I am ambivalent about federal gun control laws. Some I support, some I would not. I prefer a broad outline at the federal level that allows a lot of flexibility at the state and local level, to account for differences in crime rates, population density, and culture. But Gail Collins is spot-on when she points out the cognitive dissonance involved when members of Congress are quick to toss aside habeas corpus and Miranda rights for U.S. citizens but are unwilling to deny gun ownership to people on the terrorist watch list. Either we are going to freak out and start throwing away legal protections for U.S. citizens or we are not. And if we are going to pick and choose which rights to maintain, it seems like the 2nd Amendment for terrorists is probably the wrong way to go.
The Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on “Terrorists and Guns: The Nature of the Threat and Proposed Reforms,” concerned a modest bill sponsored by Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey. It would allow the government to stop gun sales to people on the F.B.I. terror watch list the same way it does people who have felony convictions. Because Congress has repeatedly rejected this idea, 1,119 people on the watch list have been able to purchase weapons over the last six years. One of them bought 50 pounds of military grade explosives.
No one could predict that someone on the watch list might use one of those guns or some military grade explosives to kill innocent civilians. Right? They can’t fly on a plane, but they’re free to arm themselves to the teeth.
I still don’t get this country’s fascination and obsession with guns. Gd. Are your penises that small?
It’s like birtherism. A short-term political tactic got out of hand with white males who haven’t adjusted to women’s rights. And the rationalizations have unfolded from there.
Because it’s become a political litmus test, each new grant of open carry or conceal carry doesn’t end it but produces a new demand. Which of course only the Republicans can deliver and the Democrats must capitulate to of find themselves Gored by the NRA.
It’s most annoying to me because there doesn’t seem to be any way to combat this gun culture. I don’t think gun bans work here because it’s gotten so out of hand. It’s kind of funny. Conservatives obsess that banning drugs works, but banning guns doesn’t. Really, it comes down to the culture. We’re a drug and gun loving culture, so banning them is pointless.
Recently I saw that elementary schools are educating kids about guns. At first I was pissed, but then the more I thought about it the more I thought it was a good idea. If we can’t do anything about the gun culture, we might as well have an educated populace.
Elementary schools educating about guns:
Well, that is not unusual at all. In rural areas especially. In the 1950s, the Boy Scouts were educating 11-14 year olds about guns.
It really depends on what the education consists of. (1) Don’t play with real guns was a big one in my growing up. (2) Don’t point a gun at anything accidentally. (3) Never assume that a gun is unloaded. (4) If you use guns always do it under adult supervision. Those are legitimate gun education items.
There is a great extent that this is a red precinct-blue precinct issue because of the difference in the use of guns in rural and urban areas. In most rural areas, people use guns for hunting game and they eat the game they hunt. In urban areas, most guns are either never used (sitting in the drawer “for protection”) or used in crimes. Suburbs fall between these two to the extent they are semi-rural or semi-urban in character.
In addition, there are communities of target and skeet shooters and gunmakers and collectors in all sorts of places. The first pursue target shooting in informal or formal competition. The latter are taken up with the gun as an art form, insisting on patterns of blueing, different woods, and engraving. Collectible guns can cost into the thousand of dollars and provide secondary incomes to lots of people who don’t have access to good jobs locally.
But Wayne LaPierre has turned the NRA into a Republican front group and has a personal grudge against a guy who took a bullet intended for Ronald Reagan.
I got my first gun when I was about six. It was a gift from my father, a single shot, bolt action .22 rifle. I still have it. It was, like nearly everything else he gave me, a teaching tool. When I saw it for the first time I got really excited. He held it out with one hand and when I grabbed for it, he didn’t let go right way. He kept a firm grip until he knew he had my unidivided attention. I will never forget the look on his face. Or his words.
If I ever see you point this at another human being, I will bend the barrel around that tree.
I had absolutely no doubt that he meant every word. That’s where my education about firearms started.
Just as the Christian conservative believe in the One Commandment (Thou shalt not commit adultery), broadly construed to prohibit any sex other than the sex they admit to having — the conservative Constitutional scholars believe only in the One Amendment to the Constitution (the Second Amendment). Because with the Second Amendment one doesn’t need a Congress or Supreme Court or President telling you what to do. You have the ultimate political power. It’s the Republican version of “power to the people”.
Only corporations can use the other amendments in the Bill of Rights.
terrorists never walk into places where large numbers of people are assembled and start shooting.
It’s the last totem of white-male privilege. Rationality has nothing to do with it. Although I’m sure the wingers are hurriedly scribbling about how it’s no problem if terrorists have guns because, by the second amendment, the good guys have guns too. It’s the feds and their tyrannical refusal to make assault rifles mandatory that are preventing us from winning that gun-battle. Yo Joe.
Most of the black males that I know are gun owners, too. They just aren’t noisy about it, perhaps because some live in Chicago where it’s illegal.
Interestingly, they patronize different target ranges than the white conservatives. Also they tend to own a gun, while the white conservatives only guns, plural.
That’s the breakdown I see, black males irrespective of politics and white male conservatives. There may be black or white female gun owners, but they don’t talk openly about it.
Well I’m a lot closer to the RKBA camp than anyone in the conversation so far, but still, that particular piece of cognitive dissonance makes my head hurt more than usual. I used to have a little respect for Graham as one of the less-insane Repubs, but lately he seems to be going through some kind of midlife crisis.
To me it seems like a no-brainer that if someone has aroused enough attention to be put on a no-fly list, their access to weapons of any kind ought to be if not restricted out right, at least scrutinized very very closely. Whoever maintains the no-fly list ought to be sharing their info with ATF and vice versa. And military grade explosives? You gotta be kidding me.
Sorry, but it seems like there’s a bunch of cog diss on your part, too. If gun ownership is a right, as I believe the RKBA crowd asserts, then it can’t be taken away without due process. Or “abridged”. In our loonytunes culture, owning firearms is seen as a more vital right than being free to travel. Idiotic, but that’s how it stands.
The NRA and its buddies regularly promote a no-compromise stance on the absolute right of everyone to own any kind of weapon they can get their hands on. If you support them, I don’t understand how you can at the same time urge violating that Constitutional Right. It’s either a fundamental right that must be defended or it’s not. Military grade explosives don’t kill people; people kill people. Right?
I didn’t say I support the NRA. They’ve taken what ought to be a fairly non-controversial issue and made it into a rallying point for fanatics. Where I grew up, everybody had a gun in the house. Everybody. For hunting, for target practice, for the occasional stray varmint. Nobody was armed to the teeth waiting for the black helicopters. That has come from the same place as the Tea Partiers and the Birthers and the rest of the crazies. It has about as much to do with the 2nd amendment as Obama’s birth certificate has to do with whether he’s qualified to be president.
There is nothing in the 2nd amendment that says you have an inalienable right to an AK47, or a field howitzer, or military grade explosives. There is nothing in the 2nd amendment that says we can’t have sensible regulations about firearms as we do for many other matters related to public safety. On that issue as on so many others these days, a noisy minority has gotten more attention than it deserves by staking out the most extreme position it can find and then treating any disagreement as validation of its paranoid fantasies.
The point I was trying to make is about information sharing. The Cheney admin dragooned all these disparate agencies into one so that they could collaborate and share information about persons of interest who might pose a national security threat. Yet they don’t seem to be sharing all that much. If a person is on the no-fly list, that ought to be of interest to ATF and the FBI. If ATF learns that someone is buying explosives, that ought to raise flags with the airline security folks. And so on.