Justin's Political Corner
The gun lobby sells guns and fear, it does not fight tyranny. In fact, they are the money-wielding tyrants in modern politics.
(via Think Progress Justice: STUDY: States With Loose Gun Laws Have Higher Rates Of Gun Violence)
The National Rifle Association (NRA) and its allies in Congress frequently claim that gun violence is highest in places with the toughest crime laws. But a new study from the Center for American Progress (CAP) suggests something closer to the opposite is true — the states with laxer gun laws tend to be the ones contributing the highest shares of national gun deaths and injuries.
The authors of the report, called “America Under The Gun,” developed a list of ten indices of gun violence, ranging from gun homicide levels to firearm assaults to crime gun export rate (the number of guns sold in that state used in crimes around the country), and ranked each state from 1-50 along each index. They then took the average of each state’s ranking to determine its overall level of gun violence relative to other states. Lousiana was the highest, with an average of fifth-worst across all ten indices, while Hawaii’s 45.4 ranking was the best.
The CAP report’s finding is yet another contribution to a growing body of empirical evidence that strong gun laws work. A prior, less comprehensive study also established links between gun deaths and loose gun laws. After Missouri repealed its background check law, gun homicides went up 25 percent despite a national and regional decline. Three independent papers have found that counties with more guns have higher rates of gun death.
The NRA has long attempted to use Congressional funding restrictions to cripple research on gun violence on grounds that it “may be used to advocate or promote” new gun laws.
Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., has been paralyzed since the age of 16 when his spinal cord was severed by a bullet that ricocheted following the accidental discharge of a firearm. He joins Current TV’s John Fugelsang to weigh in on why Congress is struggling to move forward on the issue of gun safety legislation, despite calls for gun control in the wake of the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012.
“This comes down to Speaker of the House Boehner taking up the issue, giving us at least the opportunity to vote on these things,” Langevin says. “I know we’re not going to get everything we want on gun safety legislation, but let us make the case.”“My accident was just that, an accident, not an issue of gun violence,” Langevin says. “But the issue of keeping our communities safe isn’t more guns, as the NRA has repeatedly suggested.”
What now LaPierre? What now Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats? Does someone grow a spine or do you keep letting the gun lobby run things? [x]
By cutting off federal funding for research and stymieing data collection and sharing, the National Rifle Association has tried to do to the study of gun violence what climate deniers have done to the science of global warming. No wonder: When it comes to hard numbers, some of the gun lobby’s favorite arguments are full of holes.
Myth #1: They’re coming for your guns.
Fact-check: No one knows the exact number of guns in America, but it’s clear there’s no practical way to round them all up (never mind that no one in Washington is proposing this). Yet if you fantasize about rifle-toting citizens facing down the government, you’ll rest easy knowing that America’s roughly 80 million gun owners already have the feds and cops outgunned by a factor of around 79 to 1.Myth #2: Guns don’t kill people—people kill people.
Fact-check: People with more guns tend to kill more people—with guns. The states with the highest gun ownership rates have a gun murder rate 114% higher than those with the lowest gun ownership rates. Also, gun death rates tend to be higher in states with higher rates of gun ownership.Myth #3: An armed society is a polite society.
Fact-check: Drivers who carry guns are 44% more likely than unarmed drivers to make obscene gestures at other motorists, and 77% more likely to follow them aggressively.
• Among Texans convicted of serious crimes, those with concealed-handgun licenses were sentenced for threatening someone with a firearm 4.8 times more than those without.
• In states with Stand Your Ground and other laws making it easier to shoot in self-defense, those policies have been linked to a 7 to 10% increase in homicides.Myth #4: More good guys with guns can stop rampaging bad guys.
Fact-check: Mass shootings stopped by armed civilians in the past 30 years: 0
• Chances that a shooting at an ER involves guns taken from guards: 1 in 5Myth #7: Guns make women safer.
Fact-check: In 2010, nearly 6 times more women were shot by husbands, boyfriends, and ex-partners than murdered by male strangers.
• A woman’s chances of being killed by her abuser increase more than 7 times if he has access to a gun.
• One study found that women in states with higher gun ownership rates were 4.9 times more likely to be murdered by a gun that women in states with lower gun ownership rates.Myth #10: We don’t need more gun laws—we just need to enforce the ones we have.
Fact-check: Weak laws and loopholes backed by the gun lobby make it easier to get guns illegally.
• Around 40% of all legal gun sales involve private sellers and don’t require background checks.40% of prison inmates who used guns in their crimes got them this way.
• An investigation found 62% of online gun sellers were willing to sell to buyers who said they couldn’t pass a background check.
• 20% of licensed California gun dealers agreed to sell handguns to researchers posing as illegal “straw” buyers.
• The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives has not had a permanent director for 6 years, due to an NRA-backed requirement that the Senate approve nominees.
h/t: Mother Jones
So it’s worth reviewing five made against regulating gun ownership in the United States:
MYTH #1: More guns don’t lead to more murders. A survey by researchers at the Harvard University School of Public Health found strong statistical support for the idea that, even if you control for poverty levels, more people die from gun homicides in areas with higher rates of gun ownership. And despite what gun advocates say, countries like Israel and Switzerland don’t disprove the point.
MYTH #2: The Second Amendment prohibits strict gun control. While the Supreme Court ruled in D.C. v. Heller that bans on handgun ownership were unconstitutional, the ruling gives the state and federal governments a great deal of latitude to regulate that gun ownership as they choose. As the U.S. Second Court of Appeals put it in a recent ruling upholding a New York regulation, “The state’s ability to regulate firearms and, for that matter, conduct, is qualitatively different in public than in the home. Heller reinforces this view. In striking D.C.’s handgun ban, the Court stressed that banning usable handguns in the home is a ‘policy choice[]‘ that is ‘off the table,’ but that a variety of other regulatory options remain available, including categorical bans on firearm possession in certain public locations.”
MYTH #3: State-level gun controls haven’t worked. Scholars Richard Florida and Charlotta Mellander recently studied state-to-state variation in gun homicide levels. They found that “[f]irearm deaths are significantly lower in states with stricter gun control legislation.” This is backed up by research on local gun control efforts and cross-border gun violence.
MYTH #4: We only need better enforcement of the laws we have, not new laws. In fact, Congress has passed several laws that cripple the ability for current gun regulations to be enforced the way that they’re supposed to. According to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, a series of federal laws referred to as the Tiahrt amendments “limit public access to crime gun trace data, prohibit the use of gun trace data in hearings, pertaining to licensure of gun dealers and litigation against gun dealers, and restrict ATF’s authority to require gun dealers to conduct a physical inventory of their firearms.” Other federal laws “limited the ATF compliance inspections” and grant “broad protections from lawsuits against firearm manufacturers and retail sellers.”
MYTH #5: Sensible gun regulation is prohibitively unpopular. Not necessarily. As the New Republic’s Amy Sullivan reported after the series of mass shootings this summer, a majority of Americans would prefer both to enforce existing law more strictly and pass new regulations on guns when given the option to choose both rather than either/or. Specific gun regulations are also often more popular than the abstract idea.
TRIGGER WARNING-Domestic violence/stalking
It is up to us, the people, to demand change in this country. the people of brookfield, the surrounding area, of wisconsin, of the whole united states. you need to speak up.
I think a foundation should be…
(via More Guns, More Mass Shootings—Coincidence? | Mother Jones)
In the fierce debate that always follows the latest mass shooting, it’s an argument you hear frequently from gun rights promoters: If only more people were armed, there would be a better chance of stopping these terrible events. This has plausibility problems—what are the odds that, say, a moviegoer with a pack of Twizzlers in one pocket and a Glock in the other would be mentally prepared, properly positioned, and skilled enough to take out a body-armored assailant in a smoke- and panic-filled theater? But whether you believe that would happen is ultimately a matter of theory and speculation. Instead, let’s look at some facts gathered in a two-month investigation byMother Jones.
In the wake of the slaughters this summer at a Colorado movie theater and a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, we set out to track mass shootings in the United States over the last 30 years. We identified and analyzed 60 of them, and one striking pattern in the data is this: In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun. Moreover, we found that the rate of mass shootings has increased in recent years—at a time when America has been flooded with millions of additional firearms and a barrage of new laws has made it easier than ever to carry them in public. And in recent rampages in which armed civilians attempted to intervene, they not only failed to stop the shooter but also were gravely wounded or killed.
America has long been heavily armed relative to other societies, and our arsenal keeps growing. A precise count isn’t possible because most guns in the United States aren’t registered and the government has scant ability to track them, thanks to a legislative landscape shaped by powerful pro-gun groups such as the National Rifle Association. But through a combination of national surveys and manufacturing and sales data, we know that the increase in firearms has far outpaced population growth. In 1995 there were an estimated 200 million guns in private hands. Today, there are around 300 million—about a 50 percent jump. The US population, now over 314 million, grew by about 20 percent in that period. At this rate, there will be a gun for every man, woman, and child before the decade ends.
Surveys suggest America’s guns may be concentrated in fewer hands today: Approximately 40 percent of households had them in the past decade, versus about 50 percent in the 1980s. But far more relevant is a recent barrage of laws that have rolled back gun restrictions throughout the country. In the past four years, across 37 states, the NRA and its political allies have pushed through 99 laws making guns easier to own, easier to carry in public, and harder for the government to track.
And we’re on our way to a situation where the most lax state permitting rules—say, Virginia’s, where an online course now qualifies for firearms safety training and has drawn a flood of out-of-state applicants—are in effect national law. Eighty percent of states now recognize handgun permits from at least some other states. And gun rights activists are pushing hard for a federal reciprocity bill—passed in the House late last year, with GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan among its most ardent supporters—that would essentially make any state’s permits valid nationwide.
Appeals to heroism on this subject abound. So does misleading information. Gun rights die-hardsfrequently credit the end of a rampage in 2002 at the Appalachian School of Law in Virginia to armed “students” who intervened—while failing to disclose that those students were also current and former law enforcement officers, and that the killer, according to police investigators, was out of ammo by the time they got to him.
How do law enforcement authorities view armed civilians getting involved? One week after the slaughter at the Dark Knight screening in July, the city of Houston—hardly a hotbed of gun control—released a new Department of Homeland Security-funded video instructing the public on how to react to such events. The six-minute production foremost advises running away or otherwise hiding, and suggests fighting back only as a last resort. It makes no mention of civilians using firearms.
Law enforcement officials are the first to say that civilians should not be allowed to obtain particularly lethal weaponry, such as the AR-15 assault rifle and ultra-high-capacity, drum-style magazine used by Holmes to mow down Batman fans. The expiration of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban under President George W. Bush in 2004 has not helped their cause: Six killers since then have wielded assault weapons in mass shootings.
But real progress will require transcending hardened politics. For decades gun rights promoters have framed measures aimed at public safety—background checks, waiting periods for purchases, tracking of firearms—as dire attacks on constitutional freedom. They’ve wielded the gun issue so successfully as a political weapon that Democrats hardly dare to touch it, while Republicans have gone to new extremes in their party platform to enshrine gun rights. Political leaders have failed to advance the discussion “in a credible, thoughtful, evidence-driven way,” says Hargarten.
In the meantime, the gun violence in malls and schools and religious venues continues apace. As a superintendent told his community in suburban Cleveland this February, after a shooter at Chardon High School snuffed out the lives of three students and injured three others, “We’re not just any old place, Chardon. This is every place. As you’ve seen in the past, this can happen anywhere.”
A freckled boy with tousled hair looks into the camera and says, “I am NRA Country.” A black guy with dreadlocks echoes him, as do two pretty young women suppressing giggles, saying in unison, “We are NRA Country.” Then there’s country music star Justin Moore, leaning against a farm fence in worn jeans and a cowboy hat, strumming a guitar as scenes of Americana flash by. “You don’t have to look far—all you gotta do is look around,” he sings. “This is NRA Country.”
In Moore’s video, NRA Country looks like a wonderful place. The girls are pretty, the skies are blue, and people seem to spend a lot of time outdoors. But appearances aside, all is not well in NRA Country: according to the National Rifle Association, it faces existential peril in the form of Barack Obama’s possible second term.
Well before the Aurora theater shooting and the Sikh temple massacre returned guns to the political radar, the NRA adopted the poker-table slogan “All In!” for the 2012 election season. The NRA’s long-serving executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, has dubbed the looming vote “the most dangerous election in our lifetime.” In mailings this summer, the NRA’s Political Victory Fund proclaimed that donations “could mean the difference between the survival or destruction of our Second Amendment freedoms.”
The NRA’s beef with Obama could be bad news for the president. The gun group, which grades candidates on their fidelity to the cause on a scale from A+ to F, claims an instrumental role in defeating John Kerry in 2004, Al Gore in 2000 and the Democrats’ Congressional majority in 1994. (“The NRA is the reason Republicans control the House,” Bill Clinton famously said after that election.) While some analysts believe its political power is overstated, the NRA is chiefly feared because it speaks to those voters who will cast their ballot based on the gun issue alone—a unity of purpose that gun control supporters lack.
Central to this fearsome image of the NRA is the notion that it is more than just an organization with a lot of money (it spent $244 million in 2010) and 4 million members (a minority of America’s estimated 70 million–plus gun owners)—that it is, in fact, the vanguard of America’s mainstream working-class culture. It isn’t just that President Obama and Nancy Pelosi disagree with the NRA on gun policy. It’s that their attitude on guns puts them out of step and out of touch with what real blue-collar Americans care about. As a recent headline in the NRA’s magazine asked: “Our America or Obama’s?”
But like the view through the scope of a high-powered rifle, that cultural lens magnifies one aspect of America’s gun politics to the exclusion of all else. Among other things, it obscures the fact that Obama has done little to nothing on gun policy. It glosses over the plain truth that the gun control battles of the 1990s are over and that the NRA has largely won. And most important, it ignores the fact that the gun issue is very much about money—money that the NRA banks with each new member, that the gunmakers earn with each new gun.
There is no divorcing the politics of guns from their profits. America’s gun lobby and gun industry both benefit from creating a fearful vision of life in the United States—a picture of criminals constantly menacing our families and a government hellbent on taking our guns—that is very effective at selling weapons. In fact, in large part because of the way anxieties about his gun policies have been manipulated, the Obama era has been a golden age for firearms manufacturers, and the run-up to Election 2012 could be for Glock and Remington what the Christmas shopping season is for Macy’s and Sears: a time to cash in before the narrative changes.
Many factors—fear of crime during the economic downturn, better promotion of hunting by state wildlife agencies, more women taking up shooting, veterans returning home with a deeper attachment to guns—have likely fueled the boom in gun sales. But Obama’s influence is given singular credit. As Remington’s then-CEO, Ted Torbeck, put it in a May 2009 conference call with investors, “demand…has risen amidst concerns that the new administration will further restrict the use or purchase of firearms and ammunition and levy additional taxes on these products.”
The NRA has been sounding the alarm over Barack Obama since at least 2008, when it called the then–presidential candidate a “serious threat to Second Amendment liberties” and later launched a website called GunBanObama.com. After the president was elected, the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action warned, “American gun owners will soon be the targets of an attack dog named Rahm Emanuel.” Barely two months into the Obama administration, the NRA put out an alert called “The Coming Storm,” which described a “wish list of gun-prohibition measures” that the gun control lobby had presented to the White House. Gun sales—which fell 23 percent the first year that George W. Bush was president—soared 23 percent in 2009.
Yet the “coming storm” blew past without incident, as Obama took up none of the wish list measures. Attorney General Eric Holder said in 2009 that the administration wanted a new ban on “assault weapons,” but the bid was quickly dropped. Instead, Obama signed a bill that year permitting guns to be carried in national parks. “Obama has done everything in his power to stay away from the gun issue,” Feldman says.
Obama’s inaction on guns earned him an F in 2009 from the pro–gun control Brady Center. Yet on the eve of the 2010 midterm elections, the NRA warned that unless people voted for a pro-gun Senate, Obama would be in the position to pick a Supreme Court that “puts democracy in peril.”
In 2011, after Representative Gabby Giffords was shot in the head and six others killed by Jared Lee Loughner, who was wielding a Glock handgun with an extended magazine, Obama gave a nice speech but offered no policy. When the Trayvon Martin shooting in February pointed up the problems with “Stand Your Ground” laws, Obama delivered a moving statement but no substance.
Yet the NRA’s rhetoric reached a fever pitch this spring and summer, with the association warning in a fundraising letter that a second term for Obama would give him “free rein to declare all-out war on our gun rights and rip the Second Amendment right out of our Bill of Rights.”
The “Fast and Furious” controversy gave the gun lobby what at least looked like live ammo rather than blanks.
Gun manufacturers and the gun lobby haven’t always seen eye to eye. When Smith & Wesson struck a deal with the Clinton administration in 2000, agreeing to a long list of changes to its products and business practices—including limiting the size of magazines for its semi-automatic weapons and avoiding dealers who sold a disproportionate number of guns later used in crimes—the gun lobby howled. It led a boycott of Smith & Wesson that nearly killed the company; in a span of just two years, the number of guns manufactured by Smith & Wesson fell by 44 percent. “They just beat the crap out of Smith & Wesson for a while, then let them back in,” says Diaz. Colt Firearms and Sturm, Ruger have been similarly punished for crimes against the Second Amendment.
There remain differences of tone and substance between the industry, represented by the NSSF, and the political gun rights movement, anchored by the NRA. For example, according to Keane, the NSSF isn’t nearly as concerned as the NRA about a potential United Nations Treaty on Small Arms, which would regulate international transfers of guns (although negotiations over the still-vague treaty broke down in July). And after the mass shooting in Tucson, the NSSF engaged in a White House–sponsored dialogue among gun control groups and gun rights supporters about ways to reduce violence; the NRA did not.
Come November, should the gun-friendly Mitt Romney win and the House remain under Republican control, both the NRA and the gun industry will need a new premise for their profitable scare tactics. But as is true for the increasing number of concealed-carry permit holders packing heat each time they go out for a gallon of milk, if all you need to feel frightened is the mere possibility of danger, then danger will be everywhere. After all, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo might run for president in 2016, and he has a record as a gun control proponent. He could replace Barack Obama as Public Enemy No. 1 in NRA Country.
Call it the conspiracy theory that won’t die. The U.N. has been working for years to produce a final text of the Arms Trade Treaty, an agreement to regulate the global arms trade (right now, international banana and bottled water sales are more restricted than weapons sales). The negotiations have just restarted and, with them, a massive round of panic on the right about the U.N.’s nefarious plan to undermine the Second Amendment. The NRA frets that “global gun banners have markedly stepped up their attack on our Second Amendment freedoms.” Roughly 130 Congresspeople speculated that “the ATT is likely to pose significant threats to…our constitutional rights.”
There’s just one problem with this narrative: it’s totally made up:
- The Obama Administration required language in the initial 2009 General Assembly resolution acknowledging “national constitutional protections on private ownership, exclusively within their territory.”
- The State Department rules out provisions restricting constitutional rights and sovereign control of domestic weapons regulation in its ATT “Red Lines.”
- Since the Supreme Court has held that individual gun ownership is constitutionally protected, and international law cannot override the Constitution, the U.N. could not take American guns even if the Administration and Senate wanted it to.
- As Naval Postgraduate School arms expert Diana Wueger points out, the ATT isn’t even intended to regulate domestic arms: “The Arms Trade Treaty will not regulate domestic sales of firearms. Its focus is instead on the control of the legal, international trade in conventional weapons.”
- Conspirators seize on a recently leaked U.N. paper’s suggestion that “arms trade must therefore be regulated in ways that would…minimize the risk of misuse of legally owned weapons.” Even setting aside the ambiguity of the line in question, the paper (inaccurately portrayed as part of a press kit) is playing no role in the negotiations over the text of the ATT. ThinkProgress confirmed this with U.N. Office for Disarmament Affairs Information Officer Ewan Buchanan, who said “The negotiation is being done by the member states of the U.N., not by the Secretariat. It was an information paper that does not form any part of the negotiation process and the member states of the U.N. don’t have it.”
