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New gun control legislation will not pass this Congress. I’m confident saying it won’t pass the next Congress either, or the next. In essence, new gun control legislation will never pass Congress again, as long as this generation of Democrats remains in power.
The assault weapons ban passed in 1994, not that long ago. Every time there’s a mass murder with an assault weapon, some pre-1994 Democrat calls for its reinstatement, joined possibly by the legislator from the site of the incident. In the latest mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, the assault weapon apparently jammed, dramatically reducing the number of dead, in all likelihood. It’s really an excellent test case of the proposition of whether or not banning assault weapons saves lives. And yet there will be no reinstatement of the assault weapons ban.
Every time there’s a mass murder with a high-capacity magazine, someone calls for those to be banned, arguing that the right to bear arms does not equal the right to fire 30, 40, or 100 rounds in one magazine clip. But the NRA has so distorted the Second Amendment that their minions in Congress even believe that high-capacity magazines represent a Constitutional right that cannot be taken away.
And so we have this debate for a week or so after a shooting tragedy like this, one with familiar players, who make the same arguments, who then go back to their political business and never speak of gun control again. This time around, being an election year, the Obama Administration won’t even bother to pretend that they will get right on gun control legislation, as they did in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. This time, they stressed the use of existing laws to prevent gun crimes, despite the fact that every purchase James Holmes made in the Aurora shooting was perfectly legal.
The only member of Congress actually willing to call out the game-playing is the member of Congress with one of the closest connections to gun violence in her personal life. Carolyn McCarthy’s husband died in a mass shooting, and she’s fought for gun control laws ever since. But she’s basically done:
McCARTHY: I always look at it this way, no one from the NRA is ever going to vote for me. They’re just not. They might even come after me on other issues. But the thing of it is, as a politician, a lot of politicians know it’s the right thing to try to fight for something to save lives. They don’t have the spine anymore. They pander to who’s giving them money.
(By the way, the only time Carolyn McCarthy gets on a show like Meet the Press is when there’s a mass shooting, which should tell you something about how serious the media takes the whole thing.)
And that’s the plain truth. McCarthy is talking about the mentality of the entire party right there. We don’t have political conversations in this country on issues where both sides agree, or at least where both sides agree not to fight. This charade we have every week in the face of a mass shooting is so obviously for show, I’d almost rather it didn’t happen.
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DDay, your sentence above just set off a light bulb over my head. By this logic, shouldn’t we the people be able to purchase any armaments we choose? Why limit it to guns? Why not tanks, hand grenades, weaponized drones, nuclear detonators, etc.? If the NRA treats the 2nd amendment as a carte blanche right to bear modern arms, why not all modern arms?
I would love to see a Congresscritter defend a nuke in every bedside table. By turning the argument around, it becomes more clearly ludicrous. Unless of course, one is planning a revolution, in which case mutual assured destruction could get really really interesting.
Yes, you are right. Its a dead horse already. Sometime you just got to let it go.
Let’s face it, no one in either party wishes to take on the powerful NRA. The Democrats won’t because they know the NRA will come after them in their districts in their slimy political ads to keep them from being elected. Also, I am sure there are Democrats out there who probably belong to the NRA because they themselves own guns, so then of course they would be labeled hypocrites. We all know the GOP politicans will not allow any bill to be brought to the house floor in any way shape or form, because they will piss off their base back in their states. So we will continue to argue for years to come with nothing ever being done, because the rest of us in this country are not outraged enough to fight back agains the NRA. The politicians are not the least bit interested in how easy it is to buy weapons and ammo off the internet without any kind of a background check. You can click online, go meet your party in a parking lot somewhere and walk away with a .50 calilber sniper rifle, no questions asked. Our society has moved to the point where we are so apathetic to the horrible issues facing our country, that eventually I see our nation crumbling into lawlessness and anarchy. The signs are there, but no one seems to be paying attention to them.
I guess that’s fitting then. Considering that’s basically all every pointless knee-jerk “gun control” solution that’s offered would end up being.
The reason to oppose arbitrary material bans is that they don’t work for any remotely motivated violator. Whatever other strawmen are constructed and beaten down are just two sides masturbating in front of each other.
Had any trouble locating marijuana in the last 40 years?
Turns out the right to bear arms does not equal the right to fire 30, 40, or 100 rounds into humans in a theater.
It seems to me that tweaking US gun laws would have little deterrent affect on someone willing to murder innocent people.
If the 1994 assault gun ban were in place, the guns used would not be allowed to have folding or telescoping stock, pistol grip (long guns), bayonet mount, or flash suppressor. I don’t know if the guns used had such attributes, but I hardly think any of that mattered.
We can be thankful that Holmes decided to use a 100 round jam-o-matic magazine rather than the far more reliable 20 or 30 rounders.
“their minions in Congress even believe that high-capacity magazines represent a Constitutional right that cannot be taken away.”
Of course the 2nd amendment is the only constitutional right that cannot be taken away. Assaults on the first amendment and many others is a fine thing to do.
It used to be for many decades that whatever legislation had a chance in Congress had to first and principally appease the wealthy but also on some level benefit the masses. Then about 40 years ago that changed to first, it had to help the wealthy and if it helped others, good, but by no means necessary. Now it’s if it even thinks of helping anyone other than the very wealthy, even by chance, forget it. And if, by some strange twist of unintended consequences it helps someone other than the wealthy, it will be amended to not benefit anyone but the wealthy. I know people believe the NRA is the main source of “fear” for these Democrats, but I don’t really think so anymore: they are ALL, to a person so bound up in the for-profit prison system/police state, that banning these assault weapons they know, they KNOW means fewer blacks behind bars. And that ain’t happenin, folks. Gotta keep the Jim Crow humpin along.
The weapons large enough to kill other citizens and load up the prisons will never be banned. But rest assured that the weapons large enough to damage the police state will never end up in the hands of citizens. Second amendment-ers are suckers playing right into the hands of the powerful. They’re cheerleading the killing of the innocent and powerless, but doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to challenge the genuinely powerful.
No comment necessary.
The intended use for a gun that shoots one hundred rounds is killing a lot of people very quickly at close range.
It’s a weapon of war. Automatic weapons are used to terrorize non combatant populations, for instance in the many conflicts going on in Africa. and, In The USA>
no civilian needs that kind of weapon. Unless he wants to use it for the purpose it was designed for. Which is what this person did.
There’s no surprise here.
The timer is running now for the next incident.
well said
No. The way the Right has gotten their absurd agenda passed is by repeating over and over and over what they want you to hear and to start believing: unions are bad, government is bad, regulations cost jobs, Welfare queens drive Cadillacs, “Liberal!”, this is a conservative/Christian nation, etc. We give this up for lost, and it will be lost. But if we keep calling out those who think it is acceptable for someone to buy a military assault weapon with a 100-round magazine, then maybe we’ll shift the terms of the debate a bit.
You are confusing guns with clips, which you could put large clips in anything that isn’t a revolver…actually even that’s not true as the Gatling gun is basically an evolved revolver. Also automatic weapons are already banned.
The issue is not so much the NRA as it is that half or so of Americans have no visceral existential hatred for guns the way that so many coastal liberals do. There is real popular support behind the second amendment and they are all not gun nuts.
Obama himself signed a bill into law that relaxes gun regulation and allows people to carry loaded fire arms in national parks. I’ll remember to keep that in mind when hiking in the back country of Yosemite next week.
Nothing will come of this except for its use by both sides of this divisive debate to rile up and stoke each base, just as happened with Romney’s race comments to the NAACP, just as happened with feminists a few weeks back and just as will happen to LGBT at some point in this campaign.
We are being played by power who tosses divisive grenades into our laps to distract from the big ticket consensus issues such as endless wars, the dictatorship of the banksters, insurers and big pharma and the endless attacks on social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare, which Obama cut.
Don’t take the bait. As Joe Strummer had on his Telecaster: “IGNORE ALIEN ORDERS.”
Yes, I agree….nothing will happen as a result of this new tragedy. But not for the reason most people think.
It’s not that there is no stomach to address the (stupid) gun laws, although that is obvious.
It’s because our society is addicted to mourning. We are addicted to feeling collective anguish, victimhood. It is our disease.
Our country is covered with monuments to war, loss, and tragedy. Our flags are at half mast more than not. Feeling the collective sting when we are “wronged” is our opium. We smear (other people’s) blood all over our shirts, walk around crying for a while, ask “how could this happen?”. Then we do nothing…except wait for the next time.
Our corrupt news media is all too aware of this disease, and serves up pathe’ in giant, amurican-sized portions.
We are a society of victims, requiring daily mutilation to justify the “solutions” that arise from these moments.
It allows us to do the evil things we do everyday, and will continue to do. It’s like original sin, but with victimhood. They hurt us first, therefore…..
I can’t remember all the things I’m supposed to “never forget”.
The gun/law enforcement issue is not some squishy “social” issue. It’s intimately connected to the prison/police state that enforces these economic crimes you speak of. It’s front burner.
It wouldn’t have stopped him from committing mass murder, but it would have lowered the body count. Nor would a background check have stopped him, since he had no priors and was a PhD candidate.
No one needs high capacity clips or military-grade weaponry. But given the level of militarism in our society more broadly, good luck to anyone wanting to curtail such purchases.
It’s a pipe dream, at this point.
This is getting more to the heart of the problem (and kudos for pointing it out):
I mean, let’s face some facts here. Americans, including a huge percentage of people who self-ID as “liberal,” give Obama high approval numbers, despite the fact he’s running his own personal Star Chamber out of the WH. We’re busily killing innocent people by the dozen, all over the world, and that’s somehow not a problem with our own Imperial Liberals. A lot of the people writing articles about gun control this week also support Obama’s terror campaigns, even if only by the refusal to call him out on it. But they’ll still promote him come November.
If we add in public acquiescence to militarized police departments kicking the wrong doors and still killing or terrorizing people, I’d say we have a much broader problem in such a culture of violence.
Also, we have a multi-billion dollar media infrastructure, the most prominent being FOX and Hate Radio, that immerses millions in a sea of eliminationist rhetoric. It’s practically designed to flip switches inside the heads of psychotics.
The gun issue is wrapped up tight. Nothing can happen there. So why not pick other angles, like the culture of violence more generally?
One other thing we can see here is the Democrats complete refusal to do things like re-instate the Fairness Doctrine, which would eliminate a lot of the eliminationism. Why is that?
Excepting that this isn’t apparently true. High-capacity magazines (not clips FYI, spanishinquisition) are extremely prone to jamming, and clearing a misfed round is much harder and more time consuming than simply reloading a magazine.
People seem to constantly and drastically overstate the difficulty of reloading a firearm. If you’ve never so much as held a gun in your life, it would take me little more than a single afternoon to get you proficient in dropping and reloading a magazine from virtually any firearm in a couple of seconds.
“One other thing we can see here is the Democrats complete refusal to do things like re-instate the Fairness Doctrine, which would eliminate a lot of the eliminationism. Why is that?”
Talk about going after specious or, at best, remote causes.
From the LA Times last month:
Oh, and we have more criminals in jail than anybody else in the world.
Which is perhaps one reason you shouldn’t trust these numbers as much as you might.
“Statistics are notoriously slippery, but the figures that suggest that violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to collude in an epic con,” Christopher Glazek wrote in a recent issue of n+1 magazine. “Uncounted in the official tallies are the hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country’s prison system, a vast and growing residential network whose forsaken tenants increasingly bear the brunt of America’s propensity for anger and violence.”
Prison rapes, murders, assaults — “Crime has not fallen in the United States,” Glazek writes. “It’s been shifted.”
No one really thinks about the issue of guns and murder through to its end result, which is the above. A permanent incarcerated underclass, which further aggravates urban poverty and apartheid. To those who think this issue is a distraction from the “real” issues of corporate hegemony are sort of missing the point. This is just another brick in corporate hegemony. I would argue that outliers like this Holmes kid are the distraction, in that it’s a sensational story. But the issue of gun violence and imprisonment is hand in glove with the larger issues that plague our culture.
Look, I live in the inner city and know that orders of magnitude more people from my neighborhood are busted for victimless nonviolent crimes like drug possession and crimes of poverty than for gun crimes.
The issue is squishy because it is as divisive as it is intractable; nothing is going to come of it, not from Obama, not from the Congress and not from the SCOTUS.
Thus, it is used as a device to distract you and direct your attention away from the Big Ticket Items that impact tens of millions of Americans, billions of global southerners all to keep the 1% in power atop the perfect dictatorship of the Demopublicans and Republicrats.
At some point, you all are going to have to learn to not follow the bouncing ball.
Nothing’s going to happen to reduce gun violence, but we got globalization on the run. Uh huh.
Drug possession is of course the number one reason for arrest, but even gun possession in the commission of an act is a felony, no priors needed. That’s the kind of crime that feathers the nest of the private prison system.
But the golden rule of cops is to make it through the day alive so they are one day closer to their (in San Francisco, 90% of final salary, platinum plated by any standard) pension.
Cops focus on the homeless and drug users and ignore anyone perpetrating violent crime if they can help it.
There are two poles of half critical mass, Occupy on one side and the Tea Party on the other, large segments of each resist Wall Street bail outs and the perpetual war machine but differ on issues of guns, race, and LGBT.
So what do the two parties do? They direct our attention to the divisive issues via ritualized two minutes hate to keep us from uniting on the consensus issues.
“I’m confident saying it won’t pass the next congress either, or the next…”
Bingo.
To my knowledge, the preznint of the United States, in his speaking on this, has yet to utter the word:
“gun”.
The NRA are fanatics, but not stupid. They just want to keep what they have, overreach though that may be.
We need more info about that 100 round magazine, though. When did it jam? How many (if any) rounds were fired from that magazine before it jammed? How many victims were injured or died as a result of those particular rounds? Before long all that should be known.
You could reckon an approximate but likely much higher toll by supposing there had not been a jam, and all those 100 rounds had fired from that weapon. It’s simple math.
It’s a lugubrious excursion, and DD is probably correct about nothing tangible resulting from this tragedy. Still the stark reality of what the most probable outcome really was — that should be understood by everyone.
I don’t think that is how the right got what they wanted. They got it firstly by money, then by divide and conquer (the Dems caught up evetually). There are a few issues that can’t be allowed to die because they need some way to distinguish the two political parties. Abortion, gun control, and drug criminalization will always be around because they are an easy way to control peoples emotions. The NRA needs the threat of gun control just as bad or more than anyone else. If there weren’t anyone pushing for it, they would do it themselves. There’s no reason to give the NRA money otherwise. For the same reasons I don’t think the issue of gay rights will ever “die”. D’s need their one issue voters just as much as Rs.
The last thing either party wants is any kind of root cause analysis by any of the public. They wind up their tools on “hot button” items and let the internet fill itself with mindless drivel while the chance for real meaningful change eludes those of us who would actually like it. If everyone concentrated on say, our insanely high income inequality the vested interests would lose out and much of the rest I think would follow.
Why not just sit outside under cover while the theater releases and pick people off with a hunting rifle as they come out of the building? There’s very little risk of getting caught and you don’t need any high capacity magazines. You can always go back later.
You could also sneak in 10 sticks of dynamite just as easily in between shows or some other type of explosive. You wouldn’t even need to be there when they went off.
Or go the easy route and run them over with your car. Probably won’t get away with that one long term but I’m not sure he expected to leave alive. Fire is also an option. Anyway, to actually stop not just crazy, but suicidal crazy, you’ll never run out of things to restrict. Metal detectors will catch guns in a movie theater but not bottles filled with gasoline.
If we’re going to accept the state of having batshit crazy people we should probably be thankful they aren’t imaginative and stick with 100 round magazines that jam. just sayin.
All those are valid points. Also earlier today I had brought up the attack on the Tokyo subway with sarin gas a few years ago. There are a lot of ways to inflict violence, and they can’t all be prevented all the time.
Still, I think the 100 round magazine must be too easy to obtain, and it offers a way for any perpetrator to kill a lot of people in a hurry — that remains a problem. It was also a focus of this particular incident.