Wayne LaPierre, NRA chief

By Bob Gaydos

Well, all it took for America to finally enter into a serious, rational discussion of gun control was for 20 kindergarten students to get gunned down in school by a troubled young man with an automatic weapon and lots of ammo. Who says we’ve become desensitized?

I mean, it is perfectly rational for the chairwoman of a legislative committee in Ulster County, N.Y., to argue against her state’s recently enacted tough gun control law by stating: “Genocide is almost always preceded by gun confiscation. History tells us that.” That’s rational isn’t it?

After all, that threat of government confiscation of guns is right out of the literature of the National Rifle Association, proud defender of all citizens’ rights, or at least those rights as the NRA interprets them in the Second Amendment. And genocide is not a loaded word meant to inspire fear in the minds of the less-informed members of the citizenry, is it?

Of course not. All the sturm und drung among self-declared fans of the Second Amendment — the marches and demonstrations and outraged letters to the editor — are, at least as the NRA sees it, justified sensible responses to proposals by President Barack Obama and countless political leaders around the country, including in New York, to rob them of their right to own as many guns as they want, of as many types, with as much ammo, and, truth be told, the right to carry them around anywhere they want, concealed or not, whenever they want.

Because you never know when the government is going to come after you. Hey, look at Ruby Ridge, right? Right. But setting aside the right or wrong of that incident for a moment, who won that particular shootout? And if the motivation for unfettered gun ownership is to protect citizens against their own government — as the NRA leadership often claims — how in the name of anything sane could a group of heavily armed citizens — of any size — prevail against the might of the American military with an even more unfettered access to weapons of every type? Forget the fact that most Americans have no real fear that their government is going to come after them armed to the teeth, most Americans also know that would be a losing battle.

That’s why they focus their energies in the gun control debate on such sensible proposals as requiring a background check for anyone who wants to buy a gun. All recent polls say roughly 90 percent of Americans favor this idea. That obviously includes many gun owners, but not the NRA leaders. And if they fear the government coming after their guns, why do roughly 70 percent of Americans favor creation of a federal database of gun sales? To make the FBI’s job easier? Actually, yes. Because it is the sane thing to do.

As support for gun control measures have gained strength in the wake of the ghastly shooting in Newtown, Conn., the arguments against more restrictions have grown increasingly strident and outrageous by some elements of the NRA.

This is a typical, fearful response. After years of bullying and cowing politicians with threats of political defeat, the NRA leadership is faced with a growing consensus of citizens — if not politicians — who are fed up with people claiming they have the right to carry AK-47s around in public, with lots of well-stocked magazines, because our Founding Fathers gave them that right. In fact, polls show 55 to 60 percent of Americans favor a ban on semi-automatic and assault-type weapons and about 55 percent favor a ban on high-capacity ammo magazines of the type that has created such a furor in New York because the Legislature voted to downsize the capacity from 10 to 7 rounds. This has led some gun owners to fret about being “outgunned.” I for one, don’t want to be around for that shootout, whoever has the most bullets.

The point is that as ever larger numbers of average Americans have finally stepped forward to support sensible restrictions on gun ownership, the arguments by the most avid opponents of gun control have become less sensible. Kids being shot in school? Arm the teachers. Want a safer city? Let citizens strap on guns in public. A few proud Americans armed with AR15s will keep any shopping mall safe. Requiring background checks at gun shows will only keep criminals from trying to get guns there. And making it harder for criminals to get guns is bad, why?

There is no assault on the Second Amendment going on in this gun-crazy country. (There are about 300 million firearms privately owned in America, but most Americans don’t own guns. Most gun owners own two or more weapons.) Rather, there is a growing public consensus that the time of being fearful of the NRA and its most vocal advocates is gone, drowned in the blood of kindergarten students. Politicians who don’t get this are those fearful of losing political and financial support from the NRA and some of its members. It is time for courage on their part. The responsible, prudent course for them would be to suggest reasonable restrictions on gun ownership, not rail about the unfairness of some laws that were long overdue. Work to right good laws.

The NRA has waged a long, illogical campaign of fear and threat in the guise of protecting citizens’ rights. But in recent weeks it has shown through statements of its leader, Wayne LaPierre, that its agenda is not about protecting the Second Amendment, but rather removing any and all restrictions on gun ownership. But the U.N. is not coming for your guns, America. Genocide is not on the horizon. Grow up. Demand sensible gun laws that protect you from those who have no business owning deadly weapons.

Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Our Founding Fathers also believed in those rights. No one has ever needed an assault weapon to enjoy them in America.

bob@zestoforange.com 

By Jeffrey Page

The hand wringing over the Second Amendment continues in the days and weeks after the Newtown Horror. In op-ed columns and letters to editors some people who support the gun lobby have expressed concern that any attempt by the government to regulate gun traffic somehow betrays the spirit of the Bill of Rights.

The framers didn’t limit the people’s basic rights 221 years ago so why should we allow limitations now, the question goes. This is specious in two important respects. For one thing, taken to its no-limitation conclusion, we may soon hear an argument by the National Rifle Association and other gun rights advocates suggesting that to prevent someone from possession of flame throwers, nerve gas and nuclear weapons somehow deprives us of our right to bear arms. It sounds absurd, but deep down you know that someone, sometime is going to test this position.

Then there’s the generally overlooked fact that we have always placed limitations on the rights handed to the people in the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.

–The limits on free speech – including the cry of “Fire!” in a theater, calls to violence, conspiracy, slandering, and libeling – have been detailed almost to the point of cliché. But platitudes or not, they remain limits on what are generally believed to be – but are not – absolute freedoms in the First Amendment.

–The First Amendment also prevents the government from establishing an official religion, but violations of this occur almost every year around this time. Invariably, some local bodies somewhere in America allow the placement of a Christmas tree, a crèche or a menorah on municipal property, thus violating the spirit of the First Amendment.

–The Eighth Amendment prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments,” which might come as a surprise to the two-thirds of the states with capital punishment statutes on their books.

–And then of course there is the explicit limitation in the 27 words of the Second Amendment itself: “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.” It’s confusing in its brevity, and this puzzlement is what keeps the fight over the amendment alive. The right of the people to keep arms shall not be infringed, yet the militia – comprised of the people – will be not just regulated, but well regulated.

What does “well-regulated” mean? I suggest that my interpretation of those two words is as valid as the NRA’s, maybe more. Here’s what I mean:

No, you may not possess a hand grenade, an Abrams battle tank or an assault rifle, all of which are designed to kill large numbers and not a white tailed deer or a couple of ducks. Those weapons are for the military.

And yes, background checks on the criminal and mental health histories of prospective gun buyers will be conducted with fervor and honesty. If this results in an extended long waiting period, so be it.

What America needs are politicians with the courage to inform the National Rifle Association that the working definition of “well-regulated” will not be written by NRA flacks.

The families of victims grieve near Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman opened fire on students and staff members, killing 20 children and six adults. Photo by Adrees Latif/Reuters

“Guns magnify impulses. Assault weapons and high-capacity clips multiply victims exponentially.”

– Jeffrey Jampel, New York Times website commenter

By Emily Theroux

Two days after the horrific slaughter of 20 first-graders and six adults by a suicidal rampage killer armed with a semi-automatic rifle, witless Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert had the basic lack of human decency to use the gunman’s monstrous act for political gain.

Dawn Hochsprung, the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, died in a hail of bullets while trying to tackle shooter Adam Lanza, during a brave but futile attempt to save more of the nascent lives in her care. On Faux News, the wingnut congressman projectile-vomited obscene National Rifle Association propaganda:

“I wish to God she had had an M-4 [assault rifle] in her office, locked up, so when she heard gunfire, she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands, but she takes him out, takes his head off, before he can kill those precious kids.”

Oh, really, Louie? And exactly how would that fantasy scenario have gone down? By the time the principal “heard gunfire,” most of those children would already have been mowed down. By the time she unlocked the cabinet, Lanza would have shot her in the back. (And in the hellhole of that darkened Colorado movie theater back in July, armed vigilantes probably would have shot themselves, each other, and many of the people they were trying to protect.)

The Newtown shooter held all the cards: premeditation, deadly intent, the “magical thinking” of mental aberration, the power burst of adrenaline, and the perennial advantage of surprise. He also had a green light (even though it only inadvertently lit the pathway for a maniac looking for easy firepower) from elected politicians  and National Rifle Association lobbyists.

Gun apologists like to defer responsibility for shooting rampages in America onto happenstance, or God’s anger at secular humanists for “kicking prayer out of the public schools,” or individual lunatics who would surely have resorted to bombs if they had been prevented by gun-control laws from acquiring firearms.

Among mainstays of the far-right firearms rationale:

1) If more people carried guns, these incidents could be thwarted.

2) Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. If people didn’t have access to guns, they would just use something else.

3) Such mass shootings always happen in states with gun control laws, which are strict enough as it is.

4) The guns Lanza used were legally registered to his mother, so his apparent mental issues wouldn’t have prevented the rampage weapons from falling into his hands.

5) “We need 30-round magazines for target shooting.”

6) The Second Amendment guarantees the absolute right of all American citizens to own as many guns as they want (according to a controversial 2008 ruling by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority).

7) “We have the right to defend ourselves.

Targeting NRA talking points with rapier of reason:

1) People who keep guns in their homes or cars for purposes of protection from intruders, muggers, or murderers (including Nancy Lanza) are more likely to injure or kill a family member or loved one” (or themselves) than to use a gun against a threatening outsider, according to Washington Cease Fire, a Seattle gun-control organization that ran a campaign of bus ads urging people “to think twice about owning guns,” after a series of gun accidents killed or wounded three young children (two of them after being momentarily left by their parents in cars with loaded handguns “hidden” under the seats.

A 2011 survey by the Harvard School of Public Health indicated that the health risk of keeping guns in the home is greater than the benefit. “The presence of a gun makes quarrels, disputes, assaults, and robberies more deadly. Many murders are committed in a moment of rage,” wrote Dr. David Hemenway. “For example, a large percentage of homicides – and especially homicides in the home – occur during altercations over matters such as love, money, and domestic problems.” The survey presented no credible evidence that guns reduce injury during a home invasion.

2) Adam Lanza’s attack wouldn’t have ever occurred (or to have been as lethal to so many victims) if he hadn’t had access to semi-automatic guns, and it wouldn’t have taken place “in the blink of an eye” without a 30-round ammunition clip. (By contrast, on the same day as the Sandy Hook school massacre, a deranged man in China attacked 22 elementary school students with the deadliest weapon he could get his hands on in a country with strict gun laws: a knife. Death toll? Zero.)

3) Connecticut does prohibit assault weapons, but the Bushmaster AR-15 semi-automatic rifle used by Lanza is exempt from the ban. Republican legislators riddled the 1994 federal ban as well as similar state bans with numerous loopholes that limited the definition of a banned “assault weapon” to include fully automatic firearms (already banned since 1934) and only certain semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines with at least two of five features: a folding or telescoping stock, a pistol grip, a bayonet mount, a grenade launcher, and/or a flash suppressor. Most NRA supporters claim the definition is bogus anyway, because even though the high-capacity magazine allows you to shoot much faster than a non-automatic gun would, you still have to pull the trigger each time you fire a semi-automatic.

This point may soon become moot, since the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management announced plans to “immediately” sell the Freedom Group, which manufactures the Bushmaster – after the California teachers’ pension plan suggested it might reconsider its $750 million investment with Cerberus in the wake of the elementary school tragedy. (Making this move even more imperative was the fact that Martin Feinberg, the father of the firm’s owner, billionaire financier Stephen A. Feinberg, happens to live in Newtown, Connecticut and pronounced the shooting “horrendous, truly horrendous.”)

4) You could easily argue that Nancy Lanza was just as disturbed as her son. Described by her own sister as an adherent of a doomsday survivalist cult, she was an avid gun collector and knew her son was mentally unbalanced. Nevertheless, she taught Adam and his brother how to fire guns at shooting ranges. Should she have been able to legally purchase a semi-automatic rifle and multiple-round magazines?

5) The grave danger to our children from semi-automatic firearms and high-capacity magazines far outweighs the fleeting pleasure of pretending to mow down “bad guys” (or federal agents, depending on the imaginative and ideological bent of the individual target shooter). The 30-round magazine used by Lanza was designed to allow soldiers to fire as many rounds as possible (and at a lightning-fast clip) at enemy troops or insurgents, with an optimal goal of killing them while surviving the encounter.

As Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey pointed out on The Ed Show, semi-automatic rifles equipped with high-capacity magazines were designed for use by the military, not for hunting or target shooting. (An Olympic marksman doesn’t use an assault weapon to hit a bullseye, as my husband pointed out. “It’s a power weapon, not a precision weapon,” Lance explained.”You don’t shoot assault weapons to take precise aim but to cut your target in half.” After I heard him out, I rather wished I hadn’t.)

6) Until four years ago, most federal judges agreed with the historic interpretation of the Second Amendment, whose purpose was “to ensure that the ‘state armies’ – ‘the militia’ – would be maintained for the defense of the state,” according to Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative Nixon appointee to the Supreme Court. The amendment, as Cass Sunstein recalled the justice saying in 1991, “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word fraud – on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

The D.C. vs. Heller decision in 2008 may have granted a right to bear arms to individuals for the first time, but it didn’t obviate many forms of gun control, Sunstein observed.“Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms,” wrote none other than Antonin Scalia, arguably the court’s most radical member.

7) The truly fanatic gun-rights fringe (folks far to the right of the NRA – like Larry Pratt, executive director for the past 30 years of Gun Owners of America) wants access to assault weapons for what 2010 Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle called “Second Amendment remedies.” Far-right conspiracy theorists have been stockpiling guns and ammo since the president’s first term – not to be used by “a well-regulated militia” to defend “the security of a free state,” but to shore their movement up against the federal government, in case Obama should suddenly ban all gun sales, and proclaim the dreaded “One World Order” – which is considered a very real threat by survivalists.

Others, however, are beginning to disagree. Republican Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan just vetoed a bill, passed the night before the shooting, that would have allowed concealed pistol license holders to carry concealed pistols in churches, schools, and day-care centers. And lifetime NRA member Joe Manchin, the junior senator from West Virginia, uttered words that would have been considered heresy a week ago: “I don’t know anybody that needs 30 rounds in the clip to go hunting.”

With the number of gun deaths expected to exceed traffic fatalities for the first time by 2015, reasonable people need to start paying attention.

Emily Theroux can be contacted at emily@zestoforange.com.

By Emily Theroux

It’s been a wild fortnight, as the Brits would say, in America’s homegrown “killing fields.”

Two shooting rampages have bookended the nightmarishly brief span of a mere two weeks, leaving the national psyche reeling from a surfeit of firearms carnage. On Sunday morning, the cable news channels were firmly focused on Mitt Romney’s propaganda prizefight with former boxer Harry Reid over whether the GOP candidate had paid any taxes during the past decade.

Meanwhile, at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, a neo-Nazi white supremacist named Wade Michael Page allegedly opened fire on a dozen worshipers, killing half of them before being shot in the stomach by police and “finishing himself off” with a self-inflicted shot to the head. Amardeep Kaleka, the son of the temple’s slain leader, Satwant Singh Kaleka, 65, later said Page appeared to be deliberately picking off male members of the congregation who wore their uncut hair wrapped in turbans, in accordance with Sikh religious practice.

The mainstream press sat up that afternoon and took notice, however briefly — which, with the exception of CNN, appeared to be just long enough to ascertain whether any white people had been killed in Wisconsin. Here’s how I imagine the chit-chat in the afternoon news meetings went down: “Sikhs, you say? A 500-year-old monotheistic religion with 30 million members worldwide, approximately 500,000 of whom live in the U.S., according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, those strange lefties who keep track of racist hate groups. It says right here: ‘Sikhs are not Muslims.’ Bet Wade Michael Page thought they were. So what are we looking at? Brown-skinned ‘other’ victims; tattooed skinhead member of the white-supremacist Hammerskins; disgraced ex-soldier; punk-rock musician “hate band” member; and drunken loser of a shooter who is already ‘history’ himself. Well, we all know what happened there. No pretty young white girls killed or kidnapped. Nothing to see here. Bummer — toss it to the bloggers!”

Riddhi Shah, who practices a related Indian religion known as Jainism, wrote an opinion piece in The Huffington Post asking why the American media appeared to care less about this attack than the one that had stunned the nation two weeks earlier in Colorado. The Week, a roundup of online news and opinion, offered four possible reasons:

1. Sikhs are being treated as second-class victims.
2. The relative randomness of the Aurora shooting is scarier.
3. The Oak Creek shooting wasn’t as dramatic.
4. It’s just media fatigue.

My vote, I’m afraid, remains largely with Numero Uno — not because the mainstream media are racist, but because I truly believe they peg their coverage primarily to readership and ratings. Round-the-clock coverage had already been designated to the Olympics; did TV viewers really want gymnastics superseded by wall-to-wall cable broadcasting devoted to members of an obscure religion that most Americans — including, very likely, their killer — confused with Muslims?

Unlike the cases of Jared Lee Loughner, James Holmes, and even Major Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood shooter, the Sikh temple shooting by Wade Michael Page is reportedly being investigated by the FBI as a domestic terror incident. (Fox News, by the way, wasn’t at all pleased that the Hassan shooting case was classified as a “work-related” incident — and they’re not too keen on the shooting of non-white Sikhs warranting the domestic terror designation they expected for Hassan. The difference is that, while Page may have actually committed a hate crime targeting members of a specific ethnic and religious group, Hassan shot  co-workers of no particular race, creed, or nationality.)

Jared Lee Loughner sorry he ‘failed’ to kill Gabby Giffords

Two days after the Sikh temple tragedy, Arizona mass murderer Loughner — who killed six people and seriously wounded then-Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords — resurfaced to plead guilty to his crime.

During the tense weeks after Loughner’s arrest, pols and pundits alike buzzed with speculation about whether the shooting rampage had a political motive. The gunman appeared to have targeted a Democratic congresswoman who had barely won reelection in 2010 in a blazing red state. At issue was the fact that 2008 GOP veep candidate Sarah Palin had included Giffords among 20 “vulnerable” Democrats whose districts Palin believed had a good chance of falling to their Tea Party opponents. Palin’s infamous “Don’t Retreat; Reload!” map featured what resembled a gun sight hovering over each “targeted” district.

As it turned out, however, Jared Lee Loughner was a schizophrenic who was probably too preoccupied with listening to the cacophony of incoherent voices inside his head to have been paying much attention to the rantings of wingnut radio haters.

All Loughner had to reveal this week was how sorry he was that he had “failed,” as he had in most of his past endeavors, in his mission of killing Gabby Giffords. (Loughner also admitted that he likes the menial jobs he is assigned in prison, because even he can succeed at them.)

Gov. Rick Scott vows to defend Florida’s  ‘Docs vs. Glocks’ law

Somewhere along the short and winding road from Aurora, Colorado, to Oak Creek, Wisconsin, Florida’s trigger-happy governor, “Sheriff Rick” Scott, stepped out into the public square, six-shooters blazing, for yet another “Second Amendment remedies” showdown: a solemn oath to appeal Florida’s controversial “Docs vs. Glocks” law, which makes it a crime for doctors to ask patients if they own guns.

“The NRA’s gun for hire” (as Adam Weinstein, Mother Jones’ national security reporter, tagged him), Florida firearms lobbyist Marion Hammer told The Tampa Tribune, “Patients don’t like being interrogated about whether or not they own guns when they take their child with a sore throat to a pediatrician, nor do they like being interrogated in an emergency room when their Little Leaguer broke his leg sliding into first base.”

“First, do no harm” is rapidly being replaced by “Shoot first; ask (no) questions later” in the clinic and urgent-care waiting rooms of America. While you’re filling out the standard physicians’ questionnaire about past illnesses and unhealthy habits (e.g., alcohol, tobacco, and fast food dripping in trans-fats and high-fructose corn syrup), doesn’t it stand to reason that your doctor might also want to know about “risk factors” unrelated to stuff you consume — such as whether you sleep with a loaded 9mm handgun under your pillow? Or how about locking up that unsecured Uzi before it occurs to your 5-year-old to play “show and tell” with his little neighborhood friends?

Until a federal judge tossed the 2011 Firearm Owners’ Privacy Act out of court on the grounds that it violated doctors’ First Amendment rights, this bogus bill was capable of costing inquisitive physicians their medical licenses and a $10,000 fine, according to Weinstein. Since the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act in June, NRA supporters now fear that the feds could “coerce the names and habits of gun owners out of doctors’ medical records,” as one Florida gun-rights advocate told a local newspaper.

Dr. Bernd Wollschlaeger of North Miami Beach, one of a group of physicians who successfully sued the state over the law, considers the governor’s quest dangerously quixotic.  Scott has already spent more than $880,000 in taxpayer funds, fighting largely unsuccessful court battles over conservative causes, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “My fear is the state will appeal and keeping wasting money to fight windmills,” Wollschlaeger told a McClatchy Newspapers reporter last month. “This is an ideologically driven, politically motivated vendetta by the NRA that has to stop.”

Motormouth Mitt confuses ‘Sikh’ with ‘sheik’ at Iowa fund-fest

It couldn’t have been more ludicrous if Mitt Romney had attempted the tried-and-true tongue-twister “the sixth sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick” at his recent Iowa fundraiser. Mitt made more moolah than any candidate’s ever pulled in at a single cash-bash in Iowa history — almost $2 million. (Looks like he’ll just have to undergo a news cycle’s worth of media humiliation to get his karma out of hock.)

Philip Rucker of The Washington Post took up the challenge of Mitt mockery, writing that, after getting the tricky articulation right Tuesday morning, Mitt muffed his lines at the Iowa fundraiser, where “he instead talked about the ‘sheik temple’ and the ‘sheik people’. Sheik is an Arabic honorific, whereas Sikh is a religion with roots in South Asia.”

Without a videotape, Mitt could just as easily have been talking about the  “chic people” — just doing a little bit of “framing” for his well-heeled audience. The outcome of this increasingly surreal election, after all, depends on how Mitt “sheiks” the dice.