It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, June 01, 2022
How the NRA crafted the unholy matrimony of gun culture and white supremacy
Mia Brett May 31, 2022 Wayne LaPierre speaking at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
Last week 19 children and two teachers were murdered by an 18-year-old who legally bought two semiautomatic rifles. The week before, 10 Black people visiting the supermarket were murdered by an 18-year-old who legally bought a semiautomatic rifle.
Seventy-seven percent of mass shootings are committed with legally bought guns. Seventy percent of school shooters have been under 18. The Sandy Hook shooter was 20. The Parkland shooter was 19.
The radicalization of young men and permissive gun laws for teenagers is fueling a crisis of mass shootings and violence. In the United States, gun culture and white supremacy go hand in hand.
While gun control laws were common in American history, the right to own a gun was only protected for white men. The first gun-control law passed in the British colonies was to prevent a British colonist from providing a gun to any Native American in 1619 in Virginia. Race or enslavement was a common justification to restrict gun ownership until 1867, as slave owners were terrified of slave rebellions.
It was also particularly important for white men on the frontier to have access to firearms to aid in stealing land from Native Americans. Land colonization was so important that early colonies actually armed enslaved Black men and enrolled them in militias to defend against indigenous tribes.
However, as the frontier moved West and slave rebellion became a larger worry, this practice lessened and laws were passed to bar the use of guns by enslaved people or to restrict their usage to only when supervised.
Historian Carol Anderson argues that not only were guns restricted based on race, but that the Second Amendment was in large part motivated to protect the rights of slave owners to have guns to put down slave rebellions.
After the Civil War, southern states passed Black Codes to make it illegal for free Black people to carry guns and the KKK confiscated them, but Reconstruction ended these laws.
Access to guns has remained racialized since the Civil War, even if the explicitly discriminatory laws ended. Self-defense and “Stand Your Ground laws” have only provided white men with protection because police and juries see Black men as the perpetrators of violence, not the victims.
Even women are rarely successful in legally justifying their right to use a gun in self-defense. “Stand Your Ground laws” don’t apply to domestic violence victims. Women often resort to killing their abusers when they have an opportune moment, not when there is “imminent” danger.
The NRA’s history is deeply racist while promoting an extreme image of the Second Amendment and the need for guns. The NRA was initially formed in 1871 to promote gun training and safety. It didn’t start promoting unfettered access to guns until the 1960s. In the 1920s and 1930s, NRA president Karl T. Frederick supported gun-control measures, like requiring state licenses and only granting them to “suitable” people. His framework left the discretion for licenses in the hands of local law enforcement, which allowed Black people to be systematically denied access to firearms while ensuring “suitable” white people could buy them.
The 1960s saw a new wave of gun control measures that began the NRA’s transformation. However, while some members were threatened by new gun-control measures, many in the NRA simultaneously wanted such laws to take guns away from the Black Panthers.
While the NRA would never publicly endorse any gun-control measures today, it has been reluctant to support people of color availing themselves of their Second Amendment rights, and even ignored the Philando Castile case.
Between 2012 and 2019, there were 11 mass shootings with ties to white supremacy. Everytown for Gun Safety estimates over 10,000 hate crimes are committed every year with a firearm. Of those, 63 percent are based on race. Fifteen percent on religion (religious hate crimes particularly against Jews are also a result of white supremacy).
In 2021, 21-year-old Robert Long murdered eight women, six of Asian descent in Atlanta. Two weeks ago 18-year-old Payton Gendron murdered 10 Black people after posting a manifesto about Great Replacement Theory. The shooter in the Poway Synagogue shooting believed in white genocide conspiracy theories. He was only 19. The Charleston church shooter, Dylann Roof was 21.
All these shootings were committed with legally purchased guns.
All of them could have been prevented by raising the age to buy a rifle to 21, enforcing universal background checks and passing red-flag laws that would enable confiscating someone’s guns if they show signs of radicalized white supremacist thinking or a propensity for violence.
The NRA and gun manufacturers not only oppose all these very reasonable reforms, but they target young men vulnerable to radicalization with advertising.
Gun companies post images of teens using weapons, market guns in different colors and appeal to teens possibly interested in law enforcement.
Companies skirt rules about advertising disclosure by using paid influencers to pose with guns on Instagram and social media sites. Instagram has a policy that “branded content” promoting weapons isn’t allowed on the site, but that doesn’t stop influencers from promoting weapons and hiding financial connections.
White supremacists and gun manufacturers are targeting young men online.
The predictable result is tragic mass shootings.
States are making it impossible to teach these young men about racism, which might combat their radicalization, while making it easier for them to buy guns.
Young mass shooters are buying guns legally because federal law allows automatic rifles to be bought at 18 and they pass their background checks with no red flag law recourse.
Closing the universal background check loophole could have stopped the Charleston shooting, raising the minimum age for rifle purchases could have stopped the Sandy Hook, Parkland, Poway, Buffalo and Uvalde mass shootings as well as the vast majority of school shootings.
Red-flag laws that took white supremacy seriously could have stopped almost all of these shootings. These are also three of the most popular gun reform measures.
Fifty-four percent of Republicans and 83 percent of Democrats support raising the age to buy any type of gun to 21. Eighty-three percent of Americans support universal background checks. Seventy-two percent support a national red-flag law and requiring a license.
The only thing standing in the way is the NRA and the politicians they’ve bought. Mia Brett, PhD, is a legal historian. She lives with her gorgeous dog, Tchotchke. You can find her @queenmab87.
Days before the Texas school shooting, Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O'Rourke campaigned to remove AR-15s and other 'weapons of war' from civilian life
Gubernatorial candidate Beto O'Rourke has long held the stance that people should not be able to possess AR-15s. AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall
Days before the shooting in Texas, Beto O'Rourke campaigned hard against the use of AR-15 rifles.
O'Rourke said AR-15s and AK-47s are "weapons of war" that are "designed to kill humans."
He also said that those who currently own such firearms shouldn't be allowed to keep them.
Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O'Rourke campaigned against firearms like AR-15 rifles in the days before the mass school shooting in Uvalde, arguing that such "weapons of war" have no place in society.
O'Rourke spoke at two separate campaign events on May 21, just days before the shooting on May 24.
At the events, he reiterated his stance on weapons like the AR-15, which was used by the Uvalde gunman to fatally shoot 21 people, including 19 children, at the Robb Elementary School.
"I think we are fools to believe anything other than that these weapons of war will continue to be used with greater frequency against our fellow Americans," O'Rourke said while speaking to veterans at a town hall meeting in Abilene, Texas. "It's why I've taken the position that I don't think we should have AR-15s and AK-47s in civilian life," he said. "They belong on a battlefield." O'Rourke said as much while speaking to a separate group of veterans in San Angelo that same day.
At this event, O'Rourke said he knew he had taken a politically unpopular stance against such guns but was forging ahead with it anyway.
"My kids are my conscience," he said. "And I may win or lose this race, but I'm always going to have to face them and answer for what I've done or failed to do when I had the chance to do something."
"And I just took the position that may not be politically popular, or maybe too honest, that only should no one be able to purchase an AR-15 or an AK-47," he said. "Because they're designed to kill humans."
O'Rourke then added that he did not think that current owners of AR-15s should be allowed to keep them. He added that he was hoping to find a "consensus" about whether AR-15s should be legal or not.
Sen. Bill Cassidy was recently asked why ordinary Americans need to own an AR-15, and the Louisiana Republican offered a rather creative answer.
“If you talk to the people that own it,” Cassidy said, “killing feral pigs in the, whatever, the middle of Louisiana, they’ll wonder: ‘Why would you take it away from me?’”
While we would never minimize the threat posed by feral pigs, Cassidy’s answer points to a deep perversity lurking behind our gun debate. There’s a reason it’s hard for Republicans to defend the current accessibility of AR-15-style weapons: Federal law on this matter is rooted in a deeply anachronistic understanding of what rifles in America are for, and the law hasn’t come close to catching up with today’s realities.
Right now, federal law dictates that you must be 21 years old to buy a handgun from a licensed dealer. But under federal law you can buy a rifle (including an AR-15-type assault rifle) at age 18, and while a handful of states have raised that age threshold higher, most have not.
Democrats want to change federal law to implement a national requirement that buyers of rifles are 21 years old. It remains to be seen whether Republicans will support such a change.
But for now, the idea that the threshold is lower in many places for semiautomatic rifles seems completely out of step with the last few decades of cultural change in America. Back in the 1960s, there weren’t hundreds of manufacturers turning out military-style rifles for civilian use. When the assault weapons ban passed in 1994, there were around 400,000 AR-15s in circulation, according to Zusha Elinson, a reporter who’s writing a book on the AR-15. But that ban expired in 2004, and there are now around 20 million AR-15s in circulation.
Which leaves us with the federal legal age to buy the most dangerous weapons, the ones favored by mass shooters, being lower than the age to buy handguns.
This deep disconnect has forced Republicans into contortions to defend keeping the status quo on semiautomatic rifles in place. There’s the aforementioned Sen. Cassidy line about shooting feral hogs. Then there’s the notion offered by two judges appointed by Donald Trump that 18-year-olds fought in the Revolutionary War, so today’s 18-year-olds have a right to buy what are in effect human-killing machines.
Indeed, among some Republicans, the rationale for doing little to restrict access to AR-15-style weapons seems untethered from any real-world considerations. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) recently opined that people need AR-15s to prepare for a future doomsday in which law and order breaks down entirely and police protection essentially vanishes.
Meanwhile, as The Post’s Colby Itkowitz reports, AR-15 variants have appeared in numerous GOP ads of late, and they are often brandished as little more than cultural signifiers. Assault-style weapons have taken on a kind of “own the libs” cultural life of their own: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) website recently enthused that such weaponry “TRIGGERS the Fake News Media and Democrats all across the country
Federal law seems decades behind this cultural shift. “The concept of what a long gun is in American culture has changed a lot in recent decades,” Mark Follman, the author of “Trigger Points,” a new book on mass shootings, told us.
Follman noted that the long gun was once understood as being primarily about hunting. But now, he said, rifles are increasingly marketed as a weapon of aggression and an “object of masculinity,” with a deliberate eye toward encouraging the “militarization” of gun culture.
In this sense, federal law is trapped in something of an anachronism. “The law may need to catch up with the way these weapons are perceived by 18-year-olds,” Follman said, citing massacres in Texas and Upstate New York.
There’s still another layer of perversity here. As Follman notes, mass shootings were historically carried out by semiautomatic handguns. “But that’s begun to shift in recent years,” he said. “More and more of these attacks are being carried out with AR-15s.”
“We know from case evidence that many mass shooters emulate their predecessors,” Follman continued. “The marketing of the AR-15 as the most popular rifle in America may be feeding into his problem as well.” Perhaps the law needs to catch up with this, too.
Ryan Busse, a former gun company executive who has emerged as a fierce critic of the industry, notes another absurdity: The age was set at 21 for handguns, Busse says, in part precisely because they were deemed more likely to be used by criminals against human victims than rifles would be.
“Now we have the AR-15,” Busse told us, which is the “most lethal, offensive thing out there.” Yet it isn’t treated as on a par with handguns, Busse notes, adding: “This demonstrates how behind-the-times our gun laws really are.”
Opinion by Paul WaldmanPaul Waldman is an opinion writer for the Plum Line blog. Twitter
Opinion by Greg SargentGreg Sargent writes The Plum Line blog. He joined The Post in 2010, after stints at Talking Points Memo, New York Magazine and the New York Observer. Twitter
What Is She On?’ The View Mocks Fox's Laura Ingraham Blaming Pot for Uvalde Shooting
Laura Ingraham was the subject of mockery on The View as the panel ridiculed the Fox News host for drawing a connection between America’s mass shootings and marijuana use.
The View opened its show Wednesday by continuing their discussions on the fallout from the Uvalde school shooting which left 19 children and 2 adults dead. Whoopi Goldberg threw to a montage of conservatives arguing that secularism, “wokeness,” and “the decline in the moral values” are the root cause of mass shootings, rather than guns.
The montage included Ingraham, who used her Tuesday night show to claim there is a link between shootings and the “psychosis”of young people who smoke weed.
“Why aren’t people, in general, not talking more about the pot psychosis violent behavior connection?” Ingraham asked. The View chuckled in response to the question, and Joy Behar quipped, “What is she on? She’s high on something.”
Goldberg rejected all the arguments from the conservative montage by declaring, “The issue is that there is an assault weapon out there that people can put their hands on.”
“They can put their hands on it easier than they can get a glass of beer in a bar. Kids can get an assault weapon! That’s the issue!” She continued. “It’s not if people are smoking too much weed. You know that, Laura. You should know that…You can put it through a BS lens if you want to and keep pretending like you don’t know that we have an issue with assault weapons.”
Goldberg went on to reiterate her argument that “you can keep all your other guns,” but AR-15s “should not be in anybody’s hands unless they’re a soldier.”
New York subway shooting survivor sues gun manufacturer Glock
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A New York woman who was injured during the April 12 mass shooting aboard a New York City subway car has sued Glock Inc, arguing the gun manufacturer should have known its weapons could be purchased by people with criminal intent.
Brooklyn resident Ilene Steur, 49, is seeking to have the Georgia-based company and its Austrian parent, Glock Ges.m.b.H, compensate her for physical injuries and emotional pain she suffered after she was shot on the northbound N train while on her way to work, according to the complaint.
Her lawsuit comes after New York state in 2021 passed a law allowing people affected by gun violence to sue gunmakers for creating a "nuisance" that endangers public safety and health. Steur asked a judge to order Glock to "eradicate the effects" of its marketing practices.
New York police said Frank James used a Glock pistol he bought in Ohio to open fire after setting off two smoke bombs during the rush hour attack, injuring two dozen people, including ten who were shot. James, 62, pleaded not guilty.
"The defendants' marketing and distribution practices made it far more likely that criminals, including Frank James, would obtain their weapons," Steur's lawyers wrote in a complaint filed on Tuesday in Brooklyn federal court.
Last week, a federal judge in Albany threw out a lawsuit by a group of gun manufacturers and others challenging the nuisance law's constitutionality.
Glock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The suit comes amid a renewed push to reform U.S. gun laws following a string of mass shootings, including the subway attack, a May 14 racist shooting in Buffalo, New York, that killed 10 people, and an elementary school shooting last week in Uvalde, Texas, in which 19 children and two teachers were killed.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Aurora Ellis)
Uvalde shooting: Police, guns and schools protected from lawsuits
US police and government institutions enjoy immunities that could make it difficult for Uvalde parents to take them to court.
A police officer sets flowers from someone mourning at a memorial at Robb Elementary School days after a mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, the United States
[Briana Sanchez/American-Statesman/USA Today Network via Reuters]
Published On 1 Jun 2022
While public outrage grows in the United States over a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas that left 21 dead last week, the victims’ relatives may never get their day in court against police, school authorities and gunmakers who enjoy special legal immunity that may protect them from being sued, according to attorneys.
As in past school shootings, families of the 19 students and two teachers will likely find that any lawsuits will run into legal challenges that do not exist for shootings in the workplace or other private property.
“I see Uvalde as an example of gaps in the law,” said Erik Knockaert, a Texas lawyer who has represented victims of mass shootings. He is not representing Uvalde families.
The 18-year-old gunman, Salvador Ramos, used a gun manufactured by Daniel Defense of Georgia.
The difficulty arises from three kinds of legal protections: qualified immunity, which protects law enforcement officers from many lawsuits over their actions on the job; sovereign immunity, which shields governments from lawsuits; and a US federal law shielding gunmakers from claims by shooting victims.
Qualified immunity could potentially bar lawsuits against Uvalde police even though the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety has acknowledged that officers made the “wrong decision” when they waited for backup before confronting the shooter, legal experts said.
Jamal Alsaffar, who represented victims of a 2017 Texas church shooting in Sutherland Springs, said overcoming qualified immunity will depend on what the police believed about the situation when they arrived and whether protocol required them to confront the shooter.
“The timeline is important in understanding if they can be held accountable in part for the tragedy,” said Alsaffar, who is not representing Uvalde families.
The Uvalde police department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A US federal judge dismissed a lawsuit in 2018 against Broward County, Florida and employees of its sheriff’s office for failing to protect students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed earlier that year.
The judge ruled that the sheriff and county employees had no legal duty to protect students from the shooter, echoing rulings by the US Supreme Court that said government only has a duty to protect people who are “in custody”.
However, civil and criminal cases have been allowed to proceed against Scot Peterson, a former deputy sheriff who was a school resource officer at the high school and widely criticised for failing to confront the shooter. Those cases proceeded because Peterson had a “special relationship” with the students.
He is currently scheduled to face his criminal trial in September, which his attorney, Mark Eiglarsh, called “unprecedented and irresponsible” and said he feared could lead to similar charges against law enforcement in the future.
Lawyers said there might be a case against the school district if it is determined if the shooter was easily able to enter the school because safety procedures weren’t followed, but it will likely be a difficult case.
A memorial at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas has become a shrine to the victims of the deadliest US school mass shooting in a decade, which resulted in the death of 19 children and two teachers [Veronica G Cardenas/Reuters]
The Uvalde school district did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Similar claims against the school district and town of Newtown, Connecticut by families of some of the 26 victims killed in 2012 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School were thrown out in 2018 on grounds of sovereign immunity.
Sandy Hook families were successful, however, in a case brought against gun manufacturer Remington, which made the Bushmaster assault-style weapon used by shooter Adam Lanza. The company agreed to pay families $73m and to release thousands of company documents including those on how it marketed the model of weapon used in the attack that killed 20 children between the ages of six and seven.
Gun manufacturers and dealers have near blanket immunity under a 2005 law known as the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, or PLCAA, which protects them from civil lawsuits for crimes committed with their weapons.
There are exceptions if a company knowingly violated an applicable statute, and Sandy Hook families alleged Remington violated Connecticut law related to the marketing of its product used in the shooting.
Jonathan Lowy, chief counsel for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said a number of potentially viable claims should be considered against Daniel Defense. If the company’s gun could be easily modified to fire automatically, PLCAA immunity would likely not apply, he said.
Daniel Defense declined to comment.
But others were less optimistic about following the Sandy Hook blueprint, which relied on a favorable interpretation of Connecticut law by that state’s highest court.
“I would be surprised if the Texas Supreme Court has a strong appetite for expanding the exceptions to PLCAA immunity,” said Tim Lytton, a Georgia State University College of Law professor who specializes in gun litigation.
Still, Lytton said lawsuits can lead to significant compensation even when the law is on the defendants’ side.
In 2020, the Florida Supreme Court ruled the law caps at $300,000 liability for the school district in the Parkland shooting. Despite that, the next year the district agreed to pay $25 million to victims.
The US Department of Justice also agreed to pay Parkland families $127 million early in the litigation over the government’s failure to follow-up on tips about the shooter.
“Entering into a settlement and paying compensation,” said Lytton, “that’s a much easier response than coming up with changes in the law.”
SOURCE: REUTERS
Polling is clear: Americans want gun control
Politicians diverge from voters when it comes to preventing gun deaths.
US flags, across New York Bay from the Statue of Liberty, fly at half-mast at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, New Jersey, on May 25, 2022, as a mark of respect for the victims of the May 24 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images
The massacre of children at an elementary school in Texas is adding fresh urgency to the conversation about gun control in the United States, which has been politically fraught and lacking in progress. That’s not because of a lack of support for gun control. That support just needs a little bit of parsing.
To be clear: Americans’ views about guns are complicated, and vary significantly by political party and geography. Overall, the vast majority of Americans support the right for private citizens to own guns, and more than 40 percent of households own at least one firearm. That doesn’t mean they’re against tighter rules on their guns. Nearly three-quarters of Americans think that gun violence is a big or moderately big problem, according to a survey last year by Pew Research Center. And a majority of Americans think that the epidemic of school shootings could be stopped with drastic changes in legislation, according to a poll this week by YouGov.
Still, when Americans are asked broadly if they support stricter gun laws, their opinions volley back and forth, and it’s hard to see a consistent majority. Slightly more than half (52 percent) of Americans in a Gallup poll last year said laws regarding firearms sales should be stricter — a number that has actually gone down in recent years — and a Quinnipiac poll last year found that just under half (45 percent) support stricter gun laws. More recently, a Politico/Morning Consult poll last week found that 59 percent of registered voters think it’s very important (41 percent) or somewhat important (18 percent) for lawmakers to pass stricter gun laws.
But these might not be the right things for pollsters to be asking. That’s because of how drastically existing gun laws vary state by state.
“The thing about those sort of generic questions: Somebody in Vermont can say yes and someone in California can say no, and they favor the exact same thing,” Chris Poliquin, an assistant professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, who studies gun legislation after mass shootings, told Recode.
When asking Americans about their opinions on more specific gun policies, the results are clearer. A vast majority of Americans supports universal background checks, keeping people with serious mental health issues from buying guns, bans on assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines, and so-called “red flag laws” that would allow police and family members to seek court orders to temporarily take guns away from those considered a risk to themselves and others. A majority of Americans, of both political parties, oppose carrying concealed weapons without a permit.
There’s much more action at the state level, but it doesn’t typically end with progress. Poliquin’s research found that state legislatures consider 15 percent more firearm bills in the year after a mass shooting, although the existence of more bills doesn’t typically lead to stricter gun laws. In fact, Republican legislatures pass more gun-related legislation in the wake of mass shootings — but they’re laws that make gun laws less strict.
“A lot of those [gun control measures] are actually supported in the abstract by gun owners, but often not in practice,” Matthew Lacombe, an assistant professor at Barnard and author of Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into a Political Force, told Recode. “So people have a particular issue stance, but then that issue becomes salient and Democratic and Republican politicians start taking clear stances on it. And then people’s views tend to fall into line to match their partisan outlooks.”
Part of the issue is that Americans have somewhat conflicting stances on gun control. But what’s a bigger problem is that even when a majority of Americans agree, a simple majority of lawmakers agreeing on a bill is not enough to pass laws in our country. The Senate filibuster lets a minority of states — and Americans — veto national policy that the majority of Americans want. The result is a minority of people making the laws for the majority of Americans, regardless of what the population at large thinks.
Background checks
Background checks are by far the least controversial aspect of gun legislation, according to a wholelotofsurveys. Roughly 80 to 90 percent of Americans support universal background checks, which would mean all sellers would have to verify that a person doesn’t have a history of violent crime or domestic abuse before they can buy a gun. As Robin Lloyd, managing director of the gun control advocacy group Giffords, put it, “Background checks on every gun sale polls higher than people who support ice cream.”
That overwhelmingly broad support, however, has not led to sweeping national requirements for background checks. There are currently laws requiring extended background checks for all people who buy guns in 21 states, but federal law only covers sales between federally licensed dealers. That means there’s a loophole in which about a fifth of gun sales — sold privately, online, and at gun shows — are done without that oversight. Even states that have expanded laws suffer from an influx of guns from those that don’t.
Of course, many mass shooters would have no trouble passing a background check. The 18-year-old Uvalde shooter, for instance, legally purchased his guns. The Buffalo shooter bought his guns legally. The Parkland shooter did. The list goes on. Still, according to a 2020 study, the odds of mass shootings are 60 percent lower in states with laws requiring permits for firearms — and, by extension, background checks.
Notably, many of these killers are young and don’t yet have a record. After the Parkland shooting in 2018, there was massive support for raising the legal age for buying a firearm from 18 to 21. Universal background checks are one of those rare issues that both Republicans (70 percent) and Democrats (92 percent) support, but partisanship in other areas keeps it from going anywhere. Republican senators would have to cross the aisle to vote for gun control laws — a move that would likely hurt them in their state primaries.
The Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2021, or HR 8, which would close the background check loophole, was sketched out in rough form after the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre a decade ago. Despite lawmakers from both sides of the aisle signaling support for such bills, these bills have repeatedly passed the House only to languish in the Senate.
Red flag laws
Americans overwhelminglysupport red flag laws, otherwise known as extreme risk protection orders, which work similarly to restraining orders. Again, these laws allow police and family members to petition a court — which would determine whether there’s enough evidence to do so — to temporarily keep guns from people who might be a threat to themselves or others. Some 77 percent of Americans think that a family member should be able to petition a court to do this, while 70 percent think police should, according to a survey by APM Research Lab.
And this approach to gun control has been gaining traction in recent years. A number of states adopted such laws following the Parkland, Florida, shooting, in which the gunman, like many mass shooters, displayed obvious red flags. (An acquaintance said he’d introduce himself, “Hi, I’m Nick. I’m a school shooter.”) Some say the red flag approach might be less controversial with gun owners, specifically, because it seems like common sense.
“Red flag laws are promising because they’re specifically targeted at people or cases or instances in which there’s reason to believe that there might be a problem,” Lacombe said. “So it’s not like a blanket rule that treats gun owners like a particular class of citizen.”
Of course, for red flag laws to be useful, they have to be used. If police had decided to seek such an order against the shooter in the Buffalo supermarket earlier this month, who had been referred to police for threatening violence, 10 gun deaths could have been prevented. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has since announced an executive order that would compel police to do so.
Mental health restrictions
There’s also overwhelming support on both sides of the aisle (85 percent of Republicans and 90 percent of Democrats) for stopping those with mental illness from buying a gun. But in the case of gun sales that happen through a licensed dealer, that’s supposed to already be happening (though the same loopholes occur for online and private sellers). If a court has had someone involuntarily committed or otherwise determined that they are incapable of managing their life, that person is not supposed to be able to buy a gun, since they should be flagged by the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) database.
In practice, that has not always happened.
After a student with a documented history of court-ordered mental health treatment shot and killed 32 students and faculty at Virginia Tech in 2007, there was a major push to make sure state-level records were entered into NICS. George W. Bush signed the NICS Improvement Act into law in 2008, but it still had huge holes where relevant state and federal records were not uploaded to the database. Some of those were remedied by the Fix NICS Act that was signed into law in 2018, but the system is far from perfect.
Additionally, mass shooters generally wouldn’t be considered to have mental illness severe enough to show up in the federal gun database in the first place.
“There’s sort of this perception about mass shooters that they are severely mentally ill people,” Poliquin said. “Although they might have mental health issues, the level of mental health issues doesn’t necessarily lead to institutionalization.”
Additionally, there’s a lot of debate over mental health and mass shooting coming from Republicans that might be in bad faith. It’s not as though Americans have a higher rate of mental health problems than other countries — what makes the US exceptional is the number of guns in the country and the corresponding number of gun deaths.
“I’m not aware of any instance in which a Republican saying that this is really a mental health issue has actually then come forward with a proposal to invest additional resources in our public health and mental health infrastructure, which I think sends a signal just how serious they are,” Lacombe said.
Assault rifles and high-capacity magazines
Bans on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines have an approval rating of over 60 percent in the US, according to Pew.
Assault weapons are a poorly defined class of firearms, but generally refer to military-style semi-automatic weapons. High-capacity magazines are generally ammunition clips that hold more than 10 rounds. AR-15s, the preferred style of weapon in recent mass shootings, are assault weapons, which can be modified to accept a number of after-market parts, including high-capacity magazines, that make it even deadlier.
While it has majority support, banning assault weapons is much more divided by political party. While 83 percent of Democrats approve of banning assault-style weapons, just 37 percent of Republicans do; 83 percent of Democrats would like a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines compared with 41 percent of Republicans.
Assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, both of which allow murderers to kill more people in a short span of time, used to be illegal in the US. A federal law passed in 1994 banned assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, but Congress let the legislation lapse in 2004. Even though the 1994 law had its issues — it didn’t make illegal or confiscate the 1.5 million assault weapons and 25 million large-capacity magazines that Americans already owned — the bans did significantly reduce death tolls while they were in effect.
“After that, we’ve just seen like an explosion of assault weapons all across the country,” Lloyd said, estimating the number to be in the tens of millions.
Cassandra Crifasi, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said gun laws should go beyond simply listing which specific guns are restricted or not by making it harder to get deadly gun accessories.
“In response to some of these bans, you can buy a rifle that falls into the approved list, and then you can find accessories online or at gun shows that allow you to customize it and then it may become in violation of the ban,” she said. “Once you have the rifle, if you can then buy those accessories after-market, you can skirt around the ban.”
The Buffalo shooter, for example, purchased his AR-15-style gun legally but modified it to accept a large-capacity magazine that is illegal in New York.
However it’s defined, Lloyd says, limiting guns, ammo, and accessories would limit the extent of gun violence in mass shootings.
“It is impossible to ignore the fact that assault weapons are extremely dangerous because of how many people they can kill in such a short amount of time,” she said, referring to the death tolls in Buffalo and Uvalde.
There is proposed legislation, including the Keep Americans Safe Act (HR 2510 / S 1108), that would ban high-capacity magazines, and the Assault Weapons Ban of 2021, which would ban military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. All of these bills have been introduced but not voted on, and thanks to the filibuster, would be unlikely to pass without a lot more Republican support.
Concealed carry
Though it varies by party, the vast majority (81 percent) of Americans oppose laws that would allow people to carry concealed handguns without a permit, according to a recent poll this month by Marquette Law School. And generally, support for the wider ability to carry guns — in schools, without permits — has been declining, according to Crifasi.
At the same time, laws allowing people to carry weapons in public have become much more commonplace in the last decade. The effort, however, began decades before in the 1980s as the NRA, beginning in Florida, sought to get states to slowly roll back their concealed carry laws from something that was a special dispensation to something that was expected as a way for gun owners to express their Second Amendment rights. Just last year, the Texas legislature passed a law making it so that people no longer need a license or training to carry a handgun.
“The NRA put forth a pretty strategic, organized, and concerted effort to change state laws, one state at a time,” Lacombe said. “As it became increasingly normalized to be in the law, voters also became more likely to see it as acceptable.”
The thinking behind these Republican and NRA talking points is that having a concealed weapon would allow the “good guys” to take down the bad guys. In practice, that doesn’t actually happen. Though there are a handful of anecdotes in which a person with a concealed weapon successfully stops a mass shooter, adding more guns to the mix is more dangerous. To wit: a man who stopped a mass shooter with his concealed weapon last year in Colorado, only to be mistakenly shot and killed by police.
As the conceal carry issue shows, gun policy reflects the influence of NRA lobbyists more than everyday Americans.
“We have an exceptionally powerful gun lobby that works on behalf of gun manufacturers to make it easy for gun dealers and gun manufacturers to sell a lot of guns really easily,” Crifasi said. “And many of our elected officials are more beholden to the gun lobby than they are to their own constituents.”
Many of the gun control ideas above are part of kitchen table discussions being had right now across the country, as Americans mourn yet another senseless tragedy at the hands of a mass shooter. Specific gun control measures have bipartisan support and could go a long way toward stopping the next mass shooting before it happens.
Unfortunately, what Americans want is not being reflected in America’s laws. The ability of the minority in small, mostly rural, and mostly white communities to outweigh the majority has vast repercussions for the way we live and the way we die. The Senate filibuster is undermining democracy, and in turn is undermining the American government’s legitimacy. It’s possible tragic events like the one last week in Texas could help turn the tide, but for now. tide-turning would require support from Republican lawmakers that actually matches the desires of their Republican constituents.
For that to change, Republicans in addition to Democrats will have to vote out politicians whose stances on guns don’t align with theirs. If not, these conversations begin and end at the kitchen table.
‘Strongest gun control measures’ in a generation in Canada would put freeze on handguns on top of ban, buyback of assault rifles
Published: May. 31, 2022, Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announces new gun control
legislation in Ottawa, Ontario, on Monday, May 30, 2022.
Just one week after a mass shooting at an elementary school across the border in the United States killed 19 children and two teachers, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is proposing “some of the strongest gun control measures in over 40 years” for his nation.
The proposed legislation would include implementing a national freeze on handguns, taking away firearms licenses of those involved in acts of domestic violence or criminal harassment — such as stalking — and increasing criminal penalties for gun smuggling and trafficking, according to a release from Trudeau’s office.
The handgun freeze would prevent individuals from bringing newly acquired handguns into Canada and prevent the buying, selling or transferring of handguns within the country, the prime minister’s office added.
The legislation would also provide law enforcement with more tools to investigate firearms crimes and strengthen border security measures, the release said. The United States is Canada’s only land border.
“One Canadian killed by gun violence is one too many. I’ve seen all too well the tragic cost that gun violence has in our communities across the country. Today, we’re proposing some of the strongest measures in Canadian history to keep guns out of our communities and build a safer future for everyone,” Trudeau said according to the release.
The proposal would also create a new “red flag” law that would allow courts to require that individuals considered a danger to themselves or others surrender their firearms to law enforcement — a move meant to address intimate partner violence, gender-based violence and self-harm involving firearms.
The Associated Press said this red flag law would also guard the safety of those applying through the process by protecting their identities — often those who are women in danger of domestic abuse.
In addition to the legislation, Canada’s government will require that magazines for long-guns be permanently altered so that they cannot hold more than five rounds and will also ban the sale and transfer of large capacity magazines under the country’s Criminal Code.
“These are the measures that chiefs of police, families of survivors, doctors, and advocates have been asking us to take, and they build on the many concrete actions we have already taken,” Trudeau’s office said.
In 2020, Trudeau announced a ban on over 1,500 models and variants of assault-style firearms, with a buyback program set to be introduced to offer “fair compensation to affected owners and businesses,” the release added. The country has also already expanded background checks as part of its gun control laws.
The buyback program is slated to begin at the end of the year according to the AP, and is mandatory, however, if a gun owner insists on keeping their assault weapon it will be made completely inoperable Trudeau said.
Measures such as the handgun freeze are expected to come into force in Fall 2022, Trudeau’s office said, adding that any type of military-style assault weapon will be prohibited when they enter the market going forward.
“We will continue working to ensure any new weapons that fit the definition of assault-style weapon are captured,” the prime minister’s office said.
For its 2021 budget, Canada provided $312 million in new funding to increase firearms tracing capacity and to implement stronger border control measures to prevent smuggling and trafficking.
“Law enforcement agencies seized more than double the number of firearms at the border in 2021, compared to 2020, which is also the highest number of firearms seized in recent years,” Trudeau’s office said.
The prime minister’s office added that handguns were present in the majority of firearm-related violent crimes in the decade between 2009 and 2020 at 59% and that in 2018 firearms were present in over 600 intimate partner violence incidents in the nation.
“Victims of intimate partner violence are approximately five times more likely to be killed when a firearm is present in the home,” Trudeau’s office said.
While Canada has fewer mass shootings than the United States due to a lack of easy access to guns and a smaller population, the AP said, the country is not immune to incidents of mass shootings.
In Nova Scotia in April 2020, a rampage by a gunman disguised as a police officer across multiple locations became the deadliest shooting attack in the country’s history after the 1989 shooting at Montreal’s École Polytechnique.
The Nova Scotia attack prompted Canada’s initial increased gun control action in 2020.
“In Canada, gun ownership is a privilege not a right,” Bill Blair, Canada’s minister of emergency preparedness said per the AP, who added that guns are often smuggled into Canada from the U.S. — a country with one of the world’s largest small arms arsenals.
The legislation proposed by Trudeau is assured to pass Canada’s parliament thanks to the prime minister’s ruling Liberal party and the leftist opposition New Democrats having enough votes, the AP said.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/70930462/1240894694.0.jpg)
