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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.