Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 46

John Lott Meets The New York Times. A Win-Win For Both Sides.

What? The New York Times is carrying an op-ed by John Lott? The John Lott? The John Lott who is the bete noir of the entire gun violence prevention community because he has singlehandedly convinced a majority of Americans that keeping a gun around the house will make them safe? No, not The New York Times. Not the newspaper whose recent op-ed by Gail Collins begged the GVP community to ‘energize’ and not give up.

[image error]             John has been making arguments about the positive social utility of guns since 1998 when the first edition of More Guns, Less Crime, was published by the University of Chicago Press. I also happen to be a Chicago Press author, so I’m not about to say anything nasty about his book. But I don’t have to worry, because nasty and unkind comments about this book abound.

When John first published More Guns, roughly 35% of all Americans said that guns made their home a safer environment, while 50% said a gun at home made it a more dangerous place. The GVP will tell you that this shift in opinion is due to the power and financial clout of the NRA. And while the boys from Fairfax have certainly done their best to tilt the legislative field their way, the fact is that what the poll numbers indicate is that a lot of Americans have changed their minds about gun risk who don’t happen to own guns. Our friends at Harvard estimate that somewhere under 25% of American adults (most of them men) own guns, and that’s a much smaller percentage than the percentage of people who now say that a gun makes them safe.

There are two reasons why I am pleased to see Lott’s work show up in The New York Times. First, the shift towards guns for self-defense is not just a function of the decline in hunting, nor it can’t just be blamed on the NRA. Something else is going on in the United States which has caused a growth in what scholars like Alan Fiske, Tage Rai and Steven Pinker  call ‘virtuous violence;’ i.e., the use of violence to achieve positive ends. Lott’s research is an attempt to explain why this shift has occurred and needs to be acknowledged from that point of view.

Second, I am not terribly comfortable with using regression analysis to explain human affairs. Finding an ‘association’ between two trend lines is more a kind of statistical alchemy rather than a scientific method to establish causal facts. I agree with Richard Berk who refers to most regression analysis as a good way to describe patterns of data, but description and causal explanations are two, very different things. In that regard, Lott’s reliance on regression analysis doesn’t necessarily persuade me that his argument is true. But none of his critics seem willing to do anything beyond running his data through different statistical models which will always yield different results.

The problem with relying on public health research to explain gun violence is that most of this research usually follows the traditional, epidemiological approach to figuring out risk by defining the victims, figuring out how the risk enters and move through a particular population, and then coming up with protective strategies to protect everyone else. The result is that we know an awful lot about the victims of gun violence, but we know very little about why less than 5% of Americans who commit a serious injury each year, against themselves or someone else, do it by using a gun.

Until and unless the GVP figures out why people commit gun violence, condemning John Lott for offering an answer to that question which they don’t like is a strategy leading nowhere fast. If my GVP friends would examine their own arguments with the same degree of critical vigor that they use with Lott’s work, his appearance in The New York Times will be a positive event for helping to end the violence caused by guns.

 

 

Why Do So Many ‘Trafficked’ Guns Wind Up In New York?

Now that everyone has seemed to forget about what happened in Vegas on October 1st, the noise machine is gearing up on both sides about what appears to be the possibility that the national concealed-carry bill will get to the Senate floor for a debate. The law easily floated through the House in December, but any piece of NRA-backed legislation is guaranteed to get out of the lower chamber. The question for Republicans is whether they can not only secure every red Senate vote, but grab a bunch of Democrats from gun-rich states who might be feeling a little vulnerable going into the midterm vote.

[image error]             An interesting media piece about this issue surfaced last week in, of all places, The New York Post.  If there is one newspaper in the United States which has slavishly pumped up Trump, it’s the Fox-owned Post, whose fawning coverage of Trump has been going on for years. But instead of using the gossip space on what is called Page Six, the tabloid usually gives Trump the front-page headline, and goes out of its way to make the headline read as positive as it can.

So here’s a big story about concealed-carry but the headline is a quote from the NYPD Commissioner, Jim O’Neill, describing the national CCW as ‘insanity’ and “a disaster for major cities around the country.” The Manhattan DA, Cy Vance, also chimed in, saying that he wouldn’t presume to tell the residents of West Virginia what their gun laws should say, but neither should anyone take a law written for West Virginia and apply it to New York. Vance was referring to the narrative started by Mike Bloomberg who blamed high levels of gun violence on the movement of illegal guns up the I-95 “iron pipeline” from states with lax gun laws to more restrictive states like New York.

Thank you, Cy Vance, for that quick lesson in federalism.  But with all due respect to the idea that everything would be hunky-dory in gun land if we could just figure out a way to keep those guns from the South down in the South. Back laat May, the Brooklyn DA, Eric Gonzalez, announced the biggest gun “bust’” in the borough’s history, with indictments of 24 Virginia residents who had brought more than 200 guns into the Big Apple, including a Thompson sub-machine gun, you know, one of those rat-tat-tat bangers used by the Al Capone gang. Actually the so-called machine gun is actually a semi-automatic rifle but it looks like a machine gun.

The Brooklyn press conference was quite entertaining, because in addition to all the guns lying around, DA Gonzalez also played a taped conversation between two of the crooks, one of whom was bragging to the other about how he could walk around to 10 different gun shops, buy a legal gun in each one, bring the stash up to New York and unload the guns in the street.

If someone can buy a gun legally in Virginia, they were able to pass the FBI-NICS check. A legal gun purchase is a legal gun purchase no matter where it’s made. So how come all these ‘legal’ guns only seem to come to New York from Southern states? I’ll tell you why.

If you look at the number of federal dealer licenses in Southern states  and compare to the FFL numbers in states like New York and New Jersey, there are three times as many gun licenses per capita in the South as opposed to the North. Gee, what a surprise, given the fact that per-capita gun ownership is also three times higher in the South than in the North. The movement of legally-purchased guns from one section of the country to another is a perfect example of the way the market responds to an imbalance between supply and demand. It’s not the ‘lax’ gun laws which bring Southern guns up to New York; it’s unmet demand, and laws don’t prevent the market from responding to demand.

Bruce Pankratz: Terror Management Theory and the Great Gun Debate

The book GUNS FOR GOOD GUYS, GUNS FOR BAD GUYS Gun Violence in America by Michael R. Weisser says “The basic problem with the debate about guns, as opposed to debates about other public policy issues, is that the two sides have absolutely no idea what the other side is talking about. They’re not arguing about different definitions, they’re not just using different facts. The two sides exist in two very separate universes.”  One explanation for the two different universes comes from Terror Management Theory.

[image error]In short Terror Management Theory assumes people are anxious about the fact they will die and know it could happen anytime. People live in cultures that function to keep death anxiety in the background by allowing people to believe the cultural myths to find meaning and significance in their lives. Anything that threatens that faith in their culture has to be defended against or the death anxiety rears its ugly head. I think the gun debate is a clash between two cultures in America each with its own creation myth. People in each of the cultures need to defend themselves against beliefs that are different. This explanation is perhaps too simple but I think there is a lot of truth in it and shows how logical arguments and facts do not matter much just like when people deal with deeply held religious beliefs.

My hope in writing this up is some academics out there will emerge and better discuss how terror management theory applies to the gun debate. I am only looking at one aspect in this article but think it applies in other areas as well.  With that in mind I will attempt to distill some ideas from the books The Worm at the Core: On the role of Death in Life (The Worm for short) by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and  Tom Pyszczynski (SGP for short) and In the Wake of 9-11: The Psychology of Terror (The Wake) on terror management theory and hope to show how terror management theory may offer some insights into the great gun debate.

The theory started when experimental social psychologists SGP discovered anthropologist Earnest Becker’s work and realized Becker was trying to explain two questions SGP were interested in. First, why do people need self – esteem (meaning the belief you have value in a world that means something to you).  And question two, why can’t people get along with people who are not like them. Terror management theory grew out of Becker’s work. Since SGP were experimental social psychologists they came up with ideas to test in their labs. First is a list of the details of TMT and following that is my attempt to describe the two creation myths and what I think they mean to the gun debate.

The basics of terror management theory has the following elements:

 SGP start out with the Darwin’s basic assumption that all living things have a biological predisposition toward self – preservation.
Humans are born with large brains so are different than other animals. They know they are alive and know they are going to die. The terror in TMT is the anxiety people have about knowing they will die. Making things worse they know they can die anytime.
As children grow up they shift from acting to receive their psychological security from being valued by parents to acting in ways to get a sense of value in the eyes of their culture and its gods and their earthly representatives. Cultural worldviews are shared beliefs people create about  The beliefs function to lessen  the horror created by being human with the knowledge one will sometime die and it may not be pleasant. The beliefs do this by allowing people to have some control over  the always present discomfort of death by convincing people they are beings that matter living in a meaningful world. This all only works if people keep the faith in the worldview and they feel they are important contributors to the culture.
Cultures have creation stories that lay the groundwork for the belief systems. These stories tell people how they fit in and that they matter. As an example the conservative version of the founding of America with the Founding Fathers, Declaration of Independence and the rest of the story are the basis for the beliefs of the traditional followers of American culture.
SGP also mention work by Robert Jay Lifton who talked about the difference between dealing with death discomfort with literal immortality involving an afterlife like some religions do and and symbolic immortality coming from a person’s lasting social connections and contributions to one’s culture. Example of symbolic mortality are achievements and people passing on their genes, assets and and values to their own children hoping for some influence on future generations once they themselves are gone. In addition people can have some sense of immortality by being a valued part of a larger group like  a tribe or the nation that will live on.

SGP used social psychology experiments to attempt to test their theory. There are many more details in The Wake and The Worm but here are some comments based on their findings:

 

As long as people think they are important members within the cultural worldview they belong to they can live their lives feeling confident and secure. But their beliefs are based on faith so when someone runs into people with a different beliefs they have a problem. The other people may be right and you are wrong and the discomfort of death comes back.
There is always some death anxiety in a person’s mind and SGP claim it gets projected onto other groups of people within or outside one’s own culture. The other people are scapegoats.
There are several ways to handle people who are different: 1)belittle them as misguided or stupid, try to mainstream some of their views or finally even destroy them.
Reminders of death cause people to increase their defending and reaffirming of their cultural worldviews. One example of experiments done by SGP shows when reminded of death Christians are more likely to dislike Jewish people in the US but in Israel experimenters found people are more likely to dislike Christians and Muslims.

Applying TMT to the Gun Debate

This is a bit broad but I think America has two cultural worldviews each with its own creation myth and that is why logical gun debates may be fruitless in trying to solve the problem of gun violence.

First, the traditional American creation myth and world view as described by SPG:  “… for patriotic Americans, the Revolutionary War, George Washington, the Declaration of Independence, and so on serve vital roles in their meaning systems. In this meaningful worldview, being a patriotic American makes one significant—no longer a purposeless, transient animal, one is now an eternally significant contributor to a great nation that represents eternal values of freedom and democracy. In this way, cultural worldviews set up the path to immortality, to transcendence of one’s own death. By being valued contributors to such a meaningful world, we become permanent constituents of an eternal symbolic reality, instead of just corporeal beings in a wholly material reality.” (Pyszyzynski, Tom. In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror (Kindle Locations 441-446). American Psychological Association (APA). Kindle Edition.)

This is my own impression of what I call the progressive version of a creation myth for America.  The myth says Columbus who was a white European male sailed to America and was followed by more white Europeans who pushed the native people off their land and decimated their cultures with reservations and boarding schools. For cheap labor the Europeans imported slaves who built the White House and the economy.  Many of the founding fathers (all men) owned slaves and did not allow them or women to vote. The industrial era came along and the capitalists exploited the workers to become super rich and in the long run put so much carbon dioxide in the air that the planet is in danger.  This all means educated people have a duty to fight racism, sexism, income inequality, climate change and other social ills by advocating for government programs paid for by the rich people and corporations who have unfairly exploited all of the vulnerable people.  I think many or even most anti-gun people subscribe to some form of the progressive creation myth.

TMT talks about people needing to defend themselves against the existence of cultural worldviews different from their own to prevent death anxiety from surfacing.  As SGP say in  The Wake “Probably the most common response is to simply view the others as misguided , unenlightened , or too stupid , uninformed , or brain – washed to see through the facade of unreasonable faith that ties them to their delusory belief system ; and perhaps to wish silently that someday , somehow , they will see the light and come to view the world from our own far superior perspective .”

Much of the talk about guns is to me about protecting one’s worldview against people who have a different worldview. Some examples for this in people with the progressive worldview is talking about the bitter clingers who cling to their religion and guns or saying proposed gun law changes are ‘reasonable’ or ‘common sense’ meant as a way to put down the people on the other side who are uneducated ignorant people who have neither. And when one reads the latest NRA pitch talking about the Founding Fathers it is almost like they want money to defend the traditional creation myth and culture. And if you don’t send money you will feel death anxiety though they don’t say that or perhaps even know they are saying it.

If you want more information on terror management theory try finding some of the many YouTube videos featuring Sheldon Solomon.

 

 

 

 

 

Sooner Or Later Dana Loesch Will Shut Up.

Folks, I think it’s time to figure out what noisemakers like that idiot Dana Loesch is really trying to achieve on behalf of the pro-gun movement, because if we don’t, we’re going to waste an awful lot of time being concerned about something which I think has been completely misunderstood by our friends in the mainstream (i.e., liberal) media like The New York Times and MS-NBC.

[image error]              Of course the GVP needs all the help and allies it can get. But such relationships shouldn’t foreclose a basic responsibility we share to make sure that when it comes to the public debate, we get it right. And the reactions by many of my media and GVP friends to statements from Loesch which are usually referred to as being beyond anything which should be said in public simply are wide of the mark.

I’m talking about her new video trailer which has her about to burn a copy of The New York Times but then she pauses and says, “You know, I don’t even have to do this. You guys are doing a good enough job burning down your reputations all by yourselves.” Our friends at Media Matters posted this video and now the expected responses are coming in about how Loesch and the NRA are enemies of the press, the 1st Amendment, the usual bit. Home-school Queen Dana has been going after The New York Times for the past year, with this video being just her latest attempt to show her audience how outrageous, insulting and fascist-leaning she can be.

Want to know what’s really behind her continued attempt to say the most outrageous and provocative crap coming out of the mouth of any employee of the NRA? Take a look at the January NICS background checks which just came out.  Handgun checks were 501,638, which is the lowest January total since January 2014. Month-to-month long gun checks, 2016 to 2017, were down by 25 percent!  These numbers don’t represent just a little slippage in gun sales, they represent what could be the beginning of an industry-wide collapse.

What I find most funny in Dana’s continued attacks on ‘the old lady’ (a.k.a. The New York Times) is what has happened to the stock price of the ‘failing’ New York Times since Dana first began her rants.  A year ago the stock price was $14.80. Even after the big sell-off earlier this week, the current price is sitting at $24.80. Yea, talk about the paper failing away.

Now let’s compare the ‘failing’ New York Times to the recent stock history of a company called American Outdoor Brands, which used to be known as Smith & Wesson until the management, fearing that Hillary would be elected President and would shut down the gun business decided to rebrand themselves with a new name that would make everyone ignore the fact that 88% of company revenues still comes from the sale of guns.

When Dana first started spieling for NRA she presented herself as just another Mom who carried a gun in order to protect herself and her kids, the strategy being to open the female market to guns. If that approach is working, it sure hasn’t done much for Smith & Wesson or American Outdoor Brands or whatever they now want to call themselves.

Dana then set to work pushing the new NRA training and insurance program, Carry Guard, which has a whole big, two classes listed on the program website – two classes in the whole country? That’s right. Two.

Dana’s obnoxious rants against The New York Times are nothing more than a stupid and obvious attempt to retain some social media following now that the gun business doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of revival or long-term strength. Which is why the best thing my friends in the mainstream media and GVP could do is to should simply ignore her because sooner or later she’ll do us all a favor by shutting up and going away.

Defending The ‘Right’ To Bear Arms.

Want to see the single, most incisive argument for 2nd-Amendment ‘rights?’  Forget Dana Loesch, forget Donald Trump, even forget Wayne-o and Chris-o from Fairfax, VA. You need to look at a new video produced by the folks at College Humour , a website which posts both original and previously-published internet content that attracts more than 15 million unique viewers each month.

[image error]Today’s featured video, “The New Face of the NRA,” sticks an AR-armed black guy between two white dudes, one of whom is supposed to be your typical, gun-grabbing liberal geek, the other a guy who drives around in his Ford F-150 with the veritable shotgun behind him in the rack.

The AR-wielding black guy, complete with several hundred rounds of ammo wrapped around his upper torso, is a combination of Bobby Seale of Black Panther fame and the comic Eddie Griffin, who delivers a series of rants which pop out of the mouths of pro-gun noisemakers all the time.

Geek: “The NRA thinks that everyone should have guns.” Black dude (waving the AR around): Yes, all my brothers should have guns!”

Truck Guy: “How many brothers do you have?” Black dude: “Our numbers grow daily every time there’s a case of police brutality.”

Geek: “Where do you live again?” Black dude: “That sounds like a background check which is an invasion of my privacy.”

Then some more give-and-take, the black dude is wildly waving the gun around and the Geek says: “Let’s show a little bit of control with the gun.” You know the response from the black dude: “Gun control isn’t necessary.” The video goes on from there.

Over the last several years the NRA has developed a very effective video messaging platform where various organizational employees who present themselves as media stars give one-minute monologues about gun ‘rights’ which are essentially boring and ponderous as hell. I mean who really wants to sit in front of a screen watching a video where nothing happens and nobody moves?  Well, the lips move.

Sometimes I think that the argument about gun violence could use a bit of levity at least from the GVP. We know that guns are dangerous, we know that 120,000 gun deaths and injuries each year is a sad and serious thing. But nothing achieves better resonance in a political debate than parody and satire, a perfect example of which is this new take-off on the NRA.

Watch, enjoy and thanks to Shaun Dakin.

 

 

 

 

Khalil Spencer: Gun Violence Is More Than Gun Deep.

I just finished reading Mike Weisser’s latest post on why we are not reacting more strongly to the constant string of mass shootings. Mike, as usual, makes a lot of excellent points on this subject and discusses how the GVP community needs to develop a voice that will pull  Americans into common cause to reflect on our addiction to Sam Colt’s Hammer. That said, my concern is that this is not an issue as shallow as those guns themselves.

[image error]Here in New Mexico, we are going through the latest shock and horror over the latest incident of domestic violence in our midst. Thirteen year old Jeremiah Valencia was apparently systematically abused and kept locked in a dog cage for prolonged periods. He was tortured and beaten so savagely, according to reports in the Santa Fe New Mexican and Albuquerque Journal, that he sometimes needed a cane or wheelchair to get around. He was finally beaten severely, put in the dog cage to die, and buried in a shallow grave. Maybe that was the only form of relief from torture that this little boy could hope to find. Sadly, these stories, like mass shootings, keep happening. Like mass shootings, they are here and then gone from public consciousness as we go about our everyday lives. Not to mention, these incidents often occur, as JC said in Matthew, to “the least of thee”. Easy to overlook until you read the details.

The bottom line is that in New Mexico we have a fair amount of gun violence. But at its heart we have a lot of domestic violence, drug abuse, poverty, and illiteracy (roughly one third of our kids don’t graduate high school).  The gun violence is far from random but correlated with these underlying problems. The GVP community is correct that we need to disarm domestic violence perpetrators and others who are documented risks to the public. Unfortunately, our governor vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have done just that during the 2017 legislative session. But Jeremiah’s tormentor didn’t need a gun.

It would be the height of hypocrisy to only worry about mass shootings because unlike everyday low level violence that happens in those other places, these incidents of mass carnage can happen in nice communities such as ours: Santa Fe, Los Alamos, or the town where GVP crusader Shannon Watts lives. We need to focus more efforts on why our society has this cancer within it because if we don’t do so, we will breed more monsters. As the Ghost of Christmas Present said to Scrooge about the two ragged children within his robes,

them. ‘And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers.

This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both,

and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy,

for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the

writing be erased. Deny it.’ cried the Spirit, stretching out

its hand towards the city. ‘Slander those who tell it ye.

Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse.

And abide the end.’

The gun violence certainly makes the social violence more toxic, but is only the surface manifestation of the metastases within this country. We can try to regulate guns, but we can’t build enough prisons and workhouses to escape the cancer within.

 

Why Isn’t There More Concern About Mass Shootings?

One of our friends at Huffington Post just did a story lamenting the lack of public concern about mass shootings, specifically referring to an incident in Pennsylvania when another crazie shot his ex-girlfriend and three others at a carwash and then turned the gun on himself. The reporter, Melissa Jeltsen, blamed the seeming acceptance of such violence on a combination of what she calls media, Trump and ‘compassion fatigue.’ She also sources an article in The Trace, which found that the Las Vegas shooting disappeared as an issue of interest to media shortly after it occurred.

[image error]             The idea that gun violence might become something less than a priority issue in the public domain has been a fear within the gun violence prevention (GVP) community ever since Sh*thead Numero Uno took the oath on January 20, 2018. After all, Trump often validated gun violence during the campaign, bragging that he could ‘shoot someone down in the street’ and still retain the support of his base. I hate to say it, but if he had actually gunned down a black guy, some in his base probably would have cheered.

Trump is no longer a candidate, he’s the President, and in that regard the Huffington piece also contained an interesting quote from our friend Shannon Watts regarding Trump’s stance on gun violence: ““Unlike President Obama, he [Trump] is not going to have a press conference about horrific incidents of gun violence, In fact, he is going to do everything he can to avoid talking about it.”

Shannon’s comment gets to the heart of concerns about the lack of public and media discussion on gun violence because, like it or not, just about every issue which becomes grist for the media mill is provoked and shaped by what is said by the guy at the top. My friends in the GVP community shouldn’t underestimate the extent to which public awareness about gun violence over the last several years was heightened by the response of the Obama Administration to what happened at Sandy Hook. It wasn’t just the multiple press conferences held by the President and his surrogates that filled up media space virtually every day, it was also the attempt to morph this talk into action by dint of a major legislative initiative expanding background checks to secondary sales.

Even though the effort ultimately failed, there would have been no Manchin-Toomey without the White House ginning up support.  Compare post-Newtown media interest in gun violence to what happened after James Holmes walked into a theater in Aurora, CO just six months prior to the massacre at Sandy Hook. The kid killed 12 people and wounded 58 more, Obama gave a very forceful and impassioned speech the day after the event, and that was that. No more Obama gun control, no more Aurora, within a week the media was focused on the civil war in Syria.

I trust that what I am about to say won’t be taken the wrong way because I mean no disrespect or lack of support for the GVP. But maybe the fact that Trump’s silence on shootings tends to mute media interest in gun violence is a good thing. Because what the GVP really needs to do is develop its own voice and its own messaging about guns without depending on the occupant of the Oval Office to help lead the way. I voted for her and I worked for her, but I was never all that comfortable with the idea that Hillary was considered such a friend of the GVP. Remember Obama’s prescient comment about ‘clinging’ to their guns? It was Hillary, not Wayne LaPierre, who led the criticism of Obama for making that remark.

Like every movement for change, the GVP shouldn’t turn its back on allies or friends. But the ultimate responsibility for leading the way towards reducing gun violence lies in what we say and how often we say it. That’s something we shouldn’t forget.

 

Should We Trust Government To Help Us Deal With Gun Violence?

If there is one issue, which more than any divides the two sides in the gun-violence debate, it’s the role that government should play in regulating guns. To pro-gun advocates, the government should basically stay out of the way allowing law-abiding men and women (with a minimal definition of law-abiding) to determine for themselves what to do about guns. To the gun violence prevention (GVP) movement on the other hand, aggressive and comprehensive government gun controls should be the order of the day.

[image error]             Want to carry a gun around for self-defense? The pro-gun gang says this is your unfettered ‘right,’ the gun-grabbers believe that only people who can show a specific and validated need for personal armed security should be able to walk around with a gun. Make background checks cover every transfer of a gun? There’s nothing about NICS in the Constitution argue the protectors of the 2nd-Amendment, whereas the liberals and the Bloomberg-loving crowd don’t understand how any ‘sensible’ person would object to government approval for every time a gun changes hands.

Behind this unyielding refusal to find common ground about how government should be involved in regulating guns is a much deeper division of opinion about the whole notion of government authority itself. Generally speaking, folks who don’t want government to interfere with their ownership of guns take a dim view of government interference in just about everything else. On the other side, activists promoting more government involvement in gun ownership tend to believe that government should play a large role in many social aspects of life. So basically, this division of opinion gets down to whether we should trust government or not.

What I find ironic about this division of liberal versus conservative opinion and government and about guns is that it used to be exactly the other way around.  I became politically active about civil rights in the early 1960’s, following the example of my older brother who went on several freedom rides in 1960 or 1961. My political activity then morphed into the anti-war movement (please don’t ask which war I’m talking about) with the highlight being my presence in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention of 1968.

I don’t remember a time when anyone who considered themselves to be a liberal thought the government was a force for good, and this attitude pervaded every stance which liberals took on political and social issues, even the issue of gun rights. The first major law review article that promoted the idea that the 2nd Amendment protected individual gun rights was written by Don Kates, a Yale Law School graduate who had been a civil rights worker in the South and spent nights on armed guard duty protecting black families threatened by the Klan. His work would be taken a step further by Sanford Levinson, an extremely liberal Constitutional scholar whose 1989 Yale Law Journal article, ‘The Embarrassing Second Amendment,’ basically opened the doors to the gradual tide of jurisprudence that culminated in the Heller decision of 2008.

Now we find ourselves, in the space of one generation, making a 180-degree shift with the Left manning the barricades to protect government institutions from assaults from the Right. Is there a single liberal influencer out there who hasn’t stepped up to defend the FBI? Isn’t this the same FBI that illegally tapped Martin Luther King because they knew he was just a dupe of the Reds?

Perhaps it’s my age, but regarding gun violence, I don’t feel personally comfortable placing my faith in effective government intervention while the other side gets seen as the protector of individual rights. Whether it’s gender rights, immigrant rights or any other kinds of rights up to and including gun rights, the last thing liberals should do is let the Breitbart, alt-white gang pretend they should be taken seriously or listened to at all.

When it comes to vesting the government with ultimate authority to protect us from gun violence, this is one liberal who agrees to disagree.

Here Come The Plastic Guns.

The first gun I ever owned was a silver six-shooter made out of hard plastic which I carried around wherever I went.  I was six years old so I could more or less carry my gun just about anywhere except the first grade. A couple of years later I graduated to another plastic gun which shot ammunition we used to call ‘caps,’ but I abandoned this toy when I was 12 years old and bought my first real gun.

[image error]             From then until now, if you wanted to own a gun which shot real ammunition, some of the parts, particularly the barrel, had to be made out of steel. Until the 1980’s all the other parts of a gun were also made out of steel or some metal alloy except for the gun stock which, if the gun was a rifle or shotgun, might be made out of wood.

Thanks to a guy in Austria named Gaston Glock, we began substituting polymer for metal in the non-moving parts of the gun, particularly the frame. Polymer is actually a plastic material reinforced with metallic compounds which makes the finished product more resistant to wear and tear, and in the case of a gun also reduces the overall weight. Most handguns sold in the United States today are put together with a polymer frame; when Glock first started shipping his gun to the US, it was referred to as a ‘plastic’ gun.

Now for the first time we have the appearance of a gun which is almost totally made out of plastic, engineered and developed by a young entrepreneur out of Texas, Cody Wilson,  who has become something of an iconic personality in the community which believes that personal freedom and self-made guns are one and the same thing. Wilson owns a company, Defense Distributed, which made a plastic pistol and got into a spat with the U.S. Government by releasing instructions on the internet for how to take a 3D printer and use it to make a plastic gun.

Wilson promotes himself as an innovator but he’s much more than that. What he’s really doing is finding a clever marketing niche for a segment of the gun-owning population that really believes in the idea that an individual’s freedom can only be secured at the point of a gun.  Here’s the mission statement on Cody’s site: “The specific purposes for which this corporation is organized are: To defend the human and civil right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the United States Constitution and affirmed by the United States Supreme Court; to collaboratively produce, publish, and distribute to the public information and knowledge related to the digital manufacture of arms.” Notice which statement comes first.

Wilson announced the development of a plastic AR-15 right around the time that Adam Lanza took a real AR-15 into Sandy Hook Elementary School and began blasting away.  In a recent interview on NPR’s Planet Money he admitted that the Newtown massacre gave his company a significant boost, and while he mumbled something about the mass shooting in terms of the loss of life, he was much more positive about the need to develop self-manufacturing gun technologies in order to forestall the ability of the government to infringe on personal freedom by banning civilian-owned guns.

As the Planet Money interviewer discovered, give Wilson five minutes to shoot his mouth off and what you’ll get is the standard, neo-libertarian, neo-anarchist mishmash comprised of equal parts of Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek and maybe now Steve Bannon, all of which adds up to nothing more than childish, nonsensical crap. The same people who want to believe that a gun will protect you from government tyranny (particularly when the government is run by a Black liberal) are the same people who buy gold bars from the Glenn Beck show to protect themselves from the oncoming financial collapse.

Frankly, Cody Wilson and his crypto-anarchist friends are the least of our problems when it comes to dealing with the violence caused by guns.

 

Thanks To Shaun Dakin.

Let’s Hear It For Shannon Watts And All Those Moms!

This is the 1,000th column posted on this website and I can’t think of a better topic for this special space.   

The day after the Sandy Hook massacre, a stay-at-home mom and corporate media expert sat down at her kitchen table in Indianapolis and sent out a message on her Facebook page asking people to join a group that would begin promoting a ‘common sense’ message about guns. What Shannon Watts meant then and still means now when she talks about common sense is the idea that there is simply no reason why anyone, gun owner or otherwise, should find it difficult to accept the idea that guns should never be used to hurt yourself or anyone else.

[image error]             Shannon’s Facebook page quickly became Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America and the purpose of this column is to give Shannon and her whole gang a loud shout-out for what they have accomplished over the last five years. And before any of the gun trolls who monitor my writing come back with the usual crap and nonsense about how Shannon would be ‘nothing’ without Bloomberg’s big bucks, what she and her organization have accomplished since 2012 goes far beyond anything having to do with the fact that Mike helps to foot the bill.

What makes Shannon’s effort so remarkable and so important is not because she agreed to merge her group with Bloomberg’s Everytown organization back in 2014. Money can certainly make life easier but if you don’t spend it in a way that brings results, it wouldn’t really matter how much dough comes. And it’s not as if there was really any precedent for building the kind of organization that Shannon has put together and now actively promotes its agenda in every one of the 50 states. When it comes to grass-roots messaging and organizational activity, until Shannon began her effort, the entire public discussion about guns beyond the Beltway was basically owned by my friends in Fairfax, a.k.a. the NRA.

Why shouldn’t the NRA be a formidable public relations machine for promoting guns?  After all, they have been around since right after the Civil War, which is longer than any other organization which promotes any kind of consumer item; hell, the American Automobile Association wasn’t founded until 1902. So when messages from Moms Demand Action began to appear on the internet and women with those red tee-shirts began parading around in front of Wal Mart and the local supermarket or Target stores, all of a sudden a two-sided playing field began to take shape.

A little more than five years since Shannon sat down and started blazing away, Moms now has chapters in all 50 states, and these groups aren’t just an email list or some other digital venue for talking back and forth.  Over the coming year, the organization will hold hundreds of public events, and if you want to get an idea of what they did on 2017, you can download and read a very impressive report right here.

Giving Moms a big high-five is not meant in any way to slight the efforts of other gun violence prevention (GVP) groups; I’m always willing and able to help spread the word whenever some folks get together to promote common-sense strategies about guns. But what makes Shannon’s effort so important is her understanding that with all due respect to the importance of laws, public policies and all the rest, making a real difference in terms of gun violence is a cultural issue above all. Forget all the data, all the studies, all the facts, people make up or change their minds when they talk about something to someone else.

Next time you go past a public space where some women are wearing those Moms Demand Action shirts, stop for a moment and notice how they engage other folks who just happen to be walking by. A brief conversation here, a comment or two there, funny how those conversations add up and help pave the way for needed change.

And let’s not forget that with all due respect to Mike and his gezillions, Shannon and the ladies could always use some spare change.