Guns, Prejudice and the Hearings

Shooting school children, grocery shoppers or concert audiences raise public demands for gun control. But there’s a deeper problem. Why, so far, haven’t we been able to limit the age of people who can have guns, register guns like we do cars, do background checks on all gun purchasers, deny guns to people who’ve threatened their partners or anyone else, and, especially, limit the power of the guns for sale?

For gun manufacturers and their agents, every gun is just a sale, a source of profit. Each lethal conflict worldwide sells more guns. Don’t expect much moral responsibility from gun manufacturers and traffickers.

But what conflict is the NRA trying to stoke? If not the murder of adults and children in public places, what?

At gun shows you’ll find support for conspiracy theories that are contrary to facts and make no sense – theories so illogical they couldn’t be pulled off even if some wanted to. They’re symptoms of something deeper – racial, religious and ethnic prejudices that make racists feel superior to someone. Racism can be overwhelming at gun shows, among private self-styled “militias” and the gun-brandishing crowd – heaven forbid that descendants of the people brought here in chains should be able to succeed and do well at last. Most of our ancestors weren’t here at the time, but when African-Americans have some success, most of us feel relieved. For racists, however, Black success is the problem.

It gets worse. Another theme at gun shows is freedom from what they call the “tyranny” of having to obey democratic rules. So who are they arming themselves to defend against? They have more than enough weapons to overwhelm our local sheriffs and police and already use them to intimidate local and state officials. Next target – the U.S. They make plain at gun shows their nostalgia for “the lost cause” of the Confederacy. That’s another part of their prejudice. If the South had been able to secede, prejudice and mistreatment of African-Americans would have been legal, supported by segregation, discrimination, violence and intimidation. That’s what brought them together storming the US Capitol – they want to replace the United States with a white nationalist nation, to overturn the Constitution by force and violence, a big reason why the hearings in Washington are so important.

These white nationalists and their NRA enablers are dangerous to all of us because the coup d’etat they’ve been plotting, the race war and civil war they’re trying to stoke, are all extraordinarily deadly. The American Civil War is still one of the deadliest conflicts in the history of humankind as a percentage of the population killed. Racial, ethnic or nationalist civil wars put everyone at risk. And let’s be clear – prejudice runs in packs: white nationalists in this country have aimed at all of our ancestors and their religious and ethnic prejudices are only sometimes hidden.

All of it would destroy the country we call ours. As a classmate described to me, his grandfather, the son of a Confederate officer, told my classmate that he “was glad the Union won the war, so that we had one America and did not have the institution of slavery.” Absolutely.

Those are the stakes, folks. We have to clamp down on the gun lobby, on the people who want the kind of weapons that can be used to wage war and tear this country apart again and who have no compunctions against putting those weapons in the hands of children and people who will kill us and our children in schools, parks, churches, temples and stores. Enough!

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on June 14, 2022.

Generosity and the Las Vegas Massacre

Two weeks ago, I’d prepared commentary about the value of generosity in foreign affairs but awoke to the horrible reports from Las Vegas. I went ahead with it while I caught my breath and planned commentary about guns. But generosity is very relevant and I want to return to it. Gun rights definitions which don’t account for the thousands of people killed with guns every year are simply selfish. The it’s-my-gun-so-you-have-no-right-to-regulate-it attitude is selfishness, not liberty.

Stephen Paddock shouldn’t have been able to climb to the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort with automatic weapons just because he claimed the right. Automatic weapons don’t prevent government tyranny as gun advocates sometimes claim; they’re weapons of war and provoke tyranny. We all have a right to safety and security but nuts with powerful weapons deprive us of that birthright. In a battle between self-defined freedom seekers and the military, everyone loses, permanently.

Generosity and its absence are underlie most of our political struggles and the gridlock in our national affairs. Selfish definitions of liberty which refuse to take account of the damage to others are out of keeping with our national history and traditions. Like misbegotten gun claims, arguments for an unregulated market, which ignore the hundreds of thousands of people injured by selfish business and corporate practices, are hypocritical cover for outrageous behavior. Selfishness is not a definition of freedom.

Generosity is relevant in yet another way. Our polarized politics and lack of respect for each other reflect declining generosity, when me, me, me is all that matters but opponents don’t. When people throw bricks through windows, and shoot bullets through skulls over politics, there’s no safety except in hiding. How many congressmen and women will have to be shot before Congress comes to its senses? Unwillingness to work with a president of the other party, lest he accomplish anything, is about disrespect, where only one’s own purposes count. If it was appropriate to prevent a vote on President Obama’s nominee, though a majority of the Senate would have supported Garland, is there any reason to respect any decision for which Gorsuch is essential? If it was all about them, then it’s equally appropriate that it’s all about us. That’s not democracy. That’s war.

President Trump says we all come together after a tragedies like these. We know that has been nonsense, that pleas for help after Sandy were scorned by representatives of other parts of the country, and Trump treats the efforts of Puerto Ricans as less worthy than those elsewhere. People in the continental US would have been equally helpless except that relief agencies and the Red Cross were able to organize supplies where they could be delivered, and the destructiveness of the hurricane in Puerto Rico went far beyond what happened elsewhere. But no, this was an opportunity to disparage people who aren’t part of the Trump coalition. Shame.

Even the right not to be shot in the back by officials with badges has somehow become a political issue, as if there are two sides to that question. By comparison, I’m all for the immigrants and their generous patriotism. I’ve had it with selfish imposters like Trump, Cruz, and McConnell. This country may be great again but only when we are rid of the people whose political ideal is to tear us apart.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, October 3, 2017.

Shootings, Guns and the SAFE Act

The shooting at a community college in Oregon saddens me and leads me to these observations about guns.

One of my students has convinced me that the guns used in most of the recent mass shootings do not fit the description of assault or military style weapons. And they don’t fit the categories banned or regulated by the so-called New York Safe Act. In fact some of the damage was done by pistols, by handguns. So I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the New York statute is a piece of high profile posturing, sound and fury signifying nothing. Who knew? Perhaps the problem is a bunch of people writing legislation about something they know little about. I won’t speculate.

Certainly there are weapons that no people ought to have their hands on unless they are in the military – not even police need bombs.

But more than that, gun ownership should be licensed. All of us have licenses. I have a driver’s license and a law license. It’s a reasonable protection for all of us. If I can’t see well enough I won’t be able to get behind the wheel. That’s a good thing – regardless of how I might feel about it when and if that happens to me. And when I was a practicing attorney, people who came to me could expect that I could help them. That too is a good thing – although lawyers, professors and students have all sorts of quibbles about what is actually on the bar exam. Plus the bar examiners want to know if we have good character, and they collect affidavits from everyone we have ever worked for, to make sure.

Licensing makes sense, to make sure that people with guns have no record of crime or insanity as well as the knowledge to handle and store guns carefully. Licensing will not stop everyone from getting guns who shouldn’t have them. I lost a client years ago, the dedicated leader of a community organization, to a disgruntled job-seeker. But licensing would help. And tracing technology would deter some shooters. Nothing in the decisions of the Supreme Court denies the ability of states and cities to do record checks, licensing or require identifying technology.

The resistance of the NRA to licensing and tracing methodology is so irrational and so perplexing that it makes one wonder about their loyalty as well as their good sense. Indeed I think the NRA has been catering to the extremists in its membership, and some reflect the same animus. An NRA president recently referred to “The War of Northern Aggression”, his description of the secession of the Confederate States and South Carolina firing on Fort Sumter, the federal fort protecting the Charleston harbor. Some gun toting members of private militia style organizations clearly are aiming their rhetoric at public servants, at government, and at the people they call “Fourteenth Amendment citizens.” That’s right, they object to the fact that our Black brothers and sisters are free, equal, citizens who can and do vote. In other words they are still fighting the Civil War.

Hate groups are proliferating in this country. They are the most determined gun owners. All it takes is one of their number splitting off and firing into a crowd. Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City was nursed in those groups.

Do you really want to put gun policy in their hands? Or, for that matter, people who posture about gun control without taking the time to study the problem?

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, October 6, 2015.

 

Do the police really have no time to do anything but shoot?

Perhaps you read the NY Times story over the weekend about the self-described expert in police killings, William Lewinski, who justifies every police killing on the ground that the policeman had no time to protect himself, no time to do anything but shoot. Victim’s back turned, no time. Hand in pocket, no time. Victim doing what the officer told him to do, no time. All the evidence contradicts the statement of the officer, no time.

On Lewinski’s logic, we should all not only carry weapons, we should shoot everyone on sight, because we have no time to react, so we should all practice  preemptive killing – dead men can’t shoot us. What we should really do is move to Iraq or Syria because that’s a matter of course there. Shoot, shoot, shoot.

And understanding that the police are taught by nut-jobs like Lewinski to shoot pro-actively, what we should really do is go out like armed vigilantes and attack the police systematically, kill ‘em all so they can no longer attack us. And in case you hadn’t noticed there have been groups that have targeted the police and for just that reason.

Lewinski’s approach is good only for the undertakers. I don’t know what the undertakers give him but they should chip in a lot because they will certainly benefit from a shoot on sight society.

Of course if you or I actually took that advice, we’d be charged with murder. But the rules don’t apply to the police. We can’t shoot unarmed people but police can – and get away with it. We can’t shoot people in the back but police can – and get away with it. We can’t tell a bunch of lies about what happened that are contradicted by the provable facts and get away with it but police can – and get away with it. Thanks to Lewinski.

Think what Lewinski and others of his ilk would have to tell the police if, like most of us, they weren’t armed. They’d have to tell the police to use their heads, not their guns. They’d have to tell the police to cool tempers instead of raising them. They’d have to tell the police that the best response to a disagreement isn’t a hole in the head. They’d have to tell the police that a traffic stop isn’t ground for ending someone’s life.

What a different world it would be if we learned to live together, if we learned that there is a difference between civilization and a jungle, if we learned that the default rule is respect for human beings, respect for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as the Declaration of Independence tried to tell the world. What a different world it would be if police in America acted like our servants, not our rulers, that they don’t have a God-given right to issue commands but that like most of us, the magic word is “please.”

It’s time to imitate the British and take the guns out of the hands of the cops and leave to special rules those more unusual occasions when guns should be issued for specific jobs and reasons. The ordinary rule must be to use our heads instead of blowing away everyone in sight, leaving only death and destruction in the wake of the police.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, August 4, 2015.