No more gun lies

We as a nation are unlikely to tune out this time. Even after the likely announcement Friday by the NRA that 1) a loony with a knife could be a mass murderer and 2) violent flicks and games are the real cause, not assault weapons and ammo magazines.

The Newtown murders keep us focused and are likely to continue to do so. It is the number and ages of the 20 first graders and their teachers and principal that strip the shield of lies from gun absolutists.

Despite the hourly gun murders of kids and young (almost entirely) men, Sandy Hook makes PR lies and NRA-bought legislators' justifications moot.

Pic note: This is an image from Boston's Forest Hills Cemetery. It is from the days when many parents buried their infants and small children...but after measles and other untreatable diseases, not military assault weapons. It is Creative Commons. You are welcome to it so long as you credit Mike Ball once.

Yesterday, Ryan and I offered our own take on the short-term partial prevention of assault-rife and mega-magazine bans, shutting off secondary markets, requiring all gun sales even at show to perform background checks, and doing what Australia has with such laws that has literally stopped its mass murders by guns.

Pub note: Both of the Globe and FT likely require subscriptions to view. Boo.

From elsewhere today we can two seminal examples of commentary. At the Boston Globe, its ever illogical and disingenuous token winger columnist Jeff Jacoby laid out nothing but stupid clichés. No one law or even set of them will do away with evil. He lies in claiming "Nightmares like the one in Newtown are rare," when we have we average a mass slaying by gun ever two weeks, including 161 kids since 2006. That of course does not count the shooting deaths of one or two at a time that happen daily.

Jacoby's solution is "cultivation of human goodness." While we agree that we need a cultural change long term, immediately we need gun-law revisions. Then we must examine our systems of mental health evaluation and availability of treatment. We can't click our heels as Jacoby would have the magic occur.

The other set of arguments is in contrast sensible and far more realistic. At the Financial Times, Jacob Weisberg, head of the Slate Group, does not expect huge changes in gun laws from the President and Congress. Instead he points to NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's action on smoking.

There, Bloomberg used the city's regulatory and enforcement powers. He led to a ban on smoking and restaurants and bars. That in turn is becoming normal in the nation. In NYC, in a decade the smoking rate has gone from 19% to 7% for teens and overall from 22% to 14%.

Likewise, Weisberg says give Treasury's Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms department the same power to enforce gun laws as the Traffic Safety Administration has over cars. Moreover, he wants tort reform so gun makers and sellers are no longer exempt from murders committed with their weapons.

None of his suggestions address the longer-term need to change our gun-and-violence culture here. Australia, Scotland and Finland among others had similar big issues. They started with gun laws that took military weapons away from all but cops and soldiers. We can do that.

Link update: I see that Slate is running the Weisberg commentary, in a form that won't require registration or subscription.

Yes, we do have several centuries of far too many of us ending conflicts with guns. Yes, far too many of us also hold the fantasy we are powerful and worthy in relationship to our firepower. Changing these attitudes is the long-terms answer. Meanwhile, we have crucial changes short-term.

Something Little, Something Big About Violence

As individuals, as elected officials, and as a nation, we can start with the most obvious — no sympathy or allowance for any self-absorbed whiner saying having to press a gun's trigger once for each bullet it fires takes away liberty. The right to life and safety far trumps any such lunacy.

Ryan and I shall talk (almost certainly rant) about massacres here, guns and violence tomorrow, Tuesday, December 18th at 2:30 PM on Left Ahead. You can catch that live at this URL or later back there, on Left Ahead, or our iTunes page.

Fast enactment of better gun registration, licensing and of course re-instituting bans on assault weaponry is an essential component, but nothing like a panacea.

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Cultural Change

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We have done this before, or rather we are still in the process of completing the transformation in such cultural areas as racism.

I'm old enough to have grown up in times and places of legal racism here.

Up here in Boston, we could and did pretend. Because public schools were nominally integrated, because in theory anyone of any race or nationality could legally buy any house or rent any apartment, we liked to say we were not like Alabama or other Deep South states. That was crap.

I heard locals in the 1960s say that Negroes (as the term was then) chose to live with their own kind. That was the reason the city was so obviously segregated in all aspects. Before the infamous busing ruling to compel school integration, neighborhood schools (bad in black ones/good or better in white) were assigned by geography, which was in reality race and for most, destiny.

We are over half way to changing that in and throughout the South.

Sure, it took laws, Presidential action, and other compulsions. What eventually changed though was American attitudes. When two factors squeezed the complacent racism, we started getting better. First, we saw that Congress, the Executive Branch, and even states would not allow overt racism. Second, folk of various races got to know each other, as schools, jobs, housing and all aspects of life opened.

I remember in the late 1970s sitting down in what had been a typical bar in Beaufort, South Carolina...definitely not a fern bar for the emerging Yuppie class. Three rural sorts, all middle-aged white men, were drinking beer. One used the N word in passing to disparage a black man he knew. Both of the other guys scolded him for it. Now that's change that lasts and goes deep.

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Climbing UP the slippery slope

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This is the simple road map for violence here. It is at once simple and extremely difficult.

An effective ploy of the NRA and other gun absolutists is that any restriction at all of guns or ammo is the end of our Constitutional rights under the Second Amendment. More crap, that.

They have led and pushed the nation down that very slippery slope of inaction and the of reaction to even the most sensible regulation of mass-murder weaponry. We need to crawl up that slope and back to the safe and sensible life we want. We won't come back into the sunlight of reason and compassion quickly but we have to do it.

We can grunt and ignore the mass-murder-gun types when they say this or that law would not have prevented the Sandy Hook murders. They are oblivious to both the necessary tweaks of law and the deeper cultural shift necessary. Let them stick with their literal specifics. Sadly, they are limited to such thinking and Americans must leave them behind as we're doing with racists.

The toughest part won't be the laws and regulations. It will be transcending centuries of pioneer-era, wild west times, and even more modern Rambo mentality. Yes, we have definitely been a gun-centric, violent country. Many of us are self-indulgent fantasizers about weapons. We want to have the power and tools to kill many fellow Americans and in a very short time. We state with apparent sincerity that this is for self-defense, that it is our inherited freedom, and that we are the exceptions to the reckless monsters who kill tens of thousands of Americans with guns every year.

The pretense is that we understand gun safety, we keep our weapons locked and unloaded, we never use or even touch our guns unless we are hunting, target shooting, or protecting our lives from criminals. While stats show a totally different story, these fantasies are widespread in a nation with one gun in circulation for every adult and child.

No you absolutely do not need and should not own an automatic or semiautomatic rifle or handgun. No you absolutely do not need clips or magazines that hold 30 or 100 bullets. The only reason to sell or possess those outside the military and constabulary is to enable mass murder.

Say it, members of Congress. Do you favor mass murder or oppose it?

Pass reasonable laws forbidding assault weapons and magazines. That's a start.

You likely will slink away after that. That's probably the best we can hope from a gormless, gutless group of legislators.

Yet, it's a start, one that worked superbly so far for Australia from 1996 after its most recent gun massacre. Among the industrialized nations, Australia had a similar guns-equal-liberty mentality until those restrictions on the most extreme mass-murder tools. They got better. Yet no one confiscated their hunting, target, and protection rifles, shotguns and pistols. That same would happen here, if only the Prez and Congress do the minimum.

Longer term, we need to aim for a world where macho gun behavior and mentality is not popular or even accepted. When Americans ridicule those who talk cowboy or Rambo about guns, we'll be getting there.

Real Duty of Those in Congress

Pundits, comics and we plain folk got the post-Aurora gun thing right immediately. We knew who was going to be talking gun control, yes or no, and what they'd say. For Congress, the cliché proved well based. Republicans who spoke up clearly were positively bought by the NRA and gun interests, and Democrats who did or who whimpered clearly were negatively threatened and intimidated.

None of that surprised any of us, especially not the don't-dare-politicize-this calls from gun-rights absolutists. Pay no attention to their politicizing the don't-politicize thing; these are not the liars you seek. Move along.

The slim chance for change and good sense here has been in the few calls for leadership. Even the let's at least discuss the big issues makes the absolutists scream louder and more frequently. Instead of playing their game, let's see what those in Congress are about and what they should be doing.

This is an old, but sturdy, horse that I ride. The primary job of those in the U.S. House and Senate is to lead.

If you ask the state political parties, many constituents, and nearly all in Congress, they'd likely say the first job is to bring home benefits for their local voters. Grants, federal construction and such are often used as measures of effectiveness.

When someone in either house then adds they are in D.C. to vote the way their constituents want, they are pathetic. That is the saddest, most cynical, most cowardly way to view the position.

Instead, those we send to public office should lead. I'd write must lead, but we're a long, long way from that being common enough for that.

Those in Congress should think more and learn more about issues big and small that affect us than we ordinary folk. They have access to the information and have support staff to educate them, and we would hope, the counter self-interested lies of lobbyists. Our Reps and Senators thus have a duty to be ahead of the issues, to offer solutions that help us short term and beyond.

I can do without cowards claiming they are only doing that their constituents would tell them to do. I want and we should all demand leaders who come down on the correct side, the wise side of each issue.

So with guns, ammo and related issues. Let's not get caught up in the NRA-framed jive. This isn't about some scaremongering fantasy of all guns being stolen from Americans. Let's remember that this is nearly one gun per citizen here in our hands, as well as that many thousands of us die annually from gun violence. It would go beyond political craziness to try to take away the guns, as well as physically impossible.

I'm not sure we can find enough Republicans of honesty and courage in Congress to be leaders here. The Dems don't look much better.

For our part as voters, we need to speak to our squeaking mice in D.C. We need to tell them we want leaders, not followers, on this...for a big change.