Anti-NRA protests. And it's time to lower the voting age to 16.

It's great to see so many young people coming out on Saturday to protest gun proliferation and the NRA, which is the main lobby group promoting it. Maybe 50 years ago, the NRA was more of a gun safety and hobbyist group. But it's long since become a firearms industry lobby in the form of a fanatical rightwing group that uses apocalyptic death-cult rhetoric to promote unlimited small-arms proliferation.

This Bloomberg Businessweek articles focuses on a problem that is rarely mentioned in the gun proliferation debate, the pitifully defective laws on basic product safety for handguns, Michael Smith and Polly Mosenoz, How Defective Guns Became the Only Product That Can’t Be Recalled 02/28/2018 (print version: "The Most Dangerous Gun" 03/05/2018 issue) It's about the Taurus handgun, manufactured in Brazil, which relatively inexpensive at retail prices in the US. A sidebar notes, "The Taurus 85 is the top-selling revolver in the U.S., according to Gun Genius."

The article talks about safety issues that have arisen with Taurus guns which caused the safeties on the pistols to fail, resulting in death and injury.

“I couldn’t believe that no one had warned us that those guns were bad,” Bud says. “Why didn’t Taurus warn us? Why did the government let them sell those guns?”

The simple answer is that no government entity has the power to police defective firearms or ammunition in America - or even force gunmakers to warn consumers. The Consumer Product Safety Commission can order the recall and repair of thousands of things, from toasters to teddy bears. If a defective car needs fixing, the U.S. Department of Transportation can make it happen. The Food and Drug Administration deals with food, drugs, and cosmetics. Only one product is beyond the government’s reach when it comes to defects and safety: firearms. Not even the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives can get defective guns off the market. If a gunmaker chooses to ignore a safety concern, there’s no one to stop it.

To understand how firearms makers escaped government oversight of the safety of their pistols, revolvers, and rifles, you need to go back to 1972, when Congress created the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Four years earlier, President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which regulated several aspects of firearm sales, and advocates of gun control hoped to give this new agency oversight of defective weapons. Representative John Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan and a hunter with an A-plus rating from the ascendant NRA, blocked them. In 1975 he did it again, when a colleague introduced a bill making a second run at giving the CPSC firearms authority. “We put in there an express prohibition against them getting their nose into the business of regulating firearms and ammunition,” Dingell said in debate in Congress. That second bill was crushed, 339-80, and the issue has never been seriously considered again. [my emphasis]

So it seems that even n 1938, the NRA's actual commitment to gun safety was questionable!

Smith and Moseno also report:

In 2013, Taurus stopped selling the nine gun models alleged to be defective in the U.S.: the PT-111 Millennium, PT-132 Millennium, PT-138 Millennium, PT-140 Millennium, PT-145 Millennium, PT-745 Millennium, PT-24/7, PT-609, and PT-640.

There are allegations, however, of a new kind of defect in at least one popular revolver that Taurus still sells in America. This time, the gun didn’t misfire; it blew apart, according to a lawsuit filed in September in U.S. District Court in Raleigh, N.C.

They describe the suit in more detail. It was apparently unresolved at the time of the article.

Here is a PBS Newshour report on Saturday's anti-gun proliferation and anti-NRA protests, Youth voices take center stage at March for Our Lives 03/24/2018

Also, it's time to lower the national voting age to 16.

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 3: The politics of police violence

Will Bunch reports and comments on one reaction to the massive violence against African-Americans by police across the country in Should more black people carry guns? Attytood 04/02/2015. Samuel Mosteller, head of the Georgia chapter of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), took a position that the national SCLC didn't find welcome:

The SCLC's Mosteller shocked a lot of people when he said African-Americans should "exercise their Second Amendment rights” in response to police-involved shootings. “You stand there, (police) shoot. You run, they shoot," he said. "We’re going to have to take a different tack.” Not surprisingly, the national SCLC suspended Mosteller and told him to undergo training in King's non-violent principles.

It would be an understatement to say that police shootings of African-American suspects have been in the news, especially since the Mike Brown killing and subsequent unrest in Ferguson. This week, I saw a shocking statistic -- that the more than 100 Americans killed by police during March was more than the number of people killed by police in the United Kingdom since 1900. But that's also just one aspect of the dangers of living in arguably the most violent developed nations in the world -- especially for those who live in poverty-stricken inner-city neighborhoods, where many blacks and other minorities are concentrated. [my emphasis]

And he provides some historical background to what looks a bit like the revolving of a cycle:

This new trend is a sad commentary on the current state of the violence debate in America -- and it's also infuriating. Make no mistake, a dangerous extremiist [sic] group called the NRA -- and the politicians who beg for its offerings on bended knee -- bears a disproportionate share of the blame. The gun lobby's growing success in killing even the mildest moves towards gun sanity in America, even after the senseless slaughter of babies in Newtown in 2012, has finally convinced rational people that we can never reduce the firepower on our streets -- that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

The circle on this is beyond ironic. History buffs remember that blacks arming themselves -- citing police brutality -- was a key tenet of the rise of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s. A black open-carry event at the California State Capitol led the NRA and the state's then-new governor -- Ronald Reagan, perhaps you've heard of him? -- to endorse gun control measures aimed at the black power movement. Today's new developments may test how much has really changed in American society since 1967.

From what's quoted here, Mosteller was far from advocating forming armed self-defense militias against the police or the like. Members of the NRA national leadership routinely say things that sound far more like advocacy of political violence that what Mosteller is quoted here as saying. And they don't get suspended from that organization for doing so. And their certainly aren't required to attend non-violence training for doing so!

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution mentions two recent cases of black men killed by police that were part of the immediate background of his comments (Report: SCLC suspends president of Georgia chapter 04/01/2015):

His remarks came one week after 23-year-old Goodyear employee Nicholas Thomas was fatally shot by Smyrna police serving an arrest warrant on a probation violation. Police say Thomas tried to run over officers in a customer’s Maserati, though lawyers hired by the dead man’s family have challenged the official account.

Last month, 27-year-old Anthony Hill, who suffered from bipolar disorder, was shot and killed by a DeKalb County police officer. The officer alleged the Afghanistan war veteran charged him in a threatening manner. Hill was nude and unarmed at the time.

Public officials and police departments need to find ways to dial back the level of violence directed at black citizens today. It's wrong. And it feeds further cycles of hatred and fear.

Assorted links: euro crisis, neoclassical synthesis, guns

Yanis Varoufakis and Jamie Galbraith have a wonkish article explaining the major differences in approach for the two major approaches to saving the euro, Whither Europe? The Modest Camp vs the Federalist Austerians Open Democracy 06/11/2014. They are both prominent advocates of the Modest Camp.

Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem, currently president of the "Eurogroup" of finance ministers, gives a variation of the Austerity Gospel, suggesting that sinner eurozone countries should be allowed to ease up on the austerity a little bit as long as they agree to even more drastic measures for internal devaluation, e.g., reducing real income for most people: Eurogruppen-Chef: "Mehr Zeit für Extrareformen" Der Standard 10.06.2014. He's part of the social-democratic Labour Party in the Netherlands. This nonsense is supposed to be a left-center alternative. No wonder the euro zone is in crisis and European Social Democracy in general, as well.

Paul Krugman explains the "neoclassical synthesis" in economics (Keynes in bad times, Alfred Marshall in good) and why reality is constantly challenging it, especially now: Synthesis Lost 06/12/2014. Krugman has been indicated for several years now that over time, he's had increasing doubts about the "classical" part of the synthesis.

He also has another post reflecting on errors, Including this one:

I worried a lot in 2010-2012 about a euro breakup. And here too I had a fundamentally flawed model. But the flaw wasn't in my economic model, which has worked pretty well, but in my implicit political model: I simply failed to appreciate the incentives facing European elites and how willing they would be to do whatever it takes, both in debtor countries and at the ECB, to avoid an outright rift. So, fundamental change called for — but in my political model, not my economic model.

He has mentioned this before, that he judged that democratic governments wouldn't put up for as long as they have with the level of sacrifice and economic hopelessness that Angela Merkel's austerity policies continue to impose on Cyrus, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain. I have the impression, too, that at least in the 2009-12 period, Krugman was underestimating the emotional power of "the European project" (the EU) on both elites and the public there.

That said, I think he's being a bit hard on himself over that one. Back in 2012, he wrote in Dornbusch's Law And The Euro 07/21/2014:

It really does seem as if we're looking at Dornbusch’s Law in action:

The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought, and that's sort of exactly the Mexican story. It took forever and then it took a night.

July 2012 was the month after the ECB reversed course and committed itself to a bond purchasing program that has succeeded in deterring major speculations against eurozone countries' bonds for two years now.

I think that's still a good guideline: when the euro crisis goes into another acute phase, it will seem to news consumers and most pundits like a bolt out of the blue.

Krugman also has a blog post (Fall of an Apparatchik 06/11/2014) and a column (The Fix Isn't In: Eric Cantor and the Death of a Movement New York Times 06/12/2014) on his thoughts at the momentary political demise of Eric Cantor, the two of them very similar but not identical. He makes a useful point that we aren't hearing from the usual suspects among the Pod Punditry, who still imagine that some version of the Nelson Rockefeller/Barry Goldwater split of 1964 is still operating in the Republican Party:

I don't mean that conservatism in general is dying. But what I and others mean by "movement conservatism," a term I think I learned from the historian Rick Perlstein, is something more specific: an interlocking set of institutions and alliances that won elections by stoking cultural and racial anxiety but used these victories mainly to push an elitist economic agenda, meanwhile providing a support network for political and ideological loyalists.

By rejecting Mr. Cantor, the Republican base showed that it has gotten wise to the electoral bait and switch, and, by his fall, Mr. Cantor showed that the support network can no longer guarantee job security. For around three decades, the conservative fix was in; but no more.

To see what I mean by bait and switch, think about what happened in 2004. George W. Bush won re-election by posing as a champion of national security and traditional values — as I like to say, he ran as America’s defender against gay married terrorists — then turned immediately to his real priority: privatizing Social Security. It was the perfect illustration of the strategy famously described in Thomas Frank’s book "What's the Matter With Kansas?" in which Republicans would mobilize voters with social issues, but invariably turn postelection to serving the interests of corporations and the 1 percent. [links in original]

The New Republic's spanking of Chris Hedges for alleged plagiarism this week criticized him for inserted weblinks into quotes. It never occurred to me before that such could be construed as plagiarism. Does omitting quotes from a passage you're quoting that has links in its web version count as plagiarism, too? I'm thinking, no. But I specified on that last quote!

I guess that also means I have to check the links to make sure they're not to so nasty porno site or something.

Elias Isquith on the NRA's current marketing strategy, NRA’s "really big problem": Why it’s dependent on a dwindling fringe Salon 06/13/2014, quoting Josh Sugarman of the Violence Policy Center:

... hunting, hunting as an activity is fading away — so what you're finding is that the activists ... the NRA relies upon are those who buy into its paranoid language and truly believe the government is the enemy ... [W]hen the NRA is criticized for this or confronted with their own language, they fall into this excuse of ”it's just direct mail rhetoric; it’s just articles to engage our membership. It really is a risk-free activity,” and what we’re seeing is, that’s not the case. It’s not risk-free activity. The NRA’s validating role cannot be matched by any other organization, and most importantly — and this is where it all comes full circle — the NRA’s the organization assured that those who want to live out these wild fantasies have the exact tools to accomplish it.

The NRA with the eager help of the Republican Party from Congress to statehouses, of course.

And a story about real-life people who really did have to rely on private weapons to protect themselves against the political of segregation, Amelia Thomason-Deveaux, Armed Resistance in the Civil Rights Movement: Charles E. Cobb and Danielle L. McGuire on Forgotten History The American Prospect 06/11/2014. People for whom today's NRA and most Republicans have less than zero sympathy.

And, oh yeah, the IMF thinks several countries are looking at another developing housing bubble: IMF Global Housing Watch (accessed 06/13/2014).

Tags: angela merkel, austerity economics, eu, euro, european union, gun control, gun proliferation, nra

NRA anti-science

Scientific American in "Ready. Aim. Investigate" in the March 2013 edition took note of the NRA's efforts to suppress research on the negative health effects of gun proliferation:

... the National Rifle Association of America (NRA) has been scandalously successful in suppressing public safety research into guns. The problems began when investigators funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that having a gun in the home tripled the chance that a family member would get shot. Outraged that reality was not falling into line with presuppositions, then representative Jay Dickey of Arkansas added language to federal law in 1996 that barred the CDC from conducting research that might be used "to advocate or promote gun control." This deliberately vague wording, coupled with a campaign of harassment of researchers, effectively halted federally funded gun safety research.

This is a great example of how the political power provided by money actually influences the course of science, how it is developed, what kind of research is done, how it is applied. And in this case, the influence is directed toward narrow commercial ends.

At least President Obama found a way to take direction action on this:

In January, President Barack Obama instructed the CDC to resume studying the causes and prevention of gun violence. He also asked for $10 million to support gun safety research at the CDC - a request that Congress must pass. But these measures are not enough. If history is any guide, the NRA will attempt to impede these new investigations. Doctors, scientists and ordinary citizens will have to keep up the pressure to protect research (and researchers) from political meddling. [my emphasis]

We shouldn't let Obama off the hook for direct actions he can take under Executive power.

But what can be done by direct Executive power can be ended by Executive decision. Or by Congressional action. Aside from the fact that Obama is notoriously timid in sticking by liberal decisions that play in some way into the "culture war," as gun proliferation does, good Executive actions don't end the need for good legislation.

Tags: gun control, gun proliferation, gun regulation, NRA, obama administration

Private prisons, the gun lobby and the Obama Administration

Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks talks about one of the most scandalous and destructive aspects of what we still call our "justice" system in the United States in For-Profit Prison Gets Name on Football Stadium 02/20/2013 02/20/2013.

They start talking at around 2:35 about the large amounts being spent by the federal government to detain suspected undocumented immigrants in private prisons.

One major factor with private prisons is that they can use various financial contributions to lobby (or just buy) politicians to pass tougher laws so that more people will go to prison so that they can make more money from the public till while they are cutting every cost they can get away with cutting to improve profits.

Tim Murphy reported earlier this month about how the radical-right National Rifle Association (NRA) and the for-profit prison industry share an interest in putting more and more people in jail in The Big House That Wayne LaPierre Built Mother Jones 02/08/2013. Fr the NRA, making more and more acts criminal allows them to use fear of crime to sell guns and ammunition. For the for-profit prison industry, it lets them make money from the taxpayers by housing the prisoners resulting from tougher and tougher laws.

The campaign the NRA promoted in the 1990s, called CrimeStrike, for more laws to put more people in prison and for longer terms led to badly overcrowded prisons even with massive prison construction. And to more opportunity for the for-profit prison industry. Murphy writes:

The number of people serving time in state or federal prisons increased 100 percent between 1990 and 2005. But California and Texas, the two states where the NRA had expended the most capital, were the most striking examples. The Golden State's three-strikes law differed from most of the other 29 in that it applied to an exceedingly broad definition of what amounted to a "strike." Under its guidelines, nonviolent crimes — including, in one famous case, the filching of a slice of pizza — were enough to put someone behind bars for life. ...

The prisons became simultaneously more crowded and more expensive to maintain. Writing for the majority in 2011, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy noted that inmates in California were forced to live in "telephone-booth-sized cages without toilets," and often went more than a year without receiving medical attention. The state's corrections system, Kennedy argued, was "incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in civilized society."

The consequence of California's reforms is that Texas now leads the nation in incarceration, with 154,000 people behind bars—more prisoners per capita than all but three countries. The construction boom addressed what criminal-justice watchdogs considered to be a serious problem: Violent felons were being released before they were even eligible for parole because there simply wasn't any room. But CrimeStrike and its allies did nothing to curb the underlying problem — a sentencing system that locked people up for the smallest of crimes, kept them there for a while, and openly mocked efforts to keep them from coming back.

All that's left of the NRA's prison-building arm 20 years later is a television show by the same name. Hosted by LaPierre, Crime Strike features weekly reenactments of gun owners defending their turf, with the mantra: "Take aim and fight back." But the program's legacy lives on in concrete ways.

Digby cites Murphy's article and observes (Authoritarian Freedom Fighters (yes, I'm talking about the NRA) Hullabaloo 02/24/2013):

This shows exactly what kind of people NRA followers really are. For all their talk of watering the tree of liberty with blood of tyrants, they are actually the worst kind of authoritarians. They're fine with government power when it comes to any police agency (not charged with gun regulation) and they cheer it enthusiastically when it imprisons large numbers of people they consider to be undesirable. The only powers they don't wish the government to have is the power to tax them for the cost of these authoritarian institutions or to regulate their personal firepower. And they downright love a man in uniform, whether a cop or a soldier. ...

Read the whole story at Mojo about the NRA's prison plan. And then contemplate the fact that the Democrats decided after the 2000 election that they couldn't possibly go against them ever again. (And people wonder why so many of us find the Democratic Party's "strategies" so contemptible.)

As Ana and Cenk note in their report, Obama was eager to facilitate the agenda of the xenophobes and the for-profit prison lobby, considerably exceeding the number of deportations that the Cheney-Bush Administration made in any comparable period. In the Grand Compromiser pose, this was justified by Obama's loyalists on the issue by saying it would convince Republicans that he was serious about border enforcement, and that would make them more open to compromise on immigration reform. They got the deportations, we'll see how many Republicans vote for any decent immigration reform bill.

The NRA and their supporting background chorus of gun fetishists would be an excellent target for Obama to discredit and thereby discredit much of the "culture war" rhetoric of which their positions are an integral part.

Brian Tashman reports in Gun Activists Warn Obama is Raising a Private Black Army to Massacre White Americans Right Wing Watch 02/22/2013 that the rhetoric from Gun Owners of America and its President Larry Pratt encourage even wilder rhetoric in the service of unlimited gun proliferation. Obama and the Democrats should be forcing the Republicans to either own or repudiate such characters. Obama seems to have little intention of doing so. But at least the focus on gun violence and the proliferation of guns and ammo is highlighting the crackpot extremism of groups like the NRA, the Gun Owners of America and their close Republican allies.

Tags: comprehensive immigration reform, culture war, gun proliferation, gun regulation, nra, radical right, wayne lapierre

Guns and immigration reform: the NRA makes the connection for the next round of xenophobic hysteria

Dave Neiwert and Charlie Pierce show how the NRA is linking their "culture war" issues of guns, guns and more guns to the "culture war" issues of hating on Latino immigrants with the usual mindless nationalism that comes with xenophobia in, respectively, NRA's Latest Outburst: Evil Mexicans Are Coming to Kill You! C&L 02/15/2013 and Charlie Pierce, All The Latest Rage Esquire Politics Blog 02/20/2013.

Dave, who actually knows what he's talking about on these matters, declares, "I think it is now safe to assert that the National Rifle Association is now officially a far-right extremist organization. It began its final descent into this realm -- where it had been teetering increasingly in the recent years -- this week, and with this latest outburst, it's now official." He uses as Exhibit A this video featuring Wayne LaPierre that the NRA distributed to their members, which is basically a several-minutes long xenophobic, Patriot Militia sort of propaganda piece about scary Mexicans and A-rab terrorists pouring across the US-Mexican border.

I was struck by how the piece tries hard to discredit the factual reality that "cut-out" purchases of assault weapons in the United States have massively fueled the killing among drug gangs in Mexico itself as many of those weapons are smuggled south across the border. Both universal background checks and the banning of the manufacture and importation of assault rifles would definitely mitigate that particular problem.

That's also a classic "tell" for the far-right thinking going on here. The NRA's only real purpose is to sell guns and ammo and more guns and ammo. And if large portions of those sales go to Mexican drug cartels, the Great God Free Market doesn't care at all. So it's not in the immediate profit interest of the firearms industry for which the NRA is the chief public face to limit the supply of weapons and ammunition sold in the US for smuggling to Mexico. So rather than try to duck the problem, this NRA ad tries to redefine it as (1) not a real one, and (2) one that it would be offensive to American patriotism to even try to solve.

Which fits with the xenophobia and white racism to which the ad panders and encourages. The small arms traffic to Mexico fuels the violence of the drug gangs there, which then allows the NRA and their culture-war allies to paint Mexicans and Latinos as violent thugs coming to git us innocent Amurcans, and so we Amurcans need to buy us even more guns and ammo to protect ourselves from the scary, scary Spanish-speaking people.

Marketing of death via hatred and fear: because for the NRA, to steal from a well-known sports saying, selling and ammo isn't the most important thing, it's the only thing.

For the Republican Party, defender of (their versions of) family values and True Christianity, hatred and fear can also produce turnout and votes. And, as Pierce explains, their are position hatred of immigrants as their main issue to get out their Grumpy Old Party base of aging white people for the 2014 elections:

If you want to know where the abandoned wrath is going to focus in the next election, this is the issue — and there's nothing Marco Rubio can do to stop it, in case you were wondering. It is now past cliche to note that the Republican party, and the conservative movement that gives it most of its money and all of its intellectual energy, is presently reaping what it sowed, that the chickens have returned clamorously to the roost, and that crows doth sit upon the capitol. However, for that dynamic to have a material focus on the 2014 midterms, it needs a focus. Now, you might think that would be guns, but the party and most of its elected members are on roughly the same page as the NRA as nearly as I can tell. However, the Republicans have looked at the demographics of the last election and they have made a concerted -- and very public -- effort to reform themselves on this issue because they would rather not become the Whigs of the 21st Century. As is obvious from the highlighted excerpt above, guns have their salience as an intraparty issue only when they can be connected to the issue of illegal immigration, not the other way around. In this formulation, you will note, the right to bear arms is yet another "free government benefit" that the "illiterate invaders" want. [my emphasis]

And, as Dave's piece shows, the NRA is doing their part to merge the love of guns, guns and more guns to fear of the scary Mexicans anyway.

Meanwhile, here in the real world, what happens when a state loosens up on gun regulations at the demand of the xenophobes and conspiracy-mongers of the NRA? Zack Beauchamp looks at that very question in Gun Homicides Increased 25 Percent After Missouri Repealed Background Check Law Think Progress 02/13/2013.

Here is the NRA video accompanying Dave Neiwert's post:

Tags: comprehensive immigration reform, culture war, gun proliferation, gun regulation, nra, radical right, wayne lapierre

The NRA wants people to buy guns and ammo and then more guns and ammo

Tim Dickinson takes a look at the NRA's mission to boost sales of guns and ammunition and the process of its continuing political radicalization.in The NRA vs. America Rolling Stone 01/31/2013:

"When I was at the NRA, we said very specifically, 'We do not represent the fi rearm industry,'" says Richard Feldman, a longtime gun lobbyist who left the NRA in 1991. "We represent gun owners. End of story." But in the association's more recent history, he says, "They have really gone after the gun industry."

Today's NRA stands astride some of the ugliest currents of our politics, combining the "astroturf" activism of the Tea Party, the unlimited and undisclosed "dark money" of groups like Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS, and the sham legislating conducted on behalf of the industry through groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council. "This is not your father's NRA," says Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, a top gun-industry watchdog. Feldman is more succinct, calling his former employer a "cynical, mercenary political cult."

The NRA's alignment with an $11.7 billion industry has fed tens of millions of dollars into the association's coffers, helping it string together victories that would have seemed fantastic just 15 years ago. The NRA has hogtied federal regulators, censored government data about gun crime and blocked renewal of the ban on assault weaponry and high-capacity magazines, which expired in 2004. The NRA secured its "number-one legislative priority" in 2005, a law blocking liability lawsuits that once threatened to bankrupt gunmakers and expose the industry's darkest business practices. Across the country, the NRA has opened new markets for firearms dealers by pushing for state laws granting citizens the right to carry hidden weapons in public and to allow those who kill in the name of self-defense to get off scot-free.

This is important to remember when listening to pitches from the NRA or even more radical gun-proliferation advocates like the Gun Owners of America. They promote fear to encourage more sales of guns and ammunition. And they push for changes in laws to increase gun proliferation to encourage more sales of guns and ammunition. They aren't lobbying for public safety. They're lobbying to sell guns.

Dickinson also explains how the "NRA is a completely top-down organization," which makes any hope for some sort of internal political opposition that would dramatically change the direction of this organization very unlikely. And he has some interesting things to say about Wayne LaPierre, the organization's main fact to the world:

According to NRA legend, LaPierre is actually a menace with a gun. NRA's PR team once thought it would be sexy to film LaPierre at a firing range. "It was a nightmare," an NRA staffer told Davidson. LaPierre was aiming downrange for the camera when an engineer called for a sound check. To answer the man, LaPierre swung around, but he failed to lower his rifle, aiming it directly at the engineer – before someone took the gun away from LaPierre. The incident, terrifying at the time, became a dark joke at NRA headquarters. Staffers behind on their projects were threatened that they'd have to "go hunting with Wayne." (The NRA's press office did not reply to Rolling Stone inquiries.)

Between 1978, when LaPierre was hired as a lobbyist, and 1991, when he took over as CEO, the NRA had been on a historic roll. In those early days, LaPierre served at the knee of a revolutionary NRA executive named Harlon Carter, who transformed an old-time shooters club into a political powerhouse – an "NRA so strong," Carter boasted, "that no politician in America mindful of his political career would want to challenge [our] goals." The NRA started grading politicians on guns – a process Bob Dole kvetched was "a litmus test every five minutes" – rewarding allies with campaign cash and subjecting foes to the backlash of millions of rabid, single-issue gun-owning voters. In 1980, the NRA made its first-ever presidential endorsement with Ronald Reagan, and by 1986 had the Gipper's signature on legislation, overseen by LaPierre, that would usher in a new era of unregulated gun shows.

However, today there is good reason to believe that the clout of the NRA in retail politics is greatly overblown. But with the Democrats having de-emphasized the gun regulation issue so much for years until just recently, the NRA has been an even more prominent face in the gun debate, which until the Sandy Hook school shooting had been far too one-sided.

For more on the topic, see also Blood Money: How the Gun Industry Bankrolls the NRA (Violence Policy Center; April 2011)

Tags: gun proliferation, gun regulation, nra, wayne lapierre

Wayne LaPierre's nightmare fantasy world

It's really unfortunate that President Obama isn't willing to use the extremism of the National Rifle Association and its main public face, Wayne LaPierre, to wreck the credibility of the NRA and do major damage to the Republican Party on a "culture war" issue by making use of the exceptionally ugly face of the gun issue presented by LaPierre.

Alex Seitz-Wald in Wayne LaPierre is very afraid Salon 02/14/2013 discusses the dystopian nature of the nightmare fantasies that LaPierre projects. And he points out that facts don't match up to the Mad Max scenarios LaPierre spins in order to sell more guns and ammo:

Violent crime is now at a two-decade low and urban centers are seeing a revival unlike any time in the past 100 years. But LaPierre chooses to ignore that. And he chooses to ignore the fact that most gun violence is suicide, while most homicide is inflicted by people who know each other (usually scorned lovers, angry relatives and criminals in dispute) — hardened criminals preying on innocents is relatively rare.

For instance, in his Daily Caller Op-Ed, LaPierre writes hyperbolically: "After Hurricane Sandy, we saw the hellish world that the gun prohibitionists see as their utopia. Looters ran wild in south Brooklyn. There was no food, water or electricity. And if you wanted to walk several miles to get supplies, you better get back before dark, or you might not get home at all."

In fact, crime dropped in New York City during Hurricane Sandy, with murders plummeting a whopping 86 percent over the same period in 2011 and overall crime down 27 percent. There was a single homicide on the Monday before the storm hit, then none for the next five days.

"After a natural disaster or large-scale catastrophe like 9/11, we see conventional crime come down," NYPD spokesman Paul Browne explained. "A lot of people are indoors. Taverns are closed. You have less people out late at night and getting into disputes."

Eliot Spitzer harshes on LaPierre in 'Wayne LaPierre is a complete lunatic': Eliot Spitzer weighs in on the gun control debate Viewpoint 02/14/2013. This segment covers other issues, too; the gun regulation parts starts around 4:00.

From the program summary:

"Until we see Republican legislators responding to the 85 percent who agree with what we think is the more common sense view, then we've got to say, ‘Look, Wayne LaPierre is still holding the political cards,’ crazy as it may be,” Spitzer says. "If this guy six months from now has stopped anything other than a weak universal background check — if they haven’t limited the number of bullets in a magazine, if there isn't an assault weapons ban — then he will have won. And that is a very sad reality we've got to face."

Ta-Nehisi Coates conducts a discussion with Harold Pollack of the University of Chicago's crime lab in The Social Trends Driving American Gangs and Gun Violence The Atlantic 02/04/2013. The NRA isn't interested in discussing gun violence in any other context than selling more guns and ammo. But this is a real-world discussion of some of the actual problems around gun violence. It also contains a sensible discussion of violence in popular music, a favorite culture-war target, especially when it's African-Americans singing or listening to the songs.

Tags: gun proliferation, gun regulation, nra, wayne lapierre

Gun regulation: a logjam breaks

President Obama's decision to act for the moment like a Democratic President who just won re-election with a solid majority has prominently involved his engagement against domestic gun proliferation.

Media Matters' Eric Boehlert tweeted on 1/17/2013, "the damn [sic] has broken. some of those pro-gun control polling numbers are staggering." The use of "damn" instead of "dam" may be some kind of Freudian slip, but it's also correct.

After the Sandy Hook gun masscre of children and once the Democratic President took this on and started pushing back against the pro-prliferation, pro-crime National Rifle Association, the irresponsible gun industry for which they lobby, and the various and sundry other gun lobbies and culture-war hangers on who want to see maximum gun proliferation, the public mood has shifted and I'm seeing a flood of information pushing back at the ludicrous and irresponsible claims of the gun industry and their slavishly faithful Republican Party supporters.

Boehlert was referencing in particular this report by Sarah Muller, Widespread support for more restrictive gun measures, polls say The Last World/MSNBC 01/17/2013.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll, taken before the president’s recommendations, shows 74% of Americans favor a ban on assault weapons while only 26% oppose. The question of ammunition produced similar results: 74% of Americans favor a ban on high capacity ammunition clips and 26% oppose. The same poll found 86% like the idea of expanded background checks for all would-be gun buyers, even at gun shows and through private sales. Only 14% opposed.

The CBS News/New York Times poll emphasizes the bipartisan support behind a requirement for background checks on all gun purchases. Out of Democrats, 93% support background checks. And out of Republicans, 89% support them. In households with members of the National Rifle Association, 85% are for more background checks.

The fact that the most prominent gun lobby group is sleazy and dishonest is not a good thing. But it is a good thing that much more light is being shed on their bad habits at the moment, e.g., Karoli, NRA Ad Dead Wrong, Thanks to Breitbart False Report C&L 01/19/2013.

Wendy Kaminer, A Civil Libertarian's Case for Giving Gun Control a Chancd 12/17/2012 takes a look at the state of Constitutional law on gun rights. This is an important issue. It wasn't until 2008 that the Supreme Court first held that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to gun ownership. It was a bad ruling and needs to be overturned. Unfortunately, our current President endorsed this interpretation shortly before the Supreme Court ruling came down, and he is still articulating it. This is one of several very good reasons that we need honest Democratic federal judges who aren't Federalist Society dogmatic conservative hacks who will clean up some of the egregiously bad ruling of the Thomases and Scalias.

As Kaminer explains of the 2008 decision:

Should facts about gun violence matter to federal courts when they consider the constitutionality of gun control laws? That is not a rhetorical question. The Supreme Court paid scant attention to the facts when it affirmed a constitutional right to bear arms in District of Columbia v. Heller, a 5-4, 2008 decision authored by Justice Scalia. Relying almost exclusively on history, Heller struck down the D.C. ban on handguns in the home.

Part of the recklessness of Scalia-style conservative judicial activism has been that on an important issue like this, and also in the infamous, anti-democrascy Citizens United decision, they have been willing to impose drastic new interpretations of Consitutional law with a narrowly split decision. Bush v. Gore in 2000 was also a 5-4 decision. Previously, the Court had tried to build an unanimous or near-unanimous majority on decisive new turns in legal interpretation, like Brown v. Board of Education (1954), decided 9-0.

She is focusing, without saying so in exactly these terms, on the "originalist" dogma that The Scalia-ists use to justify their destructive judicial activism, claiming that they are going back fundamentalist fashion to the original intent of the sacred Founders. The legislative record is important in evaluating a law, and that is a well-established part of judicial review and interpretation. But the Federalist Society zealots use it very instrumentally. The initial context is important but not conclusive in applying the law in new conditions.

Kaminer doesn't discuss how bad the history is that the gun lobby and their supporters bring to bear in their idolizing of the Second Amendment (excluding the words "well regulated" which they don't seem to notice are there).

Robert Perry takes a look at this aspect of The Right's Dangerously Bad History Consortium News 01/18/2013. reminding us among other things that part of the original history of Second Amendment was to protect the right of slave states to require white citizens to participate in (state-regulated) armed slave patrols:

Today’s Right also has misrepresented the original intent of the Second Amendment, which reads: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” This concession also was primarily to the states which wanted militias to maintain “security.”

The context for those concerns related to the recent experience of Shays’ Rebellion in western Massachusetts (in 1786-87) as well as the fear of slave revolts in the South and raids by Native Americans on the frontier. The states wanted their own militias to put down such uprisings.

In the early days of the Republic, the Second Amendment also was not seen as a universal right for individuals. For instance, some states passed “Black Codes” that barred all African-Americans from owning guns. When the Second Congress passed the Militia Act of 1792, the law specified arming “white” men of military age.

Digby has been sharing some gems on the gun proliferation issue. She links to this piece by Thom Hartmann emphasizing the slave patrol part of the Second Amendment history, The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery The Smirking Chimp 01/16/2013. Digby's comment on it in What were the founders really afraid of? Hullabaloo 01/17/2013:

The original sin of slavery just filters through our entire cultural and civic foundation, doesn't it?

I can't say that I'm completely surprised that the 2nd Amendment had a strong pro-slavery component considering the cultural fault lines. The idea that everyone was running in fear of the future government they were creating never rang true, despite Jefferson's musings about the need for revolution every once in a while. The need to raise a militia to repel foreign invaders? Of course. Especially since they expressly provided for no standing army. But there was always something else in there. And this makes sense.

Making sense, of course, is the last thing that the gun lobbies like the NRA want anyone to be doing when it comes to gun proliferation and gun regulation.

She also links to this useful study by Amanda Ripley, Your Brain in a Shootout: Guns, Fear and Flawed Instincts Time Swampland 01/16/2013, which discusses some of the real-world considerations of using guns for self-defense. People should be realistic about self-defense; being a fool about it can get you dead. And being fools about it is exactly what the NRA's propaganda encourages people to do. "Winning a gunfight without shooting innocent people typically requires realistic, expensive training and a special kind of person, a fact that has been strangely absent in all the back-and-forth about assault-weapon bans and the Second Amendment," Ripley writes.

She cites the experience of former police officer Jim Glennon in an actual shootout while on duty. And she quotes him on the topic of gun preparedness:

Today, Glennon runs Calibre Press, a law-enforcement training company based outside Chicago, and has trained tens of thousands of police officers nationwide. His primary message to his trainees is that they need better training than they typically get; real gunfights are nothing like the ones on TV. “Over half the police officers in the country are only required to go down once or twice a year and shoot holes in a paper target,” he says. Experts who study human performance in gunfights generally agree that people can train to perform better through highly realistic, dynamic simulation training. But that is expensive, especially compared with traditional target practice, and it doesn't happen often enough.

In the aftermath of the Newtown shootings, as local governments contemplate allowing more firearms in schools, Glennon worries that communities might inadvertently undertrain civilians just as they have done with police officers. "Cops aren’t trained well enough, so what do you think they’re going to do with teachers?" he says. "It's not enough just to carry a gun."

Bob Cesca warns that the cops-in-schools idea could be a trap for opponents of gun proliferation during the sausage-making of legislation, The NRA is Ready for the Gun Control Fight. Are You? The Daily Banter 01/17/2013:

As for the assault weapons ban, the president will definitely have his work cut out for him here, especially in the NRA-owned House of Representatives. In addition, don’t be surprised if the Republicans try to strong-arm the administration on the NRA’s latest gun-sales gimmick: turning public schools into a U.S./Soviet style arms races, with escalating caches of firearms entering buildings in which nothing more dangerous than spitballs and cafeteria tater-tots should be present. (I was about to write a line joking that the NRA is attempting to transform schools into post-apocalyptic Thunderdomes, but then I recalled from the Mad Max trivia cortex of my brain that guns weren’t even allowed inside the walls of Bartertown.) Regardless, the NRA sees the school arsenal argument as a two-pronged win for them: it distracts from real gun control laws and, if actually enacted, it would create a new market for firearms and a cash cow for the private security industry.

I also can imagine a lot of smoke being blown over this one. It's important to remember that the idea of providing funding for police in schools where the local communities clearly need the protection has been a Democratic priority for a while, and this is very different from the NRA's proposal.

The NRA's priorities are first, last and always: sell more guns and ammunition by promoting more fear. Always. The NRA's version is more-or-less to put a bunch of vigilantes as guards in the schools; the notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who literally "pals around" with neo-Nazis, already wants to implement a version of the NRA's approach. In the real world of allocating police resources - something that is not part of the NRA's priority at all - it's probably a poor use of police resource to assign a full-time officer to a school unless it's a large one with a significant risk of violence among the students.

See Evan McMorris-Santoro's report, Teachers Union Explains Why It Supports Obama’s Guns In Schools Plan But Not NRA’s TPM 01/16/2013 for more on this.

Oh, and then there's this: Blake Thorne, Security guard leaves gun unattended in restroom at Lapeer charter school MLive.com 01/16/2012. Awesome!

Some conservatives are struggling to articulate a less insane opposition to gun regulations, trying to serve the domestic arms lobby with more coherent and less hysterical propaganda than the culture warriors at the NRA can seem to manage. James Zogby offers a version of the "gee, I'd like to do something about guns but nothing will really help much, because, uh, human nature or whatever" argument in Gun Crazy Huffington Post 01/19/2013:

The president has now signed Executive Orders offering small but eminently supportable reforms. And Congress can and should pass an assault weapon ban and universal background checks for prospective gun purchasers. But these will not solve the problem. Nor will the rather bizarre proposals from gun advocates that we turn our schools into maximum security facilities with armed guards and kindergarten teachers carrying concealed weapons, or that we take a page from our "cold war" with the USSR allowing airline passengers to carry weapons thereby creating a "mutually assured destruction" stand-off on planes.

No, our problem is neither that our guns are too sophisticated for our own good or that we don't have enough of them. Our problem is simpler and deeper. It is our "gun culture" and guns, period. [my emphasis]

This is a more highbrow version of the NRA's diversionary approach. Look, over there! Video games!!

Not surprisingly, David "Bobo" Brooks also gets into the act. Bobo's having a big sad right now, because after four years of eagerly looking for Obama's Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to be enacted, he now concluding that it's "the end of the era of the Grand Bargain" (The Next Four Years 01/17/2013) He had been so looking forward to seeing starving grannies tossed out on the street!

Now, he's all worried that Obama and the Democrats might actually start seriously trying to enact a Democratic domestic agency. So he's reverting to good old conservative, "oh this big gubment stuff never works, you know." He applied that approach to gun regulation on his Political Wrap segment with Sleepy Mark Shields on the PBS Newshour 01/18/2013:

Neither Bobo nor half-asleep Mark mentioned the dramatically shifting polls on gun proliferation. But Bobo took a similar position to Zogby's:

I was surprised by the assault weapons part. I knew there would be the waiting list and some of the other things, the magazine stuff, but it was pretty comprehensive.

And it's worth pointing out that this was an issue that Democrats spent 10 years ignoring, and for good reasons -- or good political reasons, anyway, not good substantive reasons -- which was that it was seen as a cultural issue which alienated you from rural voters and it hurts Democrats -- or hurts Democrats who are in red states. ...

but, listen, I support the things, all the laws. If I were a member of the Congress, I would vote for it all. But the data is very problematic for the proponents.

We have had terrible research, in part because the NRA prevents good research. But the research we have doesn't suggest these things make a huge difference. We have had a big bill in '68. We had the Brady bill. We have had other bills. In general, when you look at the broad survey of the research, it is very hard to see big differences.

There are some areas where you do see differences. Some of the magazines do reduce en masse killing. But the level of murders, it doesn't really change much. Where I think it is most fertile to make progress, most gun violence is suicides. And if you could -- and a lot of those suicides are impulsive.

And if you can delay people's access to guns by a week, you really can do potentially some good in preventing some suicides, especially senior citizens. So I think there are some possibilities. The danger there, again -- and this is all problematic -- most people who kill themselves with guns do it with handguns, which are not really under discussion here.

And so the social science data, I think, is reasonably sound not that -- not that it doesn't work, but it doesn't work a lot.

Tags: gun control, gun proliferation, national rifle association, nra

The NRA and finding Rev. Ezekiel Bittery

Way back in 2005, when it was the Republican President George W. Bush pushing to cut benefits on Social Security and not a Democratic President, I recalled a story from one of Sinclair Lewis' less well known novels, Gideon Planish (1943), about the Rev. Ezekiel Bittery.

I was reminded of it this week, seeing people express surprise at the blithering fanaticism being articulated so proudly and publicly by the National Rifle Association (NRA). Joan Walsh, for instance, asks in Salon, Has the NRA lost it entirely? 01/16/2013 (or at least the headline-writer asks it). She explains what she means:

On the eve of President Obama announcing his gun control agenda, based on Vice President Joe Biden's task force recommendations, the National Rifle Association needed to go big: to remind Americans that the organization protects their gun rights, and to remind politicians that they’re a smart and formidable political force they’d be unwise to cross.

Instead, they showed us the truth: They're part of the vast and increasingly incompetent right-wing conspiracy that's sacrificed its own effectiveness for the pleasure of hating Democrats generally and our first black president in particular.

But, as Steven Rosenfeld explains in The Suprising Unknown History of the NRA Alternet 01/13/2013, the NRA went off the political deep end in 1977. And they've stayed there ever since.

Which brings me to the Rev. Bittery. Plagiarizing freely from my 2005 post here, Sinclair Lewis use the good Reverend to illustrate "Research", which he calls "[o]ne of the most important activities of any liberal educational organization." The example, set in the late 1930s, is the Rev. Ezekiel Bittery. Apparently he had some problems with his formal credentials, because the narrator refers to him as the "ex-Reverend."

The first step in Research is to gather a bunch of stories from newspapers about Brother Bittery and then write him to get some of his pamphlets. Then you have a few people go listen to his speeches live. With this procedure, it becomes well established that:

... Brother Bittery is a flannel-mouthed rabble-rouser who used to be charged not only with stealing the contents of the church poor-box, but of taking the box itself home to keep radishes in, and who at present if he isn't on the pay-roll of all the Fascists, is a bad collector.

After considering the matter for a couple of years, a Congressional committee proceeds to investigation, establishing for the record that "Mr. Bittery used to be a hell-fire preacher and is now a hell-fire Fascist."

More Research ensues, with scholars applying themselves to the phenomenon, which reveals "that Mr. Bittery used to favor lynching agnostics and now favors lynching socialists."

And during all this time, the Reverend Ezekiel himself will, as publicly as possible, to as many persons as he can persuade to attend his meetings, have admitted, insisted, bellowed, that he has always been a Ku Kluxer and a Fascist, that he has always hated Jews, colleges and good manners, and that the only thing he has ever disliked about Hitler is that he once tried to paint barns instead of leaving the barns the way God made them.

That is Research.

We're still rediscovering Rev. Bittery.

Tags: authoritarianism, christian right, christianism, ezekiel bittery, gideon planish, national rifle association, nra, sinclair lewis

Hitler, gun control and the American culture war

Alex Seitz-Wald has a good piece that takes on of the gun proliferation advocates' favorite factoids, The Hitler gun control lie Salon 01/11/2013. It's a real look at what gun laws were under the Third Reich.

Of course, anyone who gets their history from the NRA or anonymous forwarded e-mails just knows that Hitler banned private ownership of guns. And the fact that it isn't true won't stop them from saying it.

I have a minor quibble with one historical point mentioned: I would have specified that Hitler's public works projects were primarily in the service of preparing for war.

As he points out, German Jews "and other persecuted classes [sic]" were eventually banned from owning weapons. But there was never any attempt to stage an armed Jewish uprising, nor would such an attempt have been feasible. He quotes historian Omar Bartov, "The [Russian] Red Army lost 7 million men fighting the Wehrmacht, despite its tanks and planes and artillery. The Jews with pistols and shotguns would have done better?"

The German conspirators against Hitler, including those of the famous July 20 plot that probably not one in 10,000 of Wayne LaPierre's admirers could say what that is, also did not plan a mass uprising. They did use force. But their aim was to assassinate Hitler with a bomb and stage a military coup against the NSDAP (Nazi) government. It was not a plan to seize a radio station and call on everyone to get their handguns and hunting rifles and march on Berlin. Nor would that approach have had a large chance of success.

Also, they might have mentioned that Hitler did not take power primarily by force. The conservatives (yes, conservatives!) appointed him as Chancellor.

The NSDAP did have kind of a private army, the SA (Brownshirts), that had a big effect in causing disorders, a conscious strategy. But when Hitler decided to suppress them in 1934 (the Röhm Putsch, aka, Night of the Long Knives), the SA couldn't manage much resistance despite being armed thugs trained in street fighting.

Oh, there were also anti-Nazi private fighting groups before 1933: The Social Democratic Party's Reichsbannner, union groups and the Communists' Red Front. Can you picture any followers of the NRA's Wayne LaPierre participating with socialist union members in street-fighting against Nazis?

Me neither.

Seitz-Wald also links to this article by Deborah Homsher, Response to Bernard E. Harcourt's On Gun Registration, the NRA, Adolf Hitler, and Nazi Gun Laws: Exploding the Gun Culture Wars (A Call to Historians) Fordham Law Review 73/2 (1/2004). The article to which the title refers is Bernard Harcourt's On Gun Registration, the NRA, Adolf Hitler, and NaziGun Laws: Exploding the Gun Culture Wars (A Call to Historians) in the same issue.

Harcourt looks at the ways in which the gun proliferation advocacy has become thoroughly integrated in the rightwing "culture war" narrative. He quotes then soon-to-be NRA President Charlton Heston from a notorious 09/11/1997 speech known as the "The Second Amendment: America's First Freedom, for instance, is laced with references to Hitler's Germany":

Heaven help the God-fearing, law-abiding, Caucasian, middle class, protestant, or even worse evangelical Christian, midwest or southern or even worse rural, apparently straight or even worse admitted heterosexual, gun-owning or even worse NRA-card-carrying, average working stiff, or even, worst of all, a male working stiff, because then, not only don't you count, you're a downright nuisance, an obstacle to social progress, pal.

That pretty much sums it up. White Christian nationalism and white-guy whining married to the gun proliferation advocates and the gun lobby.

On December 7 of that same year, Heston had this to say in a speech to the Free Congress Foundation:

I wonder - how many of you in this room own guns but chose not to raise your hand?

How many of you considered revealing your conviction about a constitutional right, but then thought better of it?

Then you are a victim of the cultural war. You are a casualty of the cultural warfare being waged against traditional American freedom of beliefs and ideas. Now maybe you don't care one way or the other about owning a gun. But I could've asked for a show of hands on Pentecostal Christians, or pro-lifers, or right-to-workers, or Promise Keepers, or school voucher-ers, and the result would be the same. What if the same question were asked at your PTA meeting? Would you raise your hand if Dan Rather were in the back of the room there with a film crew?

See? Good. Still, if you didn't, you have been assaulted and robbed of the courage of your convictions. Your pride in who you are, and what you believe, has been ridiculed, ransacked, plundered. It may be a war without bullet or bloodshed, but with just as much liberty lost: You and your country are less free. ...

The Constitution was handed down to guide us by a bunch of those wise old dead white guys who invented this country. Now, some flinch when I say that. Why? It's true...they were white guys. So were most of the guys who died in Lincoln's name opposing slavery in the 1860s. So why should I be ashamed of white guys? Why is "Hispanic pride" or "black pride" a good thing, while "white pride" conjures up shaved heads and white hoods? Why was the Million Man March on Washington celebrated in the media as progress, while the Promise Keepers March on Washington was greeted with suspicion and ridicule? I'll tell you why: Cultural warfare.

Speaking of the folks that Sarah Palin would later label the Real Americans, he said:

These people have precious little time or resources to battle misguided Cinderella attitudes, the fringe propaganda of the homosexual coalition, the feminists who preach that it's a divine duty for women to hate men, blacks who raise a militant fist with one hand while they seek preference with the other, and all the New-Age apologists for juvenile crime, who see roving gangs as a means of youthful expression, sex as a means of adolescent merchandising, violence as a form of entertainment for impressionable minds, and gun bans as a means to lord-knows-what. We've reached that point in time when our national social policy originates on Oprah. I say it's time to pull the plug.

Heston was only a first vice president of the NRA when he gave that speech. We could speculate on whether it helped or hurt his popularity within the organization, but he became its president the following year.

Harcourt notes that there is no small irony in gun proliferation advocates trying to label liberal gun control advocates and their other culture-war enemies as being Nazis:

The Nazi-gun-registration argument is also a bit disorienting because, at least whenever I have been to a gun show, there are always displays of Nazi paraphernalia. The fringe pro-Nazi element in this country has far more ties to the pro-gun community than it does to the anti-gun community, and you are far more likely to see a swastika at a gun show or a pro-gun rally than you are at the anti-gun Million Mom March on the Washington Mall.

Much of the discussion between Harcourt's and Homsher's article is around ways for gun proliferation opponents to effectively counter the gun lobby's culture-war arguments.

Harcourt points hopefully to the Hitler gun control trope as a hopeful example about how the potential diversity of opinion among the gun proliferation supporters. "The fact is, there is tremendous fragmentation internal to the pro-gun community on the specific issue of Hitler and gun registration. Not all pro-gunners buy the Hitler argument." The first thing I thought of when I read this was the diversity of opinion among UFO devotees. They will have seemingly technical and well-informed debates among themselves about this or that claim or their Grand Theory of where the extraterrestrial visitors or coming from and what their intentions are.

But when it comes to addressing the fanaticism and unwillingness and/or inability to do sound reality-testing on the subject, those divisions are mostly not very meaningful. And the fact that some gun proliferation supporters may be tired of being embarrassed by having the fact that they're lying about the Hitler gun control thing pointed out to them also isn't a very promising sign of flexibility on the gun proliferation issue. As Homsher says in her response:

It is the repetitive qualities, the deaf and deafening qualities, of the American gun debates that most amaze me. We cannot analyze these debates properly unless we recognize that, in many cases, they are not conducted by scholarly methods, where the evidence is collected before the conclusions are reached. Instead, frequently, the conclusions are reached first and supporting evidence - from Nazi Germany, from the post-Civil War South, even from Cambodia, Indonesia, or China - is then mustered to be used as ammunition.

Tags: charlton heston, gun control

Skeptical of the NRA

Craig Murray seems to think that the National Rifle Association (NRA) might not be entirely sincere in their official justifications for opposing gun laws (Arms and the Man 04/17/07).

There have been a series of American commentators popping up on the TV, explaining that the right to bear arms is necessary to guard against an over-mighty executive. The strange thing is that the US now has an over-mighty executive, which has completely unbalanced the famous separation of powers. As yet I see no sign of the NRA forming up to march on the White House.

Tags: craig murray, gun control, national rifle association, nra, virginia shooting