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Swamp Things: Texas Governor Abbott’s Debt to the Gun Lobby

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See the original article here: http://progressive.org/dispatches/swamp-things-texas-governor-abbott{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}E2{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}80{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}99s-debt-to-the-gun-lobby/

Texas Governor Greg Abbott made no mention of guns at his press conference in Sutherland Springs about five hours after a man opened fire during a Sunday morning church service there, killing twenty-six people and wounding twenty. Instead, he spoke of the family members killed or injured, and asked for God’s comfort and guidance for the survivors and loved ones.

Later, after the shooter’s military conviction for domestic violence came to light, Abbott told CNN that David Kelley’s request for a permit to carry a concealed handgun had been rejected in Texas, and that, because of his prior record of domestic abuse, he should not have been allowed to buy rifles.

But ever since he ran for his first Texas legislative seat more than twenty years ago, Abbott has been a steady advocate for expanding Texans’ access to guns. He has earned a 100 percent approval rating from the National Rifle Association, and is proud of it.

“I supported #gun rights BEFORE the campaign began & have an A rating by @NRA,” Abbott tweeted during his last race. “I’ll keep Texas free.

What Abbott has not mentioned is that he owes part of his rise in Texas politics to the gun lobby.

Back in 2002, twelve years before the NRA publicly endorsed him for governor, the gun lobby used a law enforcement front group to quietly help elect Abbott as Texas attorney general. Back then, Democrats still held a majority in the Texas state house and in the Texas delegation to Congress. It was a time when the gun lobby was learning how to reach out to other right-leaning groups, forging alliances that predated both the Tea Party and the Trump campaign. It was the beginning of a redistricting or “gerrymandering” process that has since helped bring the Republican party in Texas and other states to unprecedented political power.

Abbott faced a tight race for attorney general against Austin’s popular mayor Kirk Watson. Shortly before the election, television ads appeared, attacking Watson for allegedly being soft on crime, and favoring Abbott, who was then a Texas Supreme Court justice, for supporting “the swift and aggressive prosecution of sexual predators and child pornographers.”

The ads were signed by the Law Enforcement Alliance of America. Mayor Watson said he had never before heard of this group. As I later reported in The Texas Observer in 2004, it was established in 1991 with a grant from the National Rifle Association, and opened offices just eleven miles away from NRA headquarters in Virginia. The Law Enforcement Alliance had a budget of $5 million in 2001. The Alliance’s attack ads often favored the same candidates as Texans for a Republican Majority, a group founded by then-Texas state house representative and later-U.S. House Leader Tom Delay.

Justice Abbott won the 2002 election by fifteen points—the same year that Texas Republicans gained control of the Texas House for the first time since Reconstruction. Attorney General Abbott later approved a Republican-led redistricting plan that soon helped give Texas Republicans a majority in the Senate as well. House Leader Delay was later tried and convicted of violating election laws, though this was overturned on appeal. But politicians like Attorney General Abbott continued to rise and he was elected Texas governor in 2014.

No one should doubt that the Law Enforcement Alliance was a front, one with a small office just off the Washington Beltway, rooted in the so-called “swamp.” Today its website still boasts color photos and topics like “2nd Amendment” and “Support Your Local Police.” But most of the text is just gibberish oddly in Latin, with the same lines and paragraphs repasted throughout the site.

The Alliance’s executive director for 23 years was James J. Fotis, now president of the National Center for Police Defense. Mr. Fotis recently wrote an op-ed for FoxNews.com in support of former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, initially failing to disclose that his new charity had paid for Arpaio’s legal defense.

Until it become inert, the Alliance quietly influenced elections around the nation. The group succeeded in helping defeat twelve state-level candidates in fourteen years, according to an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity. It choose tight races, running attack ads often accusing candidates of being soft on crime. The candidates it targeted were in states including Kansas, Nevada, Mississippi, Illinois, Michigan and Arkansas.

These are classic gun lobby tactics. Last month, in response to the Las Vegas country music shooting, legal scholar David Kopel, the highest paid employee of the Independence Institute, penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. He noted, correctly, that mass shootings are not as common as Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, had just claimed, but did not disclose that his Institute has received more than $2 million since 2004 from NRA foundations.

After the Newtown Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting, Mr. Kopel and another legal scholar who has received NRA grants, David T. Hardy, testified in Congress about gun violence without disclosing their NRA funding.

No wonder no one is talking about gun reform—even as mass shootings go on devastating communities. Instead, bolstered by the Trump Administration and Republican control of both the House and Senate, the NRA has publicly gone on the offensive for the first time in decades, seeking either a Supreme Court ruling or new federal legislation that would allow a permit to carry a concealed handgun issued in any one state like Texas valid across the country.

Governor Abbott recently signed one bill dropping the fee for a concealed carry permit in Texas to among the lowest in the country, joking about shooting reporters at the same time. After Hurricane Harvey, he promptly announced that concealed carry permits lost or damaged in the storm would be replaced at no charge. Governor Abbott is hardly the only elected official to benefit from the gun lobby, but his story reveals how they hide in the swamp.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has covered the NRA for more than twenty years, writing for The Village Voice, The Washington Post, The Texas Observer, MSNBC.com and The Progressive. He won a Society of Professional Journalists national investigative award for his Mother Jones story, “Unmasking NRA’s Inner Circle,” after the Sandy Hook massacre.

Why Can’t We Do Anything About Guns?

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Posted: June 21, 2016

Read the original article here: http://www.progressive.org/news/2016/06/188793/why-can{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}E2{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}80{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}99t-we-do-anything-about-guns

Once again, in the wake of a horrific mass shooting, Congress has failed to pass even any token gun reform legislation. This time, legislative inaction took a little more than eight days.

Why can’t we do anything about massacres with semi-automatic, high-capacity guns that have helped make ours the most violent advanced nation on earth? Because we have allowed a minority of extremists to control the gun debate.

The only thing stopping real gun reform in the United States is a paranoid fear that has long been quietly peddled by the gun lobby. Any system of regulation, they maintain, would create lists of gun owners that some future, tyrannical regime would use to seize Americans’ guns and impose a totalitarian state.

That might sound like hyperbole (and it is), but propaganda about a federal government registry or list of gun owners is the chief obstacle to meaningful gun reform in the United States.

For decades, proponents of gun reform have avoided the gun lobby’s central argument. Cowed by the NRA, they have chosen to try to make incremental reforms in the vain hope that they might some day build enough momentum to make a difference. That’s what happened when Democratic Senators led a filibuster last week after the Orlando gay nightclub shooting, and proposed reforms including a “no-buy” list for suspected terrorists, and a new “assault weapons” ban.

A “no buy” list would be a step in the right direction, but it would still only stop terrorist suspects who have already been clearly flagged as dangerous. An “assault weapons” ban, if it looks anything like the 1994 ban, would outlaw guns based more on their cosmetic features than their mechanical functions, or proscribe some guns while allowing for other, equally lethal weapons.

Similarly, expanded background checks, a reform proposed after the Sandy Hook school shooting that failed to pass Congress, would deter some gun buyers. But even so-called “universal” background checks, if they were finally enacted, would only marginally help reduce gun violence. In the bills proposed after recent mass shootings,  “universal” background checks have been riddled with loopholes for gun shows and private sales.

Over and over, members of Congress have allowed the NRA to deflect, distort and ultimately define the terms of the gun debate. Aging rocker, bona fide Vietnam-era draft dodger, and NRA board member Ted Nugent may be a raging, racist buffoon, but NRA executive director Wayne LaPierre is a master at public communication. He has long quietly struck an ideological chord with NRA loyalists, while making far more pragmatic sounding arguments in public.

NRA spokeswoman Catherine Mortensen at NRA headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia declined to comment for this story.

But NRA spokespeople follow a script, as anyone watching cable news since the Orlando gay nightclub shooting must have noticed. This is how it goes:

  • Before trying to pass any new laws, government must first “enforce the laws already on the books.” (Don’t mention that NRA lobbying has ensured that agencies tasked with enforcing gun laws don’t have the resources to do it. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, or ATF, prevented by law from using an electronic database to track gun sales, specifically because of NRA pressure. The Centers for Disease Control are barred from conducting research on gun violence.)
  • Proposed reforms would not have prevented shooters in recent tragedies from obtaining guns, as LaPierre said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” (The NRA, by the way, is largely right on this point, as I explain above.)
  • Bog the discussion down with mechanical minutiae about guns like whether an AR-15 riflewas used in Orlando. Disdainfully point out, for instance, that the Sig Sauer MCX rifle used inside the nightclub operates with a different firing system—gas piston instead of direct impingement- than the traditional AR-15, which the NRA has dubbed “America’s rifle.” Even though the manufacturer markets the MCX as a “next generation” improvement on the AR-15.

Most importantly, wrap yourself in the Second Amendment, saying undermining it is no way to respond to gun tragedies, like Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan did last week after Orlando. Without ever explaining how exactly the Second Amendment allegedly protects an unlimited right to guns, as the NRA claims; it doesn’t, and no court has ever ruled it does.

Finally, start over and repeat the same points ad infinitum, to prevent gun dialogue from advancing any further. The result? After each gun tragedy from Sandy Hook to San Bernardino, from Aurora to Orlando, from Columbine to Charleston, from Virginia Tech to Tucson, we end up talking more about why specific reform measures won’t work than about what actually will. Rarely, if ever, do we begin the conversation with a simple premise, Why can’t we make a difference?

This is the kind of broad question that makes NRA lobbyists nervous, as the answer has the potential to unmask the fallacy of their own core claim: Americans must have unregulated access to unlimited quantities of high-powered firearms to defend our freedom and, if necessary, fight a war or wage an insurrection against the state.

That claim might sound like a B movie pitch (as in the 1984 classic “Red Dawn” starring the late Patrick Swayze and directed by former NRA board director John Milius). But it is the steady drumbeat played by right-wing talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, and Internet outlets including  Glen Beck’s DailyCaller.com and Alex Jones’ InfoWars.com. More than a few Twitter streams are similarly flooded with terms like #Molon Labe, a classic Greek phrase for “come and take” them [guns], often juxtaposed to #NRA.

Such views have helped spawn terrorism before. In 1995, on the second anniversary of the Waco siege, Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people including 19 children. McVeigh later said he was acting in revenge for Waco’s federal raid over illegal guns, and in opposition to the “assault weapons” ban that had just passed Congress.

The gun lobby has publicly distanced itself from people like McVeigh, but its leaders clearly support the notion of armed insurrection against the state.

“Our Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment so Americans would never have to live in tyranny,” LaPierre said in 2012 before a United Nations international arms control panel. “Our Second Amendment is freedom’s most valuable, most cherished, most irreplaceable idea.”

“History proves it,” he went on. “When you ignore the right of good people to own firearms to protect their freedom, you become the enablers of future tyrants whose regimes will destroy millions and millions of defenseless lives.”

History proves no such thing, even though Ben Carson made this explicit claim in the case of Nazi Germany both in his book and when he ran for the Republican nomination for president earlier this year. Historians like professor of history and Holocaust studies Alan E. Steinweis at the University of Vermont have debunked this view, and no serious scholar has ever made a credible case for it.

Nor have U.S. courts ever even heard, let alone upheld such a view. The U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the Second Amendment as ensuring not just the right of state militias to be armed, but also the right of individuals to keep a gun in the home for self-defense. But instead of upholding the gun lobby’s expansive claim of individual gun rights, the Court in an opinion written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that that the Second Amendment is “not unlimited” and that laws may be passed on “conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

While quietly telling its base that the NRA defends its alleged right of unlimited access to guns, NRA leaders have been far more circumspect in public when asked to address the matter. In 2013, after the Sandy Hook massacre, Sen. Dick Durbin asked LaPierre point blank about the purpose behind the Second Amendment, saying his own constituents in Illinois who are NRA members have told the senator: “We need the firepower and the ability to protect ourselves from our government—from our government, from the police—if they knock on our doors and we need to fight back.”

Wasn’t that the perfect chance for LaPierre to say clearly for all to hear how much the NRA cherishes the Second Amendment for its defense of freedom? But instead the NRA executive director, just seven months after his campy U.N. speech, spoke in a more subdued tone on national television:

“Senator, I think that without a doubt, if you look at why our Founding Fathers put it there, they had lived under the tyranny of King George and they wanted to make sure that these free people in this new country would never be subjugated again,” answered LaPierre.

The polished NRA communicator then deftly changed the subject.

In today’s world, LaPierre went on, the Second Amendment remains “relevant and essential” for other reasons. People fear “being abandoned by their government. If a tornado hits, if a hurricane hits, if a riot occurs that they’re gonna be out there alone. And the only way they’re gonna protect themself (sic) in the cold and the dark, when they’re vulnerable is with a firearm.”

There is an important distinction between these two types of scenarios. You might be willing to wait for a background check before obtaining a gun to protect your family. But if you are worried about the federal government, you might be concerned that any serious regulation of firearms would generate lists of gun owners could be used by “jack-booted government thugs,” as LaPierre himself put in a 1995 fundraising letter for which he later apologized, to seize Americans’ weapons and impose a rogue state.

The NRA is serious about that idea. In 2013, after Sandy Hook, the universal background checks bill that came closest to passing Congress included language as a concession to the NRA that would have imposed extra penalties of up to 15 years in prison for any official who helps create a federal gun registry.

If change is ever to come, it will mean finally calling out the NRA for a dangerous radicalism that is wholly out of step with the opinions of both U.S. courts and the public.

One of the NRA’s own slogans in this regard could help, but gun reformists must first turn it on its head. “Guns don’t kill people, people do.” Remember that? Right. So, following the lead of the “no-buy” list, we need to focus less on guns, and more on gun buyers.

Let’s make the purchase of any highly lethal weapon as involved a process as buying a car. We should ensure that every new gun buyer has the training and the insurance to properly store and handle his or her firearms safely.

Many gun owners would support such steps, just as they already support universal background checks. Such measures are also nearly the minimum standard in every other advanced nation.

In the United States, many gun buyers first see new products in the glossy, color pages of NRA magazines like American Rifleman produced only for NRA members. The fear that the government might one day come for your guns drives record gun sales, especially of expensive, high-powered weapons like AR-15 or next generation rifles used in Orlando, San Bernardino, Sandy Hook, Aurora and other shootings. And these sales tend to spike after every well-publicized mass shooting.

Many of the same firms that make these weapons also donate a percentage of sales or in other ways contribute to the NRA. That might help explain why both the gun lobby and its allied manufacturers continue to promote inaction, as America endures at least five times more gun violence than any other advanced nation, with a mass shooting that leaves at least four people dead or wounded occurring on average more than once a day.

The gun lobby’s professed fear of government further explains why it claims citizens must maintain access to weapons so powerful that The New York Times editorial page last week said “[n]o civilian anywhere should be allowed to have” them. Because if civilians are really going to defend America’s freedom by standing up to a potentially abusive government, they will need all the firepower they can find. That means not only AR-15-style rifles, but weapons like a .50 caliber sniper rifle along with silencers that can fit almost any kind of gun.

American gun violence is dominated by white males committing suicide, followed by young minorities dying on the streets, and at least 30 people dying every day. For the gun lobby, this is the price of freedom. For the rest of us, it is beyond obscene.

Mustering the courage to enact real reform is not going to be easy, and the struggle is certain to outlast the current electoral cycle. But if we are ever going to curb America’s pandemic of gun tragedies, we first need to face the extremist minority that enables them.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist and gun owner who won the Society of Professional Journalists National Magazine Investigative Reporting Award for his Mother Jones exposé,“Unmasking the NRA’s Inner Circle,” after the Sandy Hook shooting. He has also written about the gun lobby in The Village Voice and The Washington Post, and writes often about the NRA in The Progressive.

The Times Has Finally (Quietly) Outed an NRA-Funded “Independent” Scholar

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This article originally appeared in The Progressive on April 23, 2014 here.

The Progressive, April 23, 2014

by Frank Smyth

Last Friday The New York Times finally addressed a conflict of interest that it had been ignoring for years. Although, among the powerful institutions that have long done so, the Times is hardly alone. The matter helps illustrate how the gun lobby has managed to shape the nation’s gun debate without showing its hand. The news comes to light one day before the start of the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in Indianapolis.

David Kopel is the Research Director and Second Amendment Project Director of the Colorado-based nonprofit Independence Institute, which describes itself as a “free-market think tank.” He is an Associate Policy Analyst at the Washington-based Cato Institute, and an adjunct professor of advanced constitutional law at Denver University. Kopel is also the author of 15 books and 90 scholarly articles many having to do with the Second Amendment and gun policies.

Kopel is widely known as one of the nation’s leading legal scholars on gun issues, writing from a pro-gun rights perspective. He testified in the Senate last year as an apparent independent expert in the nationally televised hearings held in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy. For even longer, he has regularly written opinion pieces for newspapers like The Wall Street Journal while being similarly identified as an independent scholar.

David Kopel has managed to establish himself as an independent authority on gun policy issues even though he and his Independence Institute have received over $1.42 million including about $175,000 a year over eight years from the NRA.

NRA officials at the nonprofit group’s Virginia headquarters declined to respond to repeated requests for comment.

Kopel, for his part, has rarely disclosed his NRA funding. But when presented with evidence of it, he has not denied it, either.

“If that’s her editorial judgement, that’s fine with me,” he said in a brief telephone interview on Friday from his Colorado office at the “Independence Institute” about a New York Times editor’s decision to disclose his NRA funding in an opinion piece under his byline posted the day before. “I’m not going to second-guess an editor.”

For years, Kopel’s defense of the gun lobby has been unmistakable. “Today, with 4 million members, the N.R.A. is one of the largest civic organizations in the U.S., and by far the largest civil liberties organization on the planet,” he wrote in the Times “Room for Debate” section last year less than one month after the Newtown Sandy Hook shooting.

Kopel also often suggests, much like NRA leaders, that there is little possible compromise in the gun policy debate. “The only item on the agenda of today’s antigun advocates that realistically could have prevented a psychopath from stealing his mother’s legally registered guns would be banning and confiscating the more than 300 million firearms in the United States,” he added in his Times’ piece last year right after a disturbed young man in Newtown used his mother’s guns to murder first his mother and then 26 others including 20 first-grade children.

Last week, in the same Times forum, Kopel painted former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who recently pledged to devote $50 million to promote gun reform efforts, as an extremist. “[A]ccording to my analysis, the Bloomberg version of background checks felonizes the vast majority of American gun owners.” A link embedded into the words “my analysis” refers to an article last spring under his byline in the National Review that similarly fails to disclose Kopel’s NRA funding.

His arguments often set up straw men that he then knocks down. How many gun control advocates or groups, for instance, have ever suggested that Mexico’s failed gun policies could somehow be a model for us? Yet Kopel recently wrote online in The Washington Post, one of two major newspapers to run his gun policy opinions last week, a piece titled “Mexico’s gun control laws: A model for the United States?”

News broadcasters and a leading journalism institute have also treated Kopel as an independent expert. Both PBS and NPR have brought him into gun policy debates as an apparent independent voice. The nonprofit Poynter Institute has asked Kopel to help lead seminars for journalists on gun policy issues including last spring during the Congressional gun debate. (This coming Friday Kopel will help lead a Firearms Law Seminar at the NRA convention in Indianapolis.)

Newspapers like The Christian Science Monitor have cited Kopel as an independent expert in news reports. Although two newspaper reporters, Ed O’Keefe and Tom Hamburger, in the news section of the Washington Post did identify Kopel’s NRA funding at least once last spring, after I broke news of it on MSNBC.com, and after the NRA itself began distributing one of Kopel’s opinion pieces during the Congressional debate over gun control legislation.

LAST FRIDAY at 3:53 PM in New York editors at The New York Times “Room for Debate” online section changed Kopel’s author ID on his opinion piece almost 22 hours after it had been originally posted. The change informed readers that Kopel “has received grant money from the National Rifle Association’s Civil Rights Defense Fund.” Kopel had been previously identified in this piece, like in his previous Times “Room for Debate” pieces, as an independent researcher, author and legal scholar.

Kopel received $1.39 million in grant money from the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund between 2004 and 2011, according the Fox News affiliate television station in Denver, Fox31, in a May 2013 report by Eli Stokols. The report was about a lawsuit filed by Kopel and his Independence Institute on behalf of 55 of Colorado’s 62 elected sheriffs challenging Colorado gun control laws passed last year.

The same day that Kopel led a press conference with Colorado sheriffs to announce the law suit, Colorado resident Tom Mauser called the Independence Institute to ask the think-tank whether it has received money from the NRA. Mauser has been a well-known Colorado gun control advocate for years, ever since his 15-year-old son, Daniel, was one of 12 students murdered along with one teacher in the 1999 Columbine High School shooting.

“I asked them if they got money from the NRA, and they wouldn’t tell me,” Mauser told Fox31 Denver. “They said, ‘look it up for yourself.’”

In February 2013, less than one month after Kopel testified in the Senate, I reported in MSNBC.com that two of the Senate’s recent witnesses, Kopel and David T. Hardy, another legal expert who similarly testified at the nationally televised Senate hearing as an independent witness, had received over $108,000 and $67,500, respectively, from the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund in 2011.

At the hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Senator Patrick Leahy from Vermont read Kopel’s biography including his affiliations with the Independence Institute, the Cato Institute and Denver University Strum College of Law. Chairman Leahy jokingly added, “Did I get that all correct?”, before giving Kopel the floor. No one, not any Senators, Kopel or the press made any mention of his NRA funding.

Kopel later conceded to me that he has received NRA funds, but maintained that he was not obligated to disclose them.

“I’ve never heard of [a] think tank or interest group employees naming donors during legislative testimony,” Kopel wrote to me in an email last year.

Kopel’s role at the Independence Institute is larger than it appears. Dozens of staff members and experts including the institute’s President Jon Caldara are listed on the institute’s website. But the highest paid employee is not the organization’s president but Kopel who earned $187,666 including bonuses, a total of $67,000 more than Caldara in 2011, according to the group’s latest financial records available.

The same year, Kopel received not only one $108,000 grant from the gun lobby, but part of another grant from the NRA’s Civil Rights Defense Fund, this one for a $55,000 grant to him and two other Independence Institute scholars.  The NRA fund has continued supporting the Independence Institute, giving the group $317,500 in 2012, according to the NRA fund’s latest records on file.

Kopel has bona fide Ivy League credentials. He graduated with honors from Brown University and earned his J.D. magna cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School. He has written for scholarly journals at Yale, New York University, Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame and the University of Pennsylvania.

Kopel is a regular contributor, too, to “The Volokh Conspiracy,” an influential and self-described “libertarian, conservative, centrist” legal blog that since January has been hosted by The Washington Post. Kopel wrote another piece there on Monday arguing that both the First and Second Amendments “safeguard natural, pre-existing human rights.”

At the same time, Kopel’s gun lobby funding is now no longer in doubt. The question is how should those who give him a platform to air his gun rights views like Congress and the Times identify him to the public?

“The more readers know about the background of an opinion writer, the better they are served. And that applies here,” The New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan told me last year in an email after I first broke news of Kopel’s NRA funding.

Last Friday, I forwarded her email to editors at the Times “Room for Debate” section, after they ran another one of Kopel’s pieces without disclosing his NRA funding. Editors made the change to identify Kopel’s receipt of NRA grant money little over an hour later, after first calling Kopel to confirm his receipt of NRA funds.

Kopel’s piece last Friday in the Times was part of an online series by six different authors about the nation’s gun policies pegged to both Bloomberg’s funding announcement and this weekend’s NRA convention. The series was titled, “Toe to Toe with the NRA.”

Frank Smyth is an independent, award-winning investigative reporter who has covered the gun lobby for The Progressive and MSNBC. His Mother Jones story last year, “Unmasking the NRA’s Inner Circle,” won the Society of Professional Journalists Delta Sigma Chi award for National Magazine Investigative Reporting. His clips are posted at www.franksmyth.com. Follow him on Twitter @SmythFrank.

– See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2014/04/187663/times-has-finally-quietly-outed-nra-funded-{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}E2{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}80{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}9Cindependent{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}E2{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}80{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}9D-scholar#sthash.OYfZhMvM.dpuf

One Year After Sandy Hook, Shooting is Still a Family Sport

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What was the mother of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter thinking over a year ago?

Trying to find a way to somehow help her clearly troubled youngest son.

Gun culture is often associated with red states in the South, Midwest and Rocky Mountains. But gun ownership is a time-honored tradition in many blue states, too, like among the bedroom communities within commuting distance of New York City in Southwestern Connecticut.

The late Nancy Lanza in Newtown grew up with firearms and had a pistol permit. She returned to shooting with more intensity, according to one family friend, after her 2009 divorce. She wanted to bond with her youngest son, Adam, especially, who five years before, at 13, had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, and who, instead of getting better, had been showing signs of social dysfunction and anxiety.

“Shooting was a pastime in which the family engaged,” reads theConnecticut State’s Attorney report of the Sandy Hook massacre released last month. “Both the mother and the shooter took National Rifle Association (NRA) safety courses. The mother thought it was good to learn responsibility for guns. Both would shoot pistols and rifles at a local range and the shooter was described as quiet and polite.”

David B. Lyman is the owner of the Blue Trail Range, “New England’s finest shooting range,” according to the range’s website, “where shooting is a family sport.” Lyman is also an NRA-certified instructor and former national sports shooting champion. He does not seem to have spoken with reporters much since the New York Post last year in the early days after the shooting named the Blue Trail Range as the Lanza family’s preferred gun range.

Did Nancy Lanza go shooting there with one or both of her sons?

“He will not be calling. I can guarantee it,” said a woman about her boss David Lyman after she answered the phone at the Blue Trail Range in Wallingford, about 40 miles from Newtown. An email from bluetrailrange.com later directed queries to Lyman’s lawyer, Craig Fishbein.

“There is nothing that has ever been confirmed,” said Fishbein about whether the Nancy and Adam Lanza went shooting at the Blue Trail Range. “There’s a sign-in process. There’s never been anything showing that.”

David Lyman’s wife, Debbie, runs the “Junior” or child shooting division of the Connecticut State Rifle & Revolver Associationbased in New Haven. One category among Junior competitors is the Smallbore or .22 caliber rifle. One popular rifle among Juniors is the Mark II made by the Massachusetts-based Savage Arms, which describes it as being “light enough to be a child’s first rifle.”

Nancy Lanza owned a Savage Mark II, which was later found near her bed. In the years before she died, she may or may not have encouraged her youngest son, Adam, to use it. All we know now for sure is that he did not partake in shooting competitions. Instead Adam, who was 20 a year ago when he perpetrated the massacre, preferred isolation, computers and video games. One friend told The Wall Street Journal last year that Nancy brought Adam to the range to not only bond with him, but to try and teach him responsibility.

This past spring, as the Sandy Hook heartbreak continued to resonate in Washington and around the nation, the Connecticut State Rifle & Revolver Association held its annual All-State Awards Dinner in Wallingford to honor Junior shooters. Junior Director Debbie Lyman presided over the ceremony, where dozens of boys and girls, some of whom were already bound for college, were honored for having successfully shot in Junior matches.

Did the Sandy Hook shooting ever come up?

“I’m not going to make any comment on the Sandy Hook issue,” Debbie Lyman said this week by telephone from her office at a university-affiliated medical office.

The Guest Speaker for the Junior awards dinner was NRA board member Patricia Clark, who works as a hospital laboratory technician. Earlier this year, I identified her in Mother Jones and The Progressive as the former Chairman of the NRA’s shadowy Nominating Committee, which hand-picks candidates to control elections to the NRA board.

Clark remains an NRA board member and member of the board’s executive committee. She also happens to live little more than a few miles from the site of America’s worst gun tragedy, the now torn-down Sandy Hook Elementary School.

NRA Director Clark declined to return both voice and email requests for comment.

Clark is a nationally recognized Smallbore rifle competitor. Both David and Debbie Lyman are NRA Double Distinguished Expert shooters with the Smallbore rifle, according to an Ohio State website and biography of their son, Remington Lyman. A member of the Ohio State Rifle Team, Remington, who shares the namesake of America’s oldest arms manufacturer, shoots air and Smallbore rifles for the Buckeyes at National Collegiate Athletic Association Rifle competitions.

Surrounded by so many families who have, by any measure, successfully bonded with their children while shooting guns, Nancy Lanza perhaps thought that giving her mentally ill son Adam guns including a Smallbore rifle might somehow help draw him out of his shell. Instead he turned the .22 caliber rifle on her.

“Prior to going to the school, the shooter used a .22 caliber Savage Mark II rifle to shoot and kill his mother in her bed at the home where they lived,” according to the Connecticut State’s Attorney report.

Adam brought two handguns — a Glock 20, a10 mm semi-automatic pistol and a Sig Sauer P226 9 mm semi-automatic pistol — along with a Bushmaster XM15-E2S semi-automatic rifle with him into the Sandy Hook school. He used the Bushmaster to quickly discharge over three hundred rounds, causing the fatal, unspeakable carnage that left 20 first-grade children and six of their teachers dead on the ground.

By then Adam had already left the Savage Mark II behind, back in his mother’s bedroom, after taking the time to use the bolt-action Smallbore rifle to shoot Nancy Lanza four times in the head.

The Connecticut State’s Attorney report concluded that the motive for Adam’s behavior may never be known. But his mother’s actions suggest a different story. No doubt she never should have introduced her youngest son to guns. But her motive for bringing him to a shooting range seems to make more sense once one glimpses the successful families of sports shooters within her community.

One reason gun reform has failed since even the Sandy Hook tragedy may be that advocates have failed to grasp the depth of gun culture in not only red states but also blue ones. Another could be that gun reform advocates have yet to find a way to talk to gun owners without the gun lobby led by the NRA twisting the discussion.
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Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has covered the National Rifle Association for The Village Voice, The Texas Observer, Mother Jones, The Progressive and MSNBC, where, over the past year, he has been a frequent on-air contributor. His clips are posted at www.franksmyth.com, and his Twitter handle is @SmythFrank.

Photo: Flickr user Gordon Tarpley, creative commons licensed.

Click here to read the original story in The Progressive: http://progressive.org/one-year-after-sandy-hook-shooting-still-a-family-sport

This Is Why the NRA Endures

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Earlier this year, long before this week’s latest tragic shooting at the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard, one expert after another predicted the gun lobby’s demise. The horrific massacre of mostly first-grade children in Newtown, Connecticut, seemed to have changed the nation’s views of guns. President Obama and Congressional leaders promised action in Washington. Governors in states from New York to Colorado pledged to pass stricter gun laws in their states, too.

For seven long days after Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the gun lobby said not a word. When the National Rifle Association chief executive Wayne LaPierre finally did speak on national television, commentators ridiculed him for sounding so “tone deaf” to the still raw emotions of the nation. His proposed solution of solving gun violence by having more guns rang hollow. The gun lobby looked vulnerable for the first time in decades since it emerged on the national stage during the unsteady, often violent times of the late 1970s.

Gun reform groups stepped up after the Newtown tragedy to do something they had never done before: They tried to match the NRA dollar for dollar in electoral campaigns to help gun reform candidates win. National trends seemed to be on their side. Analysts noted that gun ownership has fallen from half of American households back in the 1970s to a third today, and that politicians have won elections even in conservative states despite having defied the NRA. Soon one New Republic author boldly proclaimed, “This is How the NRA Ends.”

Today, however, the NRA seems strong and at no risk of going away nine months after Newtown’s Sandy Hook school shooting. NRA membership is, by any measure, at a record high. Gun sales across the nation are also breaking records. More importantly, this spring in Washington and this summer in Denver, the NRA has shown it still has the clout to influence major legislation in defiance of what opinion polls post suggest voters want, and to punish individual officials who respond to t voters’ wishes by defying the NRA and its gun rights agenda.

Underestimating the gun lobby has been the gun reform movement’s biggest mistake. Defeating an organization so deeply rooted across so much of American society will require a different approach. The side that wins this debate will be the one that manages to appeal to more gun owners and countless other Americans who share many of the same fears. It will require taking on the gun lobby where it is most vulnerable: its absolutist, if not extremist, ideology that puts forth a false choice between freedom and tyranny. Instead the gun reform movement needs to reframe the debate as a choice between gun violence and gun safety.

Nine months after the Sandy Hook school massacre, millions of Americans are actually living with fewer gun restrictions than before. Six out of the nation’s fifty states have passed stricter gun laws in the wake of the Newtown shooting.

New York, Connecticut, and Maryland have improved background checks before gun purchases, limited military-style, semi-automatic weapons and large capacity magazines, along with requiring safety training and strengthening measures to keep guns away from domestic violence abusers and the mentally ill.

Delaware and Colorado now require background checks on all gun sales. Colorado also limited magazine capacity.

California strengthened laws to confiscate guns from criminals and the mentally ill.

But many other states have moved in the opposite direction.

Arkansas now allows firearms to be carried inside churches and other places of worship.

Wyoming now lets judges decide whether to allow guns to be brought into their courtrooms.

Virginia made the records of concealed carry permit holders private.
This month in Missouri legislators tried to override Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto of a bill that aspired to make it illegal for state police and other authorities to enforce federal gun laws.

Moreover, in Washington, after their defeat this spring, gun reform groups are not expecting to make any progress until the November 2014 elections. Even then it remains far from certain how many or whether enough gun reform candidates may win.

What accounts for the gun lobby’s uncanny pull across the nation?

Many critics blame the influence of the gun industry. No doubt the gun industry plays a major role. In January I reported first in Mother Jones and later The Progressive how George K. Kollitides II, the CEO of Freedom Group that made the Bushmaster AR-15 semi-automatic rifle used in Newtown, had quietly served on the NRA’s Nominating Committee for its own internal elections. Last year Freedom Group led the gun industry with record sales of $931.9 million. Freedom Group CEO Kollitides is also a Trustee of the NRA Foundation.

Other gun industry executives sit on the NRA’s board. One is Pete Brownell, the third-generation family CEO of Brownells, Inc., America’s largest supplier of firearms parts, tools and accessories, whose father and chairman, Frank R. Brownell III, is President of the NRA Foundation. Another is Ronnie G. Barrett, the CEO of the Tennessee-based Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, which designed the first .50-caliber rifle for civilian use. A third is Stephen D. Hornady, an NRA board director who, like Kollitides, is an NRA Foundation Trustee. Hornady is the second-generation family CEO of the Nebraska-based ammunition-making firm, Hornady Manufacturing.

Other gun industry figures, like Larry and Brenda Potterfield of MidwayUSA, stay out of NRA board politics while still contributing heavily to the gun lobby. A Missouri-based retailer and wholesaler of firearms products, MidwayUSA, has contributed generously to the NRA through programs like “Round-Up,” which allows firearms consumers to round-up their purchase to the next dollar to make a donation in the name of defending the Second Amendment. To date MidwayUSA’s Round-Up program alone has contributed $8.9 million to an NRA endowment.

But gun industry money is only part of the story. Gun ownership may be down across the United States. But gun culture and politics surrounding it still thrive, especially in rural and even many suburban areas in nearly every state.

Moreover, gun rights activists have been organizing voters at the grassroots decades before anyone ever heard of the Tea Party. So-called Second Amendment activists may not have majority appeal, but they seem have to deep support across sizable minority of the population, which translates into a majority in many predominately white and rural voting districts.

Here the recall votes in September of Colorado are instructive. State senators John Morse from Colorado Springs and Angela Giron from Pueblo became the first elected officials ever recalled in the Rocky Mountain state. Colorado voters in their respective districts and across the state, much like voters across the nation, favored recent gun control legislation requiring background checks on gun purchases and limiting ammunition magazines to no more than fifteen rounds. The incumbents were put at a disadvantage in the recall election by a court ruling disallowing mail-in ballots. At the same time, they were helped by funds poured into the state by gun reform groups that in the case seem to surpass even campaign spending by the gun lobby.

The two Colorado state senators, one of whom is a former police chief, lost at the polls due to a truly impressive turnout by voters favoring gun rights.
This is what many commentators and NRA critics missed. The gun lobby may not enjoy majority appeal. But it has a larger army of organized, devoted supporters than any other single-issue lobby in America.

The gun reform lobby includes Mayors against Illegal Guns, funded by billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Americans for Responsible Solutions, organized by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (who survived a 2011 shooting in her Phoenix, Arizona, district that left six people dead, including a nine-year-old girl). These groups have money, but nowhere near the NRA’s kind of grassroots organization.

This also helps explain the defeat in Congress in April of a bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, and Pat Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania. The bill was widely criticized as a weak and ambivalent piece of legislation that divided advocates on both sides of the debate, but it would have required background checks for at least all commercial sales of guns. Its defeat was a symbolic, but still powerful victory for the gun lobby, demonstrating the ongoing national power of the NRA.

What is the lesson of the gun lobby’s success since Newtown?

The NRA does not need majority support across the nation or even individual states. As long as it can effectively divert money and mobilize voters to defeat key candidates who vote for gun reform, it can tip local locations in its favor to protect its gun rights agenda.

Promoting any meaningful gun reform in the United States will require organizing people in their communities in a way that progressives in this nation have long dreamed about but rarely been able to do, or sustain for very long. Ironically, if done properly, the need for an effective gun rights movement could finally bring progressives such a chance.

What is not needed to effectively promote gun reform across the nation is for ultra-liberal cable TV commentators who live in cities on either coast throwing up their hands and asking why anyone would ever even need a gun.

Instead, what is needed to finally promote gun reform may seem counterintuitive to some progressive: to acknowledge and respect gun owners on their own terms.

People keep firearms for many reasons. Millions of Americans hunt prey from waterfowl to deer every year. Many homes across America have shotguns, rifles, and other firearms that have been passed down through generations. For many young boys and increasingly girls, getting their own hunting rifle is a rite of passage.
Many other Americans enjoy target shooting, including in highly organized competitions.

And a lot of people have guns for what they perceive as their need for personal protection. Pointing out, as many liberal critics are prone to do, how one is statistically safer in a home without a gun rather than with one is unlikely to resonate across much of the heartland. Instead effective gun reform advocates need to reaffirm Americans’ right to keep their firearms, while making the discussion one about gun safety.

The gun lobby’s core argument is not about gun safety, though groups like the NRA deserve credit, in fact, for organizing more gun safety classes across the nation than any other groups.) The NRA’s driving principle is that guns in the hands of citizens are the first check and necessary bulwark against the possibility of government oppression. That’s is why the Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment into the Constitution, the NRA says.

“Our Second Amendment is freedom’s most valuable, most cherished, most irreplaceable idea,” said NRA CEO LaPierre before a United Nations panel last year in New York.

“History proves it. When you ignore the right of good people to own firearms to protect their freedom, you become the enablers of future tyrants whose regimes will destroy millions and millions of defenseless lives.”

This is a bogus, ahistorical argument as I wrote in The Progressive in March in “Gun Control and Genocide.” But it is a view that many self-described Second Amendment absolutists in and out of the NRA share.

Only in recent decades did the NRA first become such anideological organization. In fact, for the first 106 years of its existence, the NRA was a gun club devoted to sports shooting and safety training. But in 1977 the NRA got taken over by Second Amendment absolutists and underwent a metamorphosis into the gun lobby.

The late 1970s was a precarious time, marked by rising inflation, oil prices, and crime rates, along with a widespread lack of faith in government institutions. The popular film genres of the decade involved rogue actors taking matters, if not the law, into their own hands often through the use of righteous violence. Films like Dirty Harry, Taxi Driver, Serpico, and Death Wish all come to mind, and each in their own way seems to validate many of the basic precepts of today’s gun lobby.

NRA conventions are filled every year with predominately white men who all seem to share a fear of the future. Economic decline, decreasing incomes and rising health care costs, combined with the steady pace of changing demographics toward an increasingly “browner” America, along with what many see as eroding social mores exacerbated by mass media, combine to generate fear. The American lifestyle depicted in Norman Rockwell paintings is long gone.

For many Americans, the guns they keep in their homes make them feel like they still have some power in the face of a world they no longer know nor understand.

“It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” said then-Senator Barack Obama in a famous 2008 electoral campaign gaffe that actually touched on some truths.

Ideological extremism is where the gun lobby and the NRA are most vulnerable. Clinging to guns and bibles as a way of trying to hang on to a fleeting past is not the same as arming oneself to fight a future war against one’s own government. But the latter notion has been the driving ethos behind the gun lobby over the past 26 years, even though, until recently, most NRA leaders tried to keep such views quiet and away from public scrutiny.

Now the NRA’s most frequent keynote speaker is Glenn Beck, the former Fox News commentator and rightwing radio talk show host. Survivalists and conspiracy theorists are only growing in importance at the NRA’s base, and they hold views that often go well beyond those of even conservative libertarians. At the same time, the NRA is fighting to retain its mainstream influence within the conservative wing of the Republican Party.

Fear of a future tyrannical government is the main barrier to passage of effective gun control laws in the United States. In states like New Jersey, for instance, one can have an arsenal of weapons in one’s home to protect oneself, as long as the gun owner himself and each handgun are all individually registered with the state.

Most gun owners would have no problem with that. But the Second Amendment activists who dominate and support the NRA do.

Gun reform advocates need to promote the notion that government efforts to regulate gun ownership, to provide background checks for gun purchases, to prevent guns from being in the hands of domestic abusers and other criminals, to prevent guns from ending up in the hands of mentally ill individuals who have been found to be the shooters in so many recent tragedies, are all achievable, desirable ends.

And the legitimacy of the government’s role in regulating firearms transactions was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, in the same decision, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, that upheld the notion that every American citizen, unless there is specific reason to forfeit it, has a right to keep and bear arms.

In short, the gun lobby can be defeated. But only if gun reformers start seeing most American gun owners on they’re own terms and start organizing voters at the grassroots.

Gun lobby: Who got elected to the NRA board?

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This year’s gun lobby board election brought a few surprises, as the National Rifle Association has been trying to keep the results (and the low voter turnout) quiet.

George K. Kollitides II is the founder and CEO of Freedom Group, America’s largest and most profitable firearms consortium. One of the company’s  products is the Bushmaster AR-15 semi-automatic rifle that was used last December in the Sandy Hook school massacre.

Last year Freedom Group led the gun industry with record sales of almost $1 billion, or $931.9 million. Kollitides also quietly served last year on the NRA’s shadowy Nominating Committee for the NRA’s 2012 board elections, as reported in January in Mother Jones. His place on the Nominating Committee likely helped get his name on the NRA’s official ballot this year.

Yet he still lost his bid for the NRA board, according to election results just published in the August edition of the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine, available only to NRA dues-paying members, a copy of which was obtained by MSNBC. Kollitides remains a Trustee of the NRA Foundation, according to its latest annual report. The foundation’s activities include organizing gun safety and target shooting competitions for children.

Calls to Kollitides’ office at Freedom Group’s headquarters in Madison, North Carolina, requesting comment were not returned.

Other gun industry executives sit on the NRA’s board. Pete Brownell is the third-generation family CEO of Brownells, Inc., America’s largest supplier of firearms parts, tools and accessories. He easily won his reelection. His father and chairman of the board for the family business, Frank R. Brownell III, is also President of the NRA Foundation.

A representative of Brownells in Montezuma, Iowa, told MSNBC.com that neither executive was available for comment.

Two more gun industry executives sit on the NRA board.

Please continue reading  the story here: http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/08/19/gun-lobby-who-got-elected-to-the-nra-board/

Christie moves right on gun issues with veto

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Last summer, after Hurricane Sandy, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie showed independence from his own party when he embraced President Barack Obama. The move made Christie a target among his GOP colleagues for appearing to betray then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney. But Friday night Christie,  a possible 2016 GOP presidential candidate, seemed to move back to the right on gun issues when he vetoed three key gun bills in New Jersey.

Christie has defied the gun lobby in the past by defending New Jersey’s gun control laws, which have long been among the strictest in the nation. The state requires a background check and lifetime firearms identification card for any firearms purchase, an additional permit for any handgun purchase, and a waiting period of 30 days before another handgun may be bought.

But the New Jersey governor’s Friday veto of new gun control legislation backtracked on his previous record.

One of the bills would have prohibited .50 caliber rifles in New Jersey. The weapon is described as a “long-range anti-material” and “anti-personnel” firearm that “provides an inexpensive means of neutralizing lightly armored targets,” according to the product description from one Phoenix, Arizona-based manufacturer. California is currently the only state to ban .50 caliber rifles.

The other two New Jersey measures would have required state agencies to report lost and stolen gun data to a federal database, embedded information about gun permits onto an individual permit holder’s New Jersey driver license, created instant background checks within the state, and required safety training for New Jersey gun owners.

Please finish reading the story here: http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/08/18/chris-christie-moves-right-on-gun-issues-with-veto/