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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.

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

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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. 

Why Trump’s Second Amendment Comments are More Dangerous than You Think

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Read the original article here: http://www.progressive.org/news/2016/08/188903/why-trump{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}E2{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}80{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}99s-second-amendment-comments-are-more-dangerous-you-think

It makes sense to worry that Donald Trump’s most 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. Hiscontroversial 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 NRA 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 even more dangerous than any aspiring assassin inspired by Trump.

“He pointed out that an armed populace is a check on lawless politicians,” wrote the “FuriousYachtsman” this week about Trump’s Second Amendment remarks on the pro-gunar15.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 like to claim he is upholding the Constitution, his 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 National Rifle Association, which last month had a representative speak from the stage of a Republican National Convention for the first time. It also speaks to people like the small group of armed men who occupied of an Oregon National Wildlife Refuge earlier this year, 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, when in 1995 he blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City. Nor should we forget that he did so on the second anniversary of the federal siege at Waco, Texas, which for most people was a tragic standoff between the government 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 more potentially 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. His 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 said, and then added:

“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 if she wins through the clout of the National Rifle Association to stop senators from approving her pick for a justice.

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 #MolonLobe, an ancient Greek term for “Come and Take Them” away. 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 Executive Director Wayne LaPierre in 2012 before a U.N. arms control panel in New York.

“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— has 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 Buggs 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 last month, suggesting Trump is not as committed to the Second Amendment as he claims. 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 recentlyreported 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 a freelance journalist and gun owner who won the Society of Professional Journalists National Magazine Investigative Reporting Award for his Mother Jonesexposé,“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.

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.