Tag: gun controls
Getting Restless Under The Rule Of The Republican Minority

Getting Restless Under The Rule Of The Republican Minority

Assuming that the White House errs on the side of sanity, Democrats may be unable to prevent President Trump’s Supreme Court pick from being confirmed. But if they play their cards right, they may be able to highlight the single most important issue now confronting American democracy: increasingly unrepresentative minority rule.

On issue after issue, majority views are stifled. Regarding the Supreme Court, Republicans have become precisely what they have long pretended to abhor: a party relying upon unelected, “elitist” judges to win political disputes in the courts that they can’t win at the ballot box.

As New York ‘s Jonathan Chait trenchantly points out, Democrats have received more votes than Republican nominees in six out of the last seven presidential elections—starting with Bill Clinton in 1992.

Yet four of the eight Supreme Court justices whose judicial activism has dominated American politics since Bush v. Gore—the nakedly partisan decision handing the presidency to George W. Bush, Lion of Baghdad—have been appointed by a Republican president.

The results have been damaging to our democracy, none more than the 2010 Citizens United decision, in which the Supremes essentially ruled that corporate money is speech, rendering virtually all campaign finance laws toothless on First Amendment grounds. This has corrupted our politics almost beyond measure. In his dissent to the 5-4 decision, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the ruling “threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation….[a] democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold.”

Who could now believe anything else?

Then there’s D.C. vs Heller, the 2008 decision invalidating gun control laws based upon an absolutist reading of the Second Amendment, at odds with the plain text, which includes the phrase “well-regulated.” Over 200 years, such an interpretation never occurred to anybody until Justice Antonin Scalia dreamed it up. In view of the subsequent carnage, even Scalia had second thoughts, telling a Colorado audience after a grisly mass murder committed by a mental patient wielding an AR-15 that the right to keep and bear arms was not absolute.

The brilliant jurist gave as an example of a weapon that might be forbidden—I am not making this up—a hand-held rocket launcher capable of bringing down an airplane. He was a real card, Justice Scalia.

Although the great majority of gun owners (myself included) would favor laws taking military weapons out of civilian hands and imposing strict background checks, a Republican Party completely in thrall to the National Rifle Association—whose money, even Russian money, is deemed speech after all—resists sensible legislation. In consequence, mass shooting incidents have become an increasingly common feature of American life, rendering the sane majority helpless and fatalistic—a bad state of mind in a democratic republic.

Should a Republican Senate jam through  the nomination of yet another cookie-cutter Federalist Society ideologue before November’s congressional elections, Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker predicts some rulings we can expect.

The Supreme Court, he writes, “will overrule Roe v. Wade, allowing states to ban abortions and to criminally prosecute any physicians and nurses who perform them. It will allow shopkeepers, restaurateurs, and hotel owners to refuse service to gay customers on religious grounds. It will guarantee that fewer African-American and Latino students attend élite universities. It will approve laws designed to hinder voting rightsIt will invoke the Second Amendment to prohibit states from engaging in gun control, including the regulation of machine guns and bump stocks.”

None of these outcomes is favored by the majority of American voters. Not even close in most cases. Take Roe v Wade, for example. Polls show that two-thirds of voters nationwide favor keeping government out of people’s bedrooms and doctor’s offices. The conservative in me, for example, sees it as a straight-up Fourth Amendment privacy issue.

Regardless of your own or your church’s view that abortion is a terrible sin, how does government even know when a woman becomes pregnant? It’s simply nobody’s business. Nothing could be more private or personal. Where does anybody, much less government, get off making so intimate a decision for anybody else? It’s not a matter of being pro-abortion, but pro-liberty.

So are we headed for a country where citizens in New York, California and other highly-populated places have dramatically different personal freedoms from those in what H.L. Mencken called the “cow states?” Could be.

Indeed, much of the nation’s political paralysis derives from the outsized power the Constitution gives about 30 thinly-populated states in the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College. As things stand, the average citizen of Wyoming has approximately 70 times more power than a Californian. Exacerbated by an authoritarian president and enshrined in a Supreme Court dominated by Republican ideologues, this undemocratic division of power is tearing at the nation’s foundations.

Senate Democrats can make a great show of resisting a Trump nominee, but the only long-term solution lies in voters’ hands.

IMAGE: Pro-abortion rights protesters and anti-abortion protesters jostle with their signs as they demonstrate in the hopes of a ruling in their favor on decisions at the Supreme Court building in Washington, June 20, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Obsessed With Violence And Awaiting ‘Revolution,’ Far Right Got Another Church Massacre

Obsessed With Violence And Awaiting ‘Revolution,’ Far Right Got Another Church Massacre

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

We are living in very sick times. But make no mistake—the group that is most obsessed with violence, that worships firearms, defends gun rights to no end and fantasizes about civil strife, is the far right.

By late Sunday, everyone across America who had a TV or internet connection had heard about the latest mass gun-led slaughter. This time it was in a church in Texas. Twenty-six people were killed and more may die from critical injuries. The gunman, as the Washington Post reported Monday, was not just a military veteran dishonorably discharged because of a history of domestic abuse. Apparently, his mother-in-law attended the targeted church.

The reaction from Texas Republican politicians was what you would expect—they said more people should have carried guns into church, as if that would have ended the carnage. President Trump said the tragedy had nothing to do with guns. InfoWars said the shooter was denied a gun permit, to raise the tired NRA talking point that only the good people legally access weapons.

Why bring up InfoWars, one of the most irresponsible and repulsive right-wing propagandist sites at a serious moment like this? Because as America lurches from one crisis to the next, as has been going on for weeks now (hurricanes, fires, nuclear war threats, health care repeal, another mass shooting, and now this), we shouldn’t forget what far right crazies were hoping would happen this past weekend: They were eagerly anticipating a different conflagration.

Saturday was supposed to be the start of another apocalyptic showdown that was the secular far right’s domestic version of modern end times. As the leftist anti-war group Refuse Fascism was planning rallies in blue cities and states across America, the far right went nuts, telling all who saw their online messaging to get out their guns and get ready.

As the Washington Post noted last Wednesday—which might as well be a light year away in today’s saturation crisis news environment—“Infowars has warned ‘Antifa Plans “Civil War” to Overthrow the Government.’ The John Birch Society put out two recent videos warning Americans to ‘stay home and tell your children to do likewise’ on Saturday. YouTuber ‘A Glock Fanboy’ notched more than 400,400 views for a clip raising the alarm about ‘the first day of the revolution or whatnot.'”

The report continued, “’Honestly, I’m happy,’ the YouTuber told his followers. ‘Dude, we’ve been on the verge of the great war for what seems like forever and I’m just ready to get it going.’”

Skip the fact—yes, fact—there was a hashtag, “#civilwar2017,” and instead focus on the “ready to get it going” fantasy.

What separates the Sutherland Springs shooter from these far right yahoos? He was more than ready to get it going, obviously, and as the Post and other mainstream media reported, imposing his will by violence had long been his practice—just not on this scale, shooting dozens instead of targeting more solitary domestic victims.

The answer to what separates those who fantasize about violence and those who pull the trigger is thin. In the Trump era, the already thin skin of civilized behavior has been stretched to a tearing, if not breaking, point. People may say America has always been violent, and that’s true. But each era has its dark side and last weekend showcased it.

In the Post’s report last week on the anticipated Antifa conflagration, which didn’t happen, it quoted YouTube clips that went viral:

“The end game here is martial law,” one video warns, “is provoking Republicans, patriots, whatever, you and me, into this huge battle, whether it’s just fighting or whether it’s guns. What they will do is they will throw up their arms and say, ‘I told you so, they’re violent’….They want us out there, with our weapons so the government will commence with martial law. And then, I believe, serious gun control-slash-confiscation.”

The Post report continued:

“Make sure you got enough ammo, make sure your guns are ready,” another poster advised in a clip with more than 110,000 views. “You have to understand these are vicious, vicious people. Your life means nothing to them. In fact, if you’re a white man, you don’t deserve to live.” Infowars provocateur Alex Jones announced in a video that antifa was “going to lose on November 4 and every day after that, because they’re a bunch of meth-head pieces of crap.”

This swarm of messaging is vile and repugnant, a sick fantasyland where too many people are anticipating and embracing armed conflict, or using their cloistered microphones and online platforms to urge others to be ready to be violent and shoot first. This is the new normal in Trump’s America and it’s not good.

While healthier and saner people grimace over the country’s latest mass shooting, and wring their hands over what we all know will be no meaningful federal response via new gun controls, we have to acknowledge what’s happening in America. Violence is growing in our cultural and political vocabulary. News reports keep battering the public with one crisis after another. What’s missing? Restraint. Voices of reason. Perspective. Knowing the difference between dark fantasy and tragic realities. What is the difference between the far right’s provocateurs and the Sutherland Springs shooter? Very little. Just stepping out and squeezing the trigger.

Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America’s democracy and voting rights. He is the author of several books on elections and the co-author of Who Controls Our Schools: How Billionaire-Sponsored Privatization Is Destroying Democracy and the Charter School Industry (AlterNet eBook, 2016).

 

GOP Congress Seems Determined To Make Mass Shootings Even Deadlier

GOP Congress Seems Determined To Make Mass Shootings Even Deadlier

The mass shooting in Las Vegas, the largest in U.S. history, has left 59 dead and more than 500 injured. Now, thanks to the deceptively named Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act, the Republican Party appears hell-bent on making the next massacre that much deadlier.

The new legislation, which is wending its way through Congress, would make it harder for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to designate bullets as “armor-piercing,” thereby allowing consumers to purchase ammunition that can penetrate the protective vests police officers wear. (Shows you how much Republicans think blue lives matter when NRA dollars are at stake.) Under the law, bullets that can puncture body armor would still be legal to sell, so long as the manufacturer is careful to declare the ammunition is made for “sporting purposes.”

Rob Bishop, the Utah Republican who introduced the legislation, states on his website, “The Founding Fathers were clear when they drafted the Bill of Rights….Vagaries in today’s legal code pose a real threat to the right to keep and bear arms. The Obama Administration exploited this ambiguity to forward its agenda of restriction. It’s time to ensure no future Administration tramples on these freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution.”

Along with the armor-piercing ammo provision, the bill would make it far easier for criminals to purchase gun silencers. Politico notes that under the 1934 National Firearms Act, silencers have been “treated similarly to machine guns or explosives.” The so-called SAFE Act would lift prohibitions on silencers, which, when used, make it far more difficult to hear the source of a shooting. Republicans are attempting to sell the bill as a way to protect hunters’ hearing, though most hunters say earplugs work just fine.

“What it does is it disperses the sound, so you can’t identify where the sound is coming from,” Mike Thompson, a California Democrat and self-professed “avid hunter” told the San Francisco Chronicle. “It puts both law enforcement and the public at risk.”

“The National Rifle Association thinks Congress owes them more armor-piercing rounds and gun silencers on the streets, and today our Republican colleagues showed they’re happy to do what they’re told,” Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) told Politico earlier this month. “I’ve been here since 2003, and passing these bills in the name of ‘helping sportsmen’ is one of the most cynical excuses I’ve ever heard.”

The Chronicle notes that in addition to making gun laws even more lax, the new legislation would “loosen restrictions on hunting and shooting on public lands”:

“It would, for example, reverse an Obama administration ban on lead tackle and ammunition from most federal lands; amend the Migratory Bird Treaty Act to allow shooting of birds over unharvested cropland; ease fishing restrictions in marine sanctuaries; remove Endangered Species Act protections for Great Lakes gray wolves; and ban the purchase of new wetland and bird habitat.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi pointed out the absurdity of the GOP’s efforts to sell the legislation as a bill for hunters.

“Hunters need armor-piercing bullets? They need silencers?” she told the Chronicle. “They need to conceal and carry to hunt?”

The SAFE Act is one of a pair of gun bills expected to move through Congress in the coming months. The Chronicle also highlights the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017, which “would allow people to carry concealed weapons in any state if it is allowed in the state where they live [and]…undermine regulations in states such as California and New York that require applicants for such a permit to demonstrate a need and submit to background checks.”

Basically, the law would make a concealed carry license as easy to obtain as a driver’s license.

While Republican members of Congress would have you believe the only people opposed to the SAFE Act are coastal elites and their elected representatives, many police officers have voiced their concern about the law. Back in March, the National Law Enforcement Partnership to Prevent Gun Violence released a statement noting that, “the primary target for silencer manufacturers has been military tactical teams who use silencers to confuse the sound of gunfire and confound an enemy’s response to surprise attack.”

A House hearing on the SAFE Act was originally set to place in June, but was delayed after House Majority Whip Steve Scalise was shot during a congressional baseball practice.

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.