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newtown
Gunpowder and Blood on Their Cold, Dead Hands
This grim anniversary of the Newtown, Conn., killings, with 28 dead, reminded us of that moment back in 2000 when Charlton Heston made his defiant boast at the NRA convention that gun control advocates would have to pry his rifle from his "cold, dead hands." You would have thought he had returned to that fantasy world of Hollywood where, in a previous incarnation, he portrayed those famous Indian killers Andrew Jackson and Buffalo Bill Cody, whose Wild West, as Cody marketed it, still courses through the bloodstream of American mythology.
Don't Shoot - Organize!
That poll also noted that a quarter of Americans think that the facts about the Newtown shootings "are being hidden" and an additional eleven percent "are unsure." As Sahil Kapur wrote at the website Talking Points Memo, "The eye-opening findings serve as a reminder that Americans' deeply held beliefs about gun rights have a tendency to cross over into outright conspiracy theories about a nefarious government seeking to trample their constitutional rights -- paranoia that pro-gun groups like the National Rifle Association have at times helped stoke."
Paranoia and just plain meanness. On May 8, Christina Wilkie in The Huffington Post reported that Connecticut Carry, a pro-gun lobbying group, had issued a press release detailing the arrest record and financial difficulties of Neil Heslin, father of one of the children murdered at Newtown's Sandy Hook Elementary School. Connecticut Carry accused him of "profiting off of the tragedy." Their release read, in part, "Mr. Heslin has found the employment he has needed for so long lobbying against the rights of the citizens of Connecticut and the rest of the country," and the group implied that he had received payment from Mike Bloomberg's Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which adamantly denies anything of the sort. Similar smears have been attempted against other Newtown parents.
This hate in our country - egged on by fervid ideologues and profiteering fearmongers - is palpable, stirred by years of irresponsible invective against public officials and agencies. Gun sales are going through the roof. In a sense, so much anger and so much disillusionment are understandable in a country where the gap between rich and poor is so vast that an environment is created in which brooding resentment is easily hatched. Sure, there is corruption in government and business - crony capitalism is the offspring of it --and when the public sees plutocrats who regard politicians as the hired help and Washington as the feeding trough, it's natural to fear that we are becoming vassals; subjects rather than citizens.
But a violent uprising, with all the bloodshed and chaos that would follow? Armed revolt is when people are so desperate they kill and are killed. Who would wash the blood from the streets, restore order after the chaos and bury the dead? Have we lost our minds?
There is an alternative to force, blood, and suffering. It's called democracy. Yes, there is plenty of injustice, greed and sheer wickedness. But don't mourn the fact - organize. Stop wringing your hands and berating real and imaginary foes. Join up with others, stand up to the exploiters, throw the rascals out. If Congress and the White House are crooked and out of touch, come Election Day, you make sure they lose. And on all the other days, when you can, you work for change and demand a say.
It's not easy but slow, hard and demanding - it takes long and patient activism to make democracy work. But with committed people organized and united toward common goals of social justice and accountability, victories are possible. Drop your weapons and celebrate that we live in a country where peaceful change is still possible. Make democracy work.
Sandy Hook Promise: There Will Be Change
This week, we spent time with Francine and David Wheeler, parents of six-year-old Ben Wheeler, one of the 20 children and six educators shot and killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Francine and David moved from New York City to Newtown to raise a family somewhere safe. They could never have imagined that in that quiet place on a Friday morning, just days before Christmas, gunfire would take their younger son's life.
The Wheelers' courage and commitment deeply touched us. Since their son's death, they have managed to cope with memory and hold together their lives -- and the life of their surviving son, Nate -- with uncommon grace. Along with other Newtown families, they lobbied the Connecticut state legislature -- which now has the toughest gun law in America -- and in Washington, they walked the halls of Capitol Hill, urging senators to vote yes for the amendment that would expand the use of background checks for people buying guns.
Although a majority favored the legislation, they fell six votes short of the 60 votes necessary for passage, but the Newtown families, friends and neighbors do not intend to quit. They are part of a growing nationwide movement committed to changing our gun culture. They call it Sandy Hook Promise. "America is in desperate need of a new path forward to address our epidemic of gun violence," they write. And then comes the promise: "THIS TIME THERE WILL BE CHANGE."
You want to believe with all your heart that this is one promise that will be kept. But arrayed against them are mighty forces, mountains of money, a corrupted political system, and habits deeply ingrained in the human psyche.
That Minnesota radio host who told the Newtown families "to go to hell" is hardly alone in placing his freedom to own weapons over a child's right to live. The gun industry's most conspicuous pitchman, Wayne LaPierre, is the walking embodiment of the sociopathic mentality, one radically devoid of empathy. His National Rifle Association spent $18.6 million on the 2012 elections and then at least $800,000 lobbying the Federal government in just the first three months of this year -- pushing back against those like Sandy Hook Promise who have been calling for change after the Newtown massacre.
But Gregg Lee Carter, the editor of the encyclopedia Guns in American Society, told the Center for Public Integrity:
"The issue is not so much how much the NRA gives any senator or member of the House, it's how they can make their lives miserable. And how they make their lives miserable is they e-mail 'em, they call 'em, they fax 'em, they show up at meetings... They're much more activist than the other side and that's what really produces their gains."
As the NRA holds its annual meeting in Houston this weekend (expected attendance: more than 70.000), you see their tracks everywhere. A kindred, pistol-packing spirit, the Arizona Citizens Defense League has been raffling off an AR-15 semi-automatic at their website's online store, similar to the weapon Adam Lanza used at Sandy Hook Elementary School. They've taken it down from their site now -- when we first saw the offer, there were only five tickets left, so maybe it's sold out, but here's what the offer looked like (including the Statue of Liberty brandishing a rifle, Rambo-style).
That same group cheered on Arizona Governor Jan Brewer this week as she signed two pro-gun bills -- one that prohibits local governments from keeping lists of people who have firearms - not them any of them were - and another that requires police to take guns that are voluntarily surrendered in buyback programs and instead of destroying them, sell them back to the public. That's right: get them off the street and then get them back on the street as fast as you can. Perhaps they should install a drive-through window at the precinct houses.
Granted, this is in Arizona, where the OK Corral is hallowed ground (reenactment daily at 2 pm) and there's even a TV station in Tucson with the call letters K-GUN, but the mindset pervades across the country, even as there have been eight school shootings since Newtown and more than 3,800 gun deaths. The killing field that is America never calls a truce. In Kentucky this week, a two-year-old girl was accidentally shot and killed by her 5-year-old brother who was playing with a rifle he had received as a gift. In Alabama, a stray bullet fired nearby killed a 24-year-old mother holding her 10-day-old baby in her arms. She fell onto a couch by the door still clutching her child.
Hold that image in your head and in your heart, so emblematic of a country that has taken leave of its senses. Remember all the dead from all the solitary shootings and all the massacres. Some senators suggest there may be another vote on background checks before the end of the year. If, as David Wheeler suggested to us, this is a tipping point for the movement against gun violence, the moment has come to push harder than ever.
Make the promise: THIS TIME THERE WILL BE CHANGE.
NRA's Vision: A Nation Packing Heat
LaPierre might well have plagiarized his vision of a wholly armed nation from another "man of the people" of 40 years ago, the protagonist in the famous sit-com All in the Family. On a 1972 episode, when a local TV station comes out in favor of gun control, Archie Bunker hits the airwaves with an editorial rebuttal:
Good evening, everybody. This here is Archie Bunker of 704 Hauser Street, veteran of the big war, speaking on behalf of guns for everybody. Now, question: what was the first thing that the Communists done when they took over Russia? Answer: gun control. And there's a lot of people in this country want to do the same thing to us here in a kind of conspiracy, see. You take your big international bankers, they want to -- whaddya call -- masticate the people of this here nation like puppets on the wing, and then when they get their guns, turn us over to the Commies...
Now I want to talk about another thing that's on everybody's minds today, and that's your stick-ups and your skyjackings, and which, if that were up to me, I could end the skyjackings tomorrow... All you gotta do is arm all your passengers. He ain't got no more moral superiority there, and he ain't gonna dare to pull out no rod. And then your airlines, they wouldn't have to search the passengers on the ground no more, they just pass out the pistols at the beginning of the trip, and they just pick them up at the end! Case closed.
Case closed. Except that Archie Bunker's a fictional character, created by Norman Lear, who knew better. Not Wayne LaPierre -- he's real and he means business. Big business.
Every time we have another of these mass slayings and speak of gun control, weapon sales go up. And guess what? As journalist Lee Fang reports in The Nation, "For every gun or package of ammunition sold at participating stores, a dollar is donated to the NRA." Customers can make a contribution at the point of purchase or the gun companies make an automatic donation every time the cash register rings. Last year, just one of those merchants of death, Midway USA, used one of these NRA programs to give the gun lobby a million dollars.
So naturally, in a country where even life and death are measured by the profit margin, the cure for gun violence is, yes, more guns! Bigger profits. Never mind that just before La Pierre spoke, three were shot and killed outside Altoona, Pennsylvania. Or that early on Christmas Eve morning, in Webster, New York, two volunteer firemen were called to the scene of a fire, then executed by an ex-con who allegedly set the blaze and murdered them with the same kind of assault rifle used against those school kids and their teachers in Newtown. Or that on New Year's Eve, in Sacramento, California, reportedly in a fight over a spilled drink, a 22-year-old opened fire in a bar, killing two and wounding two others. In fact, according to Slate.com and the Twitter feed @GunDeaths, at this writing, in just those few weeks since the Newtown slaughter of the innocent, more than 400 have died from guns in America. That should boost the last quarter profit margins. Not surprising, the merchants of death are experiencing a Happy New Year.
We have to keep talking about this, because Wayne LaPierre and the NRA will keep talking and they are insidious and powerful predators. Have you seen the reports in both the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and The Washington Post of how, 16 years ago, the NRA managed to get Congress to pull funding on gun violence studies at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention? Since then, JAMA reports, "... at least 427,000 people have died of gunshot wounds in the United States, including more than 165,000 who were victims of homicide. To put these numbers in context, during the same time period, 4586 Americans lost their lives in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Last year, Congress stopped the National Institutes of Health from spending any money that might be construed as advocating or promoting gun control. There's even a section that was snuck into President Obama's Affordable Care Act that prevents doctors from collecting information on their patients' gun use. Denise Dowd, an emergency-care physician in Kansas City and adviser on firearms issues to the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the Post, "This illustrates the fact that the NRA has insinuated themselves into the small crevices of anything they can to do anything in their power to prohibit sensible gun-safety measures."
As Wayne LaPierre's brazen call for an armed populace makes clear, the odds don't favor common sense. Several members of the new Congress are reintroducing bills that would change the gun laws and USA Today reports that the White House is "likely" to issue its recommendations January 15, but there are always those legislators willing to do the gun lobby's bidding as they profess their love of the Second Amendment and wait like hungry house pets for the next NRA campaign donation.
Every American packing heat is a frightening vision of our future. It doesn't have to be, if only we stop and think. That's what a fellow named Frank James did. He stopped, thought -- and changed directions. A pawn shop owner in Seminole, Florida, whose youngest child is six, Frank James told a local ABC station he has decided to stop selling guns.
"It'll probably cause my business to go out of business because it was a big part of it but I just couldn't live with myself," he said." I thought, wow, this is crazy. As a gun dealer myself, I'm like, yes, we need more gun control. Guns are getting into the wrong hands of the wrong people."
He also said, "I'm not going to be a part of it anymore. Conscience wins over making money."
Thank you, Mr. James.
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