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Dana Loesch follows NRA playbook in Town Hall meeting by deflecting questions, avoiding fundamental conversation about gun access

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http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/nra-dana-loesch-deflects-questions-town-hall-meeting-article-1.3835143

CNN’s Town Hall meeting in Sunrise, Florida began like the most honest conversation America has had about gun violence in decades. Surviving students and parents of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting peppered politicians like GOP Sen. Marco Rubio with questions about his NRA funding and positions on guns, specifically the AR-15 rifle.

But the conversation shifted when NRA spokesman Dana Loesch took a seat and began fielding questions.

A Generation-X gun rights advocate, Loesch learned how to hunt and shoot from her grandfather in the Ozark Mountains. She is a God-fearing Christian who still goes to church regularly, she claims. She made her name for years as a conservative commentator before becoming the face of the National Rifle Association last year.

The anticipation peaked when CNN let the compelling, surviving high school senior Emma Gonzalez ask the NRA representative, “Do you believe that it should be harder to obtain the semi-automatic weapons and modifications for these weapons to make them fully automatic, like bump stocks?”

The question was on point, but the NRA spokesperson never answered it.

Instead, Loesch validated the young, grieving woman’s emotions, saying she was a teenage activist herself. The NRA representative then deflected the conversation to the shooter whom she described as a “monster” who was “nuts,” adding that “crazy” people like him should not have access to firearms.

Loesch then changed the conversation to states who don’t fully report incidences of mental illness to the national background check system. Gonzalez ended up silencing the crowd herself when people starting shouting and accusing the NRA official of dodging the question.

The high school senior, it seems, was played along with CNN and the rest of the nation.

The national outrage over the Parkland, Florida high school shooting has all the markings of a tipping point in the national debate over gun violence. Five years ago, however, the pro-gun movement managed to survive another alleged tipping point after the Newtown, Connecticut Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

No one should count the NRA out yet.

The same day as the CNN Town Hall meeting, President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence held a meeting together in the White House with survivors and educators who have endured shootings in Parkland, Newtown and Washington, D.C. One young man, a Parkland high school shooting survivor, managed to drill down on the issue of access to semi-automatic weapons. The rest, who seemed to be carefully vetted, expressed emotions demanding actions without saying exactly what they wanted.

The NRA is smarter than you think. For decades its representatives and pundits followed a playbook. Avoid the fundamental conversation about gun access. Deflect the dialogue by saying things like, “Before we pass new laws, enforce the laws already on the books,” without mentioning that NRA lobbying has ensured most of the same laws remain unenforceable.

Or change the conversation to focus on the mentally ill. If that fails, entangle opponents in the minutiae of firearms. As a last resort, wrap yourself in the Second Amendment. Meaning: posit a false choice between doing nothing about guns or trying to confiscate and outlaw them all.

Rubio seemed to be feeling the pressure. He suggested such a false choice, before unexpectedly breaking with the NRA on two points: setting an age limit to purchase firearms and limiting the ammunition capacity of magazines.

His A+ NRA rating may decline.

But Loesch made no concessions, while attempting to strike a sympathetic tone with the audience in the hall and homes across America.

Her recruitment by the NRA is part of an ongoing tactical shift for the organization.

For decades the NRA has sheltered in place, remaining leery of fellow conservative politicians and groups. No less than Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush each ended up betraying the gun lobby by denouncing high-capacity rifles and NRA anti-government rhetoric, respectively. Even with the rise of the Tea Party, which drew in activists like Loesch, the NRA kept its distance from what it saw as a largely leaderless, unpredictable movement.

Today many pro-gun activists still don’t trust President Trump. But the NRA has thrown its lot in with Trump and his supporters, betting that gun activists and his backers have plenty in common.

Loesch leads the NRA today on the culture war’s frontline. She has narrated videos lashing out at Hollywood along with the liberal media, saying the NRA will meet their purported lies with “the clenched fist of truth.”

But she showed another side at CNN’s Town Hall meeting that validated her opponents’ emotions instead of attacking them, just like President Trump did the same day inside the Oval Office.

Parkland school shooting survivors like Gonzalez have the potential to change the nation. But only if they and other gun reform advocates figure out a way to compel the NRA to answer the question.

Smyth (www.franksmyth.com) is a freelance journalist who has covered the NRA for Mother Jones, The Progressive and MSNBC.

What’s behind the AR-15’s allure, and why we must restrict its sale if we want to limit future mass shootings

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http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/behind-ar-15-allure-article-1.3823134

The AR-15 is America’s best-selling rifle, helping gun sales more than double over the past 20 years. An estimated 8 million AR-style rifles are in circulation, with more being sold every day.

The weapon is a modification of the M-16 rifle issued to U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War. Firing a small caliber bullet propelled by much gunpowder, its round is designed to maximize damage to tissue and bone.

Like the M-16, AR-style rifle magazines hold up to 30 rounds. But the AR-15 fires semi-automatically, so, instead of “spraying” bullets, it reloads to fire as quickly as one can squeeze the trigger. AR-style rifles rarely jam.

The shooter who killed 17 students at a Parkland, Florida high school and injured 14 others can be heard on a cellphone video firing rounds at will amid screams by students.

The United States is the only country in the world where high-powered, semi-automatic rifles can be so easily purchased. Once marketed as assault weapons to advance sales, they now have different names within the gun community.

The gun industry labels them tactical rifles. AR enthusiasts on forums like AR15.com call them “EBRs” or “Enhanced Battle Rifles.” One “Gen-X” National Rifle Association columnist calls them “modern sporting weapons.”

From 1994 to 2004, the federal assault weapons ban outlawed sales of some new semi-automatic weapons, limited magazine capacity to 10 rounds and banned add-on features like a flash suppressor. Since it expired, the gun industry and the NRA have together incorporated AR-style rifles into High Power Rifle Competitions, making them a new sporting weapon while further expanding their circulation.

Over just the past six years, shooters have used AR-style rifles to injure or kill dozens of people in each incident in Parkland, Sutherland Springs, Las Vegas, Orlando, San Bernardino, Newtown and Aurora. Whether motivated by mental illness, terrorism or revenge, the shooters rarely broke any laws in obtaining their guns.

What’s behind the AR-15’s allure

NRA leaders tend to go dark after each mass shooting, while sympathetic politicians and pundits claim no one should politicize the (latest) tragedy. Yet like a never-ending horror movie, America’s toll of gun violence continues to rise including far more, but less publicized gun violence among urban minority youth.

It was a former Fox News host who recently said out loud what many others think. Mass shootings, wrote Bill O’Reilly, are “the price of freedom.”

Americans have not seriously discussed gun reform in decades. The loss of 20 young children and six educators at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown gave rise to a debate in Congress that faded within four months. After America’s largest shooting, in Las Vegas, Congress debated not restricting guns but only possibly an after-market accessory-bump stocks. Today Republican leaders are offering prayers instead of action. Or talking about anything — from better reporting of military domestic abusers, to improved monitoring of disturbed children along with potential terrorists — but gun reform.

Democratic leaders are again talking about attempting to pass a new assault weapons ban. But like other modest measures passed by Congress in past years, as well as measures adopted in a number of liberal states, the ban focuses more on the features of weapons than on who can access them.

Today in most states, one has to be a convicted felon or have been deemed mentally unfit by a court authority to be ineligible to buy a firearm. Even individuals charged with domestic abuse may still keep their guns in most states.

Real reform would mean asking, Who needs tactical weapons?

This is heresy to the NRA. But without addressing gun access, any attempt to curb gun violence will fail.

Take New Jersey. Before buying any gun, an individual must apply for a firearms ID card requiring a background check and fingerprints. One must apply for a separate handgun permit involving repeated checks to buy a single revolver or pistol.

Fla. school gunman Nikolas Cruz faces premeditated murder charges
That may sound like a lot of bureaucracy, but state and federal courts have so far upheld that such regulations are constitutional.

Individuals buy AR-style rifles for many reasons, including not to be outgunned by any potential (or imaginary) attackers. They include criminals and home burglars, and marauding rioters like after the 1992 acquittal of L.A. police officers for beating Rodney King, and government forces seeking — in the minds of many gun activists — to impose some kind of dictatorial state.

During the Obama administration there was talk of overthrowing the government. Under President Trump the talk is of defending his continuance in power.

America could curb gun violence by legally regulating access to guns including tactical rifles. But doing so would require changing the conversation.

Smyth (www.franksmyth.com) is a freelance journalist who has covered the NRA for Mother Jones, The Progressive and MSNBC.

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.

Gun Reform Needs Grassroots Activists Not Astroturf

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http://progressive.org/dispatches/gun-reform-needs-grassroots-activists-not-astroturf/

Talk of gun reform after the Las Vegas country music massacre has faded within just weeks.

Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, has made a plea to regulate “bump stocks,” a marginal step, and Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, has introduced gun legislation he predicts will fail. Conservative pundits are declaring gun reform will never happen. “Why do progressives and the media keep plowing this ocean?” wrote Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger. “The chance that the American people will ever disarm remains zero.”

Most gun owners want more regulation of firearms. Yet the gun lobby, led by the National Rifle Association, is arguably near their longtime goal of achieving expanded firearms nationwide.

There are several keys to the NRA’s success. Long before the term “fake news” became a common refrain, NRA officials already knew how to control their debate: Speak only when likely to win. Obfuscate as needed to impede dialogue. Deploy paid experts whose NRA funding is not disclosed. And skillfully attack elected officials who defy them one by one. They fund attack ads targeting candidates who favor gun reform, accusing them of being soft on crime without even mentioning guns.

The elusive and dirty messaging alone does not count for the NRA’s success. That hinges on the gun lobby’s army of grassroots activists.

But the combination of elusive and dirty messaging alone does not count for the NRA’s success. That hinges on the gun lobby’s army of grassroots activists. These are people who vote religiously and in blocks, supporting pro-gun candidates at every level. Much like NRA-leaning commentators on cable news who seem to follow a script, many gun rights activists can repeat pro-gun mantras by rote. And, unlike gun reformists, pro-gun activists speak up regularly at community and town-hall meetings and online.

Gun reform groups are more like “Astroturf,” as one pro-gun blogger has noted. No matter how much you spend on it, it never grows. After the shocking 2011 Tucson shooting involving Representative Gabby Giffords, and the unspeakable carnage of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, a handful of new organizations have emerged.

These include Americans for Responsible Solutions now renamed with its founder’s namesake Giffords. Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors against Illegal Guns, has now been rebranded as Everytown for Gun Safety. Another group, Moms Demand Action, was founded by a stay-at-home Mom and former public relations executive Shannon Watts, who has become a leader for gun reform on Twitter. Newtown Action Alliance and Sandy Hook Promise are each quieter groups led by parents who lost children inside Newtown’s Sandy Hook school. An energetic news website has also appeared, The Trace, to help document gun violence.

They join other groups like the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, named after the late White House press secretary, Jim Brady, who was severely injured in the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan. The largest and most well-funded group is Everytown, which boasts 3 million members.

But how active are they when compared to NRA members?

What Bloomberg is likely defining as “supporters” are people who have gotten on his email list, noted the pro-gun blogger. That’s a vastly different animal than a dues-paying member. NRA actually has one of the strictest standards for membership of any interest group in Washington, D.C.

Where are the anti-gun blogs?, the same blogger went on. Where’s the anti-gun convention that turns out over 80,000 people, like NRA does annually? How does the NRA mobilize bigger protests ad-hoc than anti-gun activists can manage even with professional organizers and slick ad campaigns?

Two paid NRA experts, including a Golden, Colorado-based researcher and legal scholar, David Kopel, testified in Congress after the Sandy Hook tragedy without anyone mentioning their NRA funding. Kopel previously filed amicus briefs to the Supreme Court, including before the benchmark verdict in the District of Columbia vs. Heller case, without ever disclosing his NRA funding. He has also published newspaper op-eds against gun control—his funding from the NRA unmentioned.

Only after prodding by done by me in The Progressive, other publications, first The New York Times and then The Washington Post, began referencing his NRA funding next to his byline or name when quoting him in news stories. But Kopel managed to run another op-ed without disclosing his funding, this one in response to the Las Vegas shooting, in The Wall Street Journal, earlier this month.

Recently a Cub Scout, 11-year-old Ames Mayfield, was dismissed from his pack for asking a Colorado state senator, “Why on earth would you want somebody who beats their wife to have access to a gun?”

Enacting gun reform would require an infusion of informed activists at every level to finally challenge the NRA’s longstanding monopoly of the debate. Recently a Cub Scout, 11-year-old Ames Mayfield, was dismissed from his pack for asking a Colorado state senator, “Why on earth would you want somebody who beats their wife to have access to a gun?” I wonder if the pack leader, who has since declined to comment, took offense at the scout’s question because direct challenging of any almost pro-gun politician is so rare.

Progressives have many reasons to prioritize gun reform. After suicides mostly by white men, much of America’s gun violence is concentrated among young urban minorities, as documented by the Violence Policy Centerwhose research has long been unassailable. The proliferation of firearms throughout our society contributes to police shootings of minorities and others. Many police in this nation are likely to encounter more armed suspects in the early years on the job than a comparable officer in the United Kingdom or Germany might encounter in their career.

Gun reform activists need to challenge common fallacies such as, “gun control leads to genocide like the Holocaust,” a claim belied by a body of scholarship. Or, “if guns are outlawed only criminals will have guns,” a myth belied by evidence at home and from the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia. Or, “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” a claim disproved by the Las Vegas shooting itself.

Gun reform activists need to challenge common fallacies such as, “if guns are outlawed only criminals will have guns.”

Many hardline gun advocates falsely claim any gun regulation is unconstitutional, even though the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia himself wrote, “the Second Amendment right is not unlimited.” Many also claim that the Second Amendment affords citizens the right to amass high-powered weapons in case they might need to use them some day either against or for the government.

This belief, not yet ruled upon by any court, is the reason Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock was able to legally acquire so many high-powered firearms. It helps explain the presence of armed militias at the fatal White Nationalist rally last year in Charlottesville, Virginia. And it is the ideology behind the so-called “Three Percenter” movement, based on another false claim, that just three percent of colonial American militiamen helped defeat the British in the American Revolution.

The moment seems urgent. The NRA has flip-flopped about whether it would support some regulation of “bump stocks,” the inexpensive, after-market mechanism that converts a semi-automatic rifle into a repeat-firing weapon.

The NRA said it might support regulating bump stocks under one condition—a monumental one that would, by any measure, alter the nation. The gun lobby is seeking either a new federal law or high court ruling that would make permits to carry concealed handguns in one state valid in every other, like a driver’s license.

Although now the push to limit bump-stocks already seems over, while the goal of carrying concealed handguns across states is only just beginning.

How weak is gun reform today? After our worst modern gun tragedy, no one is talking about regulating guns, only expanding their access across the country.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has covered the NRA for more than twenty years, writing for The Village Voice, The Washington Post, MSNBC.comand 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.

“The Price of Freedom”: For the Gun Lobby, Mass Shootings Cannot Be Avoided

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http://progressive.org/dispatches/price-of-freedom-for-the-gun-lobby-mass-shootings/

“The Price of Freedom”: For the Gun Lobby, Mass Shootings Cannot Be Avoided

by

October 6, 2017

Why does anyone need so many guns?

This is a question that President Trump and other elected leaders, along with the gun lobby led by the National Rifle Association, are trying to avoid.

The Las Vegas country music concert shooting poses one of the toughest challenges for the NRA and its supporters to date. The shooter was neither foreign-born nor foreign-motivated. He was a homegrown killer who legally amassed an arsenal of weapons he used to target an unsuspecting crowd.

High-powered, semi-automatic rifles of the type purchased and used by the Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock are designed not for hunting or self-defense, but for combat—to target as many enemy combatants as possible in the shortest amount of time. So why does the NRA maintain every American has the right to amass these kinds of weapons? So that they can defend themselves at will without being out-armed by anyone.

“This is the price of freedom,” former, disgraced Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly wrote Monday on his own website hours after the shooting.

Under pressure to do something in the wake of America’s worst modern mass shooting to date, the NRA and a growing number of Republican politicians have said they will consider regulating “bump stocks”—a crude device used by Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock to convert one or more of his rifles into a relatively slow, but still fully automatic weapon.

This is a rare concession. Hardline gun advocates to the right of the NRA oppose it. And, it’s a symbolic gesture at best, sidestepping the issue of why the shooter was able to lawfully purchase so many powerful guns. The NRA is offering it coupled with a push for legislation to make permits to carry concealed handguns issued in any one state valid in every other, just like a driver’s license.

Paddock broke no laws until nearly the moment he opened fire. He had no apparent sign of mental illness or a criminal record, and had passed what background checks are required for retail store firearms purchases in Nevada.

He did not commit a crime when he brought ten high-powered rifles, one handgun and ammunition inside his luggage into his room at the Mandalay Hotel. He did not even break the law when he obtained a “bump stock,” as possession of one is—due to NRA lobbying—not illegal.

Paddock broke no laws until nearly the moment he opened fire.

He seems to have first broken the law only when he physically attached the device to one or more of his rifles to convert them into fully automatic firing weapons, which are with few exceptions illegal. He gave no sign of criminal intent until he broke his hotel room’s windows to give himself two clear lines of sight, 32 floors up and 400 yards away, before firing on the concert fans below.

“You know – it’s an open society,” South Dakota Republican Senator John Thune told an NBC News reporter after the Las Vegas shooting. “And when somebody does what he wants to do, it’s going to be hard to prevent anything.”

He continued: “I think people are going to have to take steps in their own lives to take precautions to protect themselves. And in situations like that, you know, try to stay safe. As somebody said — get small.”

NRA leaders have previously claimed that high-powered, semi-automatic rifles are good to kill vermin, although use of a high-powered round—designed to cause massive tissue and bone damage in a human—is literally overkill for small mammals.

But gun rights advocates have other scenarios in mind when claiming the right to stockpile such weapons including one incident that has become part of their tribal lore.

During the Los Angeles riots following the 1992 acquittal of police officers who beat Rodney King, Korean-American store owners used a variety of weapons to keep largely African-American rioters from looting. “They finally interview the Legend himself,” recently wrote one YouTube commentator about one of the store owners.

Hardline gun advocates also point to the need for self-defense after massive storms. In 2013, after Hurricane Sandy hit New Jersey and New York, NRA executive Wayne LaPierre wrote: “Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone Criminals” and the “total anarchy” that may ensue are all reasons why people need guns.

But the other reason Americans need guns is to arm themselves against a potentially tyrannical government, or so many hardline gun advocates claim. This view was popularized by the so-called patriot militia movement against gun control during the Clinton administration, and which helped motivate Timothy McVeigh to bomb a federal building in Oklahoma City. It reached a crescendo, especially in Internet chat forums, during President Obama’s eight years in office, in no small part due to his race.

The NRA maintains that previously law-abiding, mentally competent citizens like Paddock should continue having unlimited access to high-powered firearms so they can either fight, or defend, the government, depending upon who is in power.

Defense against government tyranny was also the basis of candidate Donald Trump’s threats of violence, either if he did not receive the presidential nomination by his own party, or if Hillary Clinton as president were to nominate gun reform justices to the Supreme Court. The same view remains the undercurrent driving recent NRA video messages targeting liberals, the media and others who protest nonviolently against police abuses and who oppose President Trump.

Americans should make no mistake about it. The reason that the NRA maintains that previously law-abiding, mentally competent citizens like Paddock should continue having unlimited access to high-powered firearms is so they can either fight, or defend, the government, depending upon who is in power. That would be hard to do if citizens had access to less firepower than police and other government authorities. It helps explain why the NRA is backing legislation to legalize sales of silencers, absurdly claiming that silencers—as opposed to ear plugs or muffs—are necessary to protect hearing loss among gun owners.

Of course, when it comes to the protection of, or against, government, their logic is flawed. The language of the Second Amendment reads “to keep and bear arms,” and has thus been interpreted to apply only to handheld weapons. While it could be conceivably construed to allow citizens to have weapons like shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, as the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said on Fox News shortly after the Aurora, Colorado theater shooting, no one argues that the Second Amendment allows civilians to keep and bear heavier firepower like cannons or tanks. The notion of fighting government forces, if taken literally, is a fantasy.

Americans must decide whether they accept the gun lobby’s logic. As NRA head Wayne LaPierre expressed it after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun.”

Although the NRA has now come out in favor of slightly more regulation of “bump stocks,” (but not other mechanical devices that can effectively convert semi-automatic rifles into fully automatically firing weapons), it initially went dark for several days, refusing to comment and uncharacteristically failing to update its usually active Facebook and Twitter pages.

They still seem to be scrambling to respond. The gun lobby recently advocated to make it easier for mentally ill people along with others like accused domestic abusers to continue accessing guns.

Of course, it would have made no difference in this case. I run a training and consulting firm helping prepare journalists, aid workers and others how to protect themselves from various kinds of weaponry and attacks, including domestic active shooters. But the nature of the Las Vegas attack, with the shooter having a high, distant line of sight to target the crowd in an open space with continuous fire, would render even the best of training marginally effective.

The NRA may not be saying much, but Fox News anchor Sean Hannity has. Following the NRA’s bad guy versus good guy logic, he suggested that an armed individual with a modicum of training like himself (Hannity said he was trained by his parents who had “law enforcement connections”) might stop a shooter, “when they start to reload.”

A point his own Fox News colleague immediately shot down.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has covered the NRA for more than twenty years, writing for The Village Voice, The Washington Post, 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.

 

Four Years after Sandy Hook, the NRA Continues the Arming of America

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http://www.progressive.org/news/2016/12/189100/four-years-after-sandy-hook-nra-continues-arming-america

The weekend after the presidential election, I attended a gun show in Frederick County, one of the rural counties in the blue state of Maryland that voted for Donald Trump. One mother, with her infant resting quietly in a navy blue stroller, pulled back the black metal slide of a 9mm pistol. Not far away a man caressed the polymer handguard and stock of an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

The National Rifle Association manned a booth near the entrance. One of the men behind the green wooden counter, whose nametag read Bob, said he was a longtime NRA member. I asked him what he thought about NRA head Wayne LaPierre. “He’s well-spoken, and I trust him,” he answered.

Wayne LaPierre, in a video made by the NRA just days after the election, credited NRA members for Trump’s victory: “On November 8, you, the five million members of the National Rifle Association of America, along with the tens of millions of gun owners all over this country, who followed your lead, achieved a truly extraordinary, historic, even heroic accomplishment.”

The election of Donald J. Trump, combined with a Republican sweep of the Senate, has given today’s GOP an unprecendented monopoly of power. The NRA now finds itself within reach of goals that it has pursued for nearly forty years. The organization has arrived at this point via a combination of patience, self-control, and deceit.

“In the face of the bitter hatred and elitist condemnation, this is our historic moment to go on offense and defeat the forces that have allied against our freedom once and for all,” stated LaPierre in a recent video titled, “Our Time is Now.” With a patient, self-effacing demeanor, he’s the first executive director to not come from a military, hunting, or sports background.

In the video, LaPierre also mocks universal background checks, favored by 70 to 90 percent of Americans, and derides other “common sense” gun laws. He calls for the new Congress to pass a national concealed carry reciprocity law, which would require states to accept a concealed carry weapons permits issued by other states, much like the way states recognize each other’s driver licenses. Today, twenty-six states have at least some restrictions on who is eligible to carry a concealed weapon. Among them, nine states further limit such permits to people like security guards.

LaPierre also claims President Obama has “infected” federal courts with 300 constitutionally unsound judges and states that “Second Amendment freedoms” should trump state and municipal gun control laws. How is it that in Washington, D.C., one can now legally keep a gun in the home, asks LaPierre, but there is no place to buy a gun in the same city?

The NRA pumped a record $38 million into ads to help elect Donald Trump, and another $24 million to secure GOP control of the Senate. With the help of NRA campaign ads saturating the airwaves, six NRA-backed Senate candidates won key races, including Marco Rubio in Florida. Now the gun lobby is making an unprecedented push for federally mandated measures to expand the ability of state gun permit holders to carry firearms nationwide. The group is also seeking national legislation to legalize silencers. The NRA supports President-elect Trump promise to eliminate “gun-free zones” across the country, too.

“I don’t think it’s quite game over,” said Jonathan E. Lowy, legal director of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “But there are reasons to be concerned.”

Trump will appoint at least one justice to replace the late Antonin Scalia, but the court’s liberal justices include Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who is eighty-three. If Trump gets to appoint a second Supreme Court justice, America’s entire political landscape could change. The NRA is looking for a Roberts court decision that would not only proscribe future attempts at gun control, but dramatically expand firearms access across the nation.

None of this was supposed to happen.

For years, many liberal pundits proclaimed the NRA was in decline. Gun ownership, they noted, has been decreasing across America. One report found that just three percent of Americans own most of the nation’s guns. The NRA, some said, is facing the same kind of challenges as the Republican Party in a nation that is increasingly diverse.

And then there was the gun tragedy that led gun reformists to believe their time had finally come. This Wednesday, December 14, marks the fourth anniversary of the slaughter of twenty small children and six of their educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The Sandy Hook tragedy was preceded by many other mass shootings from Columbine to Aurora, from Tucson to Virginia Tech, to name just a few, not to mention the more mundane, daily toll of gun violence. But it was this unspeakable schoolhouse tragedy that finally seemed to signal a time for change.

“So our hearts are broken today—for the parents and grandparents, sisters and brothers of these little children, and for the families of the adults who were lost,” said a teary-eyed President Obama. Over the ensuing six months, there was a palpable hope that Congress would finally act. The Senate drafted bills to try and pass “universal” background checks, even though they still had large loopholes.

But even watered-down versions of the relatively token legislation failed due to the threat of a Republican filibuster over a Democratic-controlled Senate. None of the legislation introduced after Sandy Hook ever even made to the GOP-controlled House.

Understanding how the NRA survived Sandy Hook helps explain how the gun lobby has ended up on top today. It prevailed by downplaying its own extremism, and by presenting one alleged “independent” expert whose influence ran all the way to the Senate and Supreme Court.

LaPierre’s initial response to Sandy Hook shocked many people. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun,” he said, adding that if any adults at Sandy Hook had been armed, the children and educators might still be alive. His comments were described as “tone-deaf.” During the subsequent Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on gun violence, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois asked LaPierre if he thought the Second Amendment was meant to let citizens amass arms as a check on government, the driving mantra of gun rights absolutists. LaPierre said this was the Founding Fathers’ original intent, sidestepping the question of whether this is still the NRA’s view now.

Another witness at that Senate hearing, David Kopel, titled his testimony, “What Should America Do About Gun Violence?” He identified himself as the research director of the Independence Institute in Golden, Colorado, an associate policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., and an adjunct professor of advanced constitutional law at Denver University. He did not disclose that his Institute had received more than $1.4 million, including about $175,000 a year over the past eight years, from the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund. For decades, until the funding was uncovered first by this reporter at MSNBC.com and later by FOX31 in Denver, Kopel managed to write op-eds in leading newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, without ever identifying his NRA funding.

Kopel also wrote law journal pieces at top schools, including Harvard, Yale, and the University of Michigan, without disclosing his NRA funding. And he appeared before the Supreme Court, as part of the team arguing in favor of gun rights in the District of Columbia vs. Heller. His amicus briefs on behalf of law enforcement groups, at least two of which have themselves received NRA funding, each failed to mention any NRA funding to either these groups or himself. Kopel’s briefs were cited four times in 2008 in Heller’s majority decision by the late Justice Antonin Scalia. They cropped up again in 2010 in another landmark Supreme Court gun case, McDonald v. Chicago.

Four years can seem like a long time. The gun reformists who were expecting victory after Sandy Hook now see their worst nightmares forming on the horizon.

It’s true that an NRA victory is hardly assured, especially at the state level. In November, gun restrictive referendums passed in three out of four states. In Washington, courts can now block access to people deemed dangerous. In California, background checks are now required to buy ammunition. Nevada voters passed one of the nation’s most restrictive laws, requiring background checks for almost any firearms transfers. A similar initiative failed in Maine.

“The [gun control] movement is in better shape than it’s ever been,” says Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center and longtime gun control expert, He points to relatively new organizations including one funded by parents who lost children at Sandy Hook, and another organized by former Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords, who was injured in a racially motivated 2011 attack that killed six people, including a child. A third group organized by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has pumped millions to back gun reform candidates.

But nearly all of those candidates lost on November 8, one more sign that the view from Capitol Hill in every direction favors the NRA. Unless progressives and gun reform groups manage to muster enough strength and resources to oppose it, the gun lobby may well end up expanding arms access across America for some time to come.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has covered the NRA for more than twenty years, writing for The Village Voice, The Washington Post, 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.

The Dangerous Movement Behind Donald Trump

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http://www.progressive.org/news/2016/10/189005/dangerous-movement-behind-donald-trump

It makes sense to worry that Donald Trump’s recent comments about the Second Amendment could encourage an assassination attempt against Hillary Clinton. But, as a long-time follower of the gun-rights movement, I think Trump’s words mean something else.

His controversial statement in a speech that “Second Amendment people” could stop Hillary Clinton from appointing liberal judges and cracking down on gun rights fits in with a familiar National Rifle Association message to members—that gun owners should prepare for an armed insurrection against the state. Trump is stoking the coals of an extremist movement that in the long run may prove more dangerous than any crazy would-be assassin inspired by Trump.

“He pointed out that an armed populace is a check on lawless politicians,” wrote a commenter about Trump’s Second Amendment remarks on the pro-gun ar15.com forum, adding, “I wonder if anybody else ever thought of that? Or codified it in a document of some type?”

While Trump and his supporters claim he is upholding the Constitution, these latest comments are an escalation of his ongoing attack against the credibility of our constitutional democratic process. Since he started losing ground in the polls, Trump began claiming without evidence that “the system” and the elections are rigged. Now he seems to be suggesting that some kind of collective act of resistance may be necessary to stop an overreaching government should Clinton win the November election.

This is a message that resonates with the hardline base of the gun lobby and the NRA, which this year, for the first time, had an official speak from the stage of a Republican National Convention. It also appeals to people like the small group of armed men who occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom. And it’s a message that strikes a chord with white supremacists and neo-Nazis who have never felt so comfortable with a major party presidential candidate as they do now.

Americans should not forget that Timothy McVeigh was a gun-rights absolutist who was following the plot of a novel, The Turner Diaries, written by a neo-Nazi leader, in 1995 when he blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Nor should we forget that he did so on the second anniversary of the federal siege at Waco, Texas.

For most people, the death of seventy-six people at a compound in Waco was the result of a tragic standoff between the FBI and the Branch Davidians, a messianic cult. For gun rights absolutists, Waco remains a galvanizing example of federal abuse of power. Most important to gun advocates, the original reason for the raid was the presence of illegal, fully-automatic weapons.

Seen in that context, Trump’s recent remarks are potentially more treasonous than encouraging Russian agents to hack into Democratic National Committee emails. They are a more serious threat than Trump’s remarks that riots might break out if he did not receive the Republican Party nomination. Trump’s appeal to “Second Amendment people” is the kind of claim you might hear from a failing candidate in an underdeveloped nation prone to coups.

For the first time in modern history, a major U.S. presidential candidate seems to be promoting a possible armed insurrection against the U.S. government.

Trump’s words, as usual, were sketchy and ambiguous. Clinton wants to essentially revoke the Second Amendment, Trump falsely contended, adding:

“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people—maybe there is, I don’t know.”

A Trump spokesman claimed he meant that “Second Amendment people” would act before the election by “voting in record numbers” to defeat Clinton. A Trump spokeswoman later said he meant “Second Amendment people” would act afterward, exerting their clout to stop Senators from approving Clinton’s nominees to the Supreme Court.

Neither explanation is what countless gun-rights absolutists heard. For them, the Second Amendment is about their right to keep arms in order to fight an insurgent war against our own government, should one ever become necessary to keep tyranny at bay. This may sound ludicrous. But go to Twitter and search terms like #2A, #NRA and #MolonLabe, an ancient Greek expression of defiance that means “come and take them.” Or spend any time on websites like InfoWars.com. Or read NRA statements.

“Our Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment so Americans would never have to live in tyranny,” said NRA chief executive officer Wayne LaPierre in 2012 before a United Nations arms control panel in New York City. “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 view has nothing to do with hunting or sports shooting, which is where the NRA—until hardliners took over the organization in the late 1970s—had its roots. In fact, NRA hardline advocates today deride hunters who don’t share their Second Amendment views as “Fudds,” short for the bumbling cartoon character Elmer Fudd who never managed to shoot Bugs Bunny. The late President Ronald Reagan was the NRA’s most famous Fudd for supporting gun control both during his tenure and after.

Gun rights absolutists don’t entirely trust Trump, either. “Never trust a Fudd,” wrote “waltdewalt” on a gun politics page on Reddit, suggesting Trump is not as committed to the Second Amendment as he claims.

The gun lobby is playing a long game. They have managed to withstand the fallout from one horrific mass shooting after another, including the heartbreakingly tragic loss of first-grade children in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, and the largest such tragedy in our nation’s history at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Gun reformists, meanwhile, have managed to make progress in just a handful of states, while they have failed to pass even token legislation in Congress. In the long run, the gun lobby faces the same demographic challenges as the Republican Party. But no one should count them out anytime soon.

As we approach the fortieth anniversary of the NRA’s transition from a sports shooting club to a gun lobby, the group’s vision for an armed America is becoming a reality. The change was led by a small group of determined advocates who, through some parliamentary jockeying using the NRA’s own bylaws, assumed control in 1977 at the NRA annual convention in Cincinnati, Ohio. (I attended NRA meetings and reported on the machinations of extremists controlling the NRA board for The Village Voice.)

Since then, the NRA has grown into the nation’s most powerful single-issue lobby, and has managed, through both transparent and shadowy means, to dramatically expand Americans’ access to guns across the nation.

In 1986, just nine states required the granting of concealed-carry-weapon permits; now at least forty-one states allow concealed carry, some without the need for permits. A majority of states also allow the open carrying of firearms. When gun reformists talk about passing federal gun reform legislation in Congress, they need to remember that these gun-permissive state laws are already nearly a fait accompli.

The patchwork of gun laws across the nation is precisely what allows weapons to flow unchecked across state and city lines. States with permissive gun laws are the main suppliers of guns used in crimes in states and cities with stricter laws. Of 3,806 crime guns confiscated in New Jersey last year, more than 86 percent came from other states. Of the 12,390 crime guns confiscated in Illinois, more than two-thirds came from out of state. These statistics are from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which now, due to an executive order by President Obama, is once again allowed to compile data on guns used in crimes (a simple law-enforcement practice previously outlawed thanks to successful NRA lobbying in Congress).

A few pundits have boldly predicted the NRA’s demise. But the gun lobby continues to endure, for a number of reasons. First, it controls the message, including running a script designed to deflect debate away from gun reform after every mass attack. Second, it uses “independent experts” like lawyers David Kopel and David T. Hardy, each of whom testified after Sandy Hook on national television in the Senate without anyone disclosing that Kopel in particular had by then received $1.39 million from the NRA.

Third, the NRA sets up shell organizations like the Law Enforcement Alliance of America to claim more support from police than actually exists. And, finally, the group intimidates politicians by wielding funds from its gun-industry-filled coffers, less to make donations to the candidates it supports than to finance attack ads against opponents, usually on nongun issues (like Benghazi).

The racial tensions that have exploded over the past two years since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, have only bolstered the gun lobby. Yet the sniper attack on police in Dallas, Texas, led some law enforcement officers to challenge policies long championed by the NRA. After the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, attacks, the head of the Cleveland police union raised the safety of police officers to try to get Ohio to ban both concealed and open-carry of weapons in downtown Cleveland during the Republican National Convention. The effort failed, but it shows that law enforcement is not lined up behind the gun lobby as the NRA claims.

Since Sandy Hook, a number of new gun reformist groups have emerged, including one funded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. But all of them combined still pale in comparison to the kind of deep-rooted national and local voter networks painstakingly built over decades by the NRA. One Pennsylvania gun-rights blogger mocks these gun reform efforts as little more than astroturf, meaning you can buy it and lay it down but it still won’t grow into a grassroots movement.

This year, the gun rights movement is enjoying a higher national profile than ever before. Meanwhile, the gun reform movement, despite the very good work of groups going back decades like the Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center, is in many ways just getting started. Gun reformists need to pace themselves for the struggle ahead.

The gun lobby will outlast Trump. But his campaign has helped bring far-right gun enthusiasts and white supremacist groups into the mainstream.

“We have a wonderful OPPORTUNITY here folks, that may never come again, at the RIGHT time,” wrote Rocky Suhayda, the chairman of the American Nazi Party last fall, as was recently reported by Buzzfeed. “Donald Trump’s campaign statements, if nothing else, have SHOWN that ‘our views’ are NOT so ‘unpopular’ as the Political Correctness crowd have told everyone they are!”

Mainstream pundits and the Clinton campaign are right: Trump’s talk is inciting violence, and America has a tragic history of political assassinations. We have a history of homegrown terrorism, too.

Frank Smyth is an award-winning investigative journalist and gun owner who covers the gun lobby the The Progressive. He has written about the NRA for more than twenty years for outlets including The Village Voice and The Washington Post.