Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 62

Will The World End If We Lose Our 2nd-Amendment Rights?

A week after the Presidential election in 2008, I walked into a gun shop in Houston. The place was packed.  In particular, customers were lining up to buy assault rifles along with as much ammunition as they could carry out of the store. I walked up to one guy who was waiting in line to fill out the 4473 form and asked him what was going on. And he turned to me with a very serious look on his face and whispered, “Armageddon’s coming.”

 

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Ever notice how many products Glenn Beck peddles like freeze-dried food or gold bars which portend doom?  And we have long noticed that the gun industry has been selling fear as well as selling guns since old timers like me began to fade away and hunting became something of legend instead of a real-time activity.  Owning a gun is now a statement about the importance of self-defense in an age of terrorism, along with, of course, the standard bromide about 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’

But there’s one other message which resonates among Gun-nut Nation, and it’s the idea that if you own a gun then you have something in common with every other gun owner, and if you don’t own a gun, then you’re not only sh*t out of luck, but you’re also on the outside looking in.  I’m a member of AAA but they never try to make me feel special just because I own a car. Ditto AARP, whose almost daily hearing-aid advertisements just remind me that I’m one of more than 46 million people age 65 or more. In fact, I didn’t even know that May was Senior Citizens Month.

But I do know that I am a member of a very special oppressed minority known as law-abiding gun owners who have to make sure that what makes us so special and so oppressed is the possibility that at any moment, my ‘right’ to own a gun could be taken away. And if you think that the purchase of more than 150 million guns under the Obama ‘regime,’ compared to 75 million during the previous eight years of the ‘decider’ was due to anything other than the fear that I might wake up one day and the gun wouldn’t be there, think again.  Because if sales levels continue for the second half of 2017 like they were in the first half, things will be back to where they were in 2007-2008.

Back last October, I was finishing up my weekly gun-safety class which is required in my state (MA) before you can apply for a license to own or carry a gun. And a well-dressed, professional woman came up to get her safety certificate and said, “Boy, I’m glad I could get into this class.” And when I asked her why she was so excited, she replied, and I am quoting her word for word, “Because Hillary’s probably going to win the election and then I won’t be able to buy a gun.”

How did such a crazy idea get into this woman’s head? I must admit that I simply don’t know because even though the NRA spent $30 million or more during the campaign to tell its members that Hillary would take away their guns, I simply do not believe that any normal adult could think such nonsense was true.

But you know what? That guy standing on the line in the Houston gun shop wasn’t grinning or laughing when he told me that he was willing to wait half an hour for the background check to be completed because he didn’t want to face the end of the world unarmed. He meant it, and if we want to do something reasonable to reduce gun violence, we’d better figure out how to get inside that guy’s brain. Because what’s in his brain is in the brains of lots of folks who own guns.

When It Comes To Guns, It’s Not What You Say, It’s What You Mean.

In 1989 Steven Tyler and Aerosmith released a song, ‘Janie’s Got A Gun,’ which began with the following refrain:

Janie’s got a gun

Janie’s got a gun

Her whole world’s come undone

From lookin’ straight at the sun

What did her daddy do?

What did he put you through?

They say when Janie was arrested

They found him underneath a train

But man, he had it comin’

Now that Janie’s got a gun

She ain’t never gonna be the same.

                This song became one of the group’s biggest hits, and if you don’t have the album, you can watch the video on YouTube.  It’s been seen more than 38 million times. You can also listen to it on podcasts produced and distributed by various pro-gun advocates and organizations, in particular, digital broadcasting efforts of various Evangelical preachers and personalities, such as Albert Mohler, who happens to be the President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and leads a religious denomination that is overwhelmingly pro-gun.

[image error]             There’s only one little problem.  Tyler began writing the song’s lyric’s after reading an article about gun violence which then got him thinking about child abuse. He talked about what happened in a Rolling Stone interview: “I looked over at a Time magazine and saw this article on 48 hours, minute by minute, of handgun deaths in the United States.Then I got off on the child-abuse angle. I’d heard this woman speaking about how many children are attacked by their mothers and fathers. It was f—ing scary. I felt, man, I gotta sing about this. And that was it.”

So here we have an interesting situation which needs to be considered and discussed if we’re really going to understand what to do and what to say about gun violence. Because Tyler wasn’t trying to make a positive cultural statement about guns and he certainly wasn’t trying to cynically promote himself to a certain type of audience which feeds off of pro-gun and pro-violence expressions a la the sick rantings of Ted Nugent, et. al.  He was creating an artistic expression about an idea that meant one thing to him, but ended up being taken much differently by many of his fans. Or maybe they didn’t take it any particular way. They just like his music; the ‘message’ may not be what the song meant to them at all.

But either way, in a debate as emotionally-charged as the gun debate, I think we have to be careful when we use certain words, because those words may have very different meanings depending on who uses them and when. Take for example the word ‘defense,’ as in self-defense. In the pro-gun world, this is a very positive word because it represents the idea that a gun will protect you from harm. In the gun-control community (and folks, in the Age of Trump it’s time to stop pretending that we need to apologize for wanting to control guns) a weapon that can be used defensively usually ends up being used offensively.

Why do some people believe that a gun is a valuable, self-protective ‘tool’ when study after study indicates that access to a gun actually increases risk? And I’m not talking about pro-gun trolls who will say anything to get a rise out of the other side. I’m talking about, for example, religious leaders – among conservative Protestant clergy, of whom more than two-thirds hold to the idea that gun ‘rights’ should be taken more seriously than violence caused by guns.

If we have learned anything from the extent to which a Twitter account can be used to run the United States, what is believed to be a true by one person may not be perceived as a fact by someone else. And if we are looking for messaging that will resonate with gun owners to advance public policies like expanded background checks or smart guns, we better not assume that words like ’fact’ and ‘truth’ will carry the day.

Do We Have A ‘Right” To Self-Defense? Not Unless The Government Says So.

Show me a single statement from anyone in Gun-nut Nation who justifies gun ownership without invoking the ‘individual’ or ‘inalienable right’ to self-defense and I’ll send a hundred bucks to the charity of your choice. Why, do you ask, would I be so quick to give away some of my hard-earned money? Because the idea that we have a right to protect ourselves which goes beyond the 2nd Amendment has been a stock-in-trade of gun ownership long before Charlton Heston stood up at the NRA meeting in 2000 and dared anyone to take the plastic version of an old flintlock rifle out of his ‘cold, dead hands.’

[image error]             The idea that self-defense is a ‘natural’ right which exists outside the legal system is about as true as the idea that Charlton Heston’s real name was Charlton Heston.  In fact, his name was John Carter, but how could Hollywood let someone with such a prosaic moniker bring down the Ten Commandments? On the other hand, pro-gun advocates have always felt comfortable justifying their ownership of guns as a religious commandment, so if a name could be invented for the actor who received the most holy of all religious texts, why not invent a God-given reason to own a gun?

There’s only one little problem. You can cite this biblical text or that biblical text all you want, but the notion that we have a ‘right’ to defend ourselves isn’t found anywhere in the Constitution at all. And despite what you might glean from those narcissistic tweets which keep tumbling out of the Oval Office, we still have to abide by what the Constitution says, not what we think it says or hope it says. That’s it.

If you want to understand what the Constitution says and doesn’t say about self-defense, I suggest you read the superb article by Darrell Miller, “Self-Defense, Defense of Others, and the State, which was one of the papers presented last year at the Brennan Center Symposium on the 2nd Amendment and can be downloaded from the Duke Law Journal linked here. Miller points out that even though the Heller decision rested upon a ‘basic’ and ‘deeply rooted’ pre-Constitutional ‘right,’ in fact, the legal definition of this self-protection “has been heavily conditioned and constructed by the state.” Further, “the core self-defense right identified in Heller is not as indisputably individualistic, inalienable, and innate as is often assumed. Instead, the state’s role in this concept has been dominant throughout history.”

Miller’s argument creates a serious problem for Gun-nut Nation, because the last thing they want to admit or believe is that the government should be able to define self-defense, because if it can, this means the government can regulate what types of self-defensive behavior can be allowed, which means the government can regulate – oh my God – the use of guns.  And the whole point of promoting self-defense as some kind of ‘natural’ right is to remove gun regulations from the purview of the state, particularly if the state happens to be controlled by gun-grabbers like you know who.

Miller goes all the way back to the origins of common law following the Norman invasion in 1066 and shows that from then until now, the state, either the king or later the Parliament, was always involved in defining who could and couldn’t use self-defense as a justification for committing a capital crime. These definitions changed over time, but the state never withdrew from being the ultimate arbiter of how, when and why someone could engage in an act of self-defense.

Miller’s article is persuasive because it flows from a clear and balanced reading of legal opinions and texts. But when was the last time the pro-gun gang based anything it believes or promotes on a clear or balanced presentation of opinions or facts? With all due respect to the excellent work by Professor Miller and his colleagues who research and write about guns and law, I suspect that much of what they say never gets read by those who need to read it most.

 

The Strange Case Of Luther Strange: Another Gun Nut Wants Your Vote.

Last week a special election in Montana featured television ads by the Democratic candidate, Rob Quist, who aimed his ‘old’ rifle at a television screen playing an attack ad run by his opponent, then pulled the trigger and the tv ad went away. This creative work of genius was put together by the Quist campaign to counter advertisements run by his Republican opponent, slugger Greg Gianforte, which accused Quist of being anti-gun.

[image error]I wrote a column about this ad which I found to be stupid, offensive and beyond the pale. I likened it to Sarah Palin’s Facebook page which showed target cross-hairs over the names and locations of various Democratic office-holders and candidates, one of whom happened to be Gabby the same week she was shot. I don’t care if the Democratic Party (and I’m a proud, yellow-dog Democrat, by the way) needs every Congressional seat it can get, you don’t use gun violence or an appeal to gun violence to muster up votes. You don’t do it.  As in don’t do it, okay?

Because here’s what happens when you do it. The virus spreads. And now we have another political jack-off who happens in this case to be a Republican, and he’s doing the same thing in his campaign as well. I’m talking about Luther Strange from Alabama, who was appointed on February 9 to fill Jeff Sessions’ vacated Senate seat. Given the news out of Washington yesterday that Sessions appears to have forgotten several other meetings he had with his Russian buddies during the Trump campaign, maybe it would have been better to leave his Senate vacant for a couple of months so that Session could honorably resign from the Cabinet, citing the need to return home and represent Alabama in the Senate again. But the bottom line is that there’s going to be a primary in August for a special election in the Fall, so ol’ Luther has started running campaign ads promoting himself as – guess what? – a strong supporter of the 2nd Amendment because he’s been endorsed by the NRA.

You can view this ad on Luther’s Facebook page, which shows him shooting a pistol with a silencer in a shooting range at a bunch of targets that are supposed to represent various schemes of the Obama Administration which Luther fought against and won. I found this ad interesting for two reasons: first, Senator Strange doesn’t bother to wear hearing protection, even though a silencer doesn’t provide total protection for your hearing but Luther after all, is a real man; second, he states that he “fought the Obama administration’s unconstitutional infringement on our gun rights all the way to the Supreme Court,” when in fact he did no such thing. Even the NRA’s endorsement doesn’t list him as ever having participated in any legal action which ever went to the Supreme Court.

The use of guns as a vehicle to symbolize any political narrative whatsoever is dangerous and wrong.  Because it transforms a gun into something which it is – a mechanical device that propels a piece of lead into something at which the gun is being aimed – into something which it isn’t – a metaphor for disagreeing with a statement or position that you don’t like.  And the single most upsetting thing about those Klan campaign rallies over which Trump is still presiding as a way of avoiding any real work (or discussions with lawyers about impending indictments) is his constant appeals to violence both in terms of language and physical acts.

I can certainly understand why my friends at Fairfax would be exulting when they see such political ads. After all, the one group which above all says that there’s no connection between guns and violence is the same group that endorsed good ol’ boy Luther Strange to help him retain his newly-occupied Senate seat. Which is exactly the reason that such advertising is offensive and should be condemned. Because there’s no place for appeals to violence in a country which (I hope) is still governed by laws.

Who Saved The Gun Industry? The Answer May Surprise.

 

The good news is that you don’t have to pass an IQ test to be a member of Congress. I wrote a column about one of the dumbest members of the House, Rob Bishop, who has introduced a bill that would strip the ATF of its authority to determine whether a gun can be imported into the U.S. based on whether it’s a ‘sporting’ weapon or not. And since the ATF has decided, lies from the gun industry notwithstanding, that AR and AK-style guns aren’t sporting weapons, those kinds of guns manufactured overseas can’t come in.

[image error]             As you might imagine, the moment Bishop introduced his bill, Gun-nut Nation immediately began beating the drums to get the bill turned into law. But if Bishop’s an idiot, the NRA isn’t far behind, because if foreign gun makers can begin selling assault rifles and other ‘non-sporting’ guns in the U.S., you can kiss the domestic gun industry goodbye.

Back in 1989, George H. W. Bush issued an order which prohibited the import of Chinese assault-style rifles, in particular the SKS. The ban was temporary but was made permanent and expanded by Bill Clinton in 1993. The expansion of the ban meant that no gun of any design that had a grooved barrel could be sent from China over here.  Shotguns, yes. Rifles and handguns, no.

I owned one of those Chinese handguns. It was made by a Chinese company, Norinco, which employs more than 200,000 people and makes just about everything, including ammunition and small arms. The gun I owned was a copy of the Colt 1911 pistol in 45acp caliber, and when I say ‘copy,’ I don’t mean some cheap piece of junk.  I mean an exact copy, up to and including the traditional, Colt-style checkered grips.

Did the gun function as well as the original Colt?  Yes.  Did the gun sell for 30% less than the Colt? Yes. Can you still find the pre-ban Norinco 1911 floating around on gun auction sites here and there? And the good news is that if you need a part or another barrel, you can always pick it up from Colt.

I don’t think there’s a U.S. President who is hated more by Gun-nut Nation than Clinton because, as opposed to Obama, he actually got some gun-control legislation done. And he’s no arugula-eating elitist, Billy Boy’s just a good ol’ boy right out of a Southern trailer park, so he should have known better and just kept his mouth shut. But his 1994 assault-weapons ban didn’t just mean that gun makers had to change the AR design; it was also the first time that the government told the gun industry what kinds of products they could and couldn’t make. That’s not just regulating an industry – that’s telling an industry what it can and cannot do.

But the truth is that for all of Clinton’s attempts to hurt the gun industry, his ban on Chinese guns has probably done more to help the gun industry than any pro-gun effort being bandied about by the supporters of our current President, even though #45 may be on his way down the tubes. Because if Chinese gun manufacturers entered the U.S. gun market, by now they would be over here in force; building factories, producing ARs and polymer pistols and underselling every current brand.

Back in the 1980’s, another iconic American brand, Harley-Davidson, found itself unable to compete with Japanese bike makers and was only saved by a high tariff that Reagan slapped on imported Japanese bikes.  The company continues to limp along, its stock price climb since 1911 is about 30% less than similar-sized companies tracked by Standard and Poor’s. Trump loves to talk about how this tariff is a great example of protecting American jobs, but as usual he’s lying because the tariff didn’t ultimately help Harley at all. But at least the company’s still in business, which is more than what would have happened to S&W and Ruger if Billy Boy hadn’t stopped those Chinese guns from coming our way.

 

Come To D.C.’s National Cathedral For Wear Orange Day.

I was born and raised in Washington, D.C. and when I was a kid, my mother used to take me to the National Cathedral on Wisconsin Avenue and while she was inside listening to a concert I would run around on the beautiful grounds. Anyone who has lived in DC for any period of time will sooner or later have some connection to this remarkable edifice, which calls itself “a catalyst for spiritual harmony in our nation, reconciliation among faiths, and compassion in the world.”

[image error]             The Cathedral will certainly embody those words in the event that is being planned for the Third Wear Orange Day, which is coming up on Friday, June 2. And what the Cathedral will do that evening is bathe this remarkable House of Worship’s  West front in orange from 8 P.M. until midnight as a symbol of the Congregation’s support of the Wear Orange day.

This event started as a community response to the shooting death of 15-year old Hadiya Pendleton in Chicago, but has now grown to national and even international proportions. The list of supporters, including media influencers, entertainers, non-profit agencies and organizations, municipalities and others just goes on and on down a website page and more than 150 landmark buildings and sites will be adorned by some kind of orange embellishment to mark this auspicious event.

[image error]             But I want to get back to what the National Cathedral is doing on Friday because it could serve as a symbol about what reducing gun violence should really be about. Back in 2008, as part of the Centennial celebration (the construction actually began in 1897 but cathedrals have a funny way of taking a long time to be built) the Cathedral mounted an outside exhibition by the Swiss lighting artist Gary Hofstetter, of which a picture of one of the exhibition displays accompanies this text. The exhibition was called ‘Lighting to Unite,’ which flowed directly from the Centennial address delivered the year before by Bishop Desmond Tutu entitled, Reconciliation: Hope for a Troubled World.  And in his address, the recipient of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize winner said, “Reconciliation is not an easy option. It cost God the death of his son.”

When I started thinking about writing a column on Wear Orange Day, I had to ask myself what I would be really expressing when I walked around on Friday sporting one of my hunting vests. Because don’t make the mistake of thinking that Mike the Gun Guy is going to traipse around in a little piece of orange plastic that you can pick up at Wal Mart for ten bucks. No, my vest is part of a jacket ensemble made by Laksen of Denmark, and as J. P. Morgan used to say, “If you have to ask what it costs….”

But the point is that if I’m participating in this important event, I want to understand what it really means. And I don’t think this event should only be seen as a way to raise consciousness about what happens to people who get injured with guns. Because the truth is that the only way we will ever see a real decline in gun violence is if we figure out a way to make people understand that everyone involved in a shooting is a victim of violence caused by a gun. And the only way we can do that, the only way we can make our entire society share in the tasks which must be accomplished to reduce gun violence, is to follow what Bishop Tutu said.

Whether you point a gun at yourself or at someone else, gun violence is the most shattering way to deprive us all of the joys and benefits of reconciliation whose everlasting values are embodied in the presence and spirit of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Which is why we should all go to see the Cathedral bathed in an orange glow come Friday night. Go to the Cathedral, stand there in meditation or in prayer, it’s the right thing to do.

 

If You Smile On Amazon You Can help Reduce Gun Violence.

One of our really good friends in GVP-land sent around a message the other day alerting us to the fact that the Amazon Smile website has become a location for organizations which raise money to help promote guns. And in this case the organization that was using the crowd-sourcing fundraising venue of Amazon was a group called Gun Owners of America (GOA), which is a particularly aggressive outfit that claims to be the strongest supporter of 2nd-Amendment ‘rights’ anywhere in the land.

[image error]             To understand GOA, you have to know something about its founder and now Chairman Emeritus, Larry Pratt. When all is said and done, GOA is a fundraising organization with an email list which probably includes just about every hard-core, radical-right, militia member in the United States.  You can join the group for $20, which makes their claims of having one million members absurd since their annual revenues on 2014 were less than two million bucks.

[image error]             What gets Pratt and his group headlines isn’t the so-called lobbying efforts they claim to make, but the fact that they describe themselves as being an anti-establishment organization, in this case the establishment being the NRA. And if we’ve learned anything from Donald Trump, it’s that the moment you say you’re ‘against’ the establishment, even if you’re obsessively trying to become the establishment, you’ll get some support and pick up a few bucks.

But I want to get back to the question of how GVP could use Amazon Smile, because when all is said and done, Larry Pratt and GOA are really small potatoes, in the world of gun politics they just represent the chump change. On the other hand, Amazon isn’t chump change at all. In 2015 they had overall revenues of $100 billion, and revenues for Q4 of 2016 were $47 billion alone.  Revenues for Q1 2017 ‘dipped’ to only $35 billion – my revenues should be so low. The point is that Amazon has become a cash-generating machine (nine years ago their annual revenue was ‘only’ $9 billion bucks) and I don’t see why GVP shouldn’t try to get in on this flood of dollars as best they can.

Take me, for example.  In the past 6 months I have done 36 Amazon orders that total about $670 bucks, I’m a member of Amazon Prime because otherwise the shipping would really add up.  And in addition to the emails which I receive every time I buy a book, a CD, a DVD or a gift card for family and friends, I also get at least one email every day telling me about the latest and greatest that I should immediately buy.

Am I a big Amazon buyer with purchases which average about $100 a month?  I don’t really know, but I do know this: I never heard of Amazon Smile until I received the email last week from a good friend in GVP. And I immediately went to the Smile website and chose her organization as the one I’m going to support. And I did it first of all because she took the trouble to let me know about Smile and it’s a simple, seamless and no-nonsense way to send a few bucks to the right place.

I didn’t do a very exhaustive search but I quickly found a number of GVP organizations who are listed on the Smile site.  But the fact that someone who is as hooked into GVP as I am didn‘t know about Smile until last week makes me believe that I’m hardly the only GVP activist who didn’t know that this GVP crowd-sourcing fundraising vehicle exists.  How many GVP-related emails do I receive from GVP-world each day?

So come on, GVP.  Let’s get with the program.  Every GVP group should be soliciting donations through Amazon, every group should be reminding its friends and members to open a Smile account every time. And now that I’m sending some money to an important GVP group every time I buy a record, a movie or a book, I suspect I’ll probably buy more products from Amazon just because it’s a good thing to do.

[Thanks Rob Valente.]

HEY – June 2 – Wear Orange!

Celebrate Memorial Day With A Wilderness Walk.

Yesterday I celebrated Memorial Day by sitting in a five-hour traffic jam on I-93 between Manchester and Concord, NH.  I was coming back from a graduation at a high school in Wolfeboro, as far as I could tell everyone else was driving to Lake Winnipesauke to eat soft ice cream at a drive-in, take the kids to a water park, or maybe just enjoy being inside their car instead of sitting in their backyard.

[image error]              The more our society becomes urbanized and suburbanized, the more we all want to find a way to get back to the rustic delights of the out-of-doors and nature, even if we can only do it when everyone else is trying to do it too. But as I was sitting on the highway, I kept thinking of what Jane Goodall once said, “I don’t give two hoots about civilization. I want to wander in the wild.” But how do you wander in the wild when you can’t find any wildness anywhere around?

I’ll tell you how to do it.  Download this national map from the U.S. Census and you’ll discover that wilderness may be closer than you know.  Because we have always defined wilderness as any place with less than 2 permanent residents per square mile, and this map shows that there are still plenty of such areas within easy driving distance of just about everyone in the Lower 48. Here’s a couple of examples from wilderness zones thgat I know:

New York: Franklin County – The population density is 31 per square mile, but that’s only because you’re in the Lake Saranac region where tourism abounds. But drive along State Route 30, look for Travers Road about three miles south of the town of Malone and drive east about 500 feet. The road crosses a small creek – park your car there and walk alongside the stream. As soon as you can no longer see the road you’re all alone.  As you walk along the bank of the stream, the larger prints are moose.

Virginia: Highland County – Take I-81 through Shenandoah, get off in Winchester and go west on U.S. Highway 50, go left on Route 614 and now you’re in what is called Shawnee Land. Which is a big trailer park with a street actually called Geronimo Lane. But if you drive past that mess and then make a right turn on Route 612, follow the power lines for about half a mile and you’re completely in a wilderness zone.

Georgia: Echols County – In the olden days before they built all those interstates, one of the main routes down to Florida was U.S. Highway 441.  You can still take it all the way through the middle of Georgia (it runs between Miami and Tennessee) but figure you want to stop just before you hit the Florida line, just out of Fargo, and walk along the banks of the ol’ Suwanee.  Some places you’ll find a few folks, many places you won’t.

So here are three spots that are within a day’s drive of the 112 million people who live on the East Coast. And I could easily extend this list to every part of the Lower 48.  The point is that wilderness still exists all around us and a wilderness adventure doesn’t have to be a big deal. The only thing you need to take with you is a little water if it’s a warm day and some sunscreen even if you’re going into the woods.

And the one thing you don’t need to take along in order to enjoy your walk is a gun. Because a gun is heavy, it’s a pain in the neck, and you don’t need to protect yourself or anyone else from the animals or the people you might meet along the way. And that would be just as true if you were walking down a city street except the only animals you’d probably see in New York or Boston are a few dogs or a stray cat.

Take a walk this weekend and think about what Jane Goodall said.

 

A New Law That Will Make Assault Rifles Easier To Own.

I want to make a suggestion to my friends in the gun violence prevention (GVP) community and it goes like this. I think that every year on the anniversary of Sandy Hook, or maybe on the Wear Orange day, or maybe on the Concert for America day, the GVP should get together and give an award to the public figure who has done the most that year to promote gun violence. Maybe the award would go to a President, maybe to a Detroit police chief, maybe to someone who heads a pro-gun advocacy group, the usual suspects list is obviously quite long.

[image error]              But for the inaugural award I want to nominate Representative Rob Bishop (R-UT) who has just introduced a bill called – get this – the “Lawful Purpose and Self Defense Act,” which has to rank as the single most dangerous piece of federal legislation which has ever been crafted to increase the violence caused by guns.  The bill is H.R. 2060, and I’ll get serious now and tell GVP that they better get their sh*t together and start working against this measure right now. Because if GVP doesn’t shove this bill up you know where and it becomes law, what happened at Sandy Hook and The Pulse will look like child’s play compared to the violence that a statute like this could cause.

What this bill basically does is prohibit the ATF from determining what kinds of weapons can be imported from overseas based on whether any particular gun meets the criteria for being ‘sporting’ or not. And if the ATF determines that a gun isn’t a ‘sporting’ arm, then it doesn’t come in. And what this means is that AR-style rifles, a.k.a assault rifles, don’t come in. You can import some foreign parts and assemble the gun over here, but those weapons can only be sold if they also contain a certain number of US-made parts.  Here’s the bottom line: if this bill becomes law, we will be flooded with cheap AR-15s and AK-47s, along with any other type of gun that could be used for ‘self defense.’

Now you might think that the attempt by Gun-nut Nation to pass a national concealed-carry law is a more serious threat to community safety and peace. But I actually tend to agree with the Gun-nut gang that there really isn’t a connection between gun violence rates and the fact that someone who has a clean background record is walking around with a gun. The connection is a little more incidental than whether CCW-holders commit crimes, because what’s really behind the push to validate national CCW is the expectation that such a law would increase the overall sale of guns. And the more guns that are out there, the more that get stolen or lost, the more that wind up in the wrong hands, you know the drill.

Which is exactly what would happen if every Tom, Dick and Harry manufacturer of assault weapons anywhere in the world could ship their products over here. Domestic ‘black gun’ manufacturers like S&W, Rock River and Bushmaster would drop their prices even further, dealers would discount both the guns and the ammo (and by the way, the bill also prevents ATF from deciding whether imported ammunition is ‘sporting’ or not) and the idea that an AR-15 or an AK-47 is a ‘defensive’ weapon would gain the upper hand.

Leave it to my friends in Fairfax, of course, to push this terrible piece of legislation by saying something which simply isn’t true, namely, that the ‘core’ purpose of the 2nd Amendment, as stated in the 2008 Heller decision, is self defense. What Heller says is that Americans have the Constitutional ‘right’ to keep a handgun in their homes to defend themselves; there’s not a single word about keeping an AR around the house.

I meant what I said that H.R. 2060 is the worst piece of pro-gun legislation ever introduced. Let’s not wait until a bunch of NRA toadies in the People’s House put it up for a vote. It needs to be stopped now.

There’s A Right Way And A Wrong Way To Talk About Guns.

Remember back in 2011 when everyone’s alt-right darling, Sarah Palin, adorned her Facebook with a map of the United States containing cross-hairs over states with gun-control Democrats that she wanted to defeat? One of her targets was Gabby Giffords, who was shot down the same week.  In case you’ve forgotten the pictorial assault by Palin on decency and common sense, here it is again:

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Of course it hardly came as a surprise that someone as dumb, hateful and vicious as Palin would stoop so low as to try and generate political (and financial) support by appealing to the twisted minds of some folks who enjoy thinking about inflicting violence with a gun. But don’t assume that using a gun for political messaging is just a ploy for the Right. Because we now have a Democrat who claims to be a real liberal and is doing exactly the same thing.

I’m referring to the Democratic candidate in Montana’s election today to replace Ryan Zinke. The man who’s running, Rob Quist, is a well-known country song writer who says he wants to go to Washington to fight for jobs, health care, all the usual Democratic stuff, but he’s also a strong 2nd-Amendment supporter who believes that coming out as a gun guy could tilt things his way.

Actually, it was his opponent, Greg Gianforte, who ran an attack ad against Quist because he once made an offhand comment to a reporter about the need to ‘register’ guns. Since he was just defending universal background checks, Quist had no idea what he was talking about at all. But once Gianforte began pushing the idea that Quist was anti-gun, sooner or later the Democrat needed to respond in kind. And his response has taken the form of television ads in which he stands there with what he calls a rifle that has been in the family for a ‘long time,’ even though the gun actually looks brand new. And at the end of the ad he raises the rifle and shoots out a television set that’s playing an anti-Quist ad, saying that by shooting the gun, he’s ‘defending your rights.’

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              Using a gun to defend anything, in particular political rights, is to stoop to a level that is just as malicious and uninformed as Sarah Palin’s Facebook page.  And the stupidity of this ad is now matched by an op-ed which appeared today in Politico Magazine by a writer named Bill Scher, who may be the last word on politics but doesn’t know anything about guns. Scher  criticizes Progressives because they haven’t come out against one of their own who is talking pro-gun. And this is a big problem for the Blue Team, according to Scher, because Democrats at the national level sometimes find themselves in opposition to Blue candidates who need to shore up local support by hiding or soft-peddling their opposition to guns.

Gee, what a surprise that a majority of the guns in this country happen to be located in 13 Confederate states, 4 border states and the rural sections of 5 Midwestern states, all of which contain populations that consistently vote red. Gee, what a surprise that the NRA ran most of their ads in these regions because this is where NRA members mostly live.

If Bill Scher really believes that he’s discovered a new fault-line which makes gun rights a toxic issue for the Blue Team, he’s actually exposed a much bigger problem for the Reds because while the DNC has kept quiet about the pro-gun messaging by Quist, can you imagine what the RNC would do and say if any Republican politician came out and questioned the validity of beloved 2nd-Amendment ‘rights?’ What Quist’s ad team should have done was consult with one of the gun-sense organizations to help craft a message that would disarm the pro-gun opposition but still properly raise the issue of guns and risk. Even Donald Trump used the phrase “responsible gun owners’ when he came to the NRA.

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