Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 107

What Would We Do If Ben Carson Wasn’t Protecting Our 2nd Amendment Rights?

Uh-oh, the gun industry just suffered a minor jolt that could become a knockout punch because a Federal judge has decided that the suit against Bushmaster brought by the parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook must be heard in a state, as opposed to a federal court.  What this means is that the manufacturer, Bushmaster, will have to prove that their gun was not too dangerous to sell to the public, notwithstanding the fact that Adam Lanza was able to kill 20 kids and 6 adults in slightly more than five minutes’ time.

We don’t yet know which weapons were used to kill nine people at Umpqua Community College on October 1, but we do know that one of the guns carried into the school by Christopher Harper-Mercer was an assault rifle. The fact that the Connecticut Bushmaster suit was revived the day before another school slaughter took place is a horrifying coincidence that, if nothing else, tells us two things: 1) these mass shootings are become so frequent as to be almost routine; 2) the shooter’s access to an AR-15 in both incidents simply can’t be overlooked or ignored.

                I’m hoping that if the Bushmaster case is argued in open court that Ben Carson will decide to weigh in on the side of the gun. His recent rise in the polls has coincided with a shameless effort to grab every single pro-gun vote, even if it means saying things that physicians should never say.  Here’s a sample that was posted on his Facebook page although now it’s been taken down: “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.”  Does this jerk have any idea how stupid, pandering and medically-unethical such a comment can be?  Does he have any idea how reprehensible it is for a physician to compare the effects of any injury to a legal state of affairs?

Ben – you’re a creep. Nobody’s taking anybody’s rights away. What is going to happen when the Bushmaster suit is re-opened in state court, is that the whole issue of gun violence is finally going to be discussed by people who will be under oath and won’t be able to pretend that a marketing slogan can be used to obscure or fudge the truth.  Because here’s the truth about the gun that Adam Lanza and probably Chris Mercer used when they opened fire in classrooms on both coasts. They didn’t use a ‘modern, sporting rifle,’ if by ‘sporting’ the gun industry tries to pretend that it’s no different than the old Remington 700 or Winchester 64 that I lug into the woods. It’s a military gun, pure and simple. it’s used by military and para-military forces worldwide, and just because some of the military guns can be set on full-auto doesn’t alter the fact that many armed forces units fire it in semi-auto mode as well.

But the argument about whether a semi-automatic weapon is just as lethal as a full-auto gun misses the whole point.  And to understand the degree to which gun jerks like Carson will go to drag the argument away from the reality-lethality, here’s what he said today on Fox: “Guns don’t kill people. We need to figure out who is the dangerous person so we can intervene.”  Okay Ben, how do you propose we ‘figure out’ the identity all those dangerous persons?  Should we administer a Rorschach test to every gun buyer after they fill out a 4473? Or maybe you would prefer we use the Minnesota Multiphasic exam.

I don’t think there’s much chance that Ben Carson’s going to be the tenant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue come January 20, 2017.  But I’d give anything for him to represent the gun industry when the case against Bushmaster comes into court.  I can’t wait to hear him tell the parents of the kids gunned down at Sandy Hook that those lethal wounds weren’t as important as our 2nd Amendment rights. I just can’t wait.

What Did Adam Lanza and Chris Mercer Have In Common? Moms Who Lived Guns,

So it turns out that the Oregon shooter, Christopher Mercer, got into gun s the old-fashioned way – he learned to enjoy the shooting sports from his mother.  And his mother, according to an article in today’s New York Times, was no shrinking violet when it came to exclaiming on the virtues and values of gun ownership, posting for example the following statement on the internet: “I keep two full mags in my Glock case and the ARs and AKs all have loaded mags. No one will be ‘dropping’ by my house uninvited without acknowledgement.”  Sweet.

                Adam Lanza, the shooter at Sandy Hook, was similarly enabled and supported by his mother when it came to guns.  Momma and son visited gun shops together, they shot at the range together, they probably sat and cleaned the guns together.  Adam had access to all the guns in the house, which made it easy for him to drop a cap on the old lady before going over to the elementary school where he made his feelings really known.

What’s really scary in this tale of two massacres is that along with building warm and loving relationships with their sons over guns, both mothers were also keenly aware that neither boy would have qualified for the mental stability award of the year.  Lanza’s mother dragged him from one mental health professional to another; Mercer’s mother posted that he suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder, and she encouraged other parents of troubled children to contact her for advice.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not even hinting at the idea that children (or adults) who demonstrate any kind of mental disorder should, ipso facto, be considered risks to themselves or anyone else. I’m also not saying that the fact that these two boys were encouraged to use and shoot guns means, ipso facto, that they would be more disposed to commit horrendous gun assaults.  But in all of the post-Oregon chatter what we hear from a certain group of public officials who want to become the 45th president of the United States, is that the Umpqua CC massacre “proves” that no amount of gun control will make any difference because people like Adam Lanza and Christopher Mercer will always ‘fall through the cracks.’

I don’t really blame Trump, Fiorina, Bush, et. al., for saying something as stupid as that.  After all, it’s a tight race and pro-gun voters could be decisive in primary states like Iowa and South Carolina. What’s the old saying? You do what you gotta do?  And let’s not forget that the idea that we can’t do anything about mass shootings until we ‘fix’ the mental health system didn’t emerge full-blown from Trump’s Twitter account.  It was announced with unrestrained finality by Wayne LaPierre after Sandy Hook.

Truth to tell, it probably isn’t possible to do anything that would allow us to predict with any degree of accuracy who might be the next person to walk into a school, a movie theater, or some other public venue and see how many people could be mowed down before flipping to the next mag.  Which is why the whole point about ‘fixing the mental health system’ to deal with gun violence is nothing more than an argument that has been invented to avoid talking about gun violence at all.

Because the truth is that mass shootings are pretty hard to pull off if you are carrying a bolt-action hunting rifle which, loaded to full capacity, only holds five rounds.  And the idea that anyone would take an AR-15 with a 30-shot mag into the woods to look for Bambi is nothing but pure crap.  But when sport shooting and hunting are replaced with the safety afforded by the ‘armed citizen’ versus the dangers of ‘gun-free’ zones, the result is a debasement of language to the point that no substantive discussion can ever take place.  Which pretty much sums up the strategy of the pro-gun movement when it comes to gun violence.

 

Can Hillary Close The Gun Show Loophole? I’m Not So Sure.

One of the planks in Hillary’s new gun control program calls for “closing the gun show loophole,” an issue that has been floating around for years since Dianne Feinstein who has sponsored legislation to regulate gun shows after she entered the Senate in 1992. There’s a lot of misinformation floating around on gun shows, particularly among people who don’t go to gun shows, and this is a good time to clear some misconceptions up.  In particular, the question of whether there’s any real gun-show loophole at all.

               When most people speak about gun show loopholes what they mean is that anyone can walk into a gun show and get their hands on a gun, legal requirements met or not.  Although many FFL-licensed dealers display and sell their inventory at shows, very few states impose licensing requirements on gun show vendors, as long as individuals who rent tables and sell at shows meet existing local laws on private transfers of guns. And since most states impose very few regulations on private gun transfers, buying a gun without a background check at a gun show is no different from walking across the street and buying a gun from a neighbor or a friend.

What Hillary evidently wants to do is use some kind of executive authority to force all gun show vendors to be licensed dealers which would mean that every gun sold at a gun show would by a show vendor, would have to undergo a background check.  I can’t tell you how many guns I have bought at shows just because I bumped into someone as I was walking around who was carrying a gun that I liked and a word here, a word there, some bills out of my pocket and I own the gun.  And don’t think these kinds of transactions don’t happen in the parking lot outside the show either, because they happen all the time.

If Hillary really believes that she can end private sales at gun shows or anywhere else by using her executive power to define the word ‘dealer,’ one of her staff people should take a look at the Firearms Owners Protection Act that was passed in 1986. This law was passed to define or change sections of the GCA68 law which, because it represented the first time that the feds got into regulating gun commerce in a major way, contained passages and whole sections which nobody could really figure out.  And one of the big issues that was revised was the definition of ‘dealers,’ since the ATF after 1968 had taken the position that anyone selling a gun to anyone else was engaged in gun commerce and therefore came under their control.  Talk about a bureaucracy trying to extend its reach!

What FOPA did was to define a gun dealer as someone “whose time, attention and labor is occupied by dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business with the principal objective of livelihood and profit through the repetitive purchase and resale of an inventory of firearms.”  It also specifically excluded persons who made “occasional” sales or sold guns from “personal collections.”  From my own experience based on wandering through hundreds of gun shows over the last forty years, I can honestly confirm that the FOPA definition fits probably 75% of all the guns I have seen for sale at all those shows. Most of the big-time vendors at gun shows aren’t selling firearms at all.  They go from show to show, maybe do 40 shows a year, and they’re hawking t-shirts, memorabilia, all kinds of junk and crap but they’re not selling guns.

I’m thrilled that Hillary has injected the words ‘gun violence’ into the Presidential campaign.  I hope she ramps up the message because, if nothing else, I’d like to see the ‘stuff happens’ nonsense shoved up where it belongs. But if anyone wants to really get rid of gun violence I’ll continue to say it again and again: It’s the guns, stupid.  It’s the guns.

 

First But Not Last Comments About Hillary’s Gun-Control Plan

Now that Hillary has released her gun-control plan, we have something substantive from one Presidential candidate.  The GVP community, myself included, might as well ignore the Republicans going forward because even when someone walks into a community college classroom and drops caps on nine people, they don’t consider this to be an act of ‘gun violence’ at all.  To her credit, Hillary uses the phrase again and again.  I’m going to devote some space to exploring how her plan will and I’m going to start with her recommendations for better regulation of gun dealers, since I was a retailer from 2001 until early last year.

                Hillary says “we must do more to crack down on gun stores that flood our communities with illegal guns” and claims that 58% of gun stores have not been inspected within the past 5 years. Worse is that 38% of dealers inspected in 2011weren’t following the laws under which they are supposed to operate, but only half of 1% of all inspected dealers had their licenses revoked.  The root of the problem, says Hillary, is underfunding of the ATF, which she will reverse after she takes office in 2016.

I was one of those non-compliant gun dealers following an inspection  that covered years during which I sold somewhere around `12,000 guns.  When the inspection was concluded I reported all missing or stolen guns to the ATF in Atlanta – a grand total of six guns, one of which later turned up.  It wasn’t clear that any of these guns were really missing or stolen.  I just couldn’t produce the requisite paperwork (Form 4473) to show who had purchased the gun.  I probably could have found all the guns had I taken the time and trouble to conduct an online search of the state database, but I would have had to look up every, single recorded sale in order to find the five guns, and neither I nor the ATF really cared.

The absence of paperwork on these guns made me a non-compliant dealer.  And what then made me a seriously non-compliant dealer was the fact that my Acquisitions & Disposition log, the A&D book, contained thousands of incomplete notations regarding the source of many of my guns.  Of the 12,000+ gun acquisitions listed in the A&D, I had bought at least half of them from one wholesaler who happened to be located near my shop.  This is not unusual for most retailers because guns are heavy, they have to be shipped overnight air express, and if you can drive a few miles and pick the guns up directly from the wholesaler you save the cost of a lot of freight.

Except that under ATF rules, when you receive a gun from a wholesaler you have to list his federal license number alongside the description of the gun. I didn’t do this for any of the 5,000 guns that I received from this wholesaler so I was non-compliant more than 5,000 times.  To their credit, the ATF inspectors knew this egregious failure to follow the regulations didn’t constitute even the slightest reason to suspect that I was, as the saying goes, dealing ‘out the back door.’ But in the inspection report that I was given, this failure was duly noted and the numbers of non-compliant notations were no doubt rolled up into the ATF local, then regional, then national report.

Hillary used one of these reports for her comments about non-compliant dealers, and while of course there are bad apple dealers, what I’m suggesting is that numbers alone don’t’ really tell you very much.  The report states that between 2004 and 2011, there were 174,679 guns missing or stolen from federally-licensed dealers; during that same period there were probably two million guns stolen out of private homes. None of the guns I couldn’t find ended up in the wrong hands but every gun stolen from someone’s house winds up in a place it shouldn’t be. I don’t notice the word ‘theft’ mentioned in Hillary’s plan.

 

Want To End Gun Violence? Go To The Source.

Ever notice how the chief culprits are never identified or even mentioned in the great blame game that breaks out after every horrendous shooting?  Now don’t me wrong.  The unintended injury or death of any human being is horrendous, but we don’t register the daily, humdrum gun violence affairs; we wait until a really bestial, mass murder takes place to which we then assign terms like’ horrible,’ ‘unthinkable,’ ‘tragic’ and the like.  Then we play the great blame game.

For Republicans, the blame is now squarely fixed on something called “very’ very sick people.” Or at least this is how Donald Trump began his contribution to the blame game after the Oregon massacre last week.  It was basically what he and other Presidential wannabes said after the August 26 gunning down of two television journalists in Virginia; funny how these guys (and a gal) all agree that we should do a better job of collecting information about the crazies among us but, at the same time, we don’t need to extend background checks. So what should we do with all this new information that we’ll get when we ‘fix’ the mental health system?

Smith & Wesson

Everybody’s getting down on Jeb Bush for his cogent “stuff happens” response to the blame game, but maybe he’s decided that given his standing in the polls, he’d be better off not blaming anyone or anything at all.  And when all is said and done, I give Baby Bro a high-five for at least having the honesty to come right out and say what the words of the other red-meat candidates really mean, namely, that when it comes to gun violence, they don’t want to do anything at all.

But I’m not so sure that the blame game is generating anything more credible from the other side.  What was Hilary’s line? “Sensible gun control measures,” whatever that means.  And from the woods of Vermont, Bernie Sanders issued a statement which began, “We need sensible gun-control legislation.”  Wait a minute.  I thought that Hilary owns ‘sensible.’  Joe, who hasn’t decided yet whether he can afford to be unemployed after January 20, 2016, pushed back on the ‘sensible’ argument to remind us that the 2nd Amendment didn’t protect the rights of someone who wanted to own a “bazooka or an F-15.” I like Joe and I’d vote for him if I had the chance.   But what the hell was he thinking?

If you want the official blame-game entry you have to turn to Nick Kristof’s op-ed in The New York Times.  And what we get here is a remarkable and novel approach to gun violence, namely, that guns aren’t safe. He comes right out and says it!  After all, the British cut suicide rates by switching from coal to gas, the latter much less lethal, hence ovens in England are safer. “We need to do the same with guns.”  Want to make guns safer Nickie-boy?  Design them so that when you pull the trigger, out comes a squirt of H2O.

So that’s where things stand in today’s great blame game.  Everybody’s got a way to fix the problem but nobody’s saying anything reality-based at all. But recall I said in the very first sentence that the real culprits of gun violence are never named.  So I’m going to name them now and it goes like this: Beretta, Charter, Colt, Glock, H&K, Kahr, Sig, Smith&Wesson, Springfield, Walther –  I’m probably missing one or two more.  These crummy little companies make the products that kill and injure 100,000 Americans every year.  Want to tell me that guns don’t kill people, people kill people?  Go lay brick.

It’s not about background checks, it’s not about mental health, it’s not even about ‘stuff.’  It’s about a lethal consumer product being cynically and dishonestly promoted as the most effective protection from violence and crime. It’s not true, the gun makers know it’s not true, and it’s time we stopped looking elsewhere for something to blame.

Does The Oregon Shooting Prove That Gun-Free Zones Are Dangerous? Only If You’re Trying To Sell Guns.

It’s too early to tell what went off in the head of Chris Mercer that made him walk into a classroom in Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, OR with either three or four guns, then start a shooting rampage that left 10 dead and 7 wounded. In fact, since he was killed by police, we’ll probably never know.  But what’s the difference?  Just chalk one up for the folks who keep reminding us that the biggest thing we have to fear is not the violence caused by guns, but the violence caused by ‘gun-free zones.’

                Megyn Kelly couldn’t get Donald Trump to appear on her show last night so she predictably called up Dana Loesch who couldn’t wait to tell everyone that she has renamed gun free zones ‘criminal protection areas.’  But of course Dana didn’t get out there quite as quickly as the self-appointed head of the universal CCW campaign, John Lott, who immediately posted the Umpqua CC campus security rules, which declare the school a gun-free zone.

Now that the gun industry has gotten concealed-carry of handguns to be recognized in just about every state, the idea that Americans should be able to carry a concealed weapon anywhere, anytime, helps push the ‘armed citizen’ argument to the next level, which is the stupid idea known as ‘constitutional carry,’ namely, that ownership of a gun entitles someone to carry it without undergoing specific CCW licensing or training at all.  The fact that most police officers don’t receive adequate training to help them determine whether a situation actually calls for the use of lethal force, never mind whether they can actually hit the target when they pull the trigger should not be of concern if we have all those armed citizens walking around who don’t need to demonstrate that they even know how to properly hold their gun.

The fact is that there is not a single, credible study which even vaguely shows any deterrent effect on the behavior of a mass shooter because he believes that the place he has chosen to commit mass carnage might have civilians walking around with guns. After Elliot Rodger’s 2014 rampage in Isla Vista that left 6 dead, John Lott went on Fox and declared that the manifesto written by Rodger was ‘proof’ that guns were a deterrent to mass shootings, because Rodger chose to stay away from locations where he knew that he would encounter people with guns.  The only problem was that Lott was lying, because Rodger specifically said that the guns he saw were being carried by police.  Which is exactly why we have police, right?

The GVP community is rightfully horrified by this latest act of gun violence which transforms what the Brady Campaign calls “a sanctuary for education” into “the latest memorial of victims lost to America’s gun violence epidemic.”  Everytown’s comment said, “Once again a college community has endured a tragic mass shooting.” Predictably, the White House called for strengthening gun laws knowing there’s no chance this will occur.

But what do we say if it turns out that the shooter legally acquired his guns?  How do we respond to people like Loesch and Lott who use these tragedies to promote both themselves and the ownership of guns? My response goes like this.  When I was a college undergraduate I had the good fortune to study with an economist named Paul Baran.  Educated in Germany, he came to the United States to escape the Hitler regime and taught at Stanford until his untimely death in 1964. With reference to the Nazis he once said, “a meaningful discussion of human affairs can only be conducted with humans; one wastes ones time talking to beasts about matters related to people.”

I think we waste our time trying to argue the moral imperative of gun violence with people like Dana Loesch, John Lott or Wayne LaPierre.  I don’t care how many gun nuts actually believe that good guys with guns stop bad guys.  Good guys don’t need to carry guns.

 

Dre Buys A Gun And We Learn A Lesson About Gun Violence.

Now that Anthony Anderson has replaced Bill Cosby as the African-American whose family life proves that most families face the same, universal problems regardless of race, the show’s writers have to come up with situations reflecting issues that come up when everyone’s sitting around the dinner table, or running off to school in the morning, or getting ready for bed.  That being the case, what better issue to inject onto the screen in Black-ish’s second episode this season than the issue of guns?

Anthony Anderson

And before I go any further, I just want to remind my readers that the gun industry has been trying like all get out to convince African-Americans to own guns because the typical gun owner, an older White man like me, owns more guns than he knows what to do with them anyway, so demographics like minorities, women and new immigrants hopefully represent new consumer targets who need to be convinced to buy guns. It hasn’t worked in the African-American community, by the way, no matter how many times Colion Noir prances around on the NRA video screen.  Nor have women been flocking into gun shops because a pathetic, Sarah Palin wannabe named Dana Loesch stands there in a tough leather outfit delivering a vapid monologue on how her gun protects her family from thugs.

The “Rock, Paper, Scissors, Gun” episode of Black-ish on the other hand, is both funny and profound, the former because the script simply doesn’t miss a trick when it comes to spoofing just about every sacred cow we have; the latter because interspersed with terrifically comic lines are serious statements about guns and gun violence that honestly capture both sides of the gun debate.  The argument about guns, after all, gets down to whether the benefit derived from using a gun for self-defense outweighs the risk of keeping an altogether lethal consumer product around the home.  And if you listen closely to the dialogue, you’ll realize that the folks who created this script for Black-ish have taken the trouble to read and understand both the obvious and the subtle issues that inform the gun debate.

Example: Dre wants a gun in the house, his wife Bow does not.  In fact, men are much more likely to be gun owners than women by a margin of eight or nine to one. Example:  Miles, the six-year old, gets very excited over the prospect of a gun, his older brother Andre, who spends all his time on the computer, couldn’t care less.  In fact, young children are the most vulnerable to gun accidents because they are naturally curious, have no sense of risk and everything to them is a toy.

Finally Bow gives in and Dre goes out to buy a gun.  There’s a remarkably funny moment inside a gun shop involving an older Asian-American woman who has just bought a shotgun, but I’ll leave its description unsaid.  So now the gun is in the house and one night it sounds like the veritable bad guy has broken in so everyone crowds into Dre’s bedroom because he’ll protect them with the gun. Except that the door opens and in stumbles Dre’s father played perfectly by Laurence Fishburne who doesn’t get shot only because Dre can’t figure out how to actually use the gun.

Of course the show has already come in for the usual stupid and snarky comments from the pro-gun gang, but there’s no question that Black-ish captures the truth about the risks embodied in owning a personal-defense gun.  And the final moments invoke a very profound insight when Dre confesses to his father that the reason he wants to own a gun is because he felt scared as a young boy and wished he had a real gun back then.  The GVP community often finds pro-gun fervor to be inexplicable and difficult, if not impossible, to understand in logical terms.  Is there a chance that Dre’s admission of childhood fears provides an important clue?

Do More Guns Equal Less Crime? The Lone Star State Says ‘No.’

An article has just appeared which may prove to be one of the most significant contributions by public health research to the ongoing debate about gun violence.  Not that there is much of a debate about the fact that guns kill 30,000+ yearly, injure at least 60,000 others, the total costs of which amount to more than $200 billion each year.  But the response of the pro-gun gang to this state of affairs is to deny the negative effects of gun violence when compared to the positive role that guns play in keeping us safe from crime.  And to bolster this rather disingenuous way of getting as far away from the evidence as possible, the gun gang invariably rolls out Kleck’s phony telephone survey which found that gun owners prevented millions of crimes each year, or they listen to John  Lott on some red-meat radio station promoting his discredited thesis that ‘more guns equals less crime.’

Unfortunately, most of the research on whether gun ownership does or doesn’t prevent crime suffers from the admitted failure by public health researchers to construct a research model that can really explain to what degree a coincidence (i.e., concealed-carry licenses going up, crime rates going down) is actually a causality or not. What the research team which published this study did to sharpen the focus of this question was to look at county-level issuances of CCW in 4 states (Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas) and compare this date against county-level arrest data in the same 4 states for, and here’s the important point, ten years following the issuance of CCW, or what is also referred to as CHL.

Gov. Rick Perry

Before getting to the results of this study, I should mention one very important distinction between the research team that was responsible for this work, as opposed to public health researchers who have been active in this particular field.  For the most part, the work that has debunked the ‘more guns = less crime’ argument has come out of either elite, Ivy League institutions like Harvard or Yale, or has been the product of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health.  And since everybody knows that the anti-gun monster Bloomberg funded the Hopkins School of Public Health, everyone knows that their work is only published when it supports something that is anti-gun.  And if you think I’m overstating the degree to which the pro-gun gang dismisses public health gun violence research through the shabbiest form of academic character assassination, take a look at what Gary Kleck recently said about criticisms of his work.

The group that researched and wrote the referenced article aren’t faculty from Hopkins, Stanford, Harvard or Yale.  They are from the Department of Health Policy and Management at Texas A&M. Whoa!  Texas A&M?  A school located in the state where the previous Governor claims he carries a gun for self-protection against prairie dogs when he’s out for his morning jog? But Texas, on the other hand, is not only the state for guns, but next January the Lone Star State will roll back a 140-year old law and let its good citizens carry guns openly just about anywhere they choose.

That all being said, exactly what did this team of Texans discover about the relationship between concealed-carry and crime?   They discovered that there’s no relationship at all.  Between 1998 and 2010, the personal crime rate in Florida dropped by 9%, it was flat even in Michigan, and went up slightly in Texas and Pennsylvania.  The property crime rate declined in Florida and Texas, murders increased slightly in Pennsylvania and the Sunshine State.  The burglary rate in all 4 states decreased, even though a major portion of Lott’s book was devoted to ‘proving’ that non-personal crimes would increase after CCWs were issued because criminals were afraid that more citizens would have guns.

I’ll end this comment by quoting the researchers themselves: “Is CHL licensing in any way related to crime rates? The results of this research indicate that no such relationships exist.” As my grandmother would say, “and that’s that.”

Dana Loesch Gets A Taste Of Her Own Medicine And It Couldn’t Happen To A More Deserving Gal.

Now that Dana Loesch has discovered a new way to get people to listen to her stupid and senseless I’m a pistol-packin’ Mom video, we can all sit back and wait for her next attempt to climb out from underneath her rock and pretend that she knows anything about guns. I’m referring to the childish effort by a video designer to mock Dana’s even more childish defense of gun violence by creating what is obviously a satire of her message which ends with an explosion, a spatter of blood and, if you have any kind of imagination, it looks and sounds like Dana shot herself with a Glock.

Unfortunately, the video has been removed both from the Twitter page of its designer, as well as from a story that obligingly appeared in The Blaze.  But this hasn’t stopped Dana from lining up her right-wing media cronies like Cam Edwards, as well as her legion of adoring fans to come to her defense in her hour of need.  The problem is that Dana’s original video about having a gun because she needs to protect her family uses the same, old, senseless argument that the NRA has been putting out there for thirty years, namely, that we are all the targets of violent criminals both within our homes and out in the street, and the only way to defend ourselves in an increasingly violent world is to get our hands on a gun.

But this time the attack didn’t come from some imaginary (I’m going to use one of Dana’s favorite words) thug bursting through the door; it was in the form of a video that played harmlessly on the web.  Too bad for Dana that she can’t defend herself from words or pictures by brandishing her gun.  But she can remind all her fans that the only violence they need to fear is the artistic violence perpetrated by her enemies who want to get rid of the guns.  She tweeted that the video was a “threat” on her life and then in a later tweet accused the same, liberal crowd that was behind the video of being the real promoters of violence because, after all, they will kill “babies and conservatives” if and when they get the chance.

I guess if you accuse someone of murder in print it’s okay, it’s just when a violent event is captured on video that someone’s crossed the line.  But Dana’s ready for all possibilities because remember, she’s got a gun.  And just in case the video really does constitute a threat to her life, she’s already contacted the FBI.  Of course she also made sure that an obliging gun company, in this case Remington, offered to help her protect herself by sending her a new gun. The choreography of Dana’s response to this video is all too neat, all too perfect; I’m wondering –  did she produce the video herself?

I want to say two things about Dana Loesch.  First, she’s a real bore, and I don’t mean stupid and boring, which she is. What I really mean is that she debases every discussion she joins.  Dana reduces everything to the lowest common intellectual denominator, she shamelessly panders to anger and fear. I have no issue with pro-gun folks who state their views with attention to real facts and respect for the truth.  I didn’t notice cry-baby Dana mouthing any concern when a meme appeared in which an idiot actually did threaten Shannon Watts by putting an axe through her head.

Second, because I’m polite I won’t call her a liar but what she says is simply not true.  The number of women who are shot in domestic disputes with guns kept around the home is twenty times higher than the number of women who use a gun to protect themselves from harm.  When Dana stands there primping in her leather outfit (no doubt wearing it while she home-schools her kids) and tells women that a gun will make them safe, she’s promoting real danger, not responding to a make-believe event.

 

On December 10-14 You’ll See Why The Gun Lobby Is No Match For The Cross Lobby.

I have published nearly 400 op-ed pieces on guns, which adds up to more than 240,000 words.  But until two weeks ago, when I posted a column about the November 3rd gun violence event at Washington’s National Cathedral, I hadn’t written a single word about the question of gun violence and religious faith, which the more I think about it, deserves a central place in the gun debate.

The Very Rev. Gary Hall

Part of my reluctance to write about guns and religion stems from the fact that I’m not particularly religious.  So I don’t instinctively think about religion or faith when I’m constructing an argument about guns or anything else.  But the good folks at the National Cathedral just sent me a notice about the Gun Violence Sabbath Weekend taking place on December 10-14, and the scope and depth of this remarkable event needs to be recognized and considered even by a non-religious sort like myself.

The event is actually designed to inject the issue of gun violence into the religious services of Christians, Jews, Islam, Hindus, Sikhs, Universalists and Buddhists – I hope I have them all.  Similar events took place in 2014 engaging more than 1,200 congregations and worship sites forming  a virtual coalition between the National Cathedral, the Newtown Foundation, Faiths United To Prevent Gun Violence and other faith-based and anti-violence groups.

I’m going to assume that if 1,000 congregations of different faiths choose to dedicate a Sabbath observance to gun violence that easily a million people could be involved in thinking about this issue over the four-day period beginning December 10th.  But it occurs to me that there’s one national organization that is somewhat conspicuous by its absence from the event, and that organization happens to be the NRA.  And the reason I say that is because the annual NRA fest, which will be held next year in Louisville, always includes a prayer breakfast which, according to the 2016 program, will present speakers “who will challenge you with stirring words of freedom and faith.” So if religious belief can be used both to invoke the Lord’s guidance for those who want to end gun violence, as well as to invoke God’s blessing over those whose devotion to their guns ultimately results in 30,000+ deaths each year,  how do we reconcile these two seemingly-contradictory views of faith?

I found an answer to that question in the sermon preached by The Very Reverend Gary Hall who will retire as Dean of the National Cathedral shortly after the December GVP event.  Reverend Hall preached this message on December 16, 2002, just two days after the Sandy Hook massacre that took the lives of 20 first-graders plus 6 adults.  After recounting his own reaction and the reactions of others to the horrifying event, Dr. Hall turned to the question that had to be answered: “What are we, as people of faith, to do?”  And to answer that question, he reminded the Congregation of their sacred duty:  “As Christians, we are obligated to heal the wounded, protect the vulnerable, and stand for peace. “

But if, as Reverend Hall went on to say, the gun lobby is no match for the cross lobby, then shouldn’t people who devote themselves to the cross also be out there talking to people who devote themselves to guns?  I’ve never attended the NRA prayer breakfast, but I’m sure the audience considers themselves to be persons of deep faith.  And don’t ask me how, don’t ask me why, but the religious ‘faith’ of those Republican Presidential candidates always seems to go hand-in-hand with their unwavering support for 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’

Don’t get me wrong.  Reverend Hall’s post-Newtown uplifting sermon was a powerful antidote to Wayne LaPierre’s fear-mongering rant which constituted the NRA’s response to Sandy Hook.  But there are plenty of people out there who still want to cling both to their religion and their guns. The faith-based coalition that will come together around the country on December 10-14 might consider ways to reach those folks as well.