Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
I really don’t
want to write anymore about mass shootings. Hey, I really don’t want to think anymore about mass shootings. I think I would have
had a nice, lovely life if I could have lived to the end of it without ever
having heard of “bump stocks,” those devices you stick at the end of a
semi-automatic rifle (one which reloads itself, but you have to let go of the
trigger and then pull it again to fire your next shot) to convert it to a fully
automatic machine gun-style weapon (one that keeps firing round after round as
long as you hold down the trigger and doesn’t stop until you let go).
But a man just a
few months older than me, Stephen Paddock, forced the issue on the night of
Sunday, October 2, when he allegedly took up a vantage point from a suite on
the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas and brought 23
rifles, at least 12 equipped with bump stocks. He was there to assume a sort of
god-like position over the final night’s concert of the Route 91 country-music
festival and, while the event’s headliner, Jason Aldean, performed, pick off as
many people as possible in a random hail of automatically fired bullets that
would make it pure happenstance who lived unscathed, who was wounded and who
would die. (Paddock has been mistakenly referred to in some of the news
coverage as a “sniper,” which he wasn’t. A sniper shoots from a long distance
from the target with a telescopic sight to kill a specific person. Paddock was
1,000 feet from his targets but he was shooting randomly.)
In the week or
so since the Vegas shootings happened, we’ve heard all the old, familiar and by
now tiresome arguments. We’ve heard that the U.S. is inherently a violent
country that mythologizes the role of firearms in building this country — which
is true. A majority-white population occupies the present United States of
America because our forebears brought guns with which to commit genocide against
the Native population that was here before we were. Not only did we shoot the
Native people, we also used guns to wipe out the great herds of buffalo on whom
the Natives depended for food, clothing and
shelter.
Our national
mythology says that the way you solve your problems is with guns. Our
entertainment industry rushes out film after TV show after book after magazine
article carefully indoctrinating young people that the way to deal with someone
in your way is to shoot them — or stab them, burn them, beat them or otherwise,
in the CIA’s macabre euphemism, “terminate them with extreme prejudice” (in
plain English, kill them). It’s long been known that U.S. movie censors are
considerably tougher on sex scenes than their European counterparts but considerably
looser about violence. As the late Lenny Bruce grimly joked, “It’s O.K. for
your kids to watch killing, but if they watch schtupping [Yiddish for ‘fucking’], they might want to do it
someday.”
It’s also become
a truism that the U.S. has basically outsourced its public policy on guns to
the National Rifle Association (NRA). It says a lot about the mores of this society that firearms are
the only consumer product in the
entire economy the Constitution gives you a right to own. And the NRA has been
able to convince the American people — maybe not all the American people, but
enough to make sure that politicians live or die in public office based on the
NRA’s ratings — that any law
restricting the availability of guns in any way is just the first step down the
slippery slope to a Big Brother-ish federal government swooping down and
“taking your guns away.”
Since 2000,
there have been five Presidential elections, in two of which — 2000 and 2016 —
the ultimate winner carried the Electoral College despite coming in second in
the popular vote. In both those elections, the NRA played a crucial role in the
outcome. In 2000, the NRA mounted independent campaigns for George W. Bush in
Tennessee and West Virginia, thus enabling Bush to carry both states. In an otherwise
razor-thin election, Democratic nominee Al Gore became the first major-party
Presidential candidate since George McGovern’s landslide defeat in 1972 to lose
his home state. This is relevant because had Gore carried his home state,
Tennessee, he would have won the election and all that fooforaw about Florida
wouldn’t have mattered one bit.
The Democratic
Party got the message loud and clear. Instead of the big push for new gun
regulations they’d made after the Columbine shooting in 1999, they reacted
quietly, offering bills that just nibbled around the issue with minor ideas
like broader background checks on gun purchasers. That didn’t stop the NRA from
exploiting the paranoia they’d carefully built up among their members and gun
owners in general that any laws
restricting access to guns, no matter how minor or ineffectual, was just the
prelude to the mass confiscation of everyone’s guns, which would leave ordinary
Americans helpless in the face of what NRA executive vice-president Wayne
LaPierre called “jack-booted government thugs.”
The NRA once
again helped install the minority vote-getter as President of the United States
in 2016. Exactly one year ago to the date I’m writing this (October 7), the NRA
stood behind its enthusiastic endorsement of Donald Trump even as other
Republicans were backing away from him following release of the so-called “Access
Hollywood tape” in which Trump made clear
his view that women were meat, ripe for the sexual exploitation of any macho
male within their vicinity, especially if he were a “star” and could therefore
kiss and grope them with impunity.
While some
Republicans even thought the party might have to dump Trump and find another
nominee, the NRA stood solidly behind him — and so did their voter base. Along
with his opposition to the de-industrialization of America brought about in
part by the succession of ghastly “free trade” treaties, which had started
under Bill Clinton’s administration with the passage of the North American
Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Trump’s open embrace of gun culture in general
and the NRA in particular helped him win traditionally Democratic voters in
states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio — which gave him the
election.
In addition to
its control of gun policy from Washington, D.C. the NRA has so totally dictated
gun policy in state legislatures that the rising series of mass shootings since
2007 has actually been accompanied by an increase in the legal options available for individuals to buy, carry and use
guns. Under pressure from NRA-backed legislators, state after state has passed
laws allowing virtually anyone to carry a weapon anywhere, at any time. At
first the NRA and its political supporters sought “concealed-carry” laws, which
allowed you to bring guns into public places if they weren’t visible on your
person. Then, once “concealed-carry” laws were passed in most states, the NRA
further demanded “open-carry,” which allowed you not only to walk around with
your gun wherever you pleased but have it fully visible — and readily
accessible if you decided you needed to use it immediately.
The NRA has also
pushed “stand-your-ground” laws, which make it easier for homeowners and other
individuals who shoot someone to claim self-defense and get away with it
legally. As Rachel Maddow pointed out on her MS-NBC program October 5, the very
first thing President Trump and the Republican Congress did once they took
office in January 2017 was pass a law removing restrictions on the ability of
mentally ill individuals to buy firearms — a bill Maddow chillingly
counterpointed to Trump’s public statements calling Stephen Paddock “sick” and
“deranged.” And, amazingly, while Paddock was doing his gun thing in Las Vegas,
the U.S. Congress was debating laws that would make life even easier for people who want to own guns — and, inevitably,
for people who want to kill other people with them.
According to
Doyle McManus in the October 3 Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-mcmanus-las-vegas-shooting-20171002-story.html),
“The House is preparing to take up the Sportsmen Heritage and Recreational
Enhancement Act, which not only loosens restrictions on hunting and shooting on
public lands, but also includes two provisions that don’t exactly seem
essential to sport shooters. One would legalize the sale of armor-piercing
bullets as long as the manufacturer declares that the ammunition is intended
for sporting purposes. The other would loosen longstanding federal regulations
on silencers. There is little question that the bill,
strongly supported by the National Rifle Association, will pass in the
Republican-majority House. After that, the House will take up a separate bill
that would allow people whose states permit them to carry concealed weapons to
take their guns into other states, regardless of local regulations.”
In other words, tough luck for states like California who
have tried to restrict people’s ability to own, carry and use guns. All you’d
have to do, if these NRA-backed laws are passed and you want to bring a lot of
guns into California to commit mass murder, is buy them in a “red state” where
concealed-carry, open-carry, stand-your-ground and the other wet dreams of the
NRA and the gun manufacturers they represent (most of the NRA’s income comes
not from membership dues but from the big ads gun makers buy in their
publications) are the law — and state authorities couldn’t do anything to stop
them.
The October 5 edition of the PBS news show Washington
Week offered two sobering statistics that
define just how awash the U.S. is in guns. The U.S., with just 5 percent of the
world’s population, has 50 percent of the world’s guns owned by civilians. And
those guns are concentrated among a surprisingly small portion of the U.S.’s
population: just 3 percent of Americans own 50 percent of the U.S.’s total
supply of civilian guns.
What’s more, rising gun ownership brings with it an overall
militarization of society. June 27, 2016 New Yorker article (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/27/after-orlando-examining-the-gun-business), reporter Evan Osnos quoted Jeff Cooper, firearms
instructor and ex-Marine, as saying, “Before World War II, one could
stroll in the parks and streets of the city after dark with hardly any risk. …
[But in] today’s world of permissive atrocity,” Cooper argued, one had to live
one’s whole life essentially as if you were in a war zone at all times — and
act accordingly. He mentioned famous mass killers, including Charles Manson,
and argued that their victims’ “appalling ineptitude and timidity virtually
assisted in their own murders.” Adapting a concept from the Marines, Cooper
called on civilian gun owners to assume a constant state of alertness called
“Condition Yellow.” In his 1972 book Principles of Personal Defense, Cooper wrote, “The one who fights back retains his
dignity and his self-respect.”
In 2014 a Daily
Kos contributor signed only as “Hunter” infiltrated a gun-rights group that was
planning a mass protest against Target in Texas, apparently demanding that
Target stores start selling weapons that could be used by Texans interested in
exercising their new-found open-carry rights under state law. It wasn’t easy to
figure out from Hunter’s dispatch (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/06/04/1304356/-Open-Carry-Texas-targets-Target?detail=email)
just what the aims of the group, which
called itself “Open Carry Texas,” were, but Hunter could barely conceal (pardon
the pun) his horror at what sort of society we would become if they had their
way.
“These guys want a nation that looks like Somalia with more
strip malls and higher brand penetration,” Hunter wrote. “They literally think
that everyone should be wandering around with rifles explicitly designed to
kill the people around them, and that everyone should be fine with that except
when someone pulls a trigger on purpose or by accident and then, well, all the other
patriots nearby will just sort things out as it happens. You’re not supposed to
see a group of guys march into a bank loaded for bear and think I should
duck out of here, you’re not supposed to think anything of it until the
bullets start flying. ‘Oh, I see. They were here to rob the bank after all. I
wish there had been some obvious tell that I could have used to gain valuable
run-like-hell time.’ Can’t judge them based on how they’re holding their
weapons, either, because apparently you should also be able to put your finger right up to the
trigger and we’re still supposed to figure that you’re the Good Guy
With a Gun.”
I must say I totally
miss the whole appeal of gun culture. As a kid I played with cap pistols and
fired BB guns on occasion — and felt the recoil that was the way my
grade-school science teachers explained Newton’s Third Law and demonstrated how
rockets flew. But I have never so much as held an actual firearm in my life, much less fired one. I
didn’t grow up in the Midwest or the South. I didn’t have a dad who took me out
to the country, handed me a gun and taught me to shoot. I’ve eaten meat all my
life but I’ve never had any active role in the process of killing it first
(which my vegan friends tell me makes me a hypocrite, but that’s another
topic). And, if anything, I saw the movie Bambi (which, according to one overenthusiastic NRA spokesperson
I saw on TV in the Bay Area in the 1970’s, was the worst film ever made) too
often to regard hunters as something other than villains.
Apparently, the Las Vegas massacre, and in particular the
shooter’s use of bump stocks to turn the semi-automatic rifles the NRA has
fought to keep legal into the sorts of fully automatic machine guns that have
been against the law in the U.S. for decades, has led to an ever-so-slight
softening of the NRA’s no-way, no-how attitude towards gun regulation. The NRA
has sent signals to politicians in Washington, D.C. that they wouldn’t oppose a
change in gun regulations to ban bump stocks — but they want it to come
administratively from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms rather than
through an actual law passed by Congress.
Apparently the NRA fears that if there’s an actual
Congressional bill to ban bump stocks, Congressmembers who aren’t total pawns
of the NRA will use it to sneak in background checks, closing the gun-show
loophole by which you can avoid background checks, maybe even reviving the
assault weapons ban Congress passed in the 1990’s and let expire in 2004. But
there’s a problem with relying on ATF to ban bump stocks: according to a report
on Rachel Maddow’s MS-NBC program, in 2010, when Barack Obama was in the second
year of his presidency and the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress,
ATF reviewed their powers under existing gun legislation … and decided it
didn’t give them the authority to ban bump stocks.
So the likely result of Las Vegas will be the same as it
was after Columbine, Sandy Hook, Newtown, Aurora, Santa Barbara, San
Bernardino, Charleston, Orlando and all the other mass killings by sick
individuals with the firepower they acquired under the Second Amendment: a lot
of crocodile tears of grief, a lot of solemn statements that “this isn’t the
time” to talk about gun control (just as officials of the Trump administration
said that it would be “an insult to Floridians” to talk about how human-caused
climate change just might have made Hurricane Irma more devastating, and more
costly to lives and property, than previous ones); a quick forgetting and then
the Congress getting back to business and pre-empting state laws against
concealed-carry, removing restrictions on silencers and granting the NRA the
rest of its legislative wish list.
Mass shootings, it seems, are just part of the price
Americans are supposed to pay for “freedom” — just like we get the “freedom”
from being “burdened” by having universal access to health care, and just like
previous generations of Republicans say we needed the “freedom” to work for
less than the minimum wage and current Republicans say we need the “freedom”
from being represented at the workplace by labor unions able to bargain
collectively with our employers. The Republican concept of “freedom” means the
freedom of the strong to exploit the weak; the well to exploit the sick; the
male to exploit the female; the white to exploit the person of color; and above
all, again and again, the rich to exploit the poor and to make themselves even
richer off the surplus value working people produce for them.
Gun culture is just another one of the mechanisms by which
the ruling elite in the U.S. play divide-and-conquer among the 99 percent. As
long as people on the short end of the economic stick can be persuaded that the
real enemies are white liberals,
Mexican murderers and rapists, Muslim terrorists, women who want to control
their own bodies, Queers seeking equal rights, and jack-booted government thugs
who want to take their guns away, they’ll keep voting for Republican thugs like
Donald Trump and pro-corporate Democratic sellouts like Hillary Clinton. And
the rich will take their tax cuts they’ve been given at the expense of everyone
else and laugh all the way to their secret accounts in Swiss banks they keep
just in case there’s ever a real
revolution and they have to get out of the country in a hurry.
