12.15.12
Cowering before the gun lobby
Posh Christmas catalog in the US or what Adam Lanza used?
Is that all that can be done? The early returns aren’t optimistic.
From a Michigan newspaper, the usual intelligence-insulting extremist script on self-defense as justifications for a right-to-concealed carry law rammed through the Republican held legislature hours before Newtown:
Backers say the tragedy is the work of one deranged person and shouldn’t cloud the debate in Michigan, and could actually aid in ending the slayings.
Ari Adler, spokesman for Republican House Speaker Jase Bolger, said many “believe citizens who are allowed to carry concealed pistols can act in a positive way to bring a tragedy to a close more quickly” …
Ryan Mitchell, a spokesman for bill sponsor Sen. Mike Green, R-Mayville, said the legislation is “about letting those who are vulnerable and defenseless defend themselves.”
At the New York Times, Nate Silver posted a graph showing the citation of various phrases used in news reports relating to “gun rights’ issues over the past decades.
Once again, it is another indicator of the great polarization in American society, of the civil war between rural right white America and everyone else. It is very much part and parcel with the ideology of WhiteManistan.
“Gun control” and “gun violence,” as usages, have decreased, the former plunged. “Second Amendment” usages have soared, tied almost exactly to the election of Barack Obama in 2008.
Paradoxically, from a week or so ago, on gun sales soaring in California this year:
“The National Rifle Association has done a wonderful job of demonizing President Obama,??? said [one observer to the newspaper].
In fact, Blek said, Obama’s gun policies have either been nonexistent or a step backward in the eyes of safety advocates …
While a long read, a piece from the New Yorker, written just after another massacre this year, has much to say on the radicalization of right white America’s obsession with owning firearms:
Gun-rights advocates say that the answer [to massacres] is more guns: things would have gone better, they suggest, if the faculty at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Chardon High School had been armed. That is the logic of the concealed-carry movement; that is how armed citizens have come to be patrolling the streets. That is not how civilians live. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.
The reporter, Jill Lepore, delivers some statistics. That Americans own the most guns in the world is not surprising.
However, inside that statistic is the sub-data that most Americans do not own guns. Gun ownership, in fact, is falling. The numbers come primarily from WhiteManistan, with some statistically trivial exceptions) where owning individuals have many of them (which agrees with the observation of an astonishing number of guns in the name of Adam Lanza’s mother who cannot now answer questions on why she bought so many).
“Gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, higher in the country than in the city, and higher among older people than among younger people,” she writes.
“I asked him how [David Keene, president of the NRA] would answer critics who charge that no single organization has done more to weaken Americans’ faith in government, or in one another, than the N.R.A,” writes Lepore, near the end.
“We live in a society now that’s Balkanized,??? Keene told the New Yorker’s journalist. “But that has nothing to do with guns.???
A letters page from The Chattanoogan of Tennessee, today, shows the bleak split.
And, previously, as noted up top: While there is always a lot of emotionalism at the time of an incident, the public is largely unaffected by regular massacres. Views do not shift, although the NRA has successfully reduced a basic interest in gun control over the last decade.
It’s quite the holiday gift to consider.
Just a week ago, fighting to make 3-D manufacturing plans for guns, including assault rifles, available on an “Internet redoubt.”
That’s real freedom from tyranny.
UPDATE addition:
I noted earlier today that the NRA and gun ownership is indivisible from the toxin ideology of WhiteManistan. All are intrinsically imbued with outlooks steeped in authoritarianism and pursuit of the destruction of those not deemed to be of them.
If you go to the anti-NRA site, Who Is The NRA Leadership?, it lists its leaders — all white men with the occasional token woman.
It notes the NRA bet big in terms of financial support on Romney and GOP candidates and lost the majority of its investment in 2012. And this shows that while complete freedom of gun ownership is a belief of white men, it’s still the ideology of a minority in comparison to the collective US demographic. In other words, it just lost its numbers.
Paradoxically, the Democratic Party remains cowardly when faced by the NRA. But I would bet that there are results that can be had in attacking the modern National Rifle Association and renewing issues in gun control head on.
I believe it could be be pushed further to the fringes of red white rural USA with not much of a downside for the rest of the voting core. It’s irrevocably attached to white GOP politicians. When the GOP goes down it takes the NRA with it.
The National Rifle Association spends almost all of its time demonizing Barack Obama. The Republican Party spends all of its time demonizing Barack Obama and everyone else not like it. The GOP just lost big time.
Non-white voters already alienated by that party are not going to suddenly vote Republican to stick up for getting rid of assault rifles as sporting fun. It is well past time to attack the NRA.
What’s the worst that could happen? More super-rich people with ties to gun manufacturing will give money to GOP politicians? Oh, wait …
Readers note! “WhiteManistan” added as an official category! Yippee!
My intent is to use it in place of the Extremism and Psychopath Vote categories. It supersedes and includes both. WhiteManistan has become, by definition, where extremism lives in the USA.