Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 85

An Assault Weapon Is An Assault Weapon Is An Assault Weapon. It’s Time To Put This Argument To Sleep.

            In the aftermath of the terrible events in Dallas, the argument has once again erupted over the definition of an ‘assault rifle,’ because the early but unconfirmed reports identified the shooter’s gun as an AR, but some unofficial statements referred to the rifle as an SKS.  Now in fact both guns were originally designed for military use, but the SKS, generally speaking, has a fairly modest ammunition capacity, whereas the AR generally comes with hi-cap mags.  But once President Obama said the magic words yesterday about how the shooter used a gun that was “not intended for city streets,” then Gun-nut Nation went into an immediate rant about how the gun used in Dallas was nothing other than a semi-automatic, top-loading rifle which is just like any other modern, sporting gun.

Since I can’t play golf on a rainy, Saturday afternoon, and in the interests of helping my GVP friends to understand the ins and outs of the assault rifle debate, here is a picture of a standard, assault rifle which can be found and purchased in just about every location that sells guns.  It can also be acquired in most states via a private transaction, and can also carried openly in places like Texas and a few other dumb states.

This gun, plus or minus a few other attachments, is what is generally considered to be an ‘assault rifle’ or an ‘assault weapon,’ for the simple reason that when the Feds declared a ten-year ban on such guns back in 1994, a gun fell into the prohibited category if it had a detachable magazine and two of five of the other design features numbered #1, #5, #7 or #8.  If it didn’t have at least two of those design features it could still be manufactured and sold, as long as the detachable magazine only contained a maximum of 10 rounds. The magazine limitation applied to magazines that were used in handguns as well.

When the ban on assault weapons expired in 2005, Gun-nut Nation struck back with a vengeance, not only greasing its Congressional friends to vote against an extension of the ban, but also starting up a loud campaign to rid the American lexicon, particularly the shooting lexicon, of using the word ‘assault’ at all.  And this campaign took the form of declaring that, by definition, ‘assault’ weapons had nothing to do with civilian, sporting guns because the former were automatic weapons that were prohibited from civilian use.  Additionally, any semi-automatic rifle (one trigger pull – one round fires) was a ‘sporting’ gun because, because, duh, Gun-nut Nation declared it to be a sporting gun.  Period. End of debate.

Know this: The campaign to promote ownership of AR rifles by rebranding them as ‘modern sporting’ anything is totally and completely full of crap.  Because it doesn’t really matter whether my friend Dianne Feinstein gets it right or wrong when she refers to ‘automatic guns.’  It doesn’t matter whether AR rifles ‘only’ figure in 1% of all the shooting deaths each year that involve the use of guns. It doesn’t even matter whether the Dallas shooter used an AR or an SKS.  The real issue, the only issue in the argument about assault weapons is how we understand the word ‘assault.’

Because guns like the AR or the SKS, even if they can only fire in semi-automatic mode, weren’t designed to go after Bambi in the woods or knock Big Bird out of a tree.  They were designed to do one thing and one thing only, and that was to kill human beings, and to kill as many humans as many times as the trigger of those guns can be pulled.  So why should we allow Gun-nut Nation to set the terms of the debate for determining the lethality of this gun or that?  Remember, they believe that it’s the people who are lethal, not the guns.  Tell that one to the families of the dead cops in Dallas whose dear ones were killed with a legally-purchased gun.

 

Did A Good Guy With A Gun Stop A Bad Guy With A Gun? Not In Dallas.

The last time that a sniper climbed up into an office building and tried to kill someone in downtown Dallas was November 22, 1963.  The sniper was Lee Harvey Oswald and the victim was the President of the United States.  This time around, the shooter appears to have been an ex-Army reservist who served in Afghanistan, and victims were five members of the Dallas PD.  These two sniper attacks were separated by nearly fifty-three years in time, but less than five hundred feet in space.  The unfortunate Dallas police officers were apparently shot near the intersection of Main Street and South Lamar; walk a block east down Main Street, turn left and you’re standing in front of what was the Texas Book Depository Building where Oswald perched himself when he allegedly shot JFK.

 

Bystanders stand near pollice baracades following the sniper shooting in Dallas on July 7, 2016.
A fourth police officer was killed and two suspected snipers were in custody after a protest late Thursday against police brutality in Dallas, authorities said. One suspect had turned himself in and another who was in a shootout with SWAT officers was also in custody, the Dallas Police Department tweeted.
/ AFP / Laura Buckman (Photo credit should read LAURA BUCKMAN/AFP/Getty Images)

Oswald, a former Marine Corps member, used a surplus military rifle called a Mannlicher-Carcano 91/38, which he bought from a mail-order sporting goods wholesaler in Chicago for twenty bucks. There’s been no confirmation yet out of Dallas, but I’ll bet you that the murder weapon used in yesterday attacks was an AR-15 assault rifle, or some variation on the theme, like the Sig-Sauer rifle that mowed down over 100 people inside The Pulse.

Wait a minute!  Nobody’s going to quarrel with the idea that President Kennedy was shot with a military gun; Oswald, after all, was a trained Marine Corps marksman, which meant he probably learned to shoot with a Springfield, bolt-action 1903 rifle, a gun that was similar in design and function to the gun he took into the Book Depository in order to carry out his assault.

But the AR-15 is a ‘sporting’ rifle, according to the NRA and the NSSF.  It doesn’t have any military application at all.  Those unfortunate Dallas cops weren’t shot with a military weapon, they were shot with a gun that is no more dangerous than any other rifle that you can find for sale in in any gun shop and can be purchased by anyone whose ownership of a gun is approved by a call to FBI-NICS.  Let’s not rush to judgement here, even if President Obama is already ‘politicizing’ this terrible tragedy by renewing his call for more regulations over these kinds of guns.  And what did Obama get in return for mentioning that these cop killings were the result of people being armed with ‘powerful weapons?’ He got an immediate response from Ben Carson (remember him?) who was plopped out in front of a Fox television camera to remind the audience that “we still have the 2nd Amendment” which gives us the right to use a gun to protect ourselves “against an overly aggressive government or external invasion.”

It’s going to be interesting to see how Gun-nut Nation gets past this one, if only because it’s one thing if a ‘street thug’ shoots another ‘street thug,’ it’s another thing if five police officers were killed and seven others, cops and civilians, were wounded by a guy walking around with a ‘sporting’ gun.  And remember that Texas is an open-carry state; in fact, there was one guy walking in the parade who had an AR-15 slung over his back; fat lot of good he did when the shooting broke out.

Adam Gopnick had a piece in The New Yorker in which he pointed out that the Dallas assault represented “the grotesque reductio ad absurdum of the claim that it takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun.” The parade route was lined with good guys who had guns, and the result was that five of them ended up dead.

But not to worry, Adam.  Like the veritable phoenix arising from the ashes, the NRA will wait the customary few days and then trot out again the myths of the ‘modern sporting rifle’ being used by the ‘good guy with the gun.’  After all, they now have a Presidential candidate who will probably be saying the same thing.

 

Just Because Someone’s A Gun Nut Doesn’t Mean They Don’t Have Other Concerns As Well.

It now appears that November 8th will not only be a test of the country’s collective IQ and sanity, but will also be a national plebiscite on guns.  We know where Street Thug stands on this issue because he has made it abundantly clear that a gun in the hip or in the pocketbook is where a gun should always be.  As for the Democrats, the differences that cropped up between Hillary and Bernie over gun issues during the primary campaign, it now appears that the platform that will be presented at the Philly brouhaha will contain some gun proposals quite unlike anything that has ever been previously seen.

           A draft of the platform has been out there for about a week, and it contains the following plank on guns:  “We will expand background checks and close dangerous loopholes in our current laws, hold irresponsible dealers and manufacturers accountable, keep weapons of war—such as assault weapons—off our streets, and ensure guns do not fall into the hands of terrorists, domestic abusers, other violent criminals, and those with severe mental health issues.” Programmatically, what this means is expanding NICS to cover private transactions and sales, getting rid of manufacturer’s immunity by repealing PLCAA, banning assault rifles; in other words, when it comes to guns, what Hillary wants is what Hillary’s going to get.

Of course wouldn’t you know it, but the only ripple that this gun plank has caused has been from media outlets that are pro-gun.  The NRA hasn’t yet formally responded to this document, but it’s like we don’t know what they’ll say.  After all, they have been on Hillary’s case since her husband pushed through Brady and the assault weapons ban in 1994, and they have already ponied up a couple of million bucks to run a totally-contrived attack ad against Hills that was probably illegally filmed in Arlington National Cemetery in the section that holds Civil War graves. I love how the narrator walks among those tombstones and says he can’t vote for Hillary Clinton because he doesn’t want any more of his buddies to wind up in these graves.  Somebone might have told that schmuck that those particular graves happen to be one hundred and fifty years old.

Our good friend Ken Toltz recently posted a Huffington blog in which he quoted the guru of all political gurus, David Axelrod, tweeting that Hillary’s embrace of gun control was a ‘winning’ politician strategy.  But Axelrod was referring to the primary campaign and not the general election where Hillary faces an opponent who has fashioned an entire strategy and message by appealing to what the British used to call, ‘the mob.’  And that term is defined by the Cambridge English Dictionary as “a large group of people gathered together who are often uncontrollable or violent.” And if that isn’t  Street Thug’s rallies, I don’t know what is.

But if the Gun Violence Prevention community is going to make an effective effort to help the red team pull off a November win, I think we have to look beyond the attention-grabbing behavior of Street Thug’s most virulent fans and fashion a realistic approach to try and win the hearts and minds of people who may not like Trump’s message or antics but will vote for him anyway because they believe he will protect their guns.  And not only will Street Thug protect their gun ‘rights,’ but they believe he is more or less in tune with how they feel about other social issues as well.

This was stated very clearly in a Vanity Fair interview with Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) who has emerged as the strongest Senate voice in the ongoing debate about guns. “I think the N.R.A. stamp of approval has become a proxy for a certain set of conservative values broader than your position on guns.” So the challenge for the red team is to try and engage gun-owners in a discussion that goes beyond guns.  Who knows what commonalities might emerge?

Do Attitudes Of Gun Owners And Non-Gun Owners Differ That Much? I’m Not So Sure.

You may recall that several months after the Sandy Hook massacre, the New England Journal of Medicine published a survey on attitudes towards gun regulations that was developed by the gun violence research group at The Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.  Which means, of course, that the survey was designed to promote the gun-grabbing agenda of Mayor Mike.

            I’m being a bit sarcastic in what I just wrote because there is simply no way I can hold a conversation or direct anything I write towards a dialog with Gun-nut Nation, because thanks to Street Thug Trump, Gun-Nut Nation is rapidly becoming a haven for the lunatic fringe.  And if you want proof of that last statement, I direct you to a missive from a gentleman named Dr. Michael Brown, described on the Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership website as a “pragmatic Libertarian environmentalist,” who writes in detail about what he calls “The Ten Favorite Lies of the Gun Control Lobby,” And Lie #6 just happens to be the findings of the Johns Hopkins survey which found that a majority of gun owners want “more gun control.”

When the Hopkins survey was released back in 2013, attention was riveted on an attempt to get the scope of FBI-NICS background checks expanded to cover secondary (i.e., private) transactions and sales. The bill ultimately went nowhere fast, but the findings from the Hopkins survey were used by Manchin-Toomey supporters to help build their case. In light of the claim by Michael Brown that these findings were nothing more than a lie, I decided to take another look at what the details of that survey really show.

The survey was actually two surveys, one covering gun policies, the other devoted to guns and mental health.  I’m going to focus only on the former because this is the part of the survey which has been characterized as a “lie.”  The survey was completed by 1,865 respondents, of whom one-third reported that there was a gun in the home.  Here are some of the findings:

Banning purchase of assault weapons: Non-gun owners yes – 75%.  Gun owners yes – 46%.
Confiscation of currently-owned assault weapons: Non-gun owners yes – 63%, Gun owners yes – 37%.

The survey also asked whether a physician whose patient expressed a desire to hurt himself or others should be allowed to contact the NICS system to prevent such individuals from having a gun for a period of six months.  Actually, the survey question is slightly confused because NICS covers purchases, not ownership of guns. But the bottom line is that 75% of non-gun owners believed that physicians should be able to intervene in instances where a patient’s access to guns demonstrated a risk. Ready? 72% of gun owners felt the same way. Wow.

The results of this survey are astonishing in terms of what it says about how attitudes of gun owners and often differ from the usual narrative that we get about guns. If nearly four out of ten gun owners agree that assault weapons should be confiscated, if nearly half current gun owners believe that the purchase of assault weapons should be banned, if seven out of ten gun owners think that physicians should have the authority to help prevent at-risk patients from access to guns, then I think it’s time for Gun Violence Prevention advocate to stop worrying about being demonized for wanting to ban certain guns, and it’s time for physicians to drop their concerns about raising valid medical issues that  might make them appear to be anti-gun.

It will probably be difficult for the remainder of this campaign cycle to distinguish between the rantings of Gun-nut Nation and what might be in the minds of average folks who happen to own guns.  But if things turn out the way they should on November 8th, a serious and substantive gun debate might actually take place.  The Hopkins survey clearly indicates that there are reasonable voices on both sides.

A New Gun PSA And A New Gun Website: You Should See Them Both.

Let’s begin with the PSA – both funny then shocking at the very end.  It shows a young boy running into the kitchen, trying to grab a box of cereal and grabs a box of rat poison instead; then a baby lurches towards the stairs and the gate has barbed wire on top; a young infant crawls towards a fearsome-looking animal trap, and as a young girl is almost attacked by a crazed dog the voice-over says, “You wouldn’t allow any of these other risks in your home,” while a young boy opens up a drawer and yanks out a pistol, “why allow an unlocked gun?”

           The artfully-produced PSA is featured on a new website from the Brady Campaign which is built around the idea that a gun that isn’t safely stored in the home is a serious risk.  And the risks of letting kids get their hands on guns are explained in a series of basic statements – 15 Truths About Kids and Guns – each of which can be easily tweeted or pushed onto your Facebook page. The statements cover such topics as the link between lack of safe storage and gun injuries, high rates of gun ownership and high rates of child gun deaths, none of these or other statements being new news.  But what is new is that at the bottom of this page you can download a very detailed discussion of each of these issues, a document that is comprehensive and detailed both in content and scope.  Well done, Brady, well done.

The website is robust, full of content, works exceptionally well and can be shared to your personal social media platform for friends and a wider digital audience.  There’s also a section of Fast Facts of which I want to mention one in particular, and that’s the pages devoted to the most difficult of all subjects to discuss, namely, the issue of suicide and how to create a suicide-proof home. This page links to another web initiative from Brady that is a partnership with the Rhode Island Department of Health.

If I had a nickel for every time that a pro-gun advocate objected to the idea that using a gun to commit suicide is an act of gun violence, I’d be out on the first tee every day instead of only once or twice a week.  So let’s end this stupid argument right here and now by quoting a pretty good authority on the definition of violence, which happens to be the WHO.  The World Health Organization defines violence as “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community,” which pretty much sums it up for me.  And in 2014 the intentional use of force against oneself in which the type of force was a gun claimed 21,334 lives, of whom nearly 1,000 were kids under the age of 18.

I can understand why Brady would want to launch a gun safety initiative that focuses on kids, and this site brings together just about all the credible data on gun injuries involving children and teens.  The site is aimed at parents, giving them specific information on safe storage devices, counseling options, communicating with other parents and the like.  The tone and content is also very even-handed, seeking not to preach but to inform, raising awareness by assigning responsibility free from guilt.

I do have one hope for this initiative which is in no way a criticism of what has been accomplished so far, namely, that Brady will consider expanding this effort to cover gun safety issues as they apply to adults as well.  Because all of the shocking numbers on child/teen mortality and morbidity are much more shocking when we look at the data on gun deaths and injuries for people who are no longer kids.

This site is an important step forward for Gun Violence Prevention.  Use it – link it – tweet it – get it out to as many people as fast as you can.

Some Gays Think They Need To Protect Themselves With Guns. I Don’t Agree.

One of the things I like about July 4th is that everyone’s out there having a good time.  So I am going to have a good time, too.  And since what I enjoy doing more than anything is writing, I spend part of the July 4th holiday writing something that I know will piss some people off. Which is why I usually go after something having to do with Gun-nut Nation because it’s so easy to piss them off.  And today I’m going to go after a subset of Gun-nut Nation, which is the queer Gun-nut Nation, a.k.a. a phony little group known as the Pink Pistols, and I’m not going to be either polite or politically-correct in what I’m going to say.

           I think it’s a tremendous step forward that an alliance is forming between the Gun Violence Prevention (GVP) community and LGBTQ.  If nothing else, I hope it will allow me to stop spelling out the GVP acronym as this alliance matures and grows.  But as I have said previously, the strength that LGBTQ brings to the issue of gun violence isn’t just one of numbers, it’s much more one of organizational experience and smarts.  When it comes to changing hearts and minds about a serious issue, LGBTQ has been there, done that, more times and in more places than I could ever know.

But the bad news about this alliance is that once attention starts getting paid to the issue of gays and guns, you can be sure that everyone will try to get in on the act.  And the curtain was first raised by an article in the Washington Post which discussed the emerging GVP-LGBTQ connection but made a point, in the interests of course of fair and balanced journalism, to mention some LGBTQ ‘activists’ who have ‘vigorously embraced’ gun rights.  Four days later, WaPo ran a second, full-length article on a gay guy in Philly who has organized a Pink Pistols chapter with the help of a certified, NRA pistol instructor who also happens to be gay.

So I took a little time to read up on the Pink Pistols, in particular their 25-page organizational manual which tells you who they are, how they got started and what they hope to achieve.  And what they hope to achieve is a national movement that will respond to the ongoing anti-gay violence suffered by the LGBTQ community by getting every member of that community to walk around with a gun: “We are dedicated to the legal, safe and responsible use of firearms for self-defense of the sexual-minority community.”

This is a complete load of crap and because it’s a holiday weekend I’m being polite.  Sorry, but being ‘safe and responsible’ with firearms is an oxymoron that Gun-nut Nation has been trotting out ever since the issue of gun violence was first raised, and if you want to believe it, go right ahead.  You can also believe that Martians really did land at Area 51 or that Donald Trump will build a wall.

But the agenda of Pink Pistols doesn’t actually bear on facts or the truth, it’s nothing more than a warmed-over enchilada to get another non-gun population interested in joining and supporting the NRA.   Because if you take the trouble to read their manual you’ll discover that the only training they recommend is the NRA “Refuse To Be A Victim” course, which happens to be a course that doesn’t cover anything having to do with guns at all.  It’s basically a little seminar that builds on the idea that we are all vulnerable to crime, but the issue of crimes against the LGBTQ community isn’t mentioned once.  What a surprise.

Want to read something serious and honest about gays and guns? Take a look at the LGBTQ news blog The Advocate and, in particular, the article on ‘Gays and Guns,’ along with John Feinblatt’s commentary on what Orlando meant to him. Then have a safe and happy holiday – GVP/LGBTQ will get it on!!!

Gays Meet Gun Violence Prevention On August 13 — Be There!

Now that an alliance is emerging between the Gun Violence Prevention (GVP) community and LGBTQ, I think my friends who advocate for stronger gun regulations need to whether the regulations they support will really meet the needs, expectations and goals of both groups.  Because the good news is that this alliance merges the talents, energies and experiences of LGBTQ and GVP, but the issues faced by my gay gender friends were and are different than the agenda currently on the plates my friends who advocate for more regulations of guns.

           The fact is that LGBTQ folks faced not only de-facto discrimination in past years, but in many cases had to confront legal discrimination as well. Want to marry someone of the same gender? It couldn’t be done.  Want to give a same-sex partner legal claim to your property or your estate?  It couldn’t be done.  Want to bring a child into a household comprised of two gay women or men?  Couldn’t be done.

So we aren’t talking here about the terrible inconvenience of driving to the local gun shop in order to complete a private sale or transfer of Uncle Ted’s old shotgun; we aren’t forcing anyone to sit through a couple of hours of tedious lectures in order to qualify to walk around town with a gun; we aren’t even saying that the Glock in someone’s pocket can only hold 10 rounds.  The NRA prides itself on being America’s ‘oldest’ civil rights organization, but their concern for civil rights and equality never addressed the inequality that dogged life-styles of men and women who happen to be gay.

In fact, there happens to be a gay, gun-rights organization out there called the Pink Pistols, which claims to have 45 chapters nationwide with more ‘starting up’ every day.  The Pittsburgh group has 39 members, the New York City group claims 223, in Dallas there are 106 folks who have signed on; actually these are all folks who have joined Pink Pistol groups on Facebook – who knows how many of them actually own guns?  Of course the national organization felt compelled to issue a statement after Orlando and of course felt equally compelled to use the Orlando tragedy to promote the ‘armed citizen’ nonsense that has become the basic talking-point of the NRA.  But I’ll give these folks some credit for coming up with a new twist on the stupidity and recklessness of armed, personal defense, namely that in localities that prohibit mixing guns and alcohol, exceptions should be made for ‘designated’ concealed carriers of guns.  Okay, now let’s get back to reality.

And the reality is this:  On August 13 there is going to be a big rally in Washington, DC that will cement the alliance between Gun Violence Prevention and LGBT. It’s being billed as an event to promote LGBTQ Equal Rights and Realistic Gun Law Reform and there are already 25 national gay-rights and GVP organizations signed up in support.  One of the gay groups, Gays Against Guns, formed directly after the Orlando massacre and marched in New York’s Pride parade.  Move over Pink Pistols, your concerns about gun rights just won’t fly.

The August 13 event is the brainchild and handiwork of a gay activist, Jason Hayes, who bills himself as a ‘celebrity hairstylist’ and lives in New Jersey but he’s a lot more than that.  Jason has brilliantly tapped into a wellspring of emotion and LGBTQ desire to promote yet another fundamental change.  And the LGBTQ community knows something about change.

But I want to what I said up top, namely, that LGBTQ folks come to this struggle with a very clear understanding of what inequality means, whereas on the GVP side the issue of ‘rights’ is what we always hear from Gun-nut Nation, rather than the other way around. So we need a meeting of the minds before August 13th and we also need as many minds as possible to meet on what will be an historic day.

Guess What? The National Movement To End Gun Violence Keeps Growing…And Growing…And Growing.

You may recall that back at the beginning of June there was a national outpouring of concern about gun violence known as Gun Violence Awareness Day symbolized by everyone wearing some orange as a symbol of safety around guns.  I wrote a column about the event, or I should say events, because there were more than 200 marches, meetings, concerts and other gatherings all over the United States.  And I pointed out that the growth of this movement reminded me of how demonstrations against the Viet Nam War started small and then mushroomed into something really effective and big.

           Well the same thing seems to be happening now as regards gun violence, thanks to a whole bunch of gun activists who jumped on last week’s sit-in on the floor of the House of Representatives chamber and followed all the Reps back to their home offices so that the energy and desire to do something about gun violence wouldn’t die out.  And at last count, there were close to 100 gun violence prevention events held or planned on June 29th in more than 30 states, with more to come.

Some events were held outside the district office of a House Member, and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that these events focused on Republican members who openly or otherwise supported Speaker Ryan’s calling the sit-in as a ‘publicity stunt.’  Then there were events hosted by Democratic Members, like New York’s Steve Israel, who joined other advocates and activists in a gun-violence roundtable held at the LGBT Center in his district.

All of these gigs were together planned as a ‘National Day of Action,’ which was so widespread that events were even covered by Fox News.  Now let me tell you something, folks.  As you may be aware, Fox is the media arm of the Trump campaign, so anything they let fly about guns is usually designed to appeal to Gun-nut Nation, certainly not to people who are out there trying to do something to end gun craziness in the USA.  And I’m not saying that Fox is about to cozy up to the Gun Violence Prevention community; what I am saying is that the idea that there is now an organized, national effort to challenge the previously-uncontested strength of pro-gun organizations has become major news.

And what’s really important about the National Day of Action is that there’s more to come. A big event is being planned for July 5th to greet Members of Congress as they return from the Independence Day break to get back to work in DC.  The event will be in the form of a ‘Welcome Back’ demonstration at Reagan National Airport coordinated by Brady, Everytown, my good friends at National Cathedral, with more groups to come.

In all the fifty-plus years I have been watching gun violence advocacy, this is the first time that efforts to reduce gun violence are happening on an ongoing basis and on a national stage.  And what gets this event a 5-star rating from me is that many of the demonstrations and gatherings were at offices and other locations of Republican office-holders, which is about the last place that anyone would expect to see someone advocating for more control over guns.  Until this year, when it comes to gun issues, I can guarantee you that someone like Rep. David Young from Iowa or Bob Latta from Ohio never saw anyone who wasn’t from the NRA.

It’s one thing to hold a rally or a demo in a neighborhood or community of an elected representative who wants to do something about the carnage created by guns.  It’s another to show up at an airport or Congressional office in the middle of a district where everyone just ‘loves’ their guns. Preaching to the converted is one thing, making new converts is a much different kind of task.  The groups and individuals who have put together and now sustain this national movement have become adept at doing both. And that’s great!

 

If We Can Correct The Record About Hillary, We Can Correct The Record About Guns.

If there’s one thing more than anything else that has pissed me off about Trump, it has been his propensity to use the most low-level, stupid and pandering statements about guns as if they are facts.  He probably does this with everything, but I’m no expert on economic affairs or international politics, so when someone scores him for saying something dumb about the economy or trade deals, I often take the criticism with a grain of salt.  But I know something about guns, in fact, I know a lot about guns, and if Trump really believes that walking around with a gun makes you safe, then he’s saying something that is simply dumb.

           Where does he get it from?  He gets it from the NRA, the NSSF and all the other organizations and individuals who produce hot air for Gun-nut Nation.  Believe it or not, I don’t blame the NRA for foisting such stupids on the public; the folks in Fairfax are a marketing operation and that’s what marketing operations do – they promote their products as  best they can, and as long as their lawyers tell them that something they are saying won’t wind them up in court, why not say whatever you want to say?

But this time the NRA may wind up in court not because of something they said about guns, but something they are saying about Hillary, which is just a shorthand way they are now using to talk about guns.  I’m referring to the ad that the NRA is running in some ‘swing’ states which features a Benghazi veteran named Mark Geist, who was apparently at Benghazi when the ill-fated attack took place in 2012.  And the ad shows him standing at a veteran’s cemetery warning the viewers that it was Hillary’s behavior that resulted in some of his comrades ending up in that hallowed ground, rather than standing alongside him.

By coincidence (yea, right,) the ad aired the same day that U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) released his long-awaited Benghazi report, which was so lacking in any new criticisms of Hillary that Rush Limbaugh’s response was to sink into a paroxysm of ‘Hillary’s a liar’ shrieks because he couldn’t find anything else to say. And Trump-o couldn’t find anything to say either beyond the usual ‘crooked Hillary’ riff or some words to that effect.

But the Veteran’s Administration did have something to say about the ad, and what they said was that it’s illegal to use a veteran’s cemetery for film purposes without express permission and they had not received any request from the NRA for this or any other purpose.  The NRA of course denied it had broken the law, stating that it was filmed ‘outside’ a veteran’s cemetery, but in fact the ad includes footage of Geist actually stepping between cemetery headstones.

Incidentally, I was directed to the controversy over the NRA ad by the folks who run a website, Correct The Record, which is a research and rapid-response effort aimed at supporting the Clinton campaign. Given the shameful degree to which Trump and his narrow band of supporters have based virtually every campaign statement on whatever will appeal to his so-called ‘movement’ regardless of even the remotest connection to the truth, the folks at Correct have their work cut out for them and I wish them the best of luck.

But as I page through their website, and it’s a site everyone should bookmark and read, it occurs to me that this is exactly the kind of resource that the Gun Violence Prevention community sorely needs but doesn’t have.  I wrote a column earlier today pointing out that a Youtube huckster is promoting the idea of concealed-carry without any training whatsoever and his videos get hundreds of thousands of hits! You know the old saying about appealing to hearts and minds.  GVP does a great job of appealing to hearts but Correct The Record might be a model for how to appeal to the minds.

 

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Training To Carry A Gun. No Stinkin’ Brains, Either.

This week the ‘show me’ state, a.k.a. Missouri, found itself embroiled in a major debate over gun violence because a bill known as SB 656 was sitting on Governor Jay Nixon’s desk awaiting his signature.  What the bill got was a veto, and while this immediately provoked calls for an attempted override, right now thanks to the Moms Missouri chapter, efforts by Gun-nut Nation to introduce ‘Constitutional carry’ into Missouri may be dead.

           Not that the NRA won’t try to explain Governor Nixon’s behavior as just another example of how out-of-state money (read: Bloomberg) surged into Missouri to help defeat what otherwise would have been a sensible effort to give the state’s citizens a little help in defending themselves against terrorism and crime. In fact, the NRA immediately issued a statement after Nixon’s veto, stating that “if events in Orlando and San Bernardino have taught us anything it’s that the need for self-protection can occur anywhere at any time.”

But the Governor’s refusal to sign the bill had nothing to do with making a pro or con judgement about the right to self-defense.  The real issue in this instance had to do with whether or not people who want to go around armed can prove that they possess even the slightest ability to defend themselves or others with a gun.

There’s a Youtube character named Yankee Marshal who shoots his mouth off about various gun issues and he’s an entertaining sort of fellow if you like to be entertained on a third or fourth-grade level, and he’s put out a video in which he claims that training to use a gun is a waste of time: “I think that most people with common sense and average intelligence can figure out how to safely operate a firearm.”  And he then goes on to say that if you want to carry a gun, you should also be able to exercise that ‘right’ without getting any training at all.

Which brings us back to the 2008 Heller decision that defined the 2nd Amendment – clearly and explicitly – as a Constitutional ‘right’ to keep a loaded handgun in the home for personal defense.  Not in the street, not in a holster or fanny pak as you walk around – in the privacy of your home. And what Heller unleashed was a torrent of nonsense from Gun-nut Nation, Yankee Marshal to Donald Trump, that everyone also has the ‘right’ to walk around with a gun.

Now the good news is that the judiciary hasn’t seen it that way.  We have the Peruta decision in California which upheld the ‘right’ not of the gun owner but of the county government to decide whether or not someone who owned a gun could also carry it outside his home. And back in 2014 the Supreme Court with Antonin Scalia alive and still well refused to review a New Jersey decision which basically said the same thing.

But those decisions haven’t stopped a growing movement known as ‘Constitutional carry’ which basically says that anyone who is qualified to own a gun is, ipso facto, entitled to carry it around not just within their home, but any place they damn well please.  There are now 10 states that do not require any special licensing to carry a gun outside the home, and Missouri would have been the 11th had Jay Nixon not shown some common sense and political backbone by vetoing the bill.

I would love to see whether idiots like Yankee Marshal or Donald Trump, for that matter, could actually pull a gun out of their pants and hit the broad side of a barn. The Police Foundation estimates that half the active law enforcement officers can’t do it, but why should we impose gun training requirements on civilians that we don’t even require for cops?

OK Moms.  You know what you have to do. Won a big one in Missouri but make sure it sticks.