Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 64

The NRA Goes After Mike Bloomberg Over Soft Drinks.

Anyone who says that guns aren’t a threat to public health is either consciously lying or doesn’t understand what the words ‘public health’ actually mean. And what those two words mean is anything which might be a community-wide health threat and could be monitored or regulated by public authorities. Which is why the self-appointed as well as paid representatives of Gun-nut Nation have been proclaiming that guns shouldn’t be considered as anything having to do with public health, because the whole point of their strategy is to eliminate all government regulation of guns.

[image error]              Except now the pro-gun narrative seems to be going beyond a concern about regulating guns to an attack on regulating anything else having to do with threats to health. And what I am referring to is a commentary on the NRA-ILA website which attacks Mike Bloomberg not just for funding an effort in New Mexico to expand NICS background checks, but also for pushing an attempt in Santa Fe, NM, to impose a 2-cent per ounce ‘soda tax’ on sugar-filled beverages, an effort which, along with the background check initiative, ultimately failed.

Now why would the NRA link background checks for gun transfers to whether consumers should pay more for caloric drinks?  Well, for one thing, any time they can dump on Bloomberg they’ll give it try, if only to remind Gun-nut Nation that even with Adolph Trump in the White House, there still are threats to the 2nd Amendment lurking around. But I think there’s something even more insidious going on when the NRA equates the ‘freedom’ to drink high-caloric soda with the ‘freedom’ to own a gun.  Which is exactly what the NRA-ILA statement says: “And make no mistake: he’s just as focused on coming for your guns as he is on coming for your Dr. Pepper.”

Remember a guy named Ronald Reagan?  It was during his Presidency that we first stuck warnings on packs of cigarettes. And then what happened is that we started passing additional taxes on cigarettes to discourage people from starting or continuing to smoke. And we did it because smoking is a serious risk to health.  Which also happens to be true when we talk about high-caloric drinks.  Every day, at least 5 percent of all adults add 567 calories to their food intake by drinking soda and juice with sugar; one in four adults adds at least 200 calories to their daily food intake with sugary drinks. Right now we spend nearly 200 billion a year treating the health conditions caused by obesity and the complications from obesity are probably responsible each year for 300,000 deaths.  We also probably lose 480,000 Americans to smoking every year, but that number has been going down while the obesity number keeps going up.

The amount of money spent by Bloomberg on anti-smoking campaigns around the world has gone above one billion bucks.  When it comes to personal freedom, you don’t hear the NRA or anyone else saying that Bloomberg’s attempt to get more stringent anti-smoking laws is a threat. But that’s because as loony as the NRA’s messaging has become, nobody would take Wayne-o or Chris Cox seriously if they told the membership to demonstrate their support of the 2nd Amendment by buying a pack of cigarettes and enjoying a smoke. But public opinion hasn’t yet come to a consensus on how sugary drinks contribute to the epidemic of excess weight, so the NRA can pretend that regulating soft drinks, like regulating guns, is another example of government overreach into an area of personal choice which should be left alone.

Here’s how the NRA sums it up: “we’ll happily join the residents of Santa Fe in toasting liberty with the soft drink of their choice, whatever its sugar content might be.” And on the way back from the Mini-Mart, why not stop off at your local gun shop and pick up some ammo or even another gun? After all, you can still strap on your Glock even if you can’t fit into your pants.

 

Louisiana Tries To Protect Domestic Abuse Victims But The NRA Says ‘No.’

If you buy a gun from a federally-licensed dealer, Question 11h asks: “Are you subject to a court order restraining you from harassing, stalking, or threatening your child or an intimate partner or child of such partner?” And if you answer ‘yes,’ or the FBI determines that you should have answered in the affirmative, you ain’t getting the gun. The problem with this question, however, is that there loopholes in this law big enough to drive the veritable truck.

[image error]             First, walking into a court and getting a restraining order isn’t the same thing as buying the annual dog license.  It can be a long, drawn-out process, it may only be a temporary order and believe it or not, not every state requires that the person served with the order surrender their guns. And then there’s a problem with the wording of the Question 11f itself, because if you check the fine print on the NICS-FBI form, you’ll discover that an ‘intimate partner’ is defined as a spouse or a former spouse, or someone who cohabitates or has cohabitated with the individual who took out the restraining order in the first place. [My italics.] Which means that if someone finds themselves in an abusive relationship with someone with whom they do not share living space, the prohibition on gun ownership doesn’t hold.

This gap in the law is being challenged today in of all places, Louisiana, which happens to be a particularly gun-friendly state. But a member of the Louisiana House, Helena Moreno, whose district is just south of New Orleans, has a bill which cleared committee by a near-unanimous vote, and expands the definition of domestic abuser to persons involved in dating relationships, which happens to account for 70% of domestic homicides in the state.

The bill comes up for a floor vote today and of course our friends down in Fairfax oppose it. After all, if you widen the definition of a domestic relationship to go beyond people who live together, then you are going “well beyond federal law in limiting Second Amendment rights.” Notice incidentally, that any attempt to keep people away from guns who shouldn’t have a gun is always a ‘limit’ on 2nd-Amendment rights. And pardon me for a brief editorial, but I’m really sick and tired of listening to all my GVP friends who tell me they want more gun regulations but support 2nd-amendment ‘rights.’  Enough with the 2nd Amendment, okay?

But before everyone in Gun-sense Nation starts celebrating the attempt by Louisiana to protect domestic abuse victims, it should be noted that Gun-nut Nation has been working overtime to push the legal needle in the other direction. States are also passing laws which allow domestic abuse victims to carry a gun if they are legal gun owners, whether or not they have a concealed-carry (CCW) license. A new law in Virginia approves this practice as long as a CCW application is in the works. A similar law has been introduced in Indiana, which gives the victim a temporary, 60-day period to carry a concealed weapon either from the day they obtain their court order or the day they apply for a CCW.  And the same legislation has just been signed into law in Illinois.

I’m not saying that protecting domestic abuse victims shouldn’t be the highest priority of the police and the courts. But the idea that someone who owns a gun could imagine that the presence of a firearm would give them a higher degree of protection simply promotes the utterly false narrative that guns should be the first line of defense against any and all threats.

I notice that our friends at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence publish a monthly report detailing the status of state-level gun laws. Maybe they would consider stealing a page from the NRA and coding onto their website an automated messaging system so that residents in a state with an upcoming gun vote could let the legislators know how they feel. I’ll put up $500 to help pay for that deal. Any takers?

 

Want To Reduce Gun Violence? Try The New Haven Approach.

When we think of gun violence, we usually think about big, urban centers like Chicago, Baltimore or St. Louis which have large, inner-city neighborhoods and, unfortunately, lots of violent crime. But it often turns out that gun violence is all too common in smaller cities, for example last week five people were gunned down in Chester, PA, a little burb of Phillly with a population of 34,000, the town leading the United States with an average of 53 gun homicides per 100,000 every year for the last fifteen years.

[image error]             Even though it’s the location of Yale University, the city of New Haven used to be right up there with places like Chester when it comes to residents getting shot.  In 2011 there were 34 homicides, which gave the city a per-100K homicide rate of 27.2, while the statewide rate that same year was 4.06.  In fact, in 2011, with three percent of the state’s total population, New Haven accounted for 25% of the people who were feloniously killed in that one year. That’s serious sh*t.

Know what the New Haven numbers looked like in 2016?  Homicides were down to 13, non-fatal shooting victims dropped from 133 to 67, and the number of gunshots that were picked up by the city’s ShotSpotter system went from 426 to 160.  To quote Mayor Toni Harp, New Haven has become a “healthier, safer city.”  That’s for sure.

If a city like New Haven, with a family media income that is 30% below the national average and with one-quarter of the residents living below the poverty line, can get it together and reduce gun violence to such a remarkable degree, we need to figure out what they are doing because it might serve as a template for other communities who would like to healthy and safe because gun violence goes away.

New Haven’s effort is based on a state initiative called Project Longevity, which brings together all the major institutional and community stakeholders to confront the perpetrators of gun violence through a combination of social service outreach, law enforcement attention and the application of both positive and negative incentives to the at-risk population on an ongoing basis.  Those individuals in the neighborhood who otherwise might commit gun violence but ask for assistance are given job, housing and education assistance; those who spurn such help and continue to commit violence are identified by the police and taken off the streets.

The New Haven project is the brainchild of David Kennedy, who ran his first police-community anti-violence program in Boston in the 1990’s and has taken this approach to cities in 31 states under the aegis of the National Network for Safe Communities (NNSC,) which operates out of John Jay College of The City University of New York. The Network’s informational guide should be required reading for everyone in the GVP community, and you can download it here. 

What runs through NNSC philosophy and practice is the idea that law enforcement is not just a tool for maintaining law and order by arresting and locking up the bad guys, it’s also a community-service organization where the cops spend as much or more time assisting and positively interacting with community residents as they spend chasing criminals. As the attitude of fear and suspicion between cops and community is replaced by an attitude of respect and trust on both sides, keeping the neighborhood safe becomes an effective basis for building a viable police-civilian partnership which drives down all crime.

Our friend Frank Zimring talks about the degree to which police shootings in the inner-city contribute to a general sense of violence that makes the presence and use of guns part and parcel of ghetto life. After all, if the cops can shoot willy-nilly at everyone, why can’t civilians do the same? But the decision by New Haven police to only use lethal force in the most extreme circumstances seems to have resulted in the decline of gun violence within the city as a whole. Could this be a template for reducing gun violence nationwide?

 

The NRA Has A New Scheme To Keep You Buying Guns.

When Trump went down to Atlanta to talk to his NRA friends, he stood there and said with a majestic tone in his voice: “The eight-year assault on the 2nd Amendment has come to an end.” Well, maybe it wasn’t so majestic but you get the point. And like just about everything he says, this dyslexic, ignorant Head of State got it wrong because what he should have said was that the eight-year gun-buying frenzy has come to an end.

[image error]              There was never an ‘assault’ on the 2nd Amendment even though there were and still are efforts to regulate gun ownership so that we might not suffer from 120,000+ gun deaths and injuries each year. But I didn’t hear any of the pro-GVP politicians or activists ever say that the 2nd Amendment should be abolished, or that law-abiding Americans shouldn’t be able to own guns. Yea, yea, I know – everyone who says they’re against gun violence is really against guns. So what? It’s not going to happen, it never could happen, from a legal and legislative point of view, guns are here to stay.

But what if people simply stop buying guns? What if everyone who wants to own a gun has more guns than they know what to do with, a situation which happens increasingly to be true?  If you’re in the business of making guns, you better figure out a new way to sell them or you’ll go out of business, that’s for sure. And I’ve been watching and waiting since November 8th to see what the gun industry would come up with to make up for the loss of demand once their customers realized that they didn’t have to worry about losing their guns.

And the first evidence of a change in strategy came in an email I just received from the NRA.  It’s an invitation to become a certified ‘Carry Guard’ instructor, a new training program developed by a self-promoter who claims to be a former Navy Seal with twenty years of naval special warfare experience who also says that he’s a writer and consultant to the outdoor industry, whatever that means.  He claims to have a book coming out, Terminal List, which I suspect will be an attempt to gain the attention of all the Tom Clancy fans (which includes me) now that the real Clancy is dead.

Actually, Carry Guard is an insurance program which claims to protect you from ‘certain’ losses if you engage in an act of self-defense using a legally-owned gun. The training program has been tacked on as an extra feature and is advertised as being the ‘gold standard in concealed carry training,’ although the actual details of the program remain to be worked out. If you send an email indicating your interest in becoming a student or an instructor you don’t get any reply, a note on the website says to check back in June for further information about courses, dates and costs.

The NRA started in 1871 as a training organization and currently claims to have more than 100,000 certified trainers, one of whom happens to be me. The training is basically about gun safety and safe gun use and is usually the course which is mandated by the states that require some training in gun safety prior to applying for a gun license or a concealed-carry permit, a.k.a. CCW or LTC.  The NRA offers  two courses, Defensive Pistol and Personal Protection Outside the Home, which cover aspects of concealed-carry techniques but do not focus on armed self-defense per se.

The gun industry has been venerating the ‘armed citizen’ since the 1980’s. It’s a load of crap. Now they are pushing further into fantasy pretending that military assault and tactical skills are a necessary response to the ‘dangers’ of the modern age.

Want to protect yourself from a sudden event that might change your life? Learn to read and write.

National Concealed-Carry Is Back On The Agenda Again.

Even though Donald Trump gave an uncharacteristically non-bombast verbal performance at the NRA, both sides in the gun debate are still gearing up for the showdown over national, concealed-carry licenses which has been at the top of Gun-nut Nation’s wish list since a bill was first introduced by then-Senator Larry (‘I was looking for my wallet’) Craig back in the Clinton years. That’s the Clinton who won, not the Clinton who lost.

[image error]             Our friends at The Trace are carrying a good summary of the new bill and the reasons why it might and might not get to Trump’s Oval Office desk. But what caught my eye in reading Dan Friedman’s solid piece was the comment by the sponsor of the Senate Bill, John Cornyn (R-TX) who likens such a license to a driver’s license because, as he says, “if you can drive in Texas, you can drive in New York and follow New York laws.” Which is the reason why driving laws tend to be almost the same in every state, as well as the requirements which every state imposes in order to become a licensed driver. And the basic requirement happens to be passing a road test which actually proves that you can control and drive a car.

I happen to think that if someone who does not need to have a gun for work (law enforcement, security, etc.) wants to walk around with a gun, then he/she should be allowed to do so under some very strict conditions. And these conditions would include registering the gun and being able to account for its whereabouts at all times, and most of all, being able to demonstrate that you actually know how to use the damn thing safely and properly. Which means taking and passing a mandated live-fire test supervised by a public official and not just some trainer wannabe who sat through an NRA class and answered some true-false questions, paid the training counselor a couple of hundred bucks and now considers himself an expert with a gun.

Know how many states impose such an onerous requirement on anyone who wants to walk around with a gun? None, as in zero states, okay? Many states have no live-fire requirement for concealed carry (CCW) at all. My state, Massachusetts, is always being reviled by Gun-nut Nation as a tough, anti-gun state, but the CCW license is issued without any live-fire certification at all. You can walk into any gun shop in Massachusetts, buy a gun, load it up with ammo and walk out with the gun in your pocket having never fired a real gun. And Massachusetts is typical of a majority of states in this respect.

As for states which actually require some kind of live-fire exercise before granting CCW privileges, the requirement in Connecticut is five shots, in Florida it’s one. The only state which imposes any kind of live-fire certification that even remotely compares to the process for getting and keeping a driver’s license is New Mexico (thanks to Khalil Spencer) which actually imposes a very mild performance requirement but also requires re-certification every two years.

I find the whole Gun-nut Nation CCW stance not only dumb but certifiably risky because of their refusal to accept the idea that civilians should be able to walk around armed without being required to meet the same performance criteria that we impose on police. It’s not the fact that the cops have to actually hit the target, it’s the idea that most police certifications also require that the shots be delivered within a specific period of time – usually 2-3 seconds from the holster to multiple trigger pulls. At least such a drill approximates to some degree what happens when lethal force is involved.

The reason that Gun-nut Nation will never support mandated CCW performance licensing is because such a process would severely cut handgun sales. All these people running around promoting concealed-carry aren’t doing it will make them ‘safe.’ They’re just pimping for the gun industry and don’t understand how or why.

Trump Goes To NRA And Gives ‘Em Squat.

I just listened to the speech – again. If you don’t know what speech I’m talking about, then you haven’t been following the latest doings in Gun-nut Nation.  It’s the speech that Trump gave Friday at the NRA annual meeting, the first President to address the Gun-nut Nation faithful since Saint Ronald showed up in 1983.

[image error]As speeches go, it was a fairly hum-drum and boring affair. I hate to say this, but when Trump exhorted his campaign audiences to ‘throw them the hell out,’ or ‘beat them up,’ or ‘put Hillary in jail,’ at least there was a certain amount of excitement and hoopla in the air. And he did on rare occasion show his old form, referring to Liz Warren as ‘Pocahontas’ and leading the audience in a brief ‘build the wall’ cheer. But I predicted last week that Trump would show up and just rattle on about how tough he was on crime, and that’s exactly what he did.

Trump spent the first 6 minutes cracking jokes about how nobody thought he could win; someone might tell his speechwriters that the election was six months ago and the line about how ‘everyone said I couldn’t get to 270 and they were right because I ended up at 306’ is getting a little stale. With great solemnity he then intoned that the ‘eight-year assault on the 2nd Amendment’ had come to an end, but then he veered back to a disjointed praising of the new Supreme Court justice and from the 12th minute to the 17th minute he told the audience everything else he was doing to protect us from illegal immigrants and crime.

At this point in the speech the audience was getting restive because the applause was beginning to fade, so for the next three minutes Trump babbled on and on about how he was going to build the wall. He then mentioned that a couple of Southern Governors were in the room along with Ted Cruz, and then at minute 23 he stopped short (I thought that maybe he was finally going to say something newsworthy) and said, again with great solemnity, “I will never, ever infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms.”  The next day the mainstream media reported that Trump said he would support gun ‘rights.’ This was the NRA. What was he supposed to say? That he wouldn’t support gun ‘rights?’

He then wrapped up by mumbling something about Paul Revere, the battle at Concord and a reminder that he will make America great again because his administration will bring back the idea that the ‘people can govern themselves.’  That’s what he calls Twitter?

He mentioned several times that Wayne-o and Chris Cox were doing a great job, he made reference to the NRA’s storied President, Charlton Heston, but he didn’t even pull out Heston’s epic applause line about how nobody would ever take a gun away from his ‘cold, dead hands.’ The kid who wrote Trump’s speech probably wasn’t even born when Heston first shouted those words.

The audience heard the word  ‘freedom’ again and again but at no time did they hear anything about the national, concealed-carry bill which is the NRA’s most cherished dream. There was no mention of ending ‘gun-free’ zones, another issue high on the NRA wish-list, which Trump claimed he would abolish on his first day on the job. He didn’t even talk about his son’s pet project to market gun silencers as some kind of medical device. The truth is that Trump came to the NRA meeting, talked for 28 minutes and didn’t say anything at all.

For all his talk about how much Trump ‘loves’ gun owners, his NRA speech didn’t give them squat. And I’m not saying that chickens won’t come home to roost at some point this year,but getting a big tax cut for himself and his friends is a lot more important to Trump than whether Colion Noir can go prancing around with his guns.

The Worst Gun Salesman Of All Time Coming To The NRA.

When Obama was President, the pro-gun gang used to jokingly refer to him as the best ‘salesman’ they ever had. But there was lots of truth to that statement, particularly after the massacre at Sandy Hook, when Barack tried to get Congress to expand background checks to secondary gun transfers, a remarkably mild response to gun violence which nevertheless still failed. Meanwhile, in the final four years of his ‘regime,’ the gun industry may have pushed as many as 90 million additional guns into the civilian arsenal, two to three times as many guns as were made and sold during the eight years of George W. Bush.

[image error]               Since the NRA’s pet President took over, however, things have changed, and not for the better. Since the beginning of this year, gun sales are back down to their pre-Obama levels, and nobody expects things to turn around all that quick. Let’s face it: for all the talk and hogwash about everyone walking around with a gun, what always drives gun sales is the possibility that the last gun you bought might be the last one you could ever buy.

Back last October at the end of one of my classes on handgun safety, a woman who took the class told me that she was very happy to have come to the class because she was afraid that Hillary would win the election and then she wouldn’t even be able to apply for a gun license, never mind actually buy a gun. How did such a crazy idea get into her head? Don’t ask me, ask my friends in Fairfax, because they spent $30 million last year trying to convince voters of exactly the same thing.

I think that Everytown, Brady and the Violence Policy Center should create an award for the person who has done the most to reduce gun violence, announce a big, public event, and give the award to Donald Trump. Because no matter how you slice it and dice it, there’s a direct and clear connection between the amount of gun violence that we endure and the ease with which Americans can get their hands on guns. Now I’m not saying that legal gun owners go around shooting up their neighborhoods each and every day. What I am saying is that with all due respect to the 2nd Amendment, which is a nonsense excuse for the 120,000+ gun deaths and injuries which occurs every year, the bottom line is that gun violence would come to an end if we got rid of the guns.

And by the way, not only is Trump the reason for a drop in the number of guns floating around, he also may be responsible for a disappearance of the most horrific form of gun violence, namely, those gun-violence events like Sandy Hook which result in ten, twenty, thirty or more people getting murdered with guns at the same time and at the same place.

These events aren’t just ‘mass’ shootings, which the FBI defines as three or more people killed at one place all at the same time, they are rampage shootings, where someone just keeps pulling the trigger again and again until everyone around him is either wounded or dead.

I was looking at a list of what NPR calls the ‘deadliest’ shootings in U.S. history, and I noticed there have been 15 such events since Chuckie Whitman climbed to the top of the Texas Tower in 1966 and started blasting away. Of those 15 events, which together netted almost 300 dead and another 350 injured, nine of them occurred in just eight years of that fifty-year span – the eight years between 2009 and 2017. 

Can it just be coincidence that two-thirds of the most horrific shootings in American history took place when we had a President who was venomously and hatefully accused of being anti-gun? Let’s give Trump-o a year or so in office and maybe we’ll find out.

Want To Stop National Concealed-Carry? Start With This Video.

Remember Larry Craig? He was the Republican Senator from Idaho who was the staunchest gun advocate in the U.S. Congress and was even a member of the NRA Board. My friends in Fairfax had the good sense to dump old Larry after he spent a little too much time in an airport toilet, but before that unfortunate incident occurred, he was known chiefly for introducing the first national concealed-carry bill in 1997, which this year finally has a chance of becoming law.

[image error]             The bill, (SB446 or HB38), not only allows someone with a CCW permit issued in his state to carry a concealed weapon into any other state, but even allows someone who lives in a state that does not require a specific CCW permit to go armed into states where a CCW permit is required for residents in those states. In other words, the ability to carry a concealed weapon throughout the United States becomes even easier than what is required to drive a car from one state to another, because every state requires that you can’t drive without a valid driver’s license, but at least 12 states don’t require any licensing for CCW, a number which may go to 15 or 16 states before the end of this year. And by the way, at least 24 states do not require any kind of training or performance certification before you strap on the old gun.

Folks, let me break the news to you gently. If national CCW becomes law (and Trump promoted the idea again and again during the campaign,) as far as I’m concerned, Gun-nut Nation has won. It’s not the idea that concealed-carry gunnies are necessarily more dangerous than anyone else, or that CCW would mean an increase in violence and crime. What it really means is that walking around with a gun is just as normal and mainstream as walking around with a droid. And the whole point about guns and gun violence is that don’t ask me how and don’t ask me why, but like my man Walter Mosley says, walk around with a gun and it will go off sooner or later.

So this bill represents a real threat to everyone who believes that we shouldn’t be tolerating 120,000 deaths and injuries each year because of guns. And my friends at States United to Prevent Gun Violence have just rolled out a remarkable video to drive this point home. It’s called Carrier or Killer and consists of 5 scenes after which the viewer has to guess whether the person on the camera could or should be considered a threat with a gun.  I actually got one of the five wrong because I swear that this kid standing in a convenience store was holding a gun. He wasn’t, and by the way, he’s now dead.

The most chilling video shows a young man innocently entering a building; there’s absolutely nothing in his dress, demeanor or what he is carrying that might make you believe that he would commit violence with a gun. The video, it turns out, is Dylann Roof entering the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston just before he shot nine people dead.

Folks, you have to watch this video. Then you have to watch the YouTube trailer. Then you have to get involved, put it on your Twitter, or your Facebook, or your Instagram, or however you connect with everyone else. Because national concealed-carry not only represents dreams come true for Gun-nut Nation, it’s a cynical and exploitive attempt to promote gun ownership for all the reasons that guns don’t need to be owned.

You don’t need to carry a gun because you’re afraid. You need to figure out what is causing the fear and deal with the cause, which isn’t the same thing as buying into the gun industry’s nonsense about protecting yourself with a gun. Unless you’re willing to put in hundreds of training hours which you’re not, the gun just increases the risk to you and everyone else.

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Another Crackpot Almost Joins The Trump Team.

Take a look at the change.org website and you’ll find a petition which asks Senator Chuck Schumer to have #45 declared mentally ill and removed from behind the Oval Office desk. The petition was started by a psychiatrist, John Gartner, who specializes in treating personality disorders and is convinced that Trump-o’s mental state puts the country at risk.

[image error]             I thought that the endless lying, braggadocio and confused thoughts of the Trump campaign persona were just a good act. I never thought it would carry over to his behavior as President, in particular the degree to which he continues to say things which any ‘normal’ person would know are simply untrue. He got up before a group of sheriffs last week and said that the murder rate had reached a 45-year high; in fact it has hit a 45-year low. So is Trump unable to tell the difference between fantasy and fact, or is he relying on a staff which is hopelessly unable to figure anything out?

It may be a combination of both, but the bottom line is that Dr. Gartner’s petition now has 50,784 signatures, even though it’s not clear to what degree a physician should publicly identify an at-risk individual if the physician has not actually examined the person himself. But the issue of Trump’s mental stability will no doubt be a priority for the doctor who was a finalist but didn’t get the #2 job at HHS. He’s a New York psychiatrist named Michael Welner, who wanted to head up mental health initiatives for the government, and would have played a leading role in the debate about mental health and guns.

After Sandy Hook, Democrats called for tighter gun regulations, Republicans wanted more attention paid to keeping guns away from the mentally ill. Now in fact mental illness, particularly mental illness which requires hospitalization or some other form of intensive treatment, is not usually a factor in explaining gun violence, even though people who kill other people aren’t ‘normal’ like you and me. But promoting the alleged connection between mental illness and gun violence is an easy way to avoid or ignore the degree to which Americans have basically free access to guns. And it is the ability for just about anyone to get their hands on a gun which drives our homicide rates far above other OECD violence rates.

If you’re looking for a physician to help drive the Republican agenda on mental illness and crime, then Dr. Welner’s ‘da man.’ He has developed a ‘depravity standard’ which measures whether a crime is just a crime, or whether it was depraved, heinous, atrocious; what prosecutors call ‘aggravating circumstances’ which may influence the sentence up to a death penalty, or considerations about early release from jail. The standard is based on a survey which anyone over the age of 18 can take.  It asks participants to rate the level of depravity for various behavioral, criminal acts, such as inflicting severe pain, choosing certain types of victims, influencing others to commit criminal acts; you rate the level of depravity from 1 to 100 and your answers build a database that will help judges, prosecutors and juries determine proper punishment levels in serious crimes.

What’s behind Welner’s research is an attempt to define evil, which is exactly what gets him into trouble, because there is no clear or concise definition of evil, just as there really is no clear definition of the word ‘depraved.’ But Welner is no stranger to tacking labels onto behavior, whether they fit or not.  Last year he went on CNN and not only said that Trump’s narcissism was positive and healthy, but also claimed that Hillary’s statements about Benghazi showed that she was the ‘pathological liar’ in the campaign.

Michael Welner’s crackpot theories are perfect for Trump. I can see him on CNN saying that we all need guns to protect us from ‘depraved’ criminals because that’s another crackpot theory which Trump will no doubt proclaim when he talks in front of the NRA. One good crackpot deserves another.

Trump Comes To NRA And Tells Them What They Want To Hear.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. — Goethe.

              This coming Friday, April 28th, Donald Trump is scheduled to speak at the NRA meeting in Atlanta, the first time a sitting President has appeared before the faithful since Saint Ronald showed up in 1983. And what did Reagan tell the group he was doing in Washington to advance their 2nd-Amendment rights? He went on and on about how his administration was being ‘tough on crime.’  And he also singled out a group in Arizona called the Sun City Posse, which was ‘just individuals who patrol their neighborhoods in their cars,’ the way that George Zimmerman was patrolling his neighborhood when Trayvon Martin happened to walk by.

[image error]             I’ll bet you Trump will basically roll out the same tough guy nonsense when he appears before the NRA later this week. And why not? Getting tough on crime has always sold well for the Republican brand, and come to think of it, fighting crime didn’t hurt the political fortunes of a Democrat named Bill Clinton as well. But Clinton didn’t tie his crime-fighting strategy to the promotion of guns; in fact, the passage of the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban marked him as the most successful anti-gun President we ever had.

Which is why the NRA had such an easy time of it during the Obama ‘regime,’ because sitting in the Oval Office, right in front of America’s gun owners, was a black guy who was determined to expand the so-called ‘assault’ on 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’ And what better way to keep your followers energized and excited (and opening their wallets) than to remind them again and again that the ‘enemy’ is not only at the gates but is actually inside the hen-house looking out?

Which is exactly the problem now facing the NRA because the enemy has been replaced by their seemingly best friend, which means they have to shift from attack dog to tame dog without missing a beat. And this isn’t so easy when the person you pledged to help and support not only changes his political stance every day, but has backtracked on many of the issues which led you to help him in the first place. Remember how Trump-o was going to ‘get tough’ on China trade? Remember how he used to be against the ‘dream act?’  Remember all that nonsense about how America could only become great again if we didn’t stick our nose into other country’s affairs?

Take a look at this article in Politico which really nails how the ditherings of the Trump administration has fractured what was the unquestioned alliance of the Conservative media and the organizations they represent when this mutual relationship of Obama-haters were on the outside of political power looking in. Know what happened the day that Trump announced the (brief) elevation of Steve Bannon to be his right-hand man? Everyone else who had been slavishly promoting the Trumpian agenda said ‘how come him and not me?’

So Wayne-o was invited to journey out of his lair in Fairfax on Easter to the White House to help roll some eggs on the lawn; notice how Trump’s dinner with alt-right icons Palin, Nugent and Kid Rock didn’t even make his Twitter account? You can accuse Trump of this or that, but one thing you can’t accuse him of being is loyal to his friends. The fact that the NRA spent more than $30 million of its membership dues to get #45 into the Oval Office, to quote my beloved grandmother, they can go ‘chub en drerd.’ Which means go lay brick.

But in the meantime, claiming you’re tough on crime is always a safe bet. Which is why the NRA for years has been promoting the utterly false idea about the role of armed citizens in fighting crime. There’s only one little problem – there just ain’t much crime in places where most people live who own legal guns. But Goethe’s quote about false beliefs has never been more true than now.