Portland, it has been shut down for lack of funding, thanks to that state’s right-wing governor. Reopening PIER in Portland would cost under $100,000 a year and would save many millions on hospital admissions and ruined lives spared.
What’s the connection to gun violence? “These kids who go on gun rampages,” says McFarlane, “tend to be pre-psychotic. Most people with mental illnesses are not dangerous, but these are. They still have enough functioning to methodically plot out their attacks. They have lost capacity for judgment but not for planning.”
“At our very first family meetings,” McFarlane adds, “one of the things we emphasize is safety. Families get it. If they own guns, they either get rid of them, or lock them up.”
It may be a coincidence, but there have been no gun massacres in the communities that have programs modeled on PIER. However, referrals to Dr. McFarlane’s program and others like them are voluntary. Nobody is put into a database.
At the very least, the right-wingers who hope to shift the focus from gun control to mental illness might have the decency to support more funding to treat the latter. According to Michael Fitzpatrick, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), some 60 percent of people with some form of mental illness receive no treatment whatsoever. More than half the counties in America, he adds, have no practicing psychologist, psychiatrist, or clinical social worker.
When press coverage of Adam Lanza first surfaced, there was conjecture that the 20-year-old shooter may have had Asberger’s Syndrome, a loose diagnostic category that is being dropped from the newest edition of the official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders (DSM-V) in favor of the broader category of Autism.
All over America, parents of quirky kids are agonizing over whether their children might be “on the spectrum” or whether they simply hear “a different drummer,” as Thoreau so beautifully put it. Federal and state law gives parents the right to seek a full evaluation, and if a child is identified as having some version of even mild autism, the family can qualify for additional services. But there is the dreaded trade- off of services for stigma.
What if the risk of getting your child listed on some database as potential doers of violence were added to that equation? What parent would ever seek help? In fact, Asberger’s and Autism are seldom associated with violence.
The problem, folks, is the guns.
Absent the guns, the loners who have shot up schools and shopping malls might have gotten out of control, but they would not have been able to go on shooting sprees.
To the extent that the issue is mental illness, the problem is the gross underfunding of known treatments that work. Adding stigma and surveillance while not adding funds would only make an injustice that much worse. Can’t we at least keep that straight?
By: Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect, December 21, 2012
“The NRA’s Worse Nightmare”: Gun-Rights Advocates Should Fear History Of Second Amendment
On Sunday, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer went on CBS’s Face The Nation and argued that people who support gun control “have to admit that there is a Second Amendment right to bear arms”.
Schumer’s effort to reach out to the gun-rights community may be well-intentioned, but it is also deeply ironic. If the nation truly embraced the Second Amendment as it was originally written and understood, it would be the NRA’s worst nightmare.
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.
It’s time for a history lesson about one of America’s most popular and least understood rights. It’s also long past time to expose the hollow, ignorant fawning over the Second Amendment by gun-rights advocates for what it is.
In contrast to the libertarian fantasies that drive the contemporary debate about firearms in America, the Founders understood that liberty without regulation leads not to freedom, but anarchy. They understood that an armed body of citizens easily becomes a mob. In other words, a bunch of guys grabbing their guns and waving a flag emblazoned with a rattlesnake is not a militia.
A cursory look at the history of the Second Amendment shows that regulation was a central part of its rationale—putting “well regulated” at the very start of the amendment was no accident. For instance, starting in the colonial period, states enacted a variety of “safe-storage” measures to deal with the danger posed by stored gunpowder. A 1786 law went as far as prohibiting the storage of a loaded gun in any building in Boston.
But many people who defend gun rights today are more than happy to skim over the first part of the amendment in their zeal to embrace the second. (The NRA itself literally chopped off that pesky first half when it chiseled the words on the face of its old headquarters.) As a result, our modern gun-rights ideology is often unmoored from any sense of corresponding civic obligation.
This ideology claims to rely heavily on the Second Amendment, and yet it is rooted not in the Founders’ vision, but in the insurrectionary ideas of Daniel Shays and those who rose up against the government of Massachusetts in 1786 and 1787. Indeed, there are gun-rights advocates today who think the Second Amendment actually gives them the right to take up arms against the government—but if that were true the Second Amendment would have repealed the Constitution’s treason clause, which defines treason as taking up arms against the government!
This is all so deeply twisted: after all, the Founders framed the Constitution in part as a response to the danger posed by Shays’ Rebellion.
As a result, our modern debate over gun rights has virtually nothing to with the Founders’ Second Amendment; that debate actually started about 30 years after the Amendment was adopted. What emerged was the notion that reasonable regulation was not inconsistent with the right to bear arms. In fact it was the only option in a heavily armed society.
Up until the 1980s, there was no “individual-rights” theory of the Second Amendment. Many states had adopted provisions protecting an individual right to own guns, but this tradition was distinct from the Amendment. All that changed when right-wing think tanks undertook a conscious effort to fund new scholarship to rewrite the amendment’s history. At first that effort was not well received, even in conservative circles. As late as 1991, former Supreme Court chief justice Warren Burger famously called the idea of an individual right to bear arms “one of the greatest pieces of fraud—I repeat the word ‘fraud’—on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
But the revisionism ultimately won over most of the legal establishment, reaching its zenith in 2008, when the Supreme Court broke with 70 years of established jurisprudence and affirmed that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to have guns in the home for reasons of self-defense.
In order to do this, the majority followed the lead of gun-rights advocates and essentially excised the first clause of the amendment—the “well-regulated militia” part—from the text.
(Let us pause briefly to note the irony that the opinion, District of Columbia v. Heller, was written by none other than Justice Antonin Scalia—America’s staunchest defender of originalism, or reading the Constitution according to its supposed original meaning.)
If the Heller court had simply said, “Look, most Americans think the Amendment is about an individual right, and no one really cares what James Madison or the average man on the street in 1791 thought”—then the case would be pretty uncontroversial. Instead, Scalia produced a pompous, error-filled opinion that has done more to discredit his beloved originalism than a generation of liberal academics ever could.
Even leading conservative legal scholars have harshly criticized the ruling: federal judge Richard Posner said most professional historians reject Scalia’s historical analysis in the case, and described Scalia’s jurisprudence as “incoherent”. Perhaps even more damning, J. Harvie Wilkinson, a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan, compared Heller to Roe v. Wade.
Of course, the fact that the Second Amendment is now treated as an individual right has almost no bearing on gun regulation, because no right is absolute. You can’t shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, nor can you fire a gun in one.
And most Americans—including those who own guns—are open to reasonable gun regulation. The only people who oppose such policies are the NRA, extreme gun-rights advocates, and the craven politicians who do their bidding.
But what would such regulation look like?
For one thing, we could have a comprehensive system of firearm licensing and registration. At the moment we have none (even though it is hard to fathom how one might ever muster a militia without such a system). To avoid the irrational fears of gun confiscation, such a system ought to be instituted by the states, which maintained militias long before the Second Amendment existed. Could anyone with even a minimal understanding of the history of the Second Amendment seriously maintain that a state-based system violated the Amendment’s text or spirit?
The bottom line is that although we hear the Second Amendment invoked all the time, few of those who trumpet it the most vehemently realize that restoring the Founders’ vision of the Second Amendment would be a call for more gun regulation, not less.
By: Saul Cornell, The Daily Beast, December 18, 2012
“Unfit For Responsibility”: What Americans Should Learn From The “Republican Apocalypse”
What may finally consume the House Republicans is their boundless contempt for the American public – a contempt bluntly demonstrated in their refusal to consider any reasonable compromise with President Obama to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff” on December 31. They know from the election results (and every poll) that the public believes taxes should be raised on the wealthy. They know that the public wants bipartisan compromise. And they know that the approval rating of the House Republicans, in contrast to the president’s upwardly trending numbers, are veering toward historic lows.
Moreover, they claim to believe that the major tax hikes and spending cuts that will occur on January 1, if negotiations, fail, will be ruinous for the American and perhaps the world economy. (And never mind that this concern validates Keynesian economics, flatly contradicting their professed ideology.) Failure to achieve a deal may result in a renewed recession or worse.
Yet the majority of Republican members adhere so blindly to their far-right ideology that on Thursday evening, they humiliated their own leadership by refusing to support Speaker John Boehner’s “Plan B” — and effectively scuttled negotiations between the House leadership and the White House. Boehner thought a bill to increase taxes only on households earning more than $1 million annually would pass the House, as Majority Leader Eric Cantor confidently announced. “We’re going to have the votes,” he said on Thursday afternoon. Several hours later the House leaders cancelled the roll call on the tax bill, admitting that they didn’t have the votes.
This embarrassing episode – the “Mayan Apocalypse” of the Republicans Party – demonstrates again why they are unfit for the responsibilities of national office.
They proved their unfitness the first time in the summer of 2011, when they held the national debt ceiling hostage, supposedly to reduce spending, and succeeded only in damaging both the nation’s credit rating and the economic recovery. Now they have declared their unwillingness to negotiate with a newly re-elected president, who won easily on the taxation issue. Although they held the majority, they actually lost seats and received fewer total votes than the House Democrats. But still they see no reason to deal with the president or acknowledge the national consensus.
Naturally, public anger at the Republicans is growing. But how furious would people feel if they fully understood this latest absurd episode on Capitol Hill? Boehner’s proposal was exceptionally generous to the wealthiest taxpayers – and mean to the poor and working families.
His Plan B would have extended the Bush tax cuts for their first million dollars of income; repealed a limit on tax deductions by the highest-income households; established a dividend tax rate of only 20 percent; and maintained an estate tax break for those same highest-income families worth an average $1.1 million. At the same time, according to the authoritative Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Boehner’s bill would have ended various tax credits for low-income and middle-income families, costing them roughly $25 billion a year and driving millions of American children into poverty.
But awful as that proposal was, it was deemed too liberal by the dominant faction in the Republican caucus. They found it so offensively decent, so treasonously moderate, that they made fools of their own leaders and themselves rather than let negotiations continue. (Their spending bill was even worse.)
The president is fortunate in his opposition, whose obstinacy and extremism may yet prevent him from making a terrible deal to damage Social Security or Medicare when neither is necessary. He wanted to make deal – very badly – but there is nobody with the competence or sanity with whom to make a deal, not even a raw deal.
Now Obama must explain clearly what has happened. Perhaps then voters will begin to draw the obvious conclusion – that this country’s problems cannot be addressed, let alone solved, until they remove these Republicans from power.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, December 21, 2012
“The Republican Winter Carnival”: Will John Boehner’s Speakership Survive Until Plan C?
Has there been a House speaker in modern American history with less control over his members than John Boehner?
Over the past three days, Boehner has focused all attention on “Plan B”: an effort to strengthen his hand in negotiations with President Obama by passing backup legislation that would extend the Bush tax cuts for all income under $1 million.
Tonight, Boehner lost that vote. In a dramatic turn of events on the House floor, he pulled the legislation. In a statement released moments ago, he said, “The House did not take up the tax measure today because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass.” Boehner lost.
Plan A, which was a deal with Obama, was put on ice, many believe, because Boehner couldn’t wrangle the votes to pass anything Obama would sign. Plan B failed because Boehner couldn’t wrangle the Republican votes to pass something Obama had sworn he wouldn’t sign.
The failure of Plan B proved something important: Boehner doesn’t have enough Republican support to pass any bill that increases taxes — even one meant to block a larger tax increase — without a significant number of Democrats. The House has now adjourned until after Christmas, but it’s clear now what Plan C is going to have to be: Boehner is going to need to accept the simple reality that if he’s to be a successful speaker, he’s going to need to begin passing legislation with Democratic votes.
There’s an asterisk there, though: It’s not entirely clear whether Boehner will be the speaker of the House a month from today. The vote to elect the next speaker is on Jan. 3. To win, you need an absolute majority of the House, not a plurality. Even a hopeless conservative challenge that attracts only a handful of Republican votes could deny Boehner the speakership until a consensus candidate emerged. Tonight’s vote makes that challenge more likely.
A significant number of Boehner’s members clearly don’t trust his strategic instincts, they don’t feel personally bound to support him, they clearly disagree with his belief that tax rates must rise as part of a deal, and they, along with many other Republicans, must be humiliated after the shenanigans on the House floor this evening. Worse, they know that Boehner knows he’ll need Democratic support to get a budget deal done. That means “a cave,” at least from the perspective of the conservative bloc, is certain. That, too, will make a change of leadership appealing.
If a conservative spoiler runs, he or she could very possibly deny Boehner the 218 votes he needs to become speaker, clearing the way for a more moderate candidate like Eric Cantor to unite the party. It’s hard to say exactly how likely that is. But it’s likelier than it was, say, this morning.
By: Ezra Klein, The Washington Post, December 20, 2012
“Never Ever, Ever, Ever…”: Grover Norquist’s Pledge Used To Be Politically Expedient, Now It’s Not
A few words to ponder as we sail toward the fiscal cliff. Those words would be: “That was then, this is now.”
Strip away the false piety and legalistic hair-splitting offered by Republican lawmakers rationalizing their decision to abandon a pledge that they will never ever, ever, ever vote to raise taxes, and that’s pretty much what the explanation boils down to.
Rep. Peter King says he understood the pledge, propounded by the almighty Grover Norquist and his group Americans for Tax Reform, to obligate him for only one term. Apparently, he thought it had to be renewed, like a driver’s license.
Sen. Lindsey Graham says that if Democrats agree to entitlement reform, “I will violate the pledge … for the good of the country” — a stirring statement of patriotism and sacrifice that warms your heart like a midnight snack of jalapeño chili fries.
In other words: bull twinkies. If you want the truth of why a trickle of GOP lawmakers is suddenly willing to blaspheme the holy scripture of their faith, it’s simple. The pledge used to be politically expedient. Now it is not.
This is not, by the way, a column in defense of the Norquist pledge. The only thing dumber than his offering such a pledge was scores of politicians signing it, an opinion that has nothing to do with the wisdom or lack thereof of raising taxes and everything to do with the fact that one ought not, as a matter of simple common sense, make hard, inflexible promises on changeable matters of national import. It is all well and good to stand on whatever one’s principles are, but as a politician — a job that, by definition, requires the ability to compromise — you don’t needlessly box yourself in. Never say never.
Much less never ever, ever, ever.
So this revolution against “he who must be obeyed,” however modest, is nonetheless welcome. It suggests reason seeping like sunlight into places too long cloistered in the damp and dark of ideological rigidity.
But it leaves an observer in the oddly weightless position of applauding a thing and being, simultaneously, disgusted by it. Has politics ever seemed more ignoble than in these clumsy, self-serving attempts to justify a deviation from orthodoxy? They have to do this, of course, because the truth — “I signed the pledge because I knew it would help me get elected, but with economic ruin looming and Obama re-elected on a promise to raise taxes on the rich and most voters supporting him on that, it’s not doing me as much good as it once did” — is unpretty and unflattering.
In this awkward about-face, these lawmakers leave us wondering once again whether the vast majority of them — right and left, red and blue, Republican and Democrat — really believe in anything, beyond being re-elected.
There is a reason Congress’ approval ratings flirted with single digits this year. There is a reason a new Gallup poll finds only 10 percent of Americans ranking Congress “high or very high” in honesty and ethics.
Lawyers rank higher. Advertisers rank higher. Even journalists rank higher.
This is the sad pass to which years of congressional grandstanding, fact spinning, cookie-jar pilfering and assorted harumphing and pontificating have brought us. And while a certain cynicism toward its leaders functions as a healthy antigen in the body politic, it cannot be good for either the nation or its leaders that so many of them are held in plain contempt.
The moral malleability exemplified by the likes of King and Graham will not help. Perhaps we should ask them to sign a new pledge: “I will always tell you what I think and what I plan to do in plain English, regardless of whether you like it or it benefits me politically.”
But no lawmaker would make that pledge. And who would believe them if they did?
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., The National Memo, December 10, 2012
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