Mass shootings are not ‘the price of freedom’

 

Heather Cox Richardson

Mar 24

Ten more people in Boulder, Colorado, died yesterday, shot by a man with a gun, just days after we lost 8 others in Atlanta, Georgia, shot by a man with a gun.

In 2017, after the murder of 58 people in Las Vegas, political personality Bill O’Reilly said that such mass casualties were “the price of freedom.”

But his is a very recent interpretation of guns and their meaning in America.

The Second Amendment to the Constitution is one simple sentence: “A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” There’s not a lot to go on about what the Framers meant, although in their day, to “bear arms” meant to be part of an organized militia.

As the Tennessee Supreme Court wrote in 1840, “A man in the pursuit of deer, elk, and buffaloes might carry his rifle every day for forty years, and yet it would never be said of him that he had borne arms; much less could it be said that a private citizen bears arms because he has a dirk or pistol concealed under his clothes, or a spear in a cane.”

The path to today’s insistence that the Second Amendment gives individuals a broad right to own guns comes from two places.

One is the establishment of the National Rifle Association in New York in 1871, in part to improve the marksmanship skills of American citizens who might be called on to fight in another war, and in part to promote in America the British sport of elite shooting, complete with hefty cash prizes in newly organized tournaments. Just a decade after the Civil War, veterans jumped at the chance to hone their former skills. Rifle clubs sprang up across the nation.

By the 1920s, rifle shooting was a popular American sport. “Riflemen” competed in the Olympics, in colleges and in local, state and national tournaments organized by the NRA. Being a good marksman was a source of pride, mentioned in public biographies, like being a good golfer. In 1925, when the secretary of the NRA apparently took money from ammunitions and arms manufacturers, the organization tossed him out and sued him.

NRA officers insisted on the right of citizens to own rifles and handguns, but worked hard to distinguish between law-abiding citizens who should have access to guns for hunting and target shooting and protection, and criminals and mentally ill people, who should not. In 1931, amid fears of bootlegger gangs, the NRA backed federal legislation to limit concealed weapons, prevent possession by criminals, the mentally ill and children, to require all dealers to be licensed, and to require background checks before delivery. It backed the 1934 National Firearms Act, and parts of the 1968 Gun Control Act, designed to stop what seemed to be America’s hurtle toward violence in that turbulent decade.

But in the mid-1970s, a faction in the NRA forced the organization away from sports and toward opposing “gun control.” It formed a political action committee (PAC) in 1975, and two years later elected an organization president who abandoned sporting culture and focused instead on “gun rights.”

This was the second thing that led us to where we are today: leaders of the NRA embraced the politics of Movement Conservatism, the political movement that rose to combat the business regulations and social welfare programs that both Democrats and Republicans embraced after World War Two. Movement Conservatives embraced the myth of the American cowboy as a white man standing against the “socialism” of the federal government as it sought to level the economic playing field between Black Americans and their white neighbors. Leaders like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater personified the American cowboy, with his cowboy hat and opposition to government regulation, while television Westerns showed good guys putting down bad guys without the interference of the government.

In 1972, the Republican platform had called for gun control to restrict the sale of “cheap handguns,” but in 1975, as he geared up to challenge President Gerald R. Ford for the 1976 presidential nomination, Movement Conservative hero Ronald Reagan took a stand against gun control. In 1980, the Republican platform opposed the federal registration of firearms, and the NRA endorsed a presidential candidate—Reagan-- for the first time.

When President Reagan took office, a new American era, dominated by Movement Conservatives, began. And the power of the NRA over American politics grew.

In 1981, a gunman trying to kill Reagan shot and paralyzed his press secretary, James Brady, and wounded Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy and police officer Thomas Delahanty. After the shooting, Representative Charles Schumer (D-NY) introduced legislation that became known as the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, or the Brady Bill, to require background checks before gun purchases. Reagan, who was a member of the NRA, endorsed the bill, but the NRA spent millions of dollars to defeat it.

After the Brady Bill passed in 1993, the NRA paid for lawsuits in nine states to strike it down. Although until 1959, every single legal article on the Second Amendment concluded that it was not intended to guarantee individuals the right to own a gun, in the 1970s, legal scholars funded by the NRA had begun to argue that the Second Amendment did exactly that.

In 1997, when the Brady Bill cases came before the Supreme Court as Printz v. United States, the Supreme Court declared parts of the measure unconstitutional.

Now a player in national politics, the NRA was awash in money from gun and ammunition manufacturers. By 2000, it was one of the three most powerful lobbies in Washington. It spent more than $40 million on the 2008 election. In that year, the landmark Supreme Court decision of District of Columbia v. Heller struck down gun regulations and declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.

Increasingly, NRA money backed Republican candidates. In 2012, the NRA spent $9 million in the presidential election, and in 2014 it spent $13 million. Then, in 2016, it spent more than $50 million on Republican candidates, including more than $30 million on Trump’s effort to win the White House. This money was vital to Trump, since many other Republican super PACs refused to back him. The NRA spent more money on Trump than any other outside group, including the leading Trump super PAC, which spent $20.3 million.

The unfettered right to own and carry weapons has come to symbolize the Republican Party’s ideology of individual liberty. Lawmakers and activists have not been able to overcome Republican insistence on gun rights despite the mass shootings that have risen since their new emphasis on guns. Even though 90% of Americans—including nearly 74% of NRA members— recently supported background checks, Republicans have killed such legislation by filibustering it.

Today President Biden called for the Senate to pass measures already passed by House lawmakers for universal background checks and a ban on assault weapons.

Will things be be different this time? Not likely. But, new voices are making themselves heard on this issue. The political participation of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) jumped by 91% in Georgia in 2020 and was key to electing Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to the Senate. The Georgia murders, six of which took the lives of women of Asian descent, have inspired this community to demand policy changes that address hate crimes and violence.

What ‘black-on-black crime’ miss about race and gun deaths: suicide

WASHINGTON POST

My social media timelines of late have been filled with outrage over the police killings of unarmed black citizens, but after a violent Fourth of July weekend around the nation that left several children dead, I noticed an uptick in snarky posts asking: “What about black-on-black crime? Why aren’t you protesting about that?”

Long before the March for Our Lives and the Black Lives Matter movement dominated the headlines in recent years, African Americans were marching in crime-ridden neighborhoods to protest the killings. Davon McNeal, an 11-year-old fatally shot in Washington, D.C., on July 4, had just left an anti-violence community event when he was hit by a bullet. The event was put together by his mother, Crystal McNeal, who works as a “violence interrupter,” a job that has been created in several urban areas with a goal to mediate neighborhood disputes in an attempt to break the cycle of retaliatory killings. Black citizens have formed hundreds of such organizations to save teens so often caught up in that world. Black artists have written songs and made movies, urging youths to stop the violence.

Many black people, desperate to stem the homicide rate that spiraled in the ’90s, even supported the Clinton crime bill, although some now criticize it as having hurt the black community more than it helped. A Gallup survey in 1994 found that nonwhite citizens favored it to a greater degree than white citizens, 58 percent compared with 49 percent.

As a group, African Americans are consistently more likely to be concerned about crime than white Americans. They also are the staunchest supporters of tougher gun-control laws, with 72 percent saying that controlling gun ownership is more important than protecting gun rights, compared with 40 percent of white people.

 White men, in fact, are the demographic most likely to oppose gun-control laws of any kind, although statistics show that they might benefit most from them.

That’s because the majority of the gun deaths in the United States are not homicides but suicides, and white men account for 74 percent of them. More than 288,000 white males fatally shot themselves between 1999 and 2018, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Having access to a gun substantially increases the risk of death by suicide. In other words, if white men didn’t have so many guns, they would be much less likely to die.

Despite the evidence, 60 percent of white Americans say gun ownership does more to protect people from crime than to put their personal safety at risk (35 percent), according to Pew. Black people by a similar margin (56 percent to 37 percent) say that gun ownership does more to endanger people’s personal safety.

 While most violent crime has fallen dramatically since the early 1990s, gun violence began rising again in recent years. In 2018, the most recent year for complete data, more than 22,000 Americans intentionally killed themselves with a gun, and about 11,000 people were gun homicide victims. 

Efforts to reduce firearm deaths have been hindered not by community indifference but by a Congress afraid to cross the National Rifle Association and gun rights supporters. Federally funded research into gun violence solutions ground to a halt after lawmakers passed the Dickey Amendment in 1996. The provision, pushed by the NRA, cut funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s study of the issue out of fear that it would be seen as federal agencies advocating for gun control. Republicans and some otherwise liberal Democrats fear offending white voters in swing states more concerned with protecting Second Amendment rights than saving lives, including their own.

Suicide affects white males in nearly every age group, with numbers beginning to rise in the late teen years and peaking in the mid- to late 50s. But the rate remains high even among men in their 70s and 80s. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention says that suicide most often is the result of treatable mental health issues and is related to brain functions that affect decision-making and behavioral control. As with the homicide rate, however, the reasons behind suicide are more complicated than a single issue. Trauma, substance use — or even chronic physical pain — can contribute” to someone taking their life, the AFSP said.

Similarly, research has found that many young black men — the group most likely to be perpetrators and victims of gun homicides — suffer from a condition similar to PTSD, brought on by repeated exposure to violence, extreme poverty, high unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse and other social ills that create a sense of hopelessness. A 2017 report in the Guardian newspaper found that much of America’s gun homicide problem “happens in a relatively small number of predictable places, often driven by predictable groups of high-risk people, and its burden is anything but random.”

With so much media focus on urban homicides, suicide, which kills twice as many people, gets comparatively less coverage. Some argue that suicide is a private matter that doesn’t affect the broader community. The result of such historically lopsided coverage is that the public face of gun violence in this country is that of a young black man rather than a middle-aged white one.

When white men respond to their life circumstances with gun violence, it’s treated as a public health problem, brought on by mental illness and stress. When black men do, it’s portrayed almost solely as a criminal issue, caused by lawlessness and moral failing. The multiplier in both epidemics is lawmakers’ blind devotion to the NRA. Zealously protecting their right to bear arms has come at a huge cost, and as quiet as it is kept, it’s not just the black community that is paying.

It’s Been 20 Yrs Since the Brady Bill Passed. Here Are 11 Ways Gun Politics Have Changed.

WASHINGTON POST

 Today marks the 20th anniversary of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which went into effect in 1994. The law -- named after James Brady, who was shot during an attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981 -- made background checks a requirement for gun purchases from licensed dealers. From the law's passage until 2009 -- the latest year statistics are available -- over 107 million Brady-mandated background checks were conducted.

Gun politics have also changed since the passage of the Brady bill. Here are a few notable examples.

1. When gun policy gets passed, it's usually about loosening gun restrictions, not tightening them.

The New York Times did a study in December 2013 analyzing gun policy since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School the previous year, a year when 71 other children were killed by gun violence. Around the country, 1,500 state gun bills were proposed, 109 became law, and 70 of those new laws loosened existing gun legislation. According to a Gallup poll from January 30, 2014, 55 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with existing gun policy.

2. 242 members of the House had an "A rating" from the National Rifle Association in December 2012.

46 senators did. 

3. In 2013, a plan to expand background checks failed.

Fifty-four senators were for it, 46 were against -- and it couldn't pass without a 60-vote threshold. Only 56 senators voted yes on the Brady bill. The background checks bill, co-sponsored by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), would have required checks on all commercial gun sales, and was a part of the big federal push on gun violence policy after the school shooting in Newtown, Conn. The president did sign 25 executive actions related to gun-violence prevention in 2013, however.

4. In 1998, gun violence was seen as the most pressing issue in the country, according to a Gallup survey.

In October 2013, 1 percent of respondents saw violence and crime as the most pressing issue in the country.

5. Opinions of the National Rifle Association are about the same as they were 20 years ago.

December 2012, Gallup

In a 1993 Gallup survey, 55 percent of the country had a favorable opinion of the NRA. At the end of 2012, 54 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of them.

6. In the 1993-1994 election cycle, the NRA spent $2.3 million.

In the 2011-2012 election cycle, they spent $24.8 million.

7. New gun-control groups are starting to spend big money, too.

Gabby Giffords, who was shot at a constituent meeting in Arizona in 2011, started Americans for Responsible Solutions, a gun-control focused 501(c)4. The group raised nearly $12.5 million this year. Michael Bloomberg started Mayors Against Illegal Guns in 2006. The organization has spent nearly $2 million lobbying since its formation. According to the National Journal, "gun-control groups spent five times as much on federal lobbying in 2013 as they did the year before, but the NRA and others still outpaced them by more than 7-to-1."

8. In 1993, 34 percent of Americans thought it was more important to protect the right to own guns than control gun ownership.

 

In 2013, 48 percent of Americans thought that.

9. Firearm homicides reached a peak of 17,075 in 1993.

In 2011, about 9,900 people were murdered by guns, according to FBI data. Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that 18,253 gun homicides happened in 1993, while 11,078 gun murders occurred in 2010.

10. In October 2011, 47 percent of Americans said they had a gun in the home -- the highest number since 1993.

11. Things that didn't exist in 1994 that politicians have to think about now: online gun sales, 3-D printing and smart guns.

Republicans killed gun reforms.And now the Beltway crowd is expressing its disappointment ... by blaming Obama.

THE MADDOW BLOG

In the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in December, President Obama decided to ignore the political risks and long odds of legislative success, and dove into the debate to reduce gun violence. He created a task force, led by Vice President Biden, which helped shape a detailed agenda -- ahead of schedule -- intended to save lives.
Obama proceeded to invest quite a bit of capital into the fight, including the issue in his inaugural address, hosting several public events, taking his message to the public and the media, and reaching out to lawmakers directly, urging them to do the right thing.
In the end, it wasn't enough. As we discussed yesterday, Republicans opposed gun reforms; Republicans lied about gun reforms; Republicans partnered with extremists against gun reforms; Republicans filibustered gun reforms; and last week, Republicans killed gun reforms.

And now the Beltway crowd is expressing its disappointment ... by blaming Obama.

Maureen Dowd offered a high-profile example the over the weekend, but the meme is spreading. The New York Times has an analysis piece today, connecting the defeat of the gun bill with the president's reluctance to "twist arms." John Dickerson has a piece in Slate today on the death of the legislation and Obama's clumsy legislative prowess, though the article neglected to even mention the word "Republican" in passing.
I realize overly simplistic answers to complex questions can be unsatisfying and at times incomplete, but last week's developments were fairly straightforward: Republicans opposed new gun laws, so the legislation died. There wasn't anything the president could do about it.
This wasn't about schmoozing or arm-twisting. It had nothing to do with a movie Maureen Dowd liked or the "tone" of the White House's message. Yes, there were some red-state Democrats who balked, but it wasn't their filibuster, and even if they'd voted with the majority, it wouldn't have been enough to overcome GOP opposition.
There's no denying that the legislative outcome represents a defeat for the president -- he fought for a bill that failed -- but to blame him is to overlook every relevant detail of what actually happened.

think some of the misapplied blame is the result of mistaken institutional assumptions. As we talked about last week, many like to think the president -- any president, really -- is ultimately responsible for all political progress or the lack thereof. Indeed, Americans like to think of their president as the most powerful person on the planet. POTUS is the Leader of the Free World and the Commander in Chief. He's the Top Dog, the Big Cheese, the Head Honcho, the One in Charge, and the one with whom the buck stops.
So when popular legislation the president supports dies, the assumption is that it must be the president's fault -- he's the leader, and if the guy in charge isn't getting what he wants, he must bear responsibility.

Except, the American system of government doesn't work this way. The president is powerful, but the office has limits -- the White House doesn't give dictation to the legislative branch, and a president is not the head of the opposition party that wants to see him fail.
I'd like the folks holding Obama responsible to consider a look at the recent past. In 2009 and 2010, the White House and Congress successfully approved the Recovery Act, a health care reform law 100 years in the making, Wall Street reform, DADT repeal, student loan reform, New START ratification, credit card reforms, and food-safety reforms. Are those inclined to blame Obama for gun reform's failure prepared to argue that the president simply forgot how to twist arms in 2011? That he knew how to persuade lawmakers before, but the skill suddenly vanished?

Or is it more likely that congressional Republicans changed the game after the 2010 midterms? [They changed the game by winning six senate seats. Before the midterm elections, The Democrats controlled the Senate 59--41. Since 2010, The Democratic Senatc majority is 53--47.]

I also believe there's an ongoing reluctance among many to appreciate the scope of Republican radicalization. For many, especially in media, there's an assumption that there are two major, mainstream political parties -- one center-left, the other center-right -- and an effective president can govern through competent bipartisan outreach.
Those assumptions are wrong. As we discussed in January, outreach doesn't work because Republicans have reached an ideological extreme unseen in modern American history. It's a quantifiable observation, not a subjective one. Even if GOP policymakers were inclined to work with Obama, they realize that they'd be punished soon after by a primary challenge -- and they know this to be true because it's happened more than a few times in recent years (look up names like Crist, Specter, Bennett, Lugar, etc.).
Let's return to the thesis presented by Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein: "[W]e have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party."

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country's challenges.
"Both sides do it" or "There is plenty of blame to go around" are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.
 

Here's  GREG SARGENT WASHINGTON POST to complete the argument:

 The only question, ever, is whether Obama will get two or three Republican votes vs. three or four. If the latter, he has a chance to win. But those two or three extra votes don’t depend on leverage. In fact, Obama’s leverage is negative. The last thing any Republican can afford these days is to be viewed as caving in to Obama. That’s a kiss of death with the party’s base.
One thing that continues to get lost in discussions of the demise of Toomey-Manchin is the degree to which it represented a genuine compromise proposal. Remember, after Newtown, one of the few things that was broadly agreed on by many politicians in both parties was that the background check system needed to be improved. A number of Republican Senators agreed with this, and said so publicly. There were various iterations of this — some said we needed to improve state data sharing on the mentally ill with the feds; others said we needed to take a hard look at how to run checks on private sales — but there was genuine consensus around the basic idea that tightening the background check screen was the appropriate way to deal with gun violence, post-Newtown.

 The solution to the problem negotiated by Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey was a real compromise offering. It addressed the problem both parties agreed needed to be solved, but did so while showing extraordinary sensitivity to gun owners and gun culture. Both Senators — one a Republican, and one a red state Democrat — came from states with deep gun cultures, and both had “A” ratings from the NRA. The proposal they negotiated was very responsive to not one, but two major objections from the gun rights crowd. Some worried that the proposal would infringe on certain types of casual gun transfers, such as those among family members, friends, and hunters, so the two Senators exempted all private transfers that don’t go through commercial portals at gun shows or over the Internet. Others worried that the additional record keeping under the proposal would lead to a national gun registry, so the proposal strengthened prohibitions against any such registry.

None of this was enough to win over more than four Republican Senators — less than one tenth of the number of Republican Senators who voted against it. Even if every Democrat in the Senate had voted for it, the proposal would have failed.
There have been certain moments during the last few years that have been widely acknowledged as a sign of the radicalization of the Republican Party. Among them: The debt ceiling fights; the absolute refusal of Republicans to accept any tax hikes on the wealthy until the fiscal cliff showdown forced them to; Jim DeMint’s declaration that defeating Obamacare was crucial because it would be Obama’s “Waterloo”; and Mitch McConnell’s claim that the GOP’s single overriding goal should be to render Obama a one-term president.

Just Another Day in D.C.: Gun Control Fails

The police say the gunman in Aurora used three types of weapons, including a Smith & Wesson M&P15.

A wrenching national search for solutions to the violence that left 20 children dead in Newtown, Conn., all but ended after the Senate defeated several gun-related measures. Below Richard Cohen explains why the bill, even if it passed would have done very little.  

RICHARD COHEN WASHINGTON POST

Washington is one big magic show. In black tie and tails, the Senate points to the bereaved parents of Newtown, Conn., where 20 children and six adults were shot to death. While the audience is focused on the Newtown horror, senators vote to take up a bill that would do absolutely nothing to avoid such a tragedy. A grateful nation, fooled by what magicians call “misdirection,” applauds like crazy while, in the wings, the National Rifle Association cackles in triumph. The Senate reaches into its top hat and, with appropriate flourish, extracts a bird. We expect a dove. What we get is a turkey.
The ugly bird of a bill would expand background checks and increase the penalty for illegal gun sales. Good. But the Senate voted only to consider the bill, not pass it, and already some members who voted for consideration have announced their opposition. More to the point, even if miraculously enacted, the bill would not have stopped 20-year-old Adam Lanza from his murderous rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The guns, after all, were not even his.The Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle belonged to Nancy Lanza, his mother. It was purchased perfectly legally.

The other pertinent mass murder, the killing of 12 people in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater, also entailed the use of legally purchased weapons — a Remington Model 870 shotgun, a Smith & Wesson M&P 15 semi-automatic rifle and two Glock handguns. James Holmes bought them all — and 6,000 rounds for the Glocks and the Smith & Wesson — while he was seeking psychiatric treatment and undergoing a clear psychological breakdown. Yet since he had never been convicted of a felony or involuntarily institutionalized, he was entitled to his weapons — and would be under the proposed bill. So much for background checks.




The Newtown and Aurora tragedies are, in fact, anomalies. They get our attention, but the real threat to us all is day-in-day-out gun violence. Having an estimated 310 million firearms around is a prescription for mayhem. I fear the dreaded assault rifle as much as I do a lightning strike. Handguns are a different story. I imagine them under the seat of the car that cuts me off or in the waistband of some kid who can’t tell the difference between a “diss” and a lethal threat. The sheer ubiquity of guns is frightening.
New York City has half the suicide rate of the nation a whole. Could that be because New Yorkers are jolly, happy-go-lucky types, singing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” as they pack themselves into the subway? Nay. It is because very few New Yorkers have guns. In New York, only 12 percent of residents who commit suicide use a gun. (They prefer hanging.) West of the Hudson, the number is a robust 51 percent. “People who have ready access to guns are more likely to kill themselves with guns than people who do not,” said Thomas Farley, the city’s commissioner for health (and tautologies), in a news release. Usually, it’s a good thing to make it difficult for people to kill themselves. In the morning, inevitably, the sun comes up.

In 1959, Gallup reported that 60 percent of Americans favored a total handgun ban. Nine years later, Milton Eisenhower, Dwight’s younger brother and the former president of Johns Hopkins University, proposed the confiscation of nearly all handguns. Today, only 24 percent of Americans would support such a ban. The Milton Eisenhowers of our own time read the polls and go quiet or cheer the mere consideration of a bill that would do very little. You could call it a beginning but, as we all must know, it is really the end.

Obama Calls for Broad Action to Toughen Gun Laws. Vows to ‘Put Everything I’ve Got’ Into Gun Control

 


 NEW YORK TIMES

Four days before taking the oath of office, President Obama on Wednesday staked the beginning of his second term on an uphill quest to pass the broadest gun control legislation in a generation.

In the aftermath of the Connecticut school massacre, Mr. Obama vowed to rally public opinion to press a reluctant Congress to ban military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, expand background checks, and toughen gun-trafficking laws. Recognizing that the legislative fight could be long and difficult, the president also took immediate steps by issuing a series of executive actions intended to reduce gun violence.

Surrounded by children who wrote him letters seeking curbs on guns, Mr. Obama committed himself to a high-profile and politically volatile campaign behind proposals assembled by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. that will test the administration’s strength heading into the next four years. The first big push of Mr. Obama’s second term, then, will come on an issue that was not even on his to-do list on Election Day when voters renewed his lease on the presidency.

The emotionally charged ceremony, attended by family members of those killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., reflected a decision by the White House to seize on public outrage to challenge the political power of the National Rifle Association and other forces that have successfully fought new gun laws for decades.

[Hey, NRA, the century is not even 13 years old, declaring a “fight of the century” might be a bit premature. The nation’s largest gun lobby vowed to use all their resources to fight President Obama in a fundraising letter distributed on Wednesday— “I warned you this day was coming and now it is here,” NRA president Wayne LaPierre declares in the leaflet, which is being circulated at the 35^th Annual Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade Show in Las Vegas. On Wednesday, the NRA and other gun advocacy groups spend the whole day in closed-door meetings to draft a response to Obama’s proposal to reduce gun violence, which included a ban on assault weapons, higher-capacity magazine guns, and stricter background checks.]



The N.R.A. made clear that it was ready for a fight.  [see above] Even before the president’s speech, it broadcast a provocative video calling Mr. Obama an “elitist hypocrite” for opposing more armed guards in schools while his daughters had Secret Service protection [see below].

[Stay classy, National Rifle Association. The gun-lobbying group released a video on Tuesday that calls President Obama an “elitist hypocrite” for using Secret Service protection for his daughters. “Are the president’s kids more important than yours?” the video asks. “Then why is he skeptical about putting armed security in our schools when his kids are protected by armed guards at their schools?” The NRA denied that the ad is about Malia and Sasha Obama, with spokesman Andrew Arulanandam saying that "misses the point entirely." Arulanadam said the ad is about "keeping our children safe," and about the president's skepticism about schools having armed security guards when he and his family have them. The White House called the ad "repugnant and cowardly" and spokesman Jay Carney said that the president's children should not be used as "pawns in a political fight."]

 After the speech the group said it would work to secure schools, fix the mental health system and prosecute criminals but criticized the president’s other proposals. “Attacking firearms and ignoring children is not a solution to the crisis we face as a nation,” the N.R.A. said in a statement. “Only honest, law-abiding gun owners will be affected, and our children will remain vulnerable to the inevitability of more tragedy.”

 

Mr. Obama’s plan included 4 major legislative proposals and 23 executive actions that he initiated on his own authority to bolster enforcement of existing laws, improve the nation’s database used for background checks and otherwise make it harder for criminals and people with mental illness to get guns.

Mr. Obama asked Congress to reinstate and strengthen a ban on the sale and production of assault weapons that passed in 1994 and expired in 2004. He also called for a ban on the sale and production of magazines with more than 10 rounds, like those used in Newtown and other mass shootings. Mr. Obama’s plan would require criminal background checks for all gun sales, closing the longstanding loophole that allows buyers to avoid screening by purchasing weapons from unlicensed sellers at gun shows or in private sales. Nearly 40 percent of all gun sales are exempt from the system.

 He also proposed legislation banning the possession or transfer of armor-piercing bullets and cracking down on “straw purchasers,” those who pass background checks and then forward guns to criminals or others forbidden from purchasing them.

For Mr. Obama, the plan represented a political pivot. While he has always expressed support for an assault weapons ban, he has made no real effort to pass it on the assumption that the votes were not there. But he and the White House are banking on the idea that the Newtown shooting has changed the dynamics. “I have never seen the nation’s conscience so shaken by what happened at Sandy Hook,” Mr. Biden said Wednesday. “The world has changed and is demanding action.”

 

read more at NEW YORK TIMES  

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AGENDA FACES UNCERTAIN FATE IN CONGRESS

WASHINGTON POST

As important as the executive actions are, Obama said, “they are in no way a substitute” for the legislative proposals he sent to Congress.
But on Capitol Hill, where two decades of gun-control efforts have landed in the political graveyard, leaders of Obama’s own party do not necessarily share his views.
Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) stopped short of embracing Obama’s proposals, calling them “thoughtful recommendations” and saying that he would “consider legislation that addresses gun violence and other aspects of violence in our society early this year.”

The gun-control agenda that President Obama unveiled with urgency on Wednesday now faces an uncertain fate in a bitterly divided Congress, where Republican opposition hardened and centrist Democrats remained noncommittal after a month of feverish public debate.
By pursuing an expansive overhaul of the nation’s gun laws, Obama is wagering that public opinion has evolved enough after a string of mass shootings to force passage of politically contentious measures that Congress has long stymied.

Yet there was no indication on Wednesday that the mood on Capitol Hill has changed much. Within hours of Obama’s formal policy rollout at the White House, Republicans who had previously said they were open to a discussion about gun violence condemned his agenda as violating the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms.
“I’m confident there will be bipartisan opposition to his proposal,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said in a statement.
The Senate plans to begin taking up Obama’s proposals next week, with the House waiting to see what the Democrat-controlled Senate passes first, congressional aides said. The Senate is likely to take a piecemeal approach, eventually holding up-or-down votes on the individual elements of Obama’s plan rather than trying to muscle through a single comprehensive bill, aides said.

Cuomo Signs New York Gun Legislation Into Law

Take note, Congress: if notoriously fractured Albany can make a deal, it’s your turn. New York state legislators reached a deal with Gov. Andrew Cuomo on a number of gun restrictions, including expanding the state’s assault weapons ban and enacting laws to keep guns away from the mentally ill. The deal was passed by the Legislature a month after the school massacre in Newtown, Conn. It passed the state Senate, which is controlled by a coalition of Republicans and a handful of Democrats, at 11 p.m. Monday, with support mainly from New York City and Long Island legislators. Not one Republican from the rural upstate caucus voted for it.

The expanded ban on assault weapons would broaden the definition of such weapons, banning semiautomatic pistols and rifles with detachable magazines and one military-style feature, as well as semiautomatic shotguns with one military-style feature. New Yorkers who already own such guns could keep them but would be required to register them with the state.

FOUR THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT THE GUN CONTROL DEBATE

WASH. POST POLTICAL FIX   Posted by Sean Sullivan and Aaron Blake on January 11, 2013 at 6:30 am

Vice President Biden’s Thursday meeting  [above pic]with National Rifle Association officials was the latest opportunity for two sides with starkly different views to find some common ground.
It didn’t happen.
The NRA’s post-meeting lashing of Biden’s working group underscored the deep divide that remains between gun control advocates and gun rights groups.

There have been a lot of moving parts in the renewed debate about guns in the weeks since the mass shooting at a Newtown, Conn., school. But the more things change, the more they stay the same, in many respects. With Biden’s task force set to offer recommendations on how to best curb gun violence next Tuesday, the debate ahead is defined by a few parameters:

1. The NRA’s not budging: The nation’s largest gun rights group continues to refuse to offer up or agree to any new gun control measures. “We were disappointed with how little this meeting had to do with keeping our children safe and how much it had to do with an agenda to attack the 2nd Amendment,” the group said after its sit-down with Biden. After calling for armed guards to be placed in every school as a means of preventing mass violence, the NRA hasn’t backed down, even in the face of some very hard pushback from gun-control advocates.
So far at least, the NRA hasn’t faced overwhelming public pressure to change its ways. Most Americans hold a favorable opinion of the group, a recent Gallup poll showed, while fewer than four-in-ten said it has too much influence, according to a Pew survey.
It’s becoming clearer that if new gun control measures are going to be signed into law, it will be done over clear objection from the NRA.

2. The Obama administration is moving swiftly ahead: Even with a renewed fiscal debate looming and battles over cabinet confirmations crowding everything else on his plate, Obama’s vow to act quickly to curb gun violence has held up. Biden’s task force is set to deliver his recommendations next Tuesday, and the proposals could be more sweeping than a renewed ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines. Biden has also suggested that the president will use executive action if necessary.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) suggested on Sunday that the debate about guns must take a back seat to the country’s immediate fiscal matters, like the nation’s debt....
But once Biden offers his group’s recommendations, it’s difficult to imagine Obama not addressing them quickly. The president recently said he will “not be putting off” gun control. And Obama has already said he backs reinstating the ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, which key lawmakers have promised to press for on Capitol Hill.

3. New voices in an old debate: If there’s one thing that’s shifted where other things have remained constant, its the rise of new groups that stand to give financial and political muscle to gun control advocates.
Former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and her husband, Mark Kelly, have already picked up big donations for their new PAC. And New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s super PAC made its mark on the issue of gun control in the 2012 election. NRA opposition groups could be on the verge of becoming as powerful as ever.

4. Consensus will be (very) difficult: Dealing with guns is a complex proposition that can’t be broken down along party lines. There are regional factors that must also be taken under consideration. And the millions of dollars being tossed around by outside groups further complicates the picture. Check out the number of Senate Democrats with high marks from the NRA in the Senate. Then, look at the GOP-controlled House that has been stubborn with its own leader...If a deal is reached, it may involve the formation of unlikely alliances like one between Wal-Mart and the White House, for example

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In a post-Newtown world, Americans are hoping to make some firearms a little harder to get. A new ABC News/Washington Post poll found that a majority of Americans favor gun control measures such as banning assault weapons and expanding background checks for those who buy weapons and ammunition. Support for banning high-capacity ammunition magazines is at a new high, with 65 percent in favor, and 51 percent agree with the NRA's suggestion of armed guards in schools, though more people view the group's leadership unfavorably.

Read it at ABC

Lawmakers in New York Move Toward New Limits on Guns

NY TIMES

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and legislative leaders believe they are close to an agreement on a package of gun laws that includes a restrictive ban on assault weapons, and lawmakers hope to vote on it as soon as next week.

Mr. Cuomo, delivering his third annual State of the State address on Wednesday, called on lawmakers to approve the toughest assault weapons ban in the nation. And, displaying an unsual degree of speed for Albany, lawmakers seemed prepared to move quickly on the governor’s request.

“Forget the extremists — it’s simple,” Mr. Cuomo said to a crescendo of applause near the end of his nearly-80-minute speech. “No one hunts with an assault rifle. No one needs 10 bullets to kill a deer. End the madness now.”

Mr. Cuomo not only proposed a far more restrictive assault weapons ban than currently exists in New York, but he also proposed a more comprehensive ban on large-capacity magazines. He also proposed to require background checks for private sales of guns, not just at gun shows and stores. And he called for tougher penalties for buying guns illegally or for using them to commit crimes, as well as for uniform licensing standards across the state.

“This is not taking away people’s guns,” he said. “That is not what this is about. It is about ending the unnecessary risk of high-capacity assault rifles.”

 

Mr. Cuomo has been working feverishly to negotiate a deal with lawmakers, and he is said to be close to one that would allow for rapid passage of the gun measures.

Indeed, the Senate Republican leader, Dean G. Skelos of Long Island, said on Wednesday that Republicans were having productive negotiations with Mr. Cuomo. “I think our goal is to try to get something done by the end of this week, present it to conference next week, and we’ll see where we go,” he said.

Mr. Cuomo, rewriting his agenda after the trauma of the Newtown, Conn., school massacre and the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, proposed a number of measures intended to limit the damage from future storms, in addition to steps intended to reduce the scourge of gun violence.

The governor, a Democrat who has come under attack from the liberal wing of his party as he contemplates a 2016 bid for the presidency, also tacked aggressively to the left with new proposals in his address, delivered in an auditorium at the Capitol complex. He proposed an increase of the state minimum wage to $8.75 an hour from $7.25 an hour, tougher greenhouse gas standards, solar jobs programs, a $1 billion affordable-housing initiative, grants for schools that extend school days and a 10-point plan for women that included strengthening abortion rights laws and enacting equal-pay legislation that garnered the loudest applause.

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Among his proposals was a bailout fund for homeowners who want to move out of flood-prone regions, and aid to build homes to better withstand floods. He also called for measures to better protect subways, public utilities, the fuel delivery system and the New York Harbor.

And he excoriated Washington for waiting so long to provide New York and New Jersey with federal storm aid.

“That is just too little and it is too late, and it has nothing to do with the way Congress has acted in the past,” he said. “This has long been established that in the face of a disaster, the national government comes in to help.”

“Remember New York,” he added, “because New York will not forget, I promise you.”

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,”

NY TIMES

After a weeklong silence, the National Rifle Association announced Friday that it wants to arm security officers at every school in the country. It pointed the finger at violent video games, the news media and lax law enforcement — not guns — as culprits in the recent rash of mass shootings.
“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” Wayne LaPierre, [above] the N.R.A. vice president, said at a media event that was interrupted by protesters. One held up a banner saying, “N.R.A. Killing Our Kids.”

 

The N.R.A.’s plan for countering school shootings was met with widespread derision from school administrators, law enforcement officials and politicians, with some critics calling it “delusional” and “paranoid.” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican, said arming schools would not make them safer.

 

Even conservative politicians who had voiced support this week for arming more school officers did not rush to embrace the N.R.A.’s plan.Their reluctance was an indication of just how toxic the gun debate has become after the Connecticut shootings, as gun control advocates push for tougher restrictions.

 

Nationwide, at least 23,000 schools — about one-third of all public schools — already had armed security on staff as of the most recent data, for the 2009-10 school year, and a number of states and districts that do not use them have begun discussing the idea in recent days.

 

Even so, the N. R. A’s focus on armed guards as its prime solution to school shootings — and the group’s offer to help develop and carry out such a program nationwide — rankled a number of lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

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Majority back major gun legislation:

Another national poll shows rising support for gun control. Fifty-two percent of Americans support major gun legislation, including and up to an outright ban, according to a new poll from CNN and Opinion Research.

The poll shows 37 percent support “major restrictions” and 15 percent prefer an outright ban. On the other side, 33 percent say there should be minor restrictions and 13 percent say there should be none.
A very strong majority — 62 percent — approve of a ban on semi-automatic assault guns and high-capacity ammunition clips, which Senate Democrats are pushing, but another majority — 52 percent — says people should not be prevented from buying multiple guns.

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But, despite what it may seem like on Twitter or in the media, most Americans still have a fondness for the National Rifle Association. According to a Gallup poll released Thursday, 54 percent of participants have a favorable opinion of the recently scandal-ridden gun lobby, while 38 percent view them unfavorably. The time period in which the poll was conducted includes NRA Vice President Wayne LaPierre’s speech advocating the stationing of armed guards at each school in America.

HOW OBAMA'S WIN KEEPS ON GIVING

WASH. POST MORNING FIX

Whether or not a majority of Americans — or Members of Congress — believe that President Obama’s victory amounted to a mandate, it’s clear that the incumbent’s hand has been significantly strengthened by what happened on Nov. 6.

In the new Washington Post-ABC News poll, President Obama is at 54 percent approval — the highest he has been in almost two years. (Obama was briefly at 56 percent approval in the immediate aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden.) And Obama’s approval rating when it comes to handling the economy is at 50 percent for the first time since June 2010. As importantly, Obama’s victory has strongly consolidated Democrats behind him while the defeat of Mitt Romney has left Republicans without any obvious foil, leaving the job of countering Obama to the decidedly unpopular congressional wing of the party.

In the Post-ABC poll, 90 percent of Democrats approve of the job Obama is doing while just 45 percent of Republicans feel the same way about GOPers in Congress. (Somewhat amazingly, a majority — 51 percent — of self-identified Republicans disapprove of the job their congressional leaders are doing.).

Those numbers bear out just how hard House Speaker John Boehner’s job actually is. Not only does he have to try to combat a president who has clearly benefited in the eyes of the public from winning the election, but he also must cope with the fact that there are a large number of Republicans who simply don’t like what he (or any GOP members of Congress) are doing.

We continue to believe that this political dynamic makes a deal on the fiscal cliff likely, due to the fact that to not make a deal would throw Republicans into a PR fight that they have no reasonable hope of winning. Of course, we have also heard it argued that a deal seen as an abandonment of conservative principles could cost the party a portion of its base and would, therefore, not be worth doing.

Rock, meet hard place. Winning a presidential election has its benefits for a party — most notably that you have a recently-validated leader of your side even as your opponents are scrambling to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it without any clear sense of who’s in charge.
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Boehner’s plan to hold a vote on allowing the Bush tax cuts for income over $1 million to expire and renewing the rest was quickly dismissed by Democrats and also some Republicans....It may seem like a more conservative-friendly alternative to Obama’s offer, which has moved the threshold on allowing tax cuts to expire from $250,000 to now $400,000. But to a lot of Republicans, it would still be voting for an increase in tax rates, which just about all of them have sworn not to do.

Fixbits:

Obama on Wednesday will name Vice President Biden as head of the administration’s working group on gun violence. President Obama said he would submit broad new proposals no later than January and would commit his office to overcoming political opposition in the wake of last week’s killings.

A family acquaintance said Tuesday that Lanza had been estranged from his father and brother for the past two years, despite his father's repeated efforts to repair the relationship.Adam Lanza began refusing to see his father and his brother, 24-year-old Ryan Lanza, at about the same time that his father began seeing another woman in the year after the Lanzas' divorce became final in 2009, he said. Peter Lanza eventually married the woman.

The hard drive to Adam Lanza's computer was completely destroyed by him, and made irretreivable, before he went on his rampage.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) says school districts should have the right to arm their teachers.

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U.S. stocks fell on Wednesday after a brief two-session rally. Stocks began retreating after negotiations between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner hit another impasse. Obama called GOP actions “puzzling” adding that Republicans find it “very hard” to say yes to him, while a spokesman for Boehner described the White House as “irrational.”

Read it at MarketWatch

December 19, 2012 8:53 PM

GUN CONTROL IN BRITAIN VS MOLOCH IN AMERICA

A woman and a policeman look at floral tributes to the 16 children and their teacher who died at Dunblane in March 1996.

CNN

Shortly after 9 a.m. on March 13, 1996, Thomas Hamilton, a 43-year-old former Scout leader, burst into the gymnasium of a primary school in the tranquil Scottish town of Dunblane. Within minutes 15 children aged five and six had died in a hail of bullets. One died later in hospital. Their teacher, Gwen Mayor, a 44-year-old mother of two, died in the attack, reportedly while trying to shield her pupils. Two other teachers were also seriously injured while heroically trying to protect children. Hamilton turned one of his four handguns on himself and was found dead at the scene.

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Many local people said Hamilton was an oddball -- a loner obsessed with guns and young boys, someone who didn't fit into society. He was reported to have held a grudge against the Scouting movement and his local community after police questioned him about inappropriate behavior to boys in his care. Raymond Reid, secretary of a local shooting club that rejected Hamilton for membership, described him as "sleazy."

The massacre, one of the worst incidents of gun violence in mainland Britain, had a massive impact in Scotland, the rest of the UK and around the world. "This is a slaughter of the innocents, unlike anything we have ever seen in Scotland, and I think Scotland is going to have to come to terms with it," said Scottish MP Helen Liddell at the time.

After the massacre, appalled residents of Dunblane and bereaved relatives demanded to know how a person like Hamilton could be allowed to own guns. A highly successful public campaign in the months after Dunblane against gun ownership culminated in a petition being handed to the government with almost 750,000 signatures, according to British media reports. In response, then Conservative Prime Minister John Major set up a public inquiry to look into gun laws and assess ways to better protect the public.

Within a year and a half of the Dunblane massacre, UK lawmakers had passed a ban on the private ownership of all handguns in mainland Britain, giving the country some of the toughest anti-gun legislation in the world. After both shootings there were firearm amnesties across the UK, resulting in the surrender of thousands of firearms and rounds of ammunition.

Britain has never had a "gun culture" like that of the United States, but there were about 200,000 legally-registered handguns in Britain before the ban, most owned by sports shooters. All small-bore pistols, including the .22 caliber, were included in the ban, along with rifles used by target shooters. Penalties for anyone found in possession of illegal firearms range from heavy fines to prison terms of up to 10 years.

"It was one of the most shocking things that has ever happened in this country and it united the country in a feeling that we had to do something," Gill Marshall Andrews, of the Gun Control Network, told CNN. "And I don't think that it would have been possible to make the kind of progress that we have made without that tragedy."

 

The public generally supported the ban, with most saying they saw no need for guns. However, others complained bitterly that the ban deprived legitimate sports shooters of their hobby and demonized them.

NY REV OF BKS  Garry Wills  12/17/12

MOLOCH

What happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday morning cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily. Sometimes this is done by mass killings (eight this year), sometimes by private offerings to the god (thousands this year). 

Few crimes are more harshly forbidden in the Old Testament than sacrifice to the god Moloch (for which see Leviticus 18.21, 20.1-5). The sacrifice referred to was of living children consumed in the fires of offering to Moloch. Ever since then, worship of Moloch has been the sign of a deeply degraded culture. Ancient Romans justified the destruction of Carthage by noting that children were sacrificed to Moloch there. Milton represented Moloch as the first pagan god who joined Satan’s war on humankind:

First Moloch, horrid king, besmear’d with blood
Of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears,
Though for the noise of Drums and Timbrels loud
Their children’s cries unheard, that pass’d through fire
To his grim idol. (Paradise Lost 1.392-96)
 

Read more at  NY REV OF BKS

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NY TIMES   CHARLES BLOW





An analysis published earlier this year by Mother Jones of the 61 mass shootings in America over the last 30 years found that: “Of the 139 guns possessed by the killers, more than three-quarters were obtained legally.”

This comes after Jacob Roberts, a 22-year-old man, armed with a semiautomatic AR-15, carrying extra magazines and wearing a hockey mask walked into a shopping mall in Oregon filled with 10,000 people and began shooting. He killed two people, and then took his own life.

How many more deaths and mass shootings will it take for Washington to begin to lead the country in a deeper conversation about sensible gun controls? What will it take for our politicians to take firm and principled positions on gun policies and stand up to the gun lobby in this country? Surely this is a moment that calls all of us to reckoning.

According to the Web site ThinkProgress, Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, wasted no time trying to pin Friday’s shooting on gun control advocates. ThinkProgress quoted a statement of his that read, in part: “Gun control supporters have the blood of little children on their hands. Federal and state laws combined to ensure that no teacher, no administrator, no adult had a gun at the Newtown school where the children were murdered. This tragedy underscores the urgency of getting rid of gun bans in school zones.”

A gunman opened fire at a Connecticut elementary school Friday killing 26 people, most of them children. The tragedy is the sixth mass shooting in the United States this year, according to data from Mother Jones.

In the last 30 years, there have been 61 shootings across the country in which at least four people have been killed. Eleven of those incidents, according to Mother Jones, took place at schools.

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The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence provided The Huffington Post with data on where mass shootings have occurred in the U.S. since 2005.
Click on the interactive map below to see the location of the shootings, as well as more information about each of the incidents.

LOOK:  HUFFINGTON POST

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Jill Lepore's thorough look at the evolution of U.S. gun laws — from the Second Amendment, to the 1968 Gun Control Act, to the N.R.A.'s rise to political prominence — is an excellent primer for the modern day gun debate. Contributed by @Corinneavital

THE NEW YORKER  Battleground America    4/23/12

Every American can be his own policeman; the country has nearly as many guns as it has people.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/23/120423fa_fact_lepore#ixzz2FYUgexz8