Chris Kyle's murder and the practical limits of self-defense

Chauncey DeVega has a post about Chris Kyle, the famous sniper who was shot and killed by a friend he brought to a shooting range, Uncomfortable Worshipfulness Towards a Killer (Concluded): Chris Kyle, Former Navy Seal Sniper, Killed at Texas Gun Range WARN 02/03/2013:

Kyle's murder at a Texas gun range has invited some obvious--and well-deserved--snark from those who oppose the Gun Right's fetish for firearms as a cure all for society's ills.

If guns lead to a polite society why was Kyle killed at a gun range--surrounded by all of those guns? If guns make us safe, why couldn't an expert shooter, surrounded by others who are ostensibly very skilled with their guns, fight off his attacker? If teachers can be expected to fight off armed shooters, why couldn't one of the most lethal men on the planet use his gun to stop his murderer?

While those questions score cheap political points, we cannot forget that anyone can get got, as the saying goes, if they let their guard down. Omar from The Wire was killed by a kid at the corner spot. If it can happen to Omar (or Chris Kyle) it too can happen to me, you, or other folks far more dangerous.

Ron "Papa Doc" Paul got some flak from his far-right fans for making a less than reverential comment about Kyle after his death, which in turn drew a disavowal from Baby Doc (Rand). Charlie Pierce gives an account of the Intrigue in the Palace of Liberty Esquire Politics Blog 02/05/2013.

For anyone who's not a dedicated adherent of the "Gun Right" - a phrase that Chaucey DeVega uses that I am hereby stealing - stories like that of Kyle's hold some important practical lessons about reliance of armed self-defense. The Gun Right really talks about guns as though they are magical fetishes that ward off evil just by being there for their owners to fondle. Apart from any consideration of legal restrictions, it's a reckless and unrealistic attitude for people to promote.

If people have a need to use a gun for self-defense, by all means get the proper training and learn what you actually will need to do and prepare for in situations where you might need it. For most people in most situations, some training in karate or some similar form of physical self-defense is probably a more useful thing in their lives than planning for a Rambo moment.

Guns aren't magic charms. They are weapons that kill people. Which means they are a serious responsibility. People who shoot off their mouths carelessly or unrealistically about using guns for self-defense are not being responsible and they are encouraging irresponsibility in others.

Cenk Uygur on Current TV's The Young Turks interviewed Dan McKown, a man who was permanently paralyzed by a mall shooter in 2005. Portions of the interview are available at the website for the episode of 02/05/2013, although not the portion where he describes the incident. He had a handgun on him during the attack and, from his telling, had some training in how to use it during a dangerous situation. He sought out the shooter while most people in the mall were hiding or running away. But when he was taking a shot at the kid with the semiautomatic gunning people down, the kid shot him instead.

This doesn't detract from his undoubted bravery in the situation. And he says he doesn't regret making the attempt.

But it's also a reminder that guns are anything but magic charms.

Tags: assault weapons ban, gun control, gun massacres, gun proliferation

Is Obama caving on gun regulation or still fighting?

Joan Walsh has an optimistic take on the recent indications that some leading Democrats may be ready now to throw in the towel on the assault weapons ban, while hoping to get universal gun registration through, Obama’s gutsy gun control push Salon 02/05/2013.

I wasn't quite so impressed with his speech yesterday, particularly when he said clearly, "We don't have to agree on everything to agree it's time to do something. That's my main message here today."

But Joan puts more weight than I did on the fact that he said in the same speech that he wanted to see a vote on the ban in Congress. And she makes the point that gun regulation now isn't so easy to dismiss as it was since 2004:

Salon's Jillian Rayfield laid out the tough sledding that’s ahead of assault-ban supporters, including the skepticism of purple state Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Reid, rather lordly and ineptly, said on "Meet the Press" that he didn't know if he supported Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s assault-weapons ban because he hadn’t read it yet. I know the majority leader is a busy guy, but c'mon, Harry. Maybe get someone to read it to you.

I'm tired of red- and purple-state Democrats getting a pass on gun issues because hunting, say, is popular in their states. Who could be more valuable than a red-state Democrat in telling hunters that Obama’s agenda won’t take away their hunting rifles? So I’m glad Obama's demanding that Congress vote on an assault-weapons ban rather than letting leaders table it, as he did with other first-term priorities, even if that means conservative Democrats must take some tough votes. Of course, letting conservative Democrats crush an assault ban may also serve to protect them from the NRA. That’s allegedly why Reid is open to a vote on the issue. But it could have the unintended consequence of letting those newly motivated by Newtown single out Democrats who deserve criticism, or even a primary challenge, on the issue of guns.

Dianne Feinstein insists that she will push for her assault weapons ban bill, and Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who used to represent Newtown as a congressman, derided those who've declared that push futile. "Too many people in Washington want to eulogize specific pieces of gun reform legislation before the debate has even started," Murphy told "The Rachel Maddow Show." The time to act is now. [my emphasis]

Harry Reid's pro-gun-proliferation record is undoubtedly one of the problems. That's another reminder why it is such a dubious habit that Senate Democrats have adopted of making Senates from very competitive states, like Reid (Nevada) and his predecessor Tom Daschle (South Dakota) their Senate Party leaders. Whatever swing-voter appeal that might have, it means that the Democrats sometimes can't count on their Senate Party leader to support the Democratic position on a major issue. (On the other hand, there's Nancy Pelosi in the House from solid-blue San Francisco who in December was defending the idea of cutting benefits on Social Security, so go figure.)

Anyway, that's obviously a problem on this issue, though the home-state politics where Nevada Latino voters supported him for re-election in 2010 by a huge margin make it like on the immigration bill that Reid will take a harder line there.

Joan's mention of primaries is a key thing in re-democratizing the Democratic Party. Some Democrats have been making the calculation that it's safer to duck the issue of gun regulation than to deal with it. If they all know they will face a serious primary challenge if they cave on gun regulation or Social Security, their political calculations will be different.

She's right, too, about the Democrats needed to change this weasely talk about hunters and rural tradition when it comes to gun control. Diane Feinstein's proposed Assault Weapons Ban of 2013 doesn't ban shotguns or hunting rifles. And, you know, maybe people who live in urban areas - which is most Americans, BTW - just have a more realistic understanding of the realities of gun violence than Billy Bob and Mary Jane from Farmville. The folks in Farmville don't need semiautomatic AR-15's assault rifles with 30-round clips to shoot ground hawgs or to shoot the once-in-a-blue-moon burglar who tries to break into their house in the middle of the night to steal their tractor keys. If they are opposed to universal gun regulation and insisted on stockpiling military-style assault weapons and armor-piercing ammo, it really doesn't matter if it's because they are so devoted to the fond memory of Grandpa teaching them how to shoot birds when they were a child. Which I don't buy, anyway. They're opposed to realistic gun regulations.

But there was our Compromiser-in-Chief on Monday saying this: "And by the way, it's really important for us to engage with folks who don’t agree with us on everything, because we hope that we can find some areas where we do agree. And we have to recognize that there are going to be regional differences and geographic differences. The experience that people have of guns in an urban neighborhood may not be the same as in a rural community." (my emphasis) The Democrats and gun regulation advocates need to be shooting down this notion that gun regulation is some kind of urban snobbery, not scolding each other for not pandering to it sufficiently.

The Democrats let the chance to abolish the filibuster in the Senate go by. Alex Parenne explains how that's working out so far in GOP to Reid: Thanks for caving on filibuster reform, we will now destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Board Salon 02/04/2013.

Which means in practice they need a 60-vote supermajority to put through any controversial measure. If the Republican Party were deeply divided on a range of issues, that would be one thing. But they aren't. So it's really hard for me to believe that Democrats are entirely unhappy with that. Or, more precisely, there must be some Democrats in the Senate that are happy to let the Republicans block Democratic legislation that they aren't too worried about the filibuster.

With the Republicans still in obstruction mode, it seems obvious that the Democrats have to press them hard to get even decent compromise legislation through. And that means, among other things, building public support to put enough pressure on potential swing votes, including Republicans in the House, to get important measures passed.

The gun debate is a great opportunity because in it, the NRA becomes the leading face not only of the pro-gun-proliferation side but of the conservative culture war, as well. That means in particular loons like Wayne LaPierre and Ted Nugent, who make distinctly unappealing supporters for any cause. And that gives the Democrats the opportunity to stigmatize both at once. So making even "lost cause" stands on key issues like gun regulation, immigration and stimulus spending would have the benefit of weakening public support for Republicans and increasing the chances they can peel off enough Republican votes to get the next important measures through the House and 60-vote Senate.

Tags: assault weapons ban, barack obama, gun control, gun massacres, gun proliferation

Obama/Democratic strategy: things are going our way bigtime, we need to surrender quick!

It's been several weeks since we've had a Sandy Hook-size mass killing in the US. So, the Democrats are apparently ... rushing to weasel out of an assault weapons ban.

Here is President Obama speaking today, Obama Calls for Universal Background Checks for All Gun Purchases PBS Newshour 02/04/2013 (I get a strange green blinking on the video, but you can still see and hear it):

Transcript is here.

Obama's Now Is The Time: The President’s plan to protect our children and our communities by reducing gun violence 01/16/2013 calls for a ban on private possession and sale of assault weapons.

The President said explicitly what his main message is. Compromise! "We don't have to agree on everything to agree it's time to do something. That's my main message here today." And we've got that sweetbipartisan vibe going, "Senators from both parties have also come together and proposed a bill that would crack down on people who buy guns only to turn them around and sell them to criminals. It’s a bill that would keep more guns off the street and out of the hands of people with the intent of doing harm."

And, oh yeah, he's still kinda-sorta pretending he would like to do something about assault weapons: "We should restore the ban on military-style assault weapons and a 10-round limit for magazines. And that deserves a vote in Congress."

Sam Stein in Assault Weapons Ban Likely To Die So That Broader Gun Policy Legislation Can Live Huffington Post 02/04/2013 spells out emerging Democratic strategies to strip the assualt weapons ban out of what is currently Sen. Diane Feinstein's Assault Weapons Ban of 2013:

"We are not dictating to Judiciary what is in the bill," said a Senate leadership aide.

But Reid has made promises. Among them is that the assault weapons ban will get a vote, something that President Barack Obama also called for during a speech on gun violence in Minneapolis on Monday. The question is: In what form or capacity will that vote take place?

If the bill emerges from the Judiciary Committee without an assault weapons ban in it, then Reid will allow for the ban to be introduced as an amendment on the Senate floor. If the bill emerges from the Judiciary Committee with an assault weapons ban in it, the expectation is that Reid will allow for a vote to strip it out. Leadership prefers the former, as it would give more conservative Democrats the chance to publicly say they beat back the ban. If the latter were to take place, it would put Reid in an uncomfortable position of allowing for the procedural axing of a measure that remains popular in the party.

This is what's so frustrating about the Democrats. They are more used to fobbing their base off than actually fighting for what the base wants. Even when what the base wants is generally popular, which it very often is.

And because the Democrats didn't abolish the undemocratic Senate filibuster, we're left with a situation "where 60 votes would be needed to shut off debate," as Stein writes. Apparently that's still the operative assumption in the Senate, so that in turn becomes another excuse for compromising early and often.

But, gee, some Republicans are making noises about supporting some gun regulations! Stein reports, "The Obama administration and allied Democrats, however, have been heartened by the fact that bipartisan coalitions already exist in congress for background check legislation and a trafficking bill." So, what don't the Dems rush to concede more stuff? What could possibly go wrong?

And who better to speak for this viewpoint than Third Way?

"When the assault weapons ban comes to the floor, proponents including us will have to contend with the fact that very few assault weapons are actually used in a crime," Jim Kessler, a former director of policy and research at Americans for Gun Safety and co-founder of the centrist-Democratic organization Third Way. "That’s the challenge with passing this law. On the one hand, it seems that in a civil society we should draw a line on what kind of weapon a person can own. And weapons designed for warfare belong on the other side of that line. On the other hand, if you are going to die at the hands of a criminal with a gun, it's going to be a handgun."

Yeah, who cares about the occasional mass murder of churchgoers or schoolchildren? It's sad and all, but the important thing is to be bipartisan.

At least that's how the corporate Democrats seem to look at it. After all, some execs in the gun industry are presumably getting big bonuses for selling high-margin assault rifles, and Third Way would never want to interfere with honest profit-making, of course!

Obama's Now Is The Time: The President’s plan to protect our children and our communities by reducing gun violence 01/16/2013 calls for a ban on private possession and sale of assault weapons. I guess this is the new, tougher, progressive Obama? Wait two whole weeks before capitulating and relying on bipartisan good will from Republicans?

Tags: assault weapons ban, gun control, gun massacres, gun proliferation

Gun regulations and white racism

Ernest Dumas thinks that the key role white racism plays in the gun debate makes the chances for far-reaching gun regulations like those in Sen. Diane Feinstein's proposed Assault Weapons Ban of 2013 unlikely during President Obama's second term in office. He argues in The truth about guns Arkansas Times 01/30/2013:

Americans engaged in heated debates over guns periodically from 1690 until today, and race was nearly always a provocation and usually the main one. ...

... it will be a rare Southerner or Westerner, aside from the Pacific coast, who will vote for a gun bill that is associated with Barack Obama. And people will associate any gun bill with Obama. ...

Before the Civil War, runaway slaves or revolts were never a big problem here in the natural state [Arkansas], but the territorial legislature in 1824 passed a law requiring every township to keep a militia of up to 11 armed white men to capture and punish fleeing or obstreperous Negroes. There were worries and rumors about blacks getting guns and revolting before and long after the Civil War.

Sure enough, in 1967 the Black Panthers began parading around the public squares in California with guns, alarming the new governor, Ronald Reagan, who became a gun-control advocate. Bobby Seale, Huey Newton and some 30 other Panthers took loaded weapons to the Capitol in Sacramento to protest an attempt to outlaw carrying loaded weapons in public and got themselves arrested. The modern gun-control movement was under way. The National Rifle Association wanted stiff gun regulation and led the way in enacting the first major gun law, the Gun Control Act of 1968. A coup led by the arms industry changed the NRA's direction 180 degrees.

Guns were no longer important for hunting but to keep patriots armed so that they could fight a U. S. government led by a tyrant, like you know who. That requires some big weapons and giant ammo caches. After all, the black guy has tanks and the nuclear bomb. That is the mindset that sets public policy in 2013. [my emphasis]

I hope Dumas turns out to have been overly pessimistic about the Assault Weapons Ban of 2013. But he is making an important and valid point about the Republican opposition to it, and making it in a way that Republicans will not like seeing.

However, the gun proliferation advocates make a perverse application of this argument themselves, contending that "gun control" was aimed at blacks in previous years. Which is true enough to be perverse. But the element of white racism, historically and today, is far more important in the opposition to regulation of assault weapons.

I don't know if it's been polled in any meaningful way. But I'm guessing that if the people arguing that unrestricted access to assault weapons is necessary to protect against tyranny were systematically questioned, it would be pretty obvious that what a lot of them really mean is not the literal sense - which would be using their guns to kill cops, soldiers and public officials in an armed insurrection - but rather that they are white people who think they need such weapons to possibly shoot some scary black people.

And Dumas is making some similar assumption about gun proliferation advocates in his column.

Tags: assault weapons ban, gun control, gun massacres, gun proliferation

A reminder that gun violence by private individuals is not the only kind Americans have to worry about

Ryan Devereaux reports in Ramarley Graham's family sues NYPD on anniversary of teen's shooting death The Guardian 02/03/2013:

After shooting dead an unarmed teenager in his bathroom, a New York City police officer threatened to kill the boy's distraught grandmother, a newly filed lawsuit alleges.

Filed Friday, a day before the one-year anniversary of the death of 18-year-old Ramarley Graham, the suit accuses the NYPD of improperly training its officers, disproportionately targeting minority youth through its controversial stop and frisk practices and covering up the facts surrounding the death. ...

Haste was charged with first and second degree manslaughter in June. He is the first serving NYPD officer to face criminal charges for a fatal shooting since 2006. The four-year veteran of the force faces a maximum of sentence of 25 years in prison if convicted. He has pleaded not guilty.

As always, individual cases can be exceptionally complicated.

But the reality of police violence and misconduct is something American citizens can't afford to ignore.

Banning the private possession of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines as Sen. Diane Feinstein's Assault Weapons Ban of 2013 proposes won't directly affect police misconduct. But reducing the number of assault weapons would improve conditions for those demanding more police accountability and improved conduct, because it would materially lessen the risk of cop killings.

Tags: assault weapons ban, gun control, gun massacres, gun proliferation

What are we debating in the gun debate?

I just discovered, or maybe it just today re-entered by consciousness, that a bookstore near me sells the weekly Anderson Valley Advertiser, which modestly bills itself as "America's Last Newspaper." It also features on its masthead the slogans, "Fanning the Flames of Discontent" and "Peace to the Cottages! War on the Palaces!" I should probably be quoting from it regularly.

That later slogan is a translation of the slogan used by the dramatist Georg Büchner (1813-1837) on a paper, Der Hessische Landbote, promoting democratic revolution in the Electorate (Grossherzogtum) of Hessen-Darmstadt , now the German state (province) Hessen. Germany's most important literary prize today is the Georg-Büchner-Preis, whose winners have included Erich Kästner (1957), Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1963), Günter Grass (1965), Heinrich Böll (1967), Golo Mann (1968), Uwe Johnson (1971), Christa Wolf (1980) and Wolf Biermann (1991).

But I digress. This post is about guns, not books or literary prizes or famous 19th-century German democrats. So, the "Off The Record" column of the Anderson Valley Advertiser's 01/30/2013 issue summarizes what Sen. Diane Feinstein's proposed assault weapons ban, currently titled Assault Weapons Ban of 2013, is about:

DEMOCRATS, led by Dianne Feinstein, have listed the guns they want outlawed, Feinstein and Ca. also want to ban magazines that carry mare than ten rounds. The proposed bill would prohibit 158 combat-inspired rifles, including that Bushmaster XM15 that Adam Lanza used in the mass shooting of children in Connecticut. Feinstein introduced the original assault weapons ban, which became law in 1994 but expired in 2004. The proposed ban contains no sunset provision and protects 2,258 hunting and sporting rifles and shotguns, a provision aimed at undercutting gun-owner fears that Congress is intent an seizing legal guns in the aftermath of Newtown. The legislation also would ban any military-style weapon with a detachable magazine and a single military-style feature, such as a pistol grip, a flash suppressor or a bayonet lug or grenade launcher. The 1994 ban barred weapons with a detachable magazine plus two military-style features, which gave gun manufacturers too much leeway in refashioning weapons ta comply with the law, Feinstein said. If the' new proposal were ta became law, a legal weapon could have a detachable magazine but net a pistol grip, fer example. Under the previous law, such a weapon would have been allowed. [my emphasis in bold]

That spells out several important features to watch as the law proceeds through Congress. (Or not!) It's focused on assault weapons, which are defined in the legislation. As proposed, it looks to avoid some of the limitations of the 1994 ban, like the multiple-feature definition and the sunset date, that helped to seriously weaken the law and eventually end it altogether when it came up for renewal in 2004 under the Cheney-Bush Administration when the Democrats were largely still cowering in post-9/11 fear of looking "soft" on anything.

Feinstein's website has a page on the proposed legislation, Stopping the spread of deadly assault weapons, with a page summarizing the provisions of the bill, Assault Weapons Ban of 2013.

It does not ban either rifles or handguns as such. It even specifically excludes "Any weapon that is lawfully possessed at the date of the bill's enactment," which itself is a major loophole. It does ban "All semiautomatic pistols that can accept a detachable magazine and have at least one military feature," which features are defined, and both semiautomatic rifles and pistols that have fixed magazines "with the capacity to accept more than 10 rounds." And it does include "a safe storage requirement for grandfathered firearms, to keep them away from prohibited persons." And it "bans the sale, transfer, manufacturing and importation" of the proscribed items. There was an importation loophole in the 1994 that significantly weakened it.

That's why I have mixed feelings about articles like this that report on a bunch of gun deaths: Jason Cherkis, U.S. Gun Deaths Since Sandy Hook Top 1,280 Huffington Post 02/01/2013. Cherkis reports, after a heart-wrenching story about a father who left a loaded pistol out that his 2-year-old son picked up and killed himself with:

There were 29 other shooting deaths across the U.S. on Christmas. A soldier was shot and killed in his barracks in Alaska. A man was murdered in the parking lot of Eddie's Bar and Grill in Orrville, Ala. A 23-year-old was shot at a party in Phoenix. A Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department employee was killed in a drive-by.

A 20-year-old Louisville, Ky., man was shot and killed after walking his sister home. On Christmas Eve, he had posted an R.I.P. on his Facebook page for a friend and former classmate, who had been gunned down that day.

A 10-year-old in Memphis, Tenn., Alfreddie Gipson, was accidentally shot to death by gun purchased by an older brother, who had gotten the weapon after being bullied at school. Gipson was jumping on a bed when the gun slipped out of a mattress. It discharged when his 12-year-old brother tried to put it back, their mother said at a vigil.

On the one hand, I'm glad that the press is giving more attention now to gun deaths across the country. Because it's a horrible problem and should be regarded as a shameful national scandal.

But it's not at all clear that any of the individual incidents Cherkis describes in that article will be impeded in any way by this particular piece of legislation. People who already have semiautomatic pistols with fixed magazines that accept more than 10 rounds can still leave them lying around for their two-year-olds to pick up and spray bullets around the room, or into themselves. I say it that way for emphasis; hopefully most two-year-olds would be scared into stopping with the first shot, assuming they don't kill themselves with the first one, but it's not a very comforting qualification. Semiautomatic rifles and pistols can still by used for drive-by shootings or gunning down guys walking their sisters home.

Universal background checks might have at least impeded the older brother who bought a gun supposedly because he was being bullied at school and wound up being used by his 12-year-old brother to accidentally kill himself. And bans on the manufacture of assault weapons along with universal background checks will make it harder for drug gangs who use drive-by shootings to get the weapons and large magazines.

One of the tactics of the NRA and others who favor gun proliferation will be to point to cases like this to say, "See, all these here gun laws just don't work! And this won't do nothin' about most of these killin's. So go buy more guns!"

There are lots of things to look for in the gun regulation debate. One is the firearms industry's attempt to put in more gaps and loopholes in the legislation to allow aspiring mass murderers and wannabe assassins of politicians to maintain relatively easy access to semiautomatic assault weapons and large-capacity magazines to gun down school children and churchgoers and people in malls and movie theaters and to murder the occasional mayor or member of Congress. That will also let them make their argument, though it's goofy on the face of it, that because the legislation doesn't stop 100% of gun murders that we should have no legislation at all.

But the regulation advocates also need to be careful to not overpromise on this legislation. Feinstein's bill is a ban on assault weapons, not on all semiautomatic rifles and handguns, and not a ban on handguns as such at all. What the assault weapons ban will do is to put serious impediments in the way of the kind of rapid-fire mass murderers we've seen in Sandy Hook and Aurora and way too many other places in the last few years.

Then there's the chronic ailment of democratic timidity in the face of Republican devotion to allowing aspiring mass murderers to easily acquire assault weapons with large-capacity magazines. Here are Sleepy Mark Shields and David "Bobo" Brooks on the Shields and Brooks Clown Show, aka, the PBS Newshour Political Wrap of 02/01/2013. the good old boys get around to guns at around 6:35:

Bobo does his favorite schtick of trying to come up with moderate-sounding reasons to justify what the Radical Republicans want, in this case weakly making the dubious suggestion that there might be glimmers of reason among some Republicans in Congress on gun proliferation:

Well, in terms of the theater of the hearings, [Gabby] Giffords and the people who want more gun control certainly dominated.

I still think the NRA is weirdly inept. I assume they know what they are doing. This is their business. But they are not projecting it, at least to me. And having said that, though, my sense is -- and it's just a vague atmospheric sense -- that a lot of the oomph has gone out of the president's initiative and what Biden is doing.

He is up there working hard, but it's very hard for members of Congress to vote when their calls -- their phones are being flooded. And the people who really vote on this issue are on the gun rights side. And so I sense a little dissipation in the passion.

And it's still possible to get some reforms on gun control -- on the background checks and things like that. But one senses -- like the immigration, you see a move. You see real movement toward a possible law. I don't see that same sort of bipartisan or even partisan in a few movement on the gun stuff. [my emphasis]

It almost goes without saying that if Bobo knows of some actual polling or voting analysis that suggests that there's even one person in the entire Union "who really vote[s] on this issue ... on the gun rights side" (i.e, the pro-proliferation, pro-gun-massacre side), or that any of those voters aren't already part of the most loyal Republican base, he didn't bother to cite it. He also didn't mention that the gun lobbies and the hate radio screamers have been saying all along that Obama was on the verge of bringing in the UN black helicopters to confiscate everybody's guns. Nor that the polls show overwhelming approval for better gun regulation or that opinion has shifted dramatically toward that side since the President started very publicly advocating that position.

Sleepy Mark, in his usual state of semi-consciousness, was already pre-emptively surrendering on behalf of the Democrats on the assault-weapons ban:

I think that -- I think there is emerging consensus on the universal background check. And it's something that the NRA did support in the past and is now opposing. I mean, the NRA strategy is something else. I mean, when they have got David Keene, who has been on our program, is the president, is sort of avuncular and reasoned, and then they go with Wayne LaPierre, who is bombastic and strident, and following Gabby Giffords and especially Mark Kelly, her husband, who said that, in fact, if there were a background -- background -- that Gabby Giffords wouldn't have been testifying that day.

I think there is a good chance on high-capacity magazines. I mean, when you have got military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, they're intended for one purpose. And that is to inflict as much damage on human beings in as short as time as possible. That is what they are there for.

I thought the president showed some presence when he talked about people growing up with rifles, a 10-year-old receiving a rifle from his father, that there is not the demonizing of the other side, of people who have firearms and as part of their family and tradition. I thought that showed a certain maturity and, I hope, a political awareness.

I took a somewhat dimmer view of Obama's display of "maturity" and "political awareness" on the topic.

Tags: georg büchner, assault weapons ban, gun control, gun massacres, gun proliferation