After every mass shooting in America, and depending tragically on how many are killed, our nation erupts in a polarizing debate about how the shooting could have been avoided. The NRA sees it as an opportunity to further their agenda of selling more guns to more people in more places.
Gun-violence prevention groups point to a country with a flawed background-check system and a love affair with the "assault rifle," which for ten years (1994-2004) in our country was banned.
The NRA's message is consistent: more guns in the hands of more people will discourage and potentially stop these attacks. The gun-violence prevention groups consistently disagree.
Who's correct, and what are the facts?
Here are three arguments the gun lobbies traditionally make after a mass-shooting, with the counter-arguments following them. President Trump's Twitter stream made versions of these arguments today. You will hear them from our NRA-sponsored lawmakers in Congress, as well as in their counterparts in our state legislatures.
More guns in more places will discourage these mass shootings. More research is needed (and the NRA has done everything in their power to frustrate that research), but the numbers we do have show, in fact, that mass shooters ignore the possibility of facing an armed civilian. Once a person has decided to commit such a violent act, these kinds of logical considerations fall to the wayside.
The counter-argument: In fact, more guns not only fail to prevent these shootings, they increase the amount of gun violence in the community at large. More guns, more gun violence. Details here.
Gun-free zones will always invite mass shooters. Another version of the previous argument. You will hear our legislators use the standard NRA rhetoric: they will speak of "crazy killers," "sicko shooters"—our President's phrase—and "soft targets." But in fact, it has been shown that school-shooters, specifically, do not choose their targets based on whether or not they are gun-free zones. Other considerations are far more important to them.
The counter-argument: In fact, these school shooters often return to schools where they experienced emotional trauma and never consider whether it has been designated a "gun-free zone" or not. Details here.
The increase in mass-shootings in America is due to violent video games, a decrease in family structures, a general breakdown in American society, or mental illness. The idea here is to take the focus away from the guns, to stop us from looking at our flawed background-check system and the proliferation of assault rifles, and to insure that our gun manufacturers keep their bottom lines healthy.
The counter-argument: The reason for the increase in our mass-shootings is embarrassingly simple. Among developed nations, America offers the easiest access to lethal weapons, such as an assault rifle, of any country in the world. And if the NRA has its way, that access will become easier and easier. Details here.
The NRA has spent decades perfecting their propaganda regarding gun-violence in America. It is bold, loud, and often false. Now, if we want to insure the safety of our students and citizens, we must begin to gather the information that will allow us to construct our own responses, based on facts and an insistence on public safety. Many groups are already doing this, and have been doing so for a long time. We are making progress, and with your help, we will continue to do so.
After every mass shooting, a steadily growing number of Americans—concerned, activated, enraged—ask the inevitable and necessary question: What can I do?
It's a good question, and two years ago, I posted a piece that offered advice to those who wanted to become part of the solution. You can find it here. It's still relevant. And I encourage you to contact one of these organizations; they have carefully laid out ways for you to help that will fit both your schedule and your level of commitment. We can't all be full-time activists, and the best organizations realize this.
My guess is that each one of you has wondered how our country has arrived at this particular place—more guns than citizens, more mass shootings per capita than any other developed country, more legislators opining about the horrific nature of these slaughters while piously claiming that now is not the time to discuss these senseless tragedies. The NRA and America have a long and complicated history—much too long for me to address in a blog posting—but there are two mini-histories, if you will, that are deeply relevant to our current problem with guns, and they're not complicated.
If you take the time to read these two pieces, you will understand the broad outlines of the two trends that have most shaped the problem that we now confront.
The first piece here was published just after the Las Vegas shooting, and it's titled, "The NRA Wasn't Always Against Gun Restrictions." You want to pay special attention to what happened to this organization in 1971, which is detailed in the section, "The Hardliners Took Over the NRA after an NRA Member Was Killed by Federal Agents."
The name to remember is Harlon Carter, a Texas lawyer who turned the NRA into a conservative, pro-gun, anti-immigration lobby.
And by the way, if you're a fan of the Drive-By Truckers, you'll want to have a look at this video of the band's single, "Ramon Casiano," that details the murder of Casiano by Carter. Carter is never mentioned by name, but it's a powerful send-up of the founder of the NRA's violent campaign, as well as the racism that powers it.
The second piece, "A Confirmed Decline in Hunter Participation Should Be a Call to Action for Sportsmen," tracks in effect the decline in sales of traditional hunting firearms. Faced with this declining revenue, arms manufacturers had to appeal to another demographic simply because Americans have been steadily losing interest in hunting and the firearms that traditionally accompany that sport.
The argument the gun-lobby made was fairly simple: you don't buy shotguns nowadays to shoot quail; you need military-style weapons to repel the hordes of heavily armed invaders that are currently planning to trample the borders of our country, our homes, our schools.
An essentially militaristic advertising campaign and the fear-baiting that provided its fuel—it struck home with many Americans, and the gun industry began to recover its losses.
So—a growing lack of interest in hunting, which led to a drop in traditional firearms revenue, corrected by an NRA that has become increasingly militaristic in its appeal to self-defense and closely aligned with the gun manufacturers whose bottom line they have made their number one priority.
And of course buying the politicians who will support their violent agenda—that too is a priority, and we have learned sadly that many of our legislators will simply work for the highest bidder. That is old news, but it is always tragic news.
In short, we're confronting an unholy alliance between the NRA and the new demographic they have spent over forty years creating to bolster a revenue problem. The gun-lobbies have a head-start, and they are very good at what they do, but reasonable solutions appeal to reasonable people, and I still believe that we are ultimately a reasonable nation.
We will prevail in this struggle because more and more Americans are becoming involved every day, and they are not giving up. Patience and commitment at a sustainable level are the keys to success.
Here in Arkansas, for example, Moms Demand has grown from a fledgling group of women in Little Rock to a broader-based organization that now has representation in many parts of our state, and they have accomplished this in only a couple of years.
And remember, the mid-term elections are coming. And voting is activism in its purest form.
I was in Baton Rouge, visiting family, when the shooting started.
I was never in any danger; I had no desire to move toward the cordoned-off area, either during the event or after the shooter was down and the area declared safe.
Like the rest of the country, I followed it on Twitter, the local news station, and the other platforms that shared information as it became available.
Reports, as always, were ceaseless and draining, often qualified with the adverb that's working overtime nowadays, "allegedly," and I tried to remain calm.
I wasn't alone. Everyone tried to remain calm.
The phone rang as friends and relatives from around the country called to make certain that we were safe. Human beings caring about human beings. No one takes it for granted any longer.
But Baton Rouge has problems that are longstanding and difficult to solve for a host of reasons that I'm not qualified to address. So I won't.
But personal testimonies and postings about the troubled city have been appearing everywhere, and I find "Maggie's" a credible one. If you have a few moments, you might want to look at it.
But I also remembered a passage from the "Preface" to Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human, where the German philosopher speaks about the "chills and fears stemming from isolation," a condition that has become an increasingly prominent aspect of American life:
Whoever guesses something of the consequences of any deep suspicion, something of the chills and fears stemming from isolation, to which every person burdened with an unconditional difference of viewpoint is condemned, this person will understand how often I tried to take shelter somewhere, to recover from myself, as if to forget myself entirely for a time . . .
And so all of us, citizens of a nation now sharply divided, and in the face of these daily executions, are trying to recover ourselves however we can, as we wait for the next event. And even when we wait in a crowd, surrounded by our fellow citizens, or our colleagues, or our family, we understand what Nietzsche meant when he spoke of the "chills and fears stemming from isolation" that come at us as we hold radically different opinions about seemingly intractable problems.
We feel helpless and angry. We feel alone.
So let's first recognize that we have become a country whose citizens are continually seeking shelter in ways that are both productive and destructive, and let's learn to tell the difference between the two.
But let's not ignore the feelings that are leading us to seek shelter. And again: that we are now a country whose citizens are seeking shelter however they can and whenever they need to do it.
The hardest part? Learning to recognize those chills and fears, and to say to ourselves, now I must take shelter. Now I must take care of myself.
These are wretched feelings. And they are spreading. And each of us will deal with them in different ways; we will attempt to recover as best we can, even when it means recovering from ourselves and our obsessive attention to our own feelings and opinions, and to the political embarrassments and assaults that our media daily serves up.
But this is necessary work that we all must undertake, and it is work that we must give everyone the space to undertake.
At this point, I don't know anything else to say or do: take shelter when necessary, on your own terms, and encourage others to do the same.
Everyone knows that American gun-violence has been in the news lately. Everyone also knows that Americans, by huge majorities, support universal background checks on the sales of all firearms and that these very same Americans have informed their Congressmen of their preferences.
And still Congress has done nothing. Why?
Let's review.
—On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old security guard, entered Pulse nightclub in Orlando, FL, killing 49 and injuring 53 before he was shot and killed by law-enforcement officers.
—Early Tuesday morning, July 5, 2016, Alton Sterling was wrestled to the ground by two policemen and fatally shot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The video leaves unanswered questions about the legitimacy of the lethal force employed by the officers.
—On July 6, 2016, Philando Castile was shot and killed by a police officer in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, a suburb of St. Paul. Again, the only video of the event raises several questions concerning the actions undertaken by the officer on the scene.
—On July 8, 2016, Micah Xavier Johnson, killed five policemen and injured eleven others in Dallas, Texas during a peaceful protest regarding the recent police shootings.
—Between the shooting in Orlando and the shootings in Dallas (June 13 to July 7), there were 42 mass shootings in America, leaving 38 dead and 155 wounded, according to The Gun Violence Archive.
—On Wednesday, June 22, 2016, Congressman John Lewis and others staged a sit-in the well of the House of Representatives, demanding a vote on a No-Fly-No-Buy bill.
Americans had had enough, and these Congressmen who staged the sit-in were doing what they could to respond to the people's legitimate concerns about gun-violence.
Congressman Lewis and his supporters never got their vote.
And now Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, has not only delayed, and for all practical purposes, killed the process of bringing a gun-bill to the floor, he has also threatened to penalize those who staged the sit-in in June.
So—in the face of the recent carnage in America, our Speaker is worried about whether Congressman Lewis has violated Parliamentary procedure in his peaceful demonstration in the House well.
Speaker Ryan, and those among the GOP who support him, are no longer credible representatives of the American people. Their allegiance is sworn to the NRA and the funding from the gun-lobbies that secure their jobs.
If the recent blood-shed cannot move them to action, then they will not be moved. Period.
Gun reform will come to America; it is, in fact, already happening.
But it is happening despite the work of the GOP-controlled Congress, and not because of it.
We move forward, then, around the obstructionists, or over them, or under them, or through them. But we will mover forward.
It saddens me to say this, but Paul Ryan and his supporters are no longer credible witnesses to the violence that has infected our country.
They have become its enablers, and history will see them as what they are: part of the problem and not part of the solution.
The screen cap above is taken from the website of the Academy of Combative Warrior Arts in Richardson, Texas, just outside Dallas. We learned recently that Micah Johnson, an Army veteran who killed five Dallas policemen at a protest march, had not only continued military drills in his yard after being discharged, but had also received tactical training at this Academy. While the Academy website promotes training in self-defense, it also offers training in assault tactics. It's a full-service organization, offering specialized programs for men, women, children, and Christians who are doing missionary work in countries that might not want them there. Here is their description of the assault-tactics program:
Reality is highly dynamic, you will be drawing your firearm, moving, shooting on the move, fixing malfunctions, etc. all under high levels of stress. Most people never get to train these skills as they are not typically allowed on the static gun range. With this disconnect in mind, we have created what we call A.C.W.A. - T.A.P. (Tactical Applications Program), which consists of real world applications of dry fire drills and scenario based interactions. These drills work to instill and hone these missing skills, creating a firm foundation for you to work from. You can see some basic fundamental drills in the video clip above, this is only the beginning.
The NRA, of course, for almost four decades now, has been creating the kind of fear in our citizens that has generated these kinds of organizations. They have been militarizing our country, encouraging untrained amateurs to buy military-grade weapons in fear of being attacked by looters, drug-addicts, and minority populations. These so-called training academies do little to prepare its students to address the kinds of gun-violence we have seen recently, and that is why armed civilians rarely, if ever, are able to stop such a slaughter.
But what happened in Dallas last week reveals a paradox the no one in the gun-community wishes to discuss. Bad guys can also enroll in these programs. And so a bad guy with a gun killed five good guys with a gun. The bad guy had been trained to do this, both by the Academy and by his time in the military.
The score then, coming out of Dallas, is sobering: one bad guy with a gun took down five good guys with guns.
Knowing that I was involved in the gun-violence prevention movement, one of my students asked me this morning to respond to the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, as well as the shootings in Dallas last night.
It is a difficult moment for our country now, and very often, it is equally difficult to respond coherently to these events, even as the details of the tragedies are unfolding.
Still, I found the request reasonable, even necessary. Here is what I wrote:
I stand with all innocent victims of gun-violence. And I view the senseless taking of life, whether by snipers or unnecessary police-shootings or accidental shootings or suicides facilitated by the easy availability of guns, as symptomatic of a country whose gun lobbies have established the gun as a reasonable, though military solution, for settling civic and psychological problems.
The point is that gun-violence has been taking American lives now in practically every corner of the population for a very long time, although police violence in the black communities has finally and rightly risen to national attention. There are many ways to respond to gun-violence in our communities, and when faced with this kind of brutality, most of us want to help. That is a very human and essential reaction.
One strategy, however, will not work for every community. We have to be creative; we have to share our ideas; and we have to respect the different approaches that we will encounter. I have for the past two weeks, anticipating the Dalai Lama's birthday on July 6, been posting on my Facebook page, once a day, pictures of peace-workers who realized that violence is never the appropriate response to violence—and to be sure, cultivating fear, division, paranoia, and insecurity, which the NRA, and the politicians they fund, do so well, is a potent form of violence.
I posted these pictures because I take these people as my models.
Their vision and method of working are two-fold, and by example they make two recommendations:
Work in your immediate arena, doing what you can, where you can, when you can (social media, talking, writing, connecting, organizing, raising awareness).
Tap the long-term, unfolding commitment to the principle that peace and nonviolence are the most effective responses to violence, particularly for the long term. Last night's protest in Dallas had embraced this philosophy. And the workers I most admire and who continue to be my teachers have all, without exception, acted with the same conviction.
It is not a solution that everyone will accept, or that works for everyone, and I often fall short of its ideals, but I believe that this path, the path of nonviolence, of civil disobedience, is the right path.
After the initial shock of the tragedy passes, many people return to their normal lives, but it is then that the real work of gun-violence prevention begins, continues, and develops. But I do feel that each of us, if we are to be responsible citizens, must choose a method to respond to this violence, a method that is sustainable over the long-term.
This choice will be and should be different for everyone.
The point is not to over-react, and not to undertake activities that we can't sustain—the NRA and Congress depend on this draining burst of hyper-activity, knowing that the American people will soon forget, at which point the gun-lobbies and the NRA can get back to making money and buying our elected officials. This is what they do best, and tragedies of this sort provide only a momentary inconvenience for them.
So, it is better, in short, to tweet once a day in support of a GVP organization for three years than it is to tweet 100 per day for a month.
Find your pace, an activity, a method that works for you, and stick to it. Many of my friends do far more than I do, many do far less.
It doesn't matter.
The long-view is the important view. Thanks for reaching out. I hope you are well.
Let me speak personally to you, without statistics, without affiliation, without insult, without condescension.
Without history, in effect, which is impossible, I know, but worth trying.
I want to speak to you person-to-person. You know what I mean: the bill-paying, family-raising, slightly disgruntled, wish-things-could-be-better person who, if we were stranded on a lifeboat together, would find a way, if we had two oars, to row together toward a safer place. I would look at you, and you would look at me, and we would know what we had to do, and we would do it.
That's the person who's writing this letter, and that's the person I want to address.
I know, in fact, that you are such a person most of the time—wanting and willing to help your fellow citizen when the chips are down. But like me, you have opinions that often divide us. Like me, you want your opinions to be right. Even better, you want them to be founded on facts. Why? Because you want your opinions to be founded on something that can't be overturned. And if they can't be overturned, then they must be right, and by extension, you too must be right.
After all, being right is a good feeling. No doubt about it.
But I want to suggest that being right at the present moment is less useful than being civil during every moment that we have left together.
Why? Because I continue to believe that we can row this boat together; or I believe that trying to row this boat together makes sense, that it is our last option, even though Congress tells us every day, every hour, every minute, that co-operation is fatal to the health of the Republic. Together, we must stop listening to Congress and listen to each other—with civility.
Remember: many of our politicians today are exactly those people that Washington, Madison, and Jefferson (you're always quoting them) warned us against. They are destroying the spirit of co-operation, the very spirit we need now to solve our problems. You know that, and I know that.
The problem is that the gun debate uses statistics, and you have your set of statistics, and I have mine, and we toss them back and forth at each other, as we have done, for years. But statistics, when they appear in polemical settings, are often designed to polarize, and now, at the current moment, this polarization is killing us, literally, every day.
It works like this. I don't change my mind because I have confidence in my statistics, and you don't change yours because you have faith in your numbers. The only thing left to do then is to call each other "stupid," or "ignorant," or "libtard," or "ammosexual," or "racist," or "sexist," or if we're feeling compassionate, we might go with "liberal" or "conservative" because each label softly offends the other one.
And offending is what we're trying to do.
So have we wasted our time? Probably.
Maybe there are those who haven't made up their minds on the issues that you and I have long ago decided, and maybe they're quietly watching our back-and-forth, and maybe they will finally embrace one position or the other based on our shouting match.
But I doubt it. Why? Because uncivil rhetoric appeals only to those who have already committed both to the position and the attack-language associated with that position. If we ever do convince someone who hasn't already formed an opinion, the key ingredient in that act of persuasion, along with statistics, will likely be civility.
I believe that. The problem is I don't know if you do.
But I have hope. I'll say it again, my new mantra: you and I have much in common because, as I said at the beginning of my letter, you're probably a family-raising, bill-paying American, and so we have much to lose at this current impasse if we don't respect each other's opinions when they differ.
To quote the great British folk-singer, Roy Harper: "We're both fighting for the very same breath, and what did you say were your reasons?"
So I think we should both re-boot, and start again with the premise of civility.
We already agree that we have important decisions to make regarding the future of guns in our culture, and we're going to have to do it together. Civility is not simply another word for "manners;" civility is about civilization, and civilization is a group project, and civilization can perish or prosper. We need to commit to that project, particularly that project of prosperity. And we need to do it now. And we need to do it together.
If you don't think civility is a revolutionary concept, if you think it's something your parents preached, or your teachers insisted on in class, then you're not paying attention.
Civility, wielded at the right time, is the revolution. And I believe that the right time is right now.
Very few people are doing it, and so we could, together, make history.
Shannon Watts (center), Jamie Ford (far right), and a few of the dedicated women of Moms Demand, Little Rock.
On Wednesday, April 27, I had the good fortune to hear Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, in a question-and-answer session at The Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock, Arkansas. I became active in the gun-violence prevention movement in January 2013 when our state legislators attempted to pass a campus-carry bill, and since Shannon had founded Moms Demand a year earlier, on December 15, 2012, I got to know her through various social-media channels. But I had never met her.
Having met her, and spoken with her now, I see why Shannon is a powerful advocate for gun-violence prevention. First, she has no hidden agendas—she is not secretly attempting to confiscate firearms from American gun-owners; she isn't attempting to vilify gun-owners (in fact, her organization's members include gun-owners); and she isn't even attempting to repeal the Second Amendment.
She is simply trying to make America a safer place to live, work, and raise children. The organization's platform is difficult to criticize, once it's understood. (And the gun-lobbyists have worked overtime to misrepresent it.)
In fact, her major initiatives find broad support among the American public: she advocates for universal background checks on all purchases of firearms, and she proposes to do this by closing the loopholes on gun-show and internet gun-sales, where background checks are not required. (Amy Schumer, in fact, has weighed in on this enormous problem in another of her biting, hilarious videos. You can, and must, view it here.)
For the record, though, 90% of the American public support these proposals, as well as 75% of the NRA's membership. And gun-owners in general overwhelmingly support them as well.
Shannon also advocates for safe-storage of all firearms within the home, a simple and preventive measure that would stop the rash of child-shootings that are now part of our daily headlines—shootings that are routinely ignored by the national media.
The problem, of course, as Shannon said, lies with our politicians who continue to support bills that the public opposes, and they do so because they are paid to do it by the NRA. It isn't news, it isn't complicated, but it is formidable: money and politics make powerful and, at times, destructive allies.
But 91 people in America die from gunshot wounds every day, and Moms Demand, like most every American, believes that this figure is a national embarrassment. So, the organization is working to decrease that number, and they have been very successful to date in building a campaign with both short and long-term goals. And remember, the NRA has been working its agenda for 30 years, and Moms Demand has been around for a little over four years. Their impact has been little short of miraculous.
Of course, Moms Demand is part of a network of gun-violence prevention groups, such as the Brady Campaign, whose roots extend back to the 70's, but Shannon's organization, as its name implies, focuses on mothers (although everyone is welcome), and as a result has a distinctly grass-roots feel to it that is designed to allow even the busiest Americans to participate in meaningful ways, often through a few minutes at the keyboard using social media or on the phone calling an elected official.
The success of Moms Demand in uniting mothers at this fundamental level was obvious in Little Rock. I knew many of these women previously through social-media connections, but had never met them. Jamie Ford, Jaimee Alverson, Kat Koran Hills, Austin Gelder Bailey, Julie Dunekacke Jaeger, Shelley Adams—and others whose names I should, but can't recall—are working quietly in Little Rock, and well beyond, to make our country a safer place.
The important thing to note about Moms Demand, as an organization devoted to reform through political channels, is that Shannon has insisted that no action taken on behalf of gun-violence-prevention is too small. One tweet, strategically hash-tagged, will have an impact. As her organization has grown, she has kept that message in the foreground, and this tactic has served the movement well.
It's also important to articulate one of the unspoken assumptions behind the success of Moms Demand: the horrific and inexcusable levels of gun-violence in America are so clear and obvious that when one American becomes aware of these levels, the gun-violence prevention movement has gained another supporter.
So, Moms Demand, first of all, is about raising awareness, and that can be done with just a few clicks a day. Their website is full of helpful suggestions about how anyone can do this, and once you become involved with this group of talented women, you will find solid guidance about getting further involved with the movement at a level that you can sustain. And that is one of the reasons the movement has grown: sustainable involvement is the focus.
Anyone can make a difference. It's an obvious, simple, and often overlooked truth. But it's also a profound truth.
Historical aside: Gandhi repeatedly said the same thing about nonviolence—embrace it only to the extent that you can sustain it. Sustainability is essential to a successful social action, and Shannon clearly knows this.
So finally thanks to Shannon Watts, thanks to Jamie Ford, who oversees the organization of several states in this region, and thanks to all the women that I met in Little Rock who are working to make Arkansas a safer state, at times against heavy odds. While resisting gun-legislation in a red state is a multi-faceted operation, Moms Demand is in the fight with us in a big way. They have extremely smart, energetic, and dedicated workers, and I am thankful that they are here.
Now, if we could just get a Fayetteville chapter started!
Anyone who was listening to the Democratic debate on Sunday, March 7, and heard Sanders make the comment that the NRA promptly endorsed knew that this was a bad moment for him. If you're a progressive candidate of any sort, you don't want to wake up the next morning and find the NRA standing by your side, particularly when your opponent, Hillary Clinton, has been for months unflinching in her criticism of that organization and their reckless gun policies.
But that happened to Sanders, and now, as if having the NRA sing your praises weren't bad enough, The Washington Post published on Friday, March 18, an op-ed by Mark and Jackie Barden. The title of the piece is chilling, direct, and heart-breaking: "Sanders Is Wrong About the Lawsuit We Filed After Our Son's Murder in Newtown."
Their son, Daniel, of course, fell victim to Adam Lanza and his Remington Bushmaster AR-15 on December 14, 2012, at Sandy Hook Elementary. In a matter of days, Senator Sanders had hit a dangerous double: he gained the NRA as a supporter and the parents of a child murdered at Sandy Hook as an adversary.
By any stretch of the progressive imagination, this was a bad run for the Senator from Vermont.
But it speaks to one of the problems that faces the Senator as he turns to face a nation increasingly hostile toward the NRA and the destructive culture it has produced—he comes from a state that is a "gun-rights paradise" and has led the nation in allowing, even encouraging, unrestricted gun ownership. Sanders' constituency is about the size of Memphis, TN, but is 97% white, and as of 2012, was the most rural state in the Union. Vermont also has one of the lowest rates of gun-homicide in the country, a result of its largely rural population and still very active tradition of hunting, an activity, as opposed to self-defense, where gun-violence is relatively rare.
But Senator Sanders has now entered the national stage—diversity, complexity, and hard, nuanced choices are the order of the day, and he arrives there from a racially homogenous, rural, and gun-friendly state. His constituency is white, and they are well armed. Go after guns in Vermont, and you will go out of office.
So his problems now are more complicated, and he shows signs of lacking the tact to negotiate them. He finds himself wedged into the difficult position between a gun-toting constituency in Vermont and the NRA, the radical and dangerous organization that speaks for many of Sanders' supporters back home and has the potential to weaken his progressive stance.
That he has compromised here by leaning toward the gun manufacturers is particularly unfortunate for him. And particularly telling—the massacre at Sandy Hook has emerged, whether rightly or wrongly, as a litmus test on gun-control for our politicians, and Sanders has chosen sides. He has chosen to avoid directly confronting the gun manufacturers and their unfettered marketing of a specific kind of weapon to an untrained public—a weapon that is capable of killing quickly and widely, and would seem unnecessary for civilian purposes.
The law suit that the Bardens and others are filing against Bushmaster does not, as Sanders inexplicably indicated, hold Remington accountable for manufacturing the weapon that Lanza used in his killing spree. Manufacturers cannot, of course, be responsible for every misuse of their product. That is simplistic, and Sanders must know that, but his insistence on misrepresenting the law is baffling. The law suit, instead, holds Remington accountable for their marketing of the product, an entirely different issue:
Indeed, Remington promotes the AR-15’s capacity to inflict mass casualties. It markets its AR-15s with images of soldiers and SWAT teams; it dubs various models the 'patrolman' and the 'adaptive combat rifle' and declares that they are 'as mission-adaptable as you are;' it encourages the notion that the AR-15 is a weapon that bestows power and glory upon those who wield it. Advertising copy for Remington’s AR-15s has included the following: 'Consider your man card reissued,” and “Forces of opposition, bow down. You are single-handedly outnumbered.'
The law that looms both over Sanders' comment and the suit against Remington is called the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA). The bill was signed into law by George W. Bush on October 26, 2005, and was heavily supported by Wayne LaPierre and the NRA. It provides unprecedented immunity for gun manufacturers and their products, and is partly responsible for the violent ad campaigns that some of these manufacturers are now waging. The law does not, as the gun lobbyists rightly point out, give them immunity from selling defective products. Still, as many legal historians argue, in passing this law, Congress was particularly aggressive in allowing the gun industry this particular kind of shield. Clearly, no other product on the market has quite this kind of protection.
From the beginning, Clinton has aligned herself against the law, and said that she would act to repeal it if elected. Repealing the law could potentially do much to alter the militaristic, macho culture that gun-manufacturers like to promote in their advertising. Sanders, on the other hand, voted for the law in 2005—his constituency would have supported it—but under increased national scrutiny, has recently back-pedaled a bit, indicating that he might consider repealing portions of it. He is clearly trying to avoid the issue. Clinton is embracing it.
Every political candidate at the national level is involved in the project of winning votes. Period. And in the most difficult moments, winning votes encounters a bedeviling problem: What happens if personally held and private convictions, when publicly articulated, will not sway as many voters as a slightly modified version of those same convictions certainly would?
Most of the time, our candidates compromise, and offer up a version of their convictions that will appeal to the largest demographic that seems palatable to them at the moment.
Senator Sanders, of course, has made a career out of claiming that he refuses to make these compromises, and I respect him for that.
But as he enters the national spotlight, the Senator has found that life for a so-called "principled" candidate is hard. And compromises must be made.
The first one he made, of course, was running as a Democrat, the party that he has spent decades vilifying, condemning, and disparaging. But to mount a viable campaign for the Presidency, he also saw that he must become part of the system he disparaged for years.
But now he finds himself praised by the NRA and corrected by a Sandy Hook family, and that's not a good mix for him.
So maybe he's making compromises; maybe he's trying to garner votes from an unlikely demographic. Perhaps Senator Sanders is dog-whistling members of the NRA with his refusal to attack the PLCAA, hoping to attract a few of their votes. I can easily see how more moderate, gun-owning Democrats would desert Clinton and move toward Sanders based on this tactic alone (many gun-owners are single-issue voters, and their single issue is guns). Clinton has led Sanders, however, kicking and screaming, into a more centrist position concerning firearms (as he has led her on economic matters), but it is precisely this kicking and screaming that makes many gun-violence prevention advocates uneasy and unwilling to support him.
And since gun-violence in America is unparalleled among developed countries, for many voters this has become a central issue in the 2016 election. I count myself among that number.
Amidst all of the tributes for Sandy Hook that will take place today, I would point to only one thing: our clear need to develop the space for an ongoing civil discourse about gun-violence and its effect on American life. Period.
There will always be divisions, anger, heated exchanges, but we must also have moments of reciprocated respect and civility. Moments—we can start with those, and only those.
Charles Blow in his New York Times op-ed today is already calling for such a demilitarized zone of discussion, and I'll close with his plea:
I thought of how productive it would be if more people with discordant views on gun regulations could have as civil a discussion as I had with my brother — full of mutual respect, adults disagreeing but not attempting to demonize, honestly searching for solutions.
The gun lobby poisons these conversations. It pumps out and promotes a never-ending stream of worst-case scenarios until it builds a level of fear and paranoia that only profits gun makers and grinds all progress to a halt.
So if you're concerned about gun-violence in this country, you might make room on your list of talking-points for civility and productive discourse: ask for it when it seems to have disappeared, and cease the conversation when it refuses to return.
That's my resolution for the New Year, which nowadays begins on December 14.
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