Justin's Political Corner
HOUSTON (AP) — The incoming leader of the National Rifle Association has a long history with the powerful gun rights lobby and a penchant for bold statements that are sure to enflame an already explosive national debate over gun control.
James Porter, an Alabama attorney and first vice president of the NRA, assumes the presidency on Monday after the group’s national convention wraps up in Houston. He didn’t wait until then to ignite a new furor over gun control, telling the NRA grass-roots organizers on Friday they are the front line of a “culture war” that goes beyond gun rights.
“(You) here in this room are the fighters for freedom. We are the protectors,” Porter said.
Porter, 64, whose father was NRA president from 1959-1961, is part of the small, Birmingham, Ala., law firm of Porter, Porter & Hassinger. The firm’s website notes its expertise in defending gun manufacturers in lawsuits.
Porter takes over the organization as the NRA finds itself in a national fight over gun control in Washington, D.C., and state capitols around the country. The NRA had a major victory regarding gun control with the defeat in the U.S. Senate of a bill that would have expanded background checks for gun sales. But it lost ground in some places as several states passed laws expanding background checks and banning large ammunition magazines after December’s mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school.
Porter has called President Barack Obama a “fake president,” Attorney General Eric Holder “rabidly un-American” and the U.S. Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression.” On Friday, he repeated his call for training every U.S. citizen in the use of standard military firearms, to allow them to defend themselves against tyranny.
Gun control advocates say Porter makes outgoing NRA President David Keene look like a moderate on gun issues, even though Keene had said the NRA would try to punish lawmakers who voted in favor of expanded background checks and other gun control measures.
Keene had worked to offer a softer, if equally staunch voice for the gun lobby’s ideas when compared with Wayne LaPierre, the fiery executive vice president who remains the NRA’s most prominent voice on the public stage.
Porter as president, “pulls (the NRA) more into the extremist camp,” said Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “With Jim Porter, they’ve gone full crazy.”
New President, same extremist agenda at the NRA.
H/T: TPM
For much of its more than 140-year history, the National Rifle Association promoted gun ownership, shooting, and hunting as good, clean, constitutionally-protected fun. That changed in the past four decades as the NRA transformed into a hardline group closely allied with the gun industry and the conservative establishment whose only solution to gun violence is ever more guns. Watch the shift unfold in this collection of ads promoting the organization from the early 20th century to the present.
1920: “Rifle shooting is a mighty fine sport.” This Remington ad in Boys Life declared that the NRA was “a United States Government organization.” It wasn’t, but that gives you a sense of just how tight the gun group and the government once were—before the NRA entered its current state of perpetual freak-out about the feds coming for Americans’ guns.
1970: “Hunters Beware!” Sounding more like the contemporary NRA, this ad warned about “powerful forces—possibly well-intentioned but ill-informed—working eagerly yet relentlessly to curb and eventually abolish the hunting rights, privileges and freedoms you enjoy today.” Bonus: A guest appearance by future pro football Hall of Famer Chris Hanburger.
1982: “I’m the NRA” This famous campaign, launched in 1982, was intended to demonstrate the NRA’s broad appeal. Ads included kids (such as eight-year-old BB-gun enthusiast Bryan Hardin), women, African Americans, cops, and clergy. A more recent version of the campaign has featured NRA celebrity board members Tom Selleck and Karl Malone.
Late 1980s: “Why can’t a policeman be there when you need him?” Fears about violent crime fueled these ads promoting concealed-carry laws. The notion that gun laws are ineffective because criminals break them remains a core NRA argument, as does the idea that armed citizens routinelyfend off attackers.
1995: Bill Clinton is “daffy.” With the number of hunters on the decline, you’d think the NRA would embrace high-profile recreational shooters. Yet in this poster sold to its members, the NRA unintentionally distanced itself from its longtime stance that hunting was central to gun rights, declaring that “Mr. Clinton, the Second Amendment is not about duck hunting.”
1997: “Gun rights are lost on our kids.” Heston promised to lead a $100 million, “three-year crusade…to restore the Second Amendment to its rightful place as America’s First Freedom.” For the kids, of course.
2013: “Are the president’s kids more important than yours?” All the anti-government paranoia, fear-mongering, and liberal-baiting of the past few decades culminated in this video, produced in the wake of the Newtown massacre. By opposing putting armed guards in every school in America, Obama proved himself to be “just another elitist hypocrite” whose kids are protected by the Secret Service.
H/T: Mother Jones
Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy (D) tore into the National Rifle Association during an appearance on CNN’s State Of The Union on Sunday. The NRA this week introduced its legislative response to the massacre in Malloy’s home state. Its plan focuses on arming school staff.
Malloy specifically called out NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre for his absolute opposition to commonsense gun regulations, including the new gun law just enacted by Connecticut. After watching a clip of LaPierre mocking Connecticut’s new law, Malloy shot back, “Wayne reminds me of the clowns at the circus. They get the most attention”:
MALLOY: That’s what he’s paid to do. But the reality is is that the gun that was used to kill 26 people on December 14th was legally purchased in the state of Connecticut even though we had an Assault Weapons Ban. But there were loopholes in it that you could drive a truck through. This guy is so out of whack, it’s unbelievable. 92% of the american people want universal background checks. I can’t get on a plane as the Governor of the state of Connecticut without somebody running a background check on me. Why should you be able to buy a gun? Or buy armor-piercing munitions? It doesn’t make any sense. He doesn’t make any sense. Thus my reference to the circus.[…]
Bring it back to reality. Why are they against universal background checks when 92% of the American public is in favor of them? If they can’t answer that question — and they can’t, Candy — What this is about is the ability of the gun industry to sell as many guns to as many people as possible even if they’re deranged, even if they’re mentally ill, evening if they have a criminal background, they don’t care. They want to sell guns.
NRA leadership demonstrated yet again last week just how low they are willing to go in their unconscionable effort to block any and all common sense, life saving gun violence legislation. Their most recent repugnant tactic—repeated robo calls to Newtown families—mocks and betrays the courage and compassion demonstrated by the Newtown community just barely three months after one of the world’s most horrific acts of gun violence seized 26 beautiful and heroic young lives.
Less than two months ago at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence, I asked NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre if he would join the tens of thousands of people around the world in taking the Sandy Hook Promise. The Promise is a very simple message. It asks its followers to honor the 26 lives lost at Sandy Hook Elementary School by promising to do everything possible to encourage and support common sense solutions to make our communities and country safer from similar acts of violence. “I promise this time there will be change,” the Promise concludes. Wayne LaPierre agreed to the Promise that day, yet every minute of everyday since then, he and his organization have poured countless amounts of time, money and effort into making that simple promise harder and harder to achieve.
In its relentless effort to defeat the Sandy Hook Promise and block common sense, life saving gun violence legislation, NRA leadership has shown no boundary it will not cross—including injecting its fear-based messages into the homes, the sanctuaries, of a grieving community.
What NRA leadership simply refuses to acknowledge is that, despite their hopes and efforts, the Connecticut effect is not going to fade. In fact, it is growing, and it will not go away until we get the weapons of war off our streets, provide law enforcement the tools they need to enforce the laws on the books, improve the safety of our schools (and I don’t mean vigilante dads and teachers with guns), and strengthen our mental health system. With or without the NRA, we will act.
My message to NRA leadership: Stop these invasive, unconscionable calls. Join the vast majority of Americans and Newtown residents in supporting common sense measures to stem and stop gun violence.
If you agree, join me in urging NRA leadership to cease and desist these inhumane calls by calling them at 1-800-672-3888.
And he [LaPierre] proved how reasonable he is by saying that any effort to create a database of gun owners would either be hacked by the Chinese government, handed over to Mexican government, or used by the American government to confiscate them.
(via Wayne LaPierre: “Obama Wants National Registry To Take Away Guns” (VIDEO) | TPM LiveWire)
“Don’t you be fooled, there is nothing universal or reasonable about it,” LaPierre said at the 2013 Western Hunting and Conservation Expo in Salt Lake City, Utah. “This so-called universal background check… is aimed at one thing: It’s aimed at registering your guns. And when another tragic opportunity presents itself, that registry will be used to confiscate your guns.”
The idea that the Obama administration wants a national gun registry in order to take away Americans’ guns is one the NRA has been pushing for weeks as they oppose any new gun laws in the wake of the school shooting in Newtown, Conn.
WASHINGTON — Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association, adopted on Wednesday a significantly more ominous and expansive line of reasoning than he has before in order to make the case that newer, more dangerous threats require Americans to buy more guns, join the NRA and organize opposition to gun control measures.
“Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone criminals. These are perils we are sure to face — not just maybe,” LaPierre wrote in a commentary published by The Daily Caller, a conservative news site. “It’s not paranoia to buy a gun. It’s survival. It’s responsible behavior, and it’s time we encourage law-abiding Americans to do just that.”
“Tens of millions of Americans are already preparing to Stand And Fight to protect their families and homes,” LaPierre declared, but the threats are growing “during the second Obama term.”
In dramatic language, LaPierre wrote that “the American people clearly see the daunting forces we will undoubtedly face: terrorists, crime, drug gangs, the possibility of Euro-style debt riots, civil unrest or natural disaster. Gun owners are not buying firearms because they anticipate a confrontation with the government. Rather, we anticipate confrontations where the government isn’t there — or simply doesn’t show up in time.”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE COMMENTARY. (IT’S WORTH IT.)
New York City in the wake of Hurricane Sandy was LaPierre’s prime example of just such a disaster: “After Hurricane Sandy, we saw the hellish world that the gun prohibitionists see as their utopia. Looters ran wild in south Brooklyn. There was no food, water or electricity. And if you wanted to walk several miles to get supplies, you better get back before dark, or you might not get home at all.”
The facts, however, indicate the opposite was true. In the five days following Hurricane Sandy, there were no homicides at all in New York City — which is unusual, considering historical data.
ew York and its staunchly pro-gun-control mayor, Michael Bloomberg, together represent a bogeyman that LaPierre referenced throughout his diatribe. “Michael Bloomberg and [progressive mega-donor] George Soros are each, individually, far wealthier than the entire National Rifle Association,” LaPierre wrote. “The hard truth is that due to Bloomberg, Soros, and the rest of their ilk, the dangers require that we increase our presence all across the country — in Congress, the state capitols, and in your city and towns.”
Besides New York, LaPierre singled out the U.S.-Mexican border — and Phoenix in particular — as the other greatest source of danger to Americans. People need “semi-autos,” he wrote, in order to protect themselves from “Latin American drug gangs [who have] invaded every city of significant size in the United States.”
The border, he said, “remains porous not only to people seeking jobs in the U.S., but to criminals whose jobs are murder, rape, robbery and kidnapping.” Phoenix, LaPierre added, “is already one of the kidnapping capitals of the world.”
Here, too, statistics contradict his claim. A 2010 report by the FBI revealed that the U.S.-Mexican border is one of the safest areas in the United States, and among the nation’s big cities, the four with the lowest violent crime rates were all in Mexican-border states: San Diego; Phoenix; El Paso, Texas; and Austin, Texas. In 2011, an investigation revealed that Phoenix police had grossly inflated the city’s kidnapping statistics in order to get federal grant money.
LaPierre also invoked Islamic extremist groups: “Ominously, the border also remains open to agents of al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations [and] when the next terrorist attack comes, the Obama administration won’t accept responsibility. Instead, it will do what it does every time: blame a scapegoat and count on Obama’s ‘mainstream’ media enablers to go along.”
The NRA’s WAYNE LaPIERRE, following the Columbine school shootings in 1999.
What a difference 14 years makes and hundreds of thousands of gun deaths makes.
The CEO of the National Rifle Association (NRA) says that the American public should not trust President Barack Obama’s push for new gun control laws because the administration lied about “Obamacare” being a tax and a universal background check would just be a “check on law-abiding people.”
“It’s a fraud to call it universal,” the NRA’s LaPierre told Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday. “It’s never going to be universal, the criminals aren’t going to comply with it, they could care less.”
“We ought to quit calling it right now a universal check, the real title ought to be the check on law-abiding people all over this country,” he insisted.
LaPierre showed Wallace a flyer from Obama’s 2012 campaign which he claimed said that the president was “not going to take away your rifle, shotgun, handgun.”
“And now he’s trying to take away all three!” he declared.
“He’s not taking away shotguns,” Wallace pointed out.
“Have you looked at the Feinstein [assault weapons ban] bill that he supported?” LaPierre shot back. “That’s exactly what it does. I think that what they’ll do is they’ll turn this universal check on the law abiding into a universal registry of law-abiding people. And law-abiding people don’t want that.”
Wallace, however, argued that “there’s nothing that anyone in the administration’s said that indicates they’re going to have a universal registry.”
“And Obamacare wasn’t a tax until they needed it to be tax,” LaPierre quipped. “I mean, I don’t think you can trust these [people].”
What exactly goes on at the NRA? Boy have we got answers for you:
(via truth-has-a-liberal-bias)
Updated 11:30 p.m. EST: The use of assault weapons among women emerged as standout topic at Wednesday’s Senate hearing on gun control legislation. Gayle Trotter, a lawyer and senior fellow at the conservative Independent Women’s Forum, said women need that type of firearm to level the playing field when confronted by physically stronger male attackers.
The guns rights advocate told lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee that “guns make women safer.” To her, AR-15s are the “weapon of choice” because “they have good handling, they’re light, they’re easy for women to hold.” And the appearance of such a “scary-looking gun” deters violent male criminals during home invasions.
But a recent study conducted by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center disputed those assertions. The study found that women living in states with more accessibility to guns are at a greater risk for violent death. This includes “unintentional gun deaths, suicides and homicide, particularly firearm suicides and firearm homicides.”
During an interview on The Last Word Wednesday night, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell challenged Trotter for not being able to provide one real life example of a case when an assault weapon specifically saved one woman’s life in that kind of a situation. “You don’t go to the Senate to imagine things!” O’Donnell said.
While speaking in front of the senators, Trotter described a hypothetical scene of a “young woman defending her babies in her home” when faced with “three, four, five violent attackers, intruders in her home with her children screaming in the background” as a reason to own an assault rifle.
“The peace of mind that she has, knowing that she has a scary-looking gun, gives her more courage when she’s fighting hardened, violent criminals,” said Trotter, who was the only woman on the five-person panel. “If we ban these types of assault weapons, you are putting these types of women at a great disadvantage–more so than men because they don’t have the same type of physical strength and opportunity to defend themselves in a hand-to-hand struggle.”
The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was injured after being shot in the head, and her husband Mark Kelly also spoke at the hearing.
(via Daily Kos: Dick Durbin dismantles Wayne LaPierre)
Warning: If you’re a fan of Wayne LaPierre and his stewardship of the National Rifle Association, do not watch this video from today’s Senate Judiciary Committee gun control hearing, because Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) completely demolishes him, along with his argument against gun background checks.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) caught National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre in a significant contradiction during Wednesday’s hearing on preventing gun violence. Since the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut the nation’s most influential gun lobby has opposed the growing bipartisan push for universal background checks, arguing that such a policy would infringe on the Second Amendment rights of law abiding Americans. But as Leahy pointed out, the group has supported the reasonable background checks in the past.
Under current law, gun purchasers buying firearms from federally licensed dealers are subject to background checks. As a result, more than 2 million applicants have been prohibited from purchasing guns. Unfortunately, 40 percent of firearm acquisitions are from individuals who are not licensed gun dealers and do not undergo any background checks. Gun safety advocates have sought to close the loophole for years and in the 1999, the NRA backed this effort.
“We think it is reasonable to provide mandatory, instant criminal background checks for every sale at every gun show,” LaPierre said during a hearing held on May 27, 1999, in the wake of the Columbine High School shooting. “No loopholes anywhere for anyone. That means closing the Hinckley loophole so the records of those adjudicated mentally ill are in the system.”
While NRA leadership opposes universal background checks, its members back the change. A national survey conducted by Johns Hopkins University found that “89 percent of all respondents, and 75 percent of those identified as NRA members, support universal background checks for gun sales. Similar surveys by Pew Research Center and Gallup have also found background checks to be by far the most popular gun control proposal in the aftermath the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.”
H/T: Think Progress
The post-inauguration push for President Obama’s ambitious second term agenda kicks into high gear this week, with major action on Capitol Hill for two of Obama’s signature legislative goals: immigration reform and gun violence prevention.
While most of the news Monday was dominated by a bipartisan call for comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate, the day also kicked off a big week for gun violence prevention. Recent days have included a push by Vice President Biden for the president’s gun control agenda — as well as signs that in the Senate at least, key parts of that agenda could be picking up steam.
• Senate Republicans
Last week brought stories of Republican Senators crossing the aisle to at least rhetorically endorse some of the president’s top goals on gun control. Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) is reportedly working with Democratic Senators on legislation to ban the trafficking of illegal guns. He’s also working “to find an amenable background-check proposal,” according to staff.
It is not so surprising that Kirk has joined the push for new gun laws after the Newtown, Conn., school massacre. He has supported a ban on so-called assault weapons in the past and has expressed support for new proposals for one. But there are signs more conservative Republicans are ready to join the push for background checks, which is the central legislative goal of gun control advocates in the current debate. On Friday, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) said he’s working with Democrats on a background check plan. (Coburn did not respond to a request for comment from TPM Monday.)
• High-Profile Hearings Begin
On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will host leaders from all sides of the gun violence debate for a hearing. On hand will be Mark Kelly, the husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ) and organizer of a new pro-gun control super PAC, and Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association executive vice president. Committee chair Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has said he hopes to have gun violence legislation ready by “by late February or early March,” according to Politico.
But that doesn’t mean gun violence is taking a back seat. On Monday, Obama and Biden met with police chiefs from around the country — including communities affected by mass shootings over the past year — to talk about gun violence prevention. Advocates for gun control have said that law enforcement support for new regulations is key to pressuring waffling lawmakers to support them, and the White House meeting is a sign the administration agrees.
On Tuesday night, National Rifle Association Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre offered the organization’s response to President Obama’s inaugural address and the gun safety proposals he offered earlier this month.
Speaking at the Weatherby Foundation International Hunting and Conservation Award dinner in Reno, Nevada, LaPierre claimed that President Obama seeks to place “every private personal firearms transaction right under the thumb of the federal government” and charged that he will “ruin Christmas for young boys across the country by creating a system to track the country’s firearms.”
Obama’s proposal for tracking firearms is actually meant to cut down on the number of stolen guns used in crimes, and to be able to trace back weapons to their owners. The reforms will help law enforcement better understand where guns used in violent crime come from.
