Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 87

Why Do Law-Abiding Gun Owners Deserve 2nd -Amendment Protection? They Don’t.

Ever since the first gun-control law, GCA68, was debated beginning back in 1963, the NRA has trotted out the notion of the ‘law-abiding’ gun owner for all the world to see.  In fact, the terms ‘law-abiding’ and ‘gun owner’ are so much part of the gun lexicon that we might actually think of them as a single word. And the reason the term is so ubiquitous in Gun-nut Nation is because, remember, it’s not guns that kill people, it’s people who kill people, and the law-abiding gun owners wouldn’t dream of using their guns to do anything in an illegal way.

            But the problem has come up in the last several days and no doubt is being bandied about on Capitol Hill as negotiations towards some kind of new gun regulation moves ahead, because until the moment he began pulling the trigger and ultimately killed 49 patrons inside a gay nightclub, The Pulse, the deranged shooter in Orlando was as law-abiding as you or me.  In fact, he was so law-abiding that the FBI interviewed him twice and sent him on his way. Which makes it rather difficult to assume that just because someone is law-abiding to the point that they can legally own a gun, this in any way guarantees that they would never use the weapon to harm themselves or someone else.

But let’s remember, of course, that we are country of laws, and if we ever forget, the NRA and Gun-nut Nation are quick to remind us that one of those laws guarantees the right to own a gun.  And while the NRA was willing to bend a little on this issue back in 1968 and agree that the 2nd-Amendment right to gun ownership could be suspended in the case of anyone who broke certain kinds of laws (like laws prohibiting murder, burglary, robbery, aggravated assault,) they weren’t about to give government the right to prohibit gun ownership except in cases where it had been shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that giving a gun to certain individuals was a virtual certainty that these individuals would use the weapon in an unlawful and harmful way.

Accordingly, the NRA routinely fought and still fights against laws that would keep guns out of the hands of people engaged in, but not convicted of a crime stemming from a domestic dispute; they refuse to extend gun prohibitions to most misdemeanor convictions even though such convictions are usually felonies that have been pleaded down; they line up foursquare against removing guns from at-risk individuals unless they have been ‘adjudicated’ mentally ill; and whenever a sensible measure to curb gun access is proposed, they can be depended upon to always roll out the stupid and senseless ‘slippery slope’ argument about how today’s gun regulation will become tomorrow’s gun confiscation, et. al.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m as mindful as anyone about the importance of Constitutional guarantees.  And when it comes to trampling on civil liberties or citizen’s rights, the record of liberal Presidents isn’t exactly spotless in this regard.  Recall a certain President who intervened in a legal strike and seized the steel mills in 1952?  Remember those camps in California where more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent were interned during World War II?  These weren’t the actions of some right-wing Yahoos, they were deliberate policies of two liberal Presidents named Truman and FDR.

But the problem with gun violence is that using the issue of Constitutional protections every time gun-control legislation is discussed, is to forget the forest and only focus on the trees.  When states like Florida do not allow intervention by law enforcement while someone gets licensed to own and carry a gun, they are guaranteeing that the Pulse shooter will ‘slip through’ the licensing process because, after all, he’s a law-abiding citizen and every law-abiding citizen should be able to walk around with a gun.  And in case you’ve forgotten, the ‘good guys,’ are the guys with the guns.

Now That Trump And The NRA Are Partners, Who Helps Whom? Maybe Neither.

Back in May when the NRA endorsed Trump at their annual meeting, I said I wasn’t sure that either side gained that much by an endorsement that in the past never occurred until nearly the end of the Presidential campaign.  And while I don’t like to indulge in Trump-like ‘I told you so’s,’ thanks to the terrible night in Orlando, it’s beginning to look like the Trump-NRA partnership may be more of a millstone than a milestone for both sides.

As soon as it came out that the shooter had not only pledged fealty to ISIS during the attack, but had been interviewed by the FBI, Trump mounted his ‘we have to fix this, we have to fix that’ horse and basically supported denying terror ‘suspects,’ no matter how suspect, access to guns.

           Taking away gun access to anyone other than a convicted felon, habitual drug user, crazy person or fugitive (in other words, the ‘prohibited’ categories used to deny 4473 transactions by the FBI,) is an absolute no-no when it comes to Gun-nut Nation, in particular the NRA.  The closest the NRA will come to any degree of compromise on this issue is their support of a bill introduced by an NRA Senatorial puppet, John Cornyn (R-TX), which basically says that someone who is on the Terror Watch List must wait 3 days to get a gun, during which time either a decision is made to deny the transfer or the gun walks out of the store.

This is the same procedure which is currently in place with FBI-NICS when a gun purchaser may or may not actually fall into a 4473 ‘prohibited category’ and the FBI needs additional time to decide which way the decision should go.  And the overwhelming number of these three-day delays are ultimately approved simply because the information needed by the FBI to make a final determination simply isn’t there. Cornyn’s bill mandates a three-day delay window, but since it really doesn’t create any kind of mechanism for figuring out whether someone on the No-Fly List or Terrorist Watch List might be a threat if he could get a gun, the bill doesn’t change anything at all.  Which is why the NRA supports the measure, because they love gun-control laws that don’t do anything to control firearms access at all.

Now here comes Trump, who no matter what issues he grabs, immediately becomes the veritable bull in a china shop, and invariably hurts himself more than he helps.  He attacked a Federal judge whose parents, not him, were from Mexico, and his support among Hispanics, if he had any support, disappeared.  He told LGBT that he was their ‘best friend,’ because if they can scratch up the $100,000 membership fee they can join his Palm Beach club.  And what he got for that bit of comic relief was a ringing denunciation from the Christian Rght, whose support for Street Thug stands right now at 62%, and by the way, these same voters supported Romney to the tune of 79%.

But running alongside their newly endorsed candidate is even more problematic for the NRA.  They don’t have to worry about the liberals, they’ll thrive on that until the cows come home.  It’s the chickens that could come home to roost from the Right if Fairfax appears to be bending, because it wouldn’t be the first time that other gun-owning organizations challenged the NRA.

Back in 2014, a bunch of Gun Crazies walked into a Chili’s with their ARs and AKs, the NRA chastised them for their ‘weird’ behavior, and then quickly issued an apology when the emails and phone calls started rolling in. Take a look at comments made by Larry Pratt, who happens to head something called Gun Owners of America, who has also tangled with the NRA. He makes Wayne LaPierre and Chris Cox sound absolutely benign.

So we’ll soon find out if the NRA endorsement of Trump ends up as a blessing or a curse.

When Is An Assault Rifle Not An Assault Rifle? When Rush Limbaugh Says It Isn’t.

So now we have it on authority from none other than Rush Limbaugh that the post-Orlando calls to ban AR-15 rifles are nothing more than another attempt to use a shooting incident to disarm law-abiding Americans because – get this – the shooter in Orlando didn’t use an AR-15.  And since he didn’t use an AR-15, according to Rush, there’s no earthly reason why the AR-15 should be banned from public sale.

           In all the writing on guns that I have done (nearly 600 columns on my own website and nearly 200 columns on Huffington Post), nothing enrages the Gun Nut Gang more than when I use the term ‘assault rifle’ in talking about AR-15s or, for that matter, anything else.  Because the ‘assault rifle’ has become something of a sacred totem in Gun Nut-land since it’s a way of quickly figuring out whether someone is in favor or opposed to guns.

According to legend, i.e., the totally fictitious story created by the NSSF and circulated by the NRA, the term ‘assault rifle’ was invented by one of America’s chief gun grabbers, Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was the chief author of the 1994 law that temporarily banned certain types of rifles which should have been and are now once again allowed to be owned by so-called ‘law-abiding’ gun owners.  Sooner or later I’ll get deeper into the issue of what ‘law-abiding’ means or should mean, but for the moment let’s just say that if you are against ‘assault rifles,’ this makes you a bone-fide member of the gun-grabbing contingent, because everyone knows that it’s against the law to own an assault rifle, and gun owners are all law-abiding folks.

Why is it against the law to own an assault rifle?  Because according to legend, an assault rifle is a full-auto weapon, it keeps on firing with only one pull of the trigger, whereas all those look-a-like assault rifles are plain, old semi-automatic guns, one shot each time you pull the trigger, which have been around since God knows when.  Which is what makes an AR-15 a ‘modern sporting rifle,’ which means that it’s no different from any other ‘sporting’ rifle except that it’s more ‘modern’ because it looks like a modern military gun.

This is all total nonsense, by the way.  The fact is (note the use of the word ‘fact’) that the military uses what is referred to as a ‘selective fire’ gun, which means that it can be shot full-auto, semi-auto or three-shot bursts.  But the fact (there’s that word again) that fighting men and women have the option of using their battle weapon in semi-auto mode should tell you that one trigger pull, one shot, is an acceptable and often necessary way for how the military gun will be used.

If it were the case that today’s standard military rifle, now known as the M4, could only be fired as a full-auto weapon, then perhaps Gun Nut Nation’s anger over the alleged misrepresentation of the AR-15 as being an ‘assault weapon’ would have some basis in truth.  But when the NSSF says, for example, that an assault rifle can only be fired in full-auto mode, they are talking about a military weapon that is no longer being used by the military at all.  To follow their logic and their distortion of the facts (there’s that word again,) the NSSF would have to say that when a soldier selects semi-auto, he’s now carrying a modern sporting rifle into the field.  Carrying what?

The truth (another dangerous word) is that the folks who create talking-points for Rush Limbaugh and all the other apologists for gun violence don’t really care whether a gun shoots one shot or one hundred shots every time the trigger is pulled; what they care about is that Gun Nation doesn’t stop buying guns. And the one way that would make it most difficult for people to buy guns is the simplest way of all: get rid of the guns.

 

Trump, Orlando And Gun Violence: It’s Not About Hatred, It’s About Fear.

I never thought that polls would tell us very much this early in a Presidential campaign, but what we see over the next week or so may prove to be a serious litmus-test for the remainder of the year.  Because if Street Thug’s numbers go up, we’re are in for a rough five months; if his numbers stay the same or continue to drift downward, he may have finally shot his wad. And what I’m referring to, of course, are his comments about Muslims and immigration following the Pulse attack.  Because if nothing else, he appears to be building his entire campaign on one issue and one issue only, and that’s the issue of fear.

           First, what he is saying about immigration simply isn’t true.  We haven’t even taken in the 10,000 Syrian refugees we agreed to receive, other countries (e.g., Canada) have taken in many more.  We aren’t being ‘overrun’ by Muslim immigrants any more than we are being overrun by anyone else.  And the idea of ‘building a wall’ is this year’s substitute for the 2008 riff, ‘drill baby, drill.’

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying that if this desperate attempt by Street Thug to capitalize on fears engendered by Orlando falls flat, then we can all just relax and put November 8th out of our minds.  This guy is a threat, he’s a menace, and he needs not just to be beaten, he needs to be beaten bad.  But I’d rather try to figure out how to whup him when I have to look back over my shoulder to see his ugly mug, rather than letting him look back over his shoulder at me. Anyway, as I was saying before I interrupted myself.

Want to know why Trump so dearly loves the 2nd Amendment and never tires of reminding his audiences about the enduring value of walking around with a gun?  Because public opinion polls show that all those guns that were bought by the public since Obama took office were bought because of fear; fear of crime, fear of terrorism, fear of having the guns taken away, fear of God knows what.  And fear is a very powerful, very compelling emotion. And when it comes to a politics, fear can trump facts and insight every time.

The first witness who testified in 1963 against Eichmann in Jerusalem was an old friend and academic colleague, Professor Salo Baron.  And when he was asked to explain the extraordinary degree of violence represented by the Holocaust, he answered that the murder of 5 million Jews was based on fear, or what he called the ‘dislike of the unlike.’  Most of the comments coming out of Orlando are linking the ‘hatred’ of the LGBT lifestyle to this incredible act of gun violence, with the former seen as the causal emotion behind the latter event. And this may be true, but let’s step back for a second and see how this will play out in the Presidential campaign.

In his appearance at St. Anselm’s College, Street Thug specifically disavowed prejudice against gays.  He said, “Our nation stands together in solidarity with the members of Orlando’s LGBT community,” and I guess that includes him as well.  But he then went on to make one false statement after another about Muslims and immigration, with the intent of making sure that everyone knows that only a ‘tough’ guy like him understands and can respond to our fears.

Mass shootings make us afraid.  We become afraid to go to public places, we get afraid of letting the kids hang out at the mall.  And calling for a ban on assault rifles doesn’t necessarily respond to those fears.

Gun violence is a terrible kind of violence, but people fear violence more than they fear guns.  So to keep Street Thug out of the Oval Office, we have to come up with ways to help people deal with their fears.  Otherwise, they’ll just go out and buy another gun.

 

 

Want To Know Why 50 People Died In Orlando? It Wasn’t Terrorism – It Was A Gun.

Here we go again.  Another act of ‘domestic terrorism,’ and this one left over 100 people injured or dead. The shooter, 29-year old Omar Mateen, broke the old record set by James Holmes, who shot 72 people in a Colorado movie theater in 2012, of whom 60 survived. And Holmes broke Seung-Hui Cho’s 2007 record of 49 victims at Virginia Tech, and on it goes back to Charlie Whitman, who gunned down 49 people from his perch in the Texas University Tower in 1966, although only 16 lost their lives.

There’s an unemployed academic out there pretending to be a researcher named John Lott, who actually tried to ‘prove’ that at least ten other countries have higher death rates from mass public shootings than what we experience here in the U.S.A. Which is not hard to do if a country has a fraction of our population and one mass shooting takes place.  But any rational, normal and semi-intelligent person who actually believes that mass shootings are an everyday fact of life anywhere but in the United States is either hopelessly delusional or is simply trying to burnish his shopworn credentials as an NRA flack.

            The bottom line is that there have been three horrendous shootings in the last seven months (Umpqua, San Bernardino, Orlando) which together have resulted in the loss of 74 lives, and I’m not even bothering to count the little mass shootings – a few bodies here, a few bodies there – which take place all the time. Our friends at the Gun Violence Archive count 25 shootings with at least 4 victims each time over the last – ready? – three weeks!

Maybe we haven’t figured out what to do about this seemingly unstoppable carnage, but what does seem to be emerging from the unending slaughters is a convenient way of ignoring the use of guns.  Because the problem isn’t the gun, after all, it’s the person who uses the gun, and that person is now invariably described as a ‘domestic terrorist,’ which I guess means someone who is somehow tied to some kind of terrorist organization but happens to permanently live and was maybe even born in the United States. Back in the old days, meaning before the 2016 presidential election cycle, the term ‘domestic terrorist’ was usually applied to an American who had actually been in contact with a terrorist organization, or had received or planned to receive training in terrorist activities, or in some other way was directly involved in terrorist behavior of some sort. In 2014, two young Americans from Minnesota were killed fighting with ISIS in Somalia and Iraq; home-grown terrorist bomb plots have recently been thwarted in Wichita, Boston and New York.

Of course depending on what political gains can be made from the anguish and fear that any mass shooting evokes in the general population, the presumptive Republican candidate, Street Thug Trump, wanders back and forth between condemning ‘domestic terrorism’ and ‘radical Islamic terrorism,’ but let’s leave Street Thug alone, because he’s incapable of understanding what the real issue is all about.

And the real issue runs like this.  Omar Mateen was young, he was stable enough to hold down a job, he was socially isolated and alienated but he was, and this is very important, he was able to get his hands on a gun.  And the gun he chose to carry into Pulse was what has become the weapon of choice for young men who want to kill lots of people in one place – an AR-15.

So it doesn’t matter whether this shooter was a ‘domestic terrorist,’ or a ‘radical Islamic terrorist,’ or a homophobic maniac or whatever else he was or claimed to be.  He walked into a gun shop and bought some guns.  And that’s the real reason that 49 patrons at the Pulse are now dead. It’s the gun stupid, it’s the gun.

Don’t’ forget to donate to the Orlando Pulse fund.  I just did.

 

When It Comes To November 8th, The Gun Violence Prevention Community May Need To Explain To Some People How To Vote

Now that it really is going to be Hillary versus Street Thug Donald, it’s time for the Gun Violence Prevention community to sit down and figure out some best practices that can be adopted and followed through the election campaign.  And while Hills appears to have opened up a slight lead in most polls, the numbers still show that more than one out of four voters has yet to make up their minds about how to vote.

Most national elections come down to what is referred to as the ‘undecided’ vote, and while the fact that many voters are currently in that category may not appear to be unusual, four years ago the undecided vote on this same date was less than 10%.

          Speaking of the undecided, David Sedaris had what I consider to be the most brilliant piece of political satire in The New Yorker Magazine during the McCain-Obama contest in 2008: “To put them [undecided voters] in perspective,” he wrote, “I think of being on an airplane.  The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. ‘Can I interest you in the chicken?’ She asks. ‘Or would you prefer the platter of dog shit with bits of broken glass in it?’ To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.’”

Given the story that broke in USA Today about the hundreds of contractors, journeymen, employees and vendors that Street Thug has stiffed over the years, I’m beginning to wonder about the viability of a ‘crooked Hillary’ campaign, particularly since the guy who claims to be worth ten billion dollars, or maybe twelve billion, or maybe eight billion, is running a campaign that appears to be broke.  He just had a meeting with what is described as his “national finance team” consisting of two New Yorkers, one of whom owns a supermarket chain and the other who happens to own the hapless New York Jets, and they came out basically saying that Street Thug will continue to rely on all the ‘free’ advertising he gets from Fox and other media channels but, by the way, nobody’s yet kicked in any cash.

But even if Street Thug’s campaign team consists of his Twitter account, and even if choosing between him and Hillary is like waiting to be told how the chicken’s cooked, there’s always the chance that something will happen between now and November 8th that will tilt the election in a crazy and unforeseen way.  And given what a menace Street Thug represents to the future of this country, never mind to those who would like to see some progress made on the issues of violence and guns, here is how I would respond to an ‘undecided’ voter if their ultimate decision about how to vote may bear on the issue of guns.

Stand Your Ground. This election has nothing to do with 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’  It has to do with a moral imperative known as ‘thou shall not kill.’
Know Your Ground. Street Thug loves to tell his audiences that guns protect people from harm.  Guns create harm, and organizations like Everytown have plenty of information regarding same.
Share Your Ground. Know what’s the most powerful lobby in DC?  Ain’t the NRA.  It’s the environmental movement.  After all, who’s going to argue with a tree? There’s got to be an Audubon or Sierra Club chapter near you – attend one of their meetings and spread the word.

The Gun Violence Community needs to show the NRA that what they are saying about November 8th being the most important election of all time is really true.  And it’s true for the simple reason that there really isn’t a choice.  You can choose the chicken or you can choose you know what.

If You Think That Wear Orange Day Won’t Making A Difference, Think Again.

Sometime early in 1965, I remember there was snow on the ground, a bunch of us left our college campus, went down to Times Square and demonstrated against American troops in Viet Nam.  At the time there were only 20,000 or so fighting men over there and people who walked past us nodded politely, glanced at and then threw away our little leaflets. After an hour or so we all went home.

We never could have imagined that five years later there would be 400,000 American GIs in Southeast Asia, but we also couldn’t imagine that there were demonstrations daily in every American city, and that eventually the anti-war stance of a majority of Americans would help bring about an end to the war.

I was thinking about my experience as a college student during the Viet Nam War last week on Wear Orange Day.  Because when it started in Chicago as a way to commemorate the life (and terrible, terrible death) of Hadiya Pendleton, I don’t think that anyone believed or even imagined that in two short years this event would swell into an international occasion embracing the activities and energies of millions of average, ordinary folks like you and me.  And when I say millions, I’m not talking about single-digit millions; I’m talking about hundreds of millions – that’s right – hundreds of millions who were aware that wearing orange on June 2nd meant participating in an activity that allowed everyone to spend some time thinking about the violence caused by guns.

           I didn’t notice, incidentally, that the event was embraced or even mentioned by the NRA.  Usually when some organization, politician or celebrity says anything remotely reasonable about gun violence, Gun Nut Nation’s noise machine swings into action, inundating the faithful with emails, videos, and most of all, demands for cash.  Last week it was Hillary, this week it was Katie, there are plenty of targets around.  And the reason that the number of targets keeps increasing is the same reason why participation in the Wear Orange campaign is growing by leaps and bounds, namely, the silly and stupid arguments that are trotted out again and again to explain away the senseless deaths of more than 30,000 human beings every year from gun violence simply don’t work.

In 2015 there were 55,000 people who posted #WearOrange support on social media; this year more than 200,000 posts came up; last year the hashtag registered 220 million impressions across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter – try seven times that number this year; in 2015 they held a Party for Peace in Chicago, last week more than 200 events took place countryside; the Empire State Building was lit orange, so were more than 125 other landmarks from sea to shining sea.  Want a list of the hundreds of companies, major personalities, political leaders and professional sports teams that wore orange?  It’s right here.

I have been following the argument over gun violence for more than thirty years, in fact it’s going on forty because I first started paying attention to the issue of guns and gun violence prevention in the run-up to GCA68. And what is so important and different about June 2nd from every previous activity designed to increase awareness about gun violence is that this time, for the first time, it didn’t grow out of an immediate response to a horrific shooting or other crazy, gun violence event.

Which means that the emotions and energy displayed on June 2nd aren’t just going to fade away.  Because #WearOrange has now taken on a life of its own; it exists because people understand and support the idea that guns are deadly and gun violence needs to fade away.  Tomorrow I’ll go walking and spot someone who just happens to be wearing orange. I’ll flash a quick grin of recognition and I’ll probably get a quick grin back.  And if this happens to me it will happen to others and it will happen more and more.

The Gun Violence Prevention Community Has Something Much More Important To Worry About Than 2nd-Amendment Rights.

Now that the Gun Violence Prevention movement appears to have a Presidential candidate who is hell-bent on restricting/modifying/revising (take your pick) the so-called 2nd-Amendment ‘right’ of Americans to own guns, the conversation has naturally turned to a discussion within GVP over exactly what those 2nd-Amendment ‘rights’ should be. Should law-abiding, responsible gun owners be allowed more or less unfettered access to guns, perhaps with a slight nod in the direction of more regulation via expanded background checks?  Or should we go to the other extreme, simply say ‘to hell with it,’ and get rid of all the guns?

Now of course nobody but the Area-51 crowd actually believes that the government can come along and confiscate 300 million guns.  But with a blue Congress, Hillary could make it substantially more difficult for gun owners by placing a heavy tax on ammunition, or by requiring registration of guns, or by reapplying the assault weapons ban, or a combination of all three.  Incidentally, all those regulations would be affirmed by a 5-4 liberal SCOTUS, because none conflict with Scalia’s approval (in the 2008 Heller decision) of maintaining “longstanding regulations” governing the commerce in guns.

Which brings us back to the issue of the GVP stance as regards 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’  Because I happen to think, and I’m a died-in-the-wool gun nut, by the way, that the GVP community shouldn’t be concerned about the 2nd Amendment at all.  And the reason I believe this is because I also happen to believe that what the GVP should be doing is talking and messaging about one thing and one thing only, namely, the intrinsic lethality of guns.

This issue of lethality, i.e., the medical risk posed by a gun, has been validated again, again and again by peer-reviewed medical and public health research which has been appearing for at least the last twenty years.  There’s a reason why Gun Nation has been trying to push physicians out of the gun debate and silence gun research funded by the CDC.  It has to do with the fact (note the word ‘fact’) that possession of a firearm correlates with a substantially increased risk of physical harm either to the gun owner or to someone else.  And in case you want to challenge me on this point, by way of reply let me quote the Marxist economist Paul Baran who once said, “I do not debate human affairs with people who behave like beasts.”

To me, the issue is very simple.  Guns are pathogens and like any pathogen, we need to prevent its spread.  We did this with cigarettes, which happen to be legal commerce and therefore is protected by the Constitution as well.  And if you want to smoke and get cancer or heart disease you can still do it, but only in the privacy of your own home.  Which, by the way, is what the SCOTUS said about guns: you can keep them in your home.  Period.  End of story. End of 2nd Amendment debate.

If my friends in the GVP community want to be concerned about something, I’ve got something for them to be concerned about that’s much more important than 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’  And that happens to be the fact that there’s a Big Apple street thug who is hell-bent on hijacking the government on November 8th.  And if you don’t believe me, pay particular attention to what he says about violence and about guns.  He likes violence.  He likes guns.  He exhorts people at his rallies to engage in both.

The courts have held again and again that government has a ‘compelling interest’ in public safety. Which means that we expect government to keep our communities safe.  You don’t promote public safety by claiming that the 2nd Amendment gives you the ‘right’ to walk around with a gun.  What you are doing is undermining the rule of law.  There are now 152 days until November 8. Get it?

We Can End Gun Violence By ‘Fixing” The Mental Health System, Right? Wrong.

Jeffrey Swanson has been conducting important research on violence for as long as I can remember, and now he and his colleagues have published a major study on mental illness and gun suicides with a major finding that people who have been briefly hospitalized for mental issues are more likely to then commit suicide with a gun.

Gun Nut Nation usually denies the existence of ‘gun violence,’ unless it is perpetrated by ‘street thugs’ or people who are seriously mentally ill. As to the former, the solution according to the NRA is to lock ‘em up and throw away the key; for the latter the mental health ‘system’ needs to be ‘fixed.’  Last August Donald Trump told the then-adoring media that two Virginia television journalists wouldn’t have been killed if the mental health system wasn’t ‘broken.’ Which happens to be the subject of Swanson’s research and, no great surprise, happens not to be true.

           Because the problem isn’t whether mentally ill individuals receive proper treatment before or after they commit a violent act against others or themselves; the problem is whether the legal system, not the mental health system, allows such individuals to keep getting access to guns. The research by Swanson, et. al., covered more than 80,000 adults who received mental health treatment in two Florida counties – Dade (Miami) and Pinellas (St. Petersburg) from 2002 to 2011.  Of this total population, roughly one-third were prohibited from owning guns either because of a mental health disqualification (long-term hospital commitment, incompetent to stand trial) or a criminal record; i.e., conviction for a felony crime.  Of the remaining two-thirds of this population that had been treated for mental illness, none were disqualified from gun ownership even if they had been temporarily placed in a treatment facility against their will.

And what was the result of a legal (not a mental) system which allowed such individuals continued access to guns?  The results of the study were ambiguous as to the degree to which such people used guns to commit serious crimes, but it clearly showed a link between access to guns by this population and an increase in gun suicides, and this in a population that was more vulnerable to suicide given the fact that they had been treated for mental problems in the years leading up to their life-ending attempt.

Now I’m not going to spend one second responding to the loony emails I receive all the time from Gun Nut Nation telling me that the 2nd Amendment protects everyone’s ‘right’ to choose whether they want to end their own lives (I actually do receive such crazy stuff) except to say that people who attempt suicide and fail overwhelmingly state that they are glad to still be alive.  But using a gun to commit suicide usually doesn’t give someone much chance of surviving, and what this study found was that a majority of gun-eligible individuals who committed gun suicides had experienced one or multiple short-term, involuntary commitments which, in Florida, are not reportable legal events.

So here we come back not to the mental health system but to the legal system which needs to be fixed if some way is going to be found to cut the suicide rate among people who have not been legally disqualified from owning guns.  And guess which organization stands up and cries – foul! – every time an effort is made to fix the legal system in order to help protect some gun owners from themselves.  Because in case you didn’t know it, back in 1999 the World Health Organization defined violence as “the intentional use of physical force, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community.”

So let’s cut the NRA nonsense about how the mental health system needs to be ‘fixed.’ And while we’re at it, remember there are 146 days until we have an opportunity to send Donald Trump away for a much-needed mental health fix himself.

Gun Nation Doesn’t Need The NRA To Attack Katie Couric – They Have Morning Joe.

Leave it to Joe Scarborough, the conservative ‘conscience’ of MSNBC, to try and sully the reputations of the producers of Under The Gun by running a segment on the alleged mistakes and omissions which, according to Morning Joe, was a ‘stunning’ and ‘shocking’ misuse of journalistic power aimed at making sure that a group of ‘Americans’ who happened to be gun owners looked and sounded ‘dumb.’

Those comments, which Scarborough then used to guide his roundtable through a brief discussion of Couric’s misdeeds, could have been written for him by the NRA.  In fact, the NRA’s initial statement referred to Katie as a political ‘activist’ who ‘bends’ the truth to ‘propagandize audiences,’ which I guess is Katie’s legacy for having asked that moron from Alaska to name one newspaper that she ever read.

By the way, not a single member of Scarborough’s gallery – Chuck Todd, Chris Cillizza, et. al. – had actually seen the film.  But that didn’t stop them from shooting their mouths off and following Scarborough’s lead in condemning Katie and Stephanie because they had an unimpeachable source for their comments, namely, Page Six of The New York Post. Now when I was growing up, The Post was a left-liberal newspaper which carried a daily op-ed from Eleanor Roosevelt and, generally speaking, promoted a liberal, pro-labor line. The paper is now owned by Rupert Murdoch, it shamelessly panders to the lowest standard of digital and online journalism and, in case you didn’t know it, has become the campaign communications machine for Donald Trump.

What shocked me most of all about the segment was not Scarborough’s attempt to create a hot item out of nothing more than a silly, editing mistake.  Rather, it was the fact that not one of these journalistic experts on the panel made absolutely any attempt to balance Joe’s description of the film as a “hit job on a group of Americans,” even though the leader of this group of ‘Americans’ specifically said that he didn’t believe that there should be any backgrounds in a CBS interview that aired in 2009.  To me, Katie’s only mistake was to create the impression that the group of gun owners whose comments Scarborough referred to as ‘eloquent,’ and one of the other panelists claimed were ‘long’ and ‘well thought out’ are just your average gun owners who are concerned about their 2nd-Amendment rights.  They happen to be members of the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL) which, in case you didn’t know it, advocates for no gun regulations of any kind. The VCDL always showed up at public appearances by Emily Miller, a Washington Star journalist who wrote a book about buying a gun to defend herself after she was the victim of a home invasion, except the home invasion actually didn’t take place.

Now I don’t know about you, but if the deleted segment covered nine seconds, resulting in the loss of the entire comments made by three people identified as gun ‘activists,’ how long and well thought out could each comment have been?  Three seconds long? Here’s one of the deleted comments: “I’ll ask you what crime or what law has ever stopped a crime? Tell me one law that has ever stopped a crime from happening.” You think that’s well thought out? Go lay brick.

Want to know why there has been such a big hue and cry over this film?  Because it’s far and away the best film on gun violence that has ever been made. I have now watched it three times and I cannot get over the images, the flow, the weaving together of public commentary with the reality of guns, lives and the places where gun violence occurs.  So let’s stop wringing our hands because Morning Joe put together a stupid and basically dishonest discussion to fill up three minutes of his show. Let’s make sure everyone who is or should be concerned about gun violence sees this film, and that’s the end of that.