The most widely backed response to the Parkland shooting would provide new incentives for public agencies to submit information that could disqualify prospective gun buyers to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, an action most agree is modest at best.
Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url
3More
3More
Once Again, Push for Gun Control Collides With Political Reality - The New York Times - 0 views
-
-
To Democrats, the fact that the N.R.A. is not opposed to the proposal is prima facie evidence that it falls short.
-
Mr. Trump told lawmakers they should use a broader bipartisan background check measure that failed in 2013 after the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., as the basis for a comprehensive measure that could take in many proposals, including the Cornyn plan, new mental health provisions and added security for schools
6More
Republicans' indifference to the massacres of innocents will lead to their ruin - The W... - 0 views
-
When I walked away from Donald Trump’s Republican Party, I did not walk away from conservatism. Instead, I gave up on a political party whose policies had become indefensible.
-
once again, I and many other reasonable conservatives find ourselves at odds with GOP — read: National Rifle Association — orthodoxy.
-
In District of Columbia v. Heller, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that the regulation of gun ownership was compatible with the Second Amendment. That “important limitation . . . is fairly supported,” Scalia wrote, “by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons.’ ”
- ...3 more annotations...
-
You would think that the ruling of a conservative legend such as Scalia would provide courage to Republicans who want to end the epidemic of mass shootings. Or they could stand with Ronald Reagan. His pleas to lawmakers helped lead to the 1994 ban on assault-style weapons .
-
After losing to the Gipper, NRA lobbyists in Washington lost their minds. They all but declared war on America’s government while comparing law enforcement officers to Nazis. These “jack-booted government thugs” wanted to “take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property and even injure or kill us.”
-
GOP politicians and the gun lobbyists they represent live in a bubble. Their indifference to the massacres of innocents will lead to their political ruin. Then, and only then, can we have an honest debate on the epidemic of guns in America.
7More
Why CNN's Parkland Town Hall Mattered - The Atlantic - 0 views
-
I was 10 years old when, in 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered 12 students at Columbine High School, in what was then the most-deadly school shooting in American history. What I can recall most from my childhood mind from the time aren’t the gruesome details in the news reports or even the sense of dread that gripped students and teachers across the country, but the feeling that something central about the country had changed. Something about America had shifted, and it was significant enough that even a child’s understanding could grasp it.
-
Almost two decades later, after multiple mass shootings and dozens of slain children, it’s clear that what changed wasn’t the mobilization of a country to stop events like Columbine, but the beginning of the normalization of those events.
-
The theme of most of the night was criticism of Rubio, who often appeared hesitant in the face of withering boos and tough questions. As the New Yorker writer Evan Osnos put it: “The pummelling of Rubio felt like an expression of collective rage at the falseness of so much that happens in Washington.” The usual rhetorical feints and misdirections employed by politicians in more milquetoast town halls only seemed to anger the crowd more.
- ...4 more annotations...
-
“The issue is not the loopholes,” the senator said, “it’s the problem that once you start looking at how easy it is to get around it, you would literally have to ban every semi-automatic rifle that’s sold.” But the crowd cheered loudly at the suggestion of such a ban, a response that caught Rubio off guard.
-
“I want you to know that we will support your two children in the way that you will not,” Gonzalez said. She also asked Loesch if the NRA supported any restrictions on the purchase of semiautomatic weapons and modifications like bump stocks.
-
It’s unclear if those kinds of restrictions would actually reduce the rate of gun violence or incidence of mass shootings, but the town hall did show that the power of people—especially young people—is still important even in this age of big money.
-
That power only seems to be growing. Students across Florida and other places in the country are marching, and there appears to be an ongoing political awakening among youth about the issue of gun violence. Students from Stoneman Douglas are finding their footing as political leaders in their own right, forced into the fire by tragedy, and have now proven effective in meeting the strongest arguments of their policy opponents, and in wielding the power of public opinion on their side. If there is significant movement on gun-control reforms in the future, it’s possible, perhaps even probable, that the country will look back on Wednesday’s town hall as a paradigm-shifting moment that might have finally moved the debate.
15More
Why I Carry a Gun - The Atlantic - 0 views
-
Miles’s law states, “Where you stand is based on where you sit.” In other words, your political opinions are shaped by your environment and your experience. We’re products of our place, our time, and our people. Each of these things is far more important to shaping hearts and minds than any think piece, any study, or certainly any tweet.
-
And it strikes me that many millions of Americans don’t truly understand how “gun culture” is built, how the process of first becoming a gun owner, then a concealed-carrier, changes your life.
-
It starts with the consciousness of a threat. Perhaps not the kind of threat my family has experienced. Some people experience more. Some less. And some people don’t experience a threat at all—but they’re aware of those who do
- ...12 more annotations...
-
With the consciousness of a threat comes the awareness of a vulnerability. The police can only protect the people you love in the most limited of circumstances (with those limits growing ever-more-severe the farther you live from a city center.) You want to stand in that gap.
-
So you take a big step. You walk into a gun store. Unless you’re the kind of person who grew up shooting, this is where you begin your encounter with American gun culture. The first thing you’ll notice—and I’ve seen this without fail—is that the person behind that counter is ready to listen.
-
Next, you realize that you want that sense of safety to travel with you. So you sign up for a concealed-carry permit class. You gather one night with friends and neighbors and spend the next eight hours combining a self-defense class with a dash of world-view training.
-
something else happens to you, something that’s deeper than the fun of shooting a paper target. Your thought-process starts to change. Yes, if someone tried to break into your house, you know that you’d call 911 and pray for the police to come quickly, but you also start to think of exactly what else you’d do. If you heard that “bump” in the night, how would you protect yourself until the police arrived? You’re surprised at how much safer you feel with the gun in the house.
-
Often the person behind the counter is a veteran. Often they’re a retired cop. Always they’re well-informed. Always they’re ready to teach.
-
nd when you carry your weapon, you don’t feel intimidated, you feel empowered. In a way that’s tough to explain, the fact that you’re so much less dependent on the state for your personal security and safety makes you feel more “free” than you’ve ever felt before.
-
And as your worldview changes, you expand your knowledge. You learn that people defend themselves with guns all the time, usually without pulling the trigger.
-
At the end of this process, your life has changed for the better. Your community has expanded to include people you truly like, who’ve perhaps helped you through a tough time in your life, and you treasure these relationships
-
It’s a myth that gun owners despise regulation. Instead, they tend to believe that government regulation should have two purposes—deny guns to the dangerous while protecting rights of access for the law-abiding. The formula is simple: Criminals and the dangerously mentally ill make our nation more violent. Law-abiding gun owners save and protect lives.
-
Thus the overwhelming support for background checks, the insistence from gun-rights supporters that the government enforce existing laws and lock up violent offenders, and the openness to solutions—like so-called “gun violence restraining orders” that specifically target troubled individuals for intervention.
-
Progressive policy prescriptions, like assault-weapons bans and bans on large-capacity magazines, are opposed because they’re perceived to have exactly the wrong effect. They’ll present only the most minor of hurdles for the lawless, while the law-abiding experience the law’s full effect. It’s a form of collective punishment for the innocent, a mere annoyance—at best—for the lawless.
-
Because of the threats against my family—and because I don’t want to be dependent on a sometimes shockingly incompetent government for my family’s security—I carry a weapon. My wife does as well. We’re not scared. We’re prepared, and that sense of preparation is contagious. Confidence is contagious. People want to be empowered. That’s how gun culture is built. Not by the NRA and not by Congress, but by gun owners, one free citizen at a time.
35More
shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 18
- No Cached
Democracy Is Dying by Natural Causes - Foreign Policy - 0 views
foreignpolicy.com/...acy-is-dying-by-natural-causes
democracy decline crisis culture history politics liberalism modernization
shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 18
- No Cached
-
I have been reading the end-is-nigh books that the publishing industry has been pumping out recently like so many donuts. There’s How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt; How Democracy Ends, by David Runciman; The People vs. Democracy, by Yascha Mounk; and On Tyranny, by Timothy Snyder.
-
You’d have to go back more than a century, to the 15 years before World War I, to find another moment when so many leading thinkers — Herbert Croly, Walter Weyl, Nicholas Murray Butler, and others — questioned democracy’s future. But at the time, nations had not yet surrendered to ideological totalitarianism. Whatever America and the West might have been plunging toward then was much less terrifying than it is today.
-
The most obvious and dismal analogy to our current moment is 1933. That is the premise of Snyder’s book
- ...32 more annotations...
-
just as Pascal argued that we’re better off betting on God’s existence than not, because the consequences are so much worse if we wrongly disbelieve than if we wrongly believe, so we’d be foolish to think, as the Germans did, “it can’t happen here.”
-
The problem with the Pascal analogy is that there are very real, and sometimes ruinous, consequences to betting on the unspeakable.
-
Is it really 1933? Donald Trump would plainly like to be an authoritarian, and some fraction of his supporters would egg him on if he began dismantling key institutions. Fortunately, Trump has neither a plan nor the evil gifts required to sustain one.
-
What’s more, American institutions are far stronger than those of any European country in the 1930s. Levels of political violence are much lower.
-
Levitsky and Ziblatt (let’s call them L & Z for short) also scare us with tales from the fascist past. But the story they tell is one of a sapping of faith slow enough that it may pass unnoticed at the time.
-
L & Z make what seems to me a very important contribution to our understanding of why we’re heading wherever it is we’re heading. Functioning democracies, they argue, depend on two norms: mutual tolerance and forbearance.
-
The first, and more obvious, entails according legitimacy to our opponents. The populist hatred for elites has made this principle feel as archaic as the code of the World War I flying ace
-
Forbearance is a more elusive idea; L & Z describe it as the principled decision not to use all the powers at one’s disposal — to eschew “constitutional hardball.”
-
This, then, is how democracies die: through the slow erosion of norms that underpin democratic institutions
-
Maybe the something that is dying is not “democracy.” According to Yascha Mounk, who is on the faculty at Harvard just like L & Z, democracy, understood as a political system designed to assure majority rule, is doing just fine, indeed all too well; what is under threat are the values we have in mind when we speak of “liberal democracy.”
-
populist parties across Europe. What these parties have in common, he writes, is an eagerness to seize on majoritarian mechanisms — above all, the ballot — in order to promote a vision hostile to individual rights, the rule of law, respect for political and ethnic minorities, and the willingness to seek complex solutions to complex problems
-
This is illiberal democracy.
-
Liberal principles are not intrinsically majoritarian.
-
Mounk concludes that liberal democracy flourished under three conditions: a mass media that filtered out extremism; broad economic growth and social mobility; and relative ethnic homogeneity. All three of those solid foundations have now crumbled away. And as they have done so, illiberal democracy and undemocratic liberalism have increasingly squared off against each other
-
Mounk says that the time has come to reconsider the shibboleth that liberal democracies become “consolidated,” and are no longer at risk of backsliding, after two consecutive peaceful exchanges of power. Poland and Hungary, he observes, are “deconsolidating” into illiberal democracies before or eyes.
-
I wonder if, in fact, failures of liberalism and of democracy are reinforcing each other. Determined minorities have increasingly learned how to prevent majorities from turning their will into legislation. In the United States, this takes the form of business interests or groups like the NRA using their financial muscle to block popular legislation, and to advance their own interests.
-
Runciman questions the premise of “modernization theory” that democracy is the end point of political development. Perhaps democracies, like all things made by men, are mortal objects that age and die.
-
The coup d’état is now a strictly Third World affair; advanced democracies, by contrast, become endangered in the name of preserving democracy
-
Even if Trump is as dark a force as Timothy Snyder thinks he is, Runciman writes, we’ll never have the clarity we need to fight the good fight because he and his followers will be busy defending democracy from us.
-
Western democracies have been sorely tested before, Runciman says, whether in Europe in the 1930s or the United States in the populist era at the turn of the 20th century. But democracy was then young; the system had “slack,” as Runciman puts it. Democracies could respond to economic crisis by growing new capacities for state intervention. Now, Runciman hypothesizes, democracy is in “middle age.” The era of shape-shifting mutation lies in the past
-
If it is true, as Thomas Piketty argues in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that a brief and aberrational era of relative equality has now given way to the capitalist default of extreme inequality, does democracy have the capacity to change the rules in order to more justly distribute the fruits of enterprise? Probably not, says Runcima
-
Runciman thinks that perfectly rational citizens might choose an alternative to democracy.
-
For example, today’s pragmatic, non-ideological authoritarianism offers “personal benefits” like shiny consumer products, and “collective dignity” in the form of aggressive nationalism. That accounts for the appeal of both Xi Jinping and Donald Trump
-
What about “epistocracy,” or rule by the knowledgeable few? Much likelier in Mill’s era, Runciman concedes, than our own.
-
Or perhaps, as all the machines in our lives learn to talk to one another, and come to treat us as just so much data, the whole idea of discrete selves, with their accompanying packet of individual liberties, will become obsolete
-
Runciman has a sufficiently low opinion of democracy’s ability to deal with really catastrophic problems like climate change that he does not shed a tear over the thought of its coming demise.
-
I have been brought up short by an observation I found in each of these works (save the Snyder pamphlet): Our good fortune depends on calamity. Runciman claims that democracies require the binding effect of all-out war to put an end to divisive populism and persuade citizens to make decisions in the public good. In the absence of war, natural disaster will do.
-
L & Z observe that mutual toleration remained an unattainable good in the United States so long as Americans were divided by the great question of race. Only when Reconstruction failed, and the Republicans abandoned black citizens, did southern Democrats fully accept their place in the Union. And when the Democrats, in turn, took up the cause of civil rights after 1948, they reignited those old racial fears and ushered in our own era of mutual intolerance
-
Now diversity threatens again: The greatest peril to liberal democracy in today’s Europe is nationalist outrage at immigration and refugees.
-
Insofar as any or all of these observations are true, we must shed our end-of-history triumphalism for a more tragic sense of liberal democracy and its prospects
-
If, that is, inequality flourishes in conditions of peace, tolerance depends upon exclusion, or diversity undermines the commitment to liberalism, our deepest values will always be at odds with one another.
-
Perhaps democratic majorities really will prove unappeasable without a real sacrifice of liberal values. That may be the destiny toward which we are plunging.
14More
'Like a pinball machine': Lawmakers struggle to negotiate with an erratic Trump - The W... - 0 views
-
As part of an effort to protect young “dreamers” from deportation in exchange for border wall funding, Trump convened a bipartisan meeting at the White House in January.
-
“It really suggests that his effectiveness is compromised as long as his word is unreliable.” Trump’s style poses challenges for members of both parties, observers say.
-
Fresh uncertainty about where Trump stands on guns came Friday as White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders fielded questions from reporters about whether the president remains committed to a proposal to raise the age to purchase rifles and shotguns to 21 from 18 — an idea opposed by the NRA.
- ...10 more annotations...
-
Sanders then offered a new twist, saying Trump thinks the idea probably has “more potential” at the state level than the federal level. (States already have the ability to set a higher age for such purchases. To date, only two — Illinois and Hawaii — have done so.)
-
Sanders also stressed that Trump does not necessarily support “universal” background checks, despite his use of that word previously. “Universal” can mean different things to different people, she said.
-
Others are less charitable, saying that Trump’s flexibility stems from a lack of deeply rooted convictions on many issues. “He’s going with the television headlines from day to day instead of following a policy strategy,”
-
I knew walking out of that meeting that the White House was going to have to dial back some of what the president said,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said. “The president’s sort of lack of policy foundation allows him to flow where he thinks where the country is going.”
-
Besides stalled pushes on immigration and guns, Trump has also proposed significant investment in the country’s ailing infrastructure. But when Trump finally delivered a 53-page plan to Capitol Hill last month, the document was widely panned by Democrats and largely met with silence from the GOP.
-
Trump also initially pledged to leave Medicaid intact but later embraced cuts to the program, which provides health insurance to the poor.
-
Trump has since talked repeatedly about the importance of respecting the flag, but he has not pushed Congress to advance any legislation imposing consequences for its desecration.
-
He went to CPAC and was hailed as a conquering hero, and a week later, he moves to the left of many Democrats on gun control,” Heye said. Trump’s policy inconsistencies are sure to complicate and even stymie whatever legislative agenda he has this year, leaving a vacuum of policy details that lawmakers then attempt to fill.
-
When asked last week to assess Trump’s reliability as a negotiating partner, however, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Tex.) argued that Congress is the one charged with coming up with policy measures.
-
“The president has two powers under the Constitution: One is to sign legislation. One is to veto legislation,” he said. “Obviously, he’s important. But the executive is not the primary policymaker. It’s the Congress.”
-
Trump's unreliability led to different opinions of the bipartisan participants in a meeting that he just held.
2More
'March Against Sharia' Rallies Planned Across The U.S. : NPR - 0 views
-
'March Against Sharia' Planned Across The U.S.
-
Saturday's nationwide "March Against Sharia," sponsored by a group known for aggressively criticizing Islam, has in recent days become a rallying cause for right-wing extremists, forcing march organizers to repudiate some of their own supporters and prompting concern about clashes with militant leftists. The marches, due to be held in at least 19 states, are being coordinated by ACT for America, a conservative grassroots organization that calls itself "the NRA of national security." The group has a long history of opposing Sharia, which is a legal or philosophical code derived from Islamic scripture and meant to guide the behavior of observant Muslims. The ACT for America organizers say an adherence to Sharia among Muslims leads to abuses against women, from discrimination to honor killings.
Gun and self-defense statistics that might surprise you -- and the NRA - LA Times - 0 views
4More
These members of the Liberal Gun Club say they can be both left-leaning and support gun... - 0 views
-
They’re called the Liberal Gun Club, just one of a number of left-leaning gun clubs now in operation, who seem to support less gun restrictions and agree with the NRA on some points.
-
After giving it a try, researching the issue and having too many arguments with her gun-loving, former Marine husband, Ed Smith, she changed her views.
-
Members of the Liberal Gun Club say they also face some flak from liberal friends and coworkers.
- ...1 more annotation...
-
Lara and Ed Smith said they think it makes sense to have background checks when you purchase your first firearm.
9More
Opinion | Why America Can't Fix Its Gun Violence Crisis - The New York Times - 0 views
-
We know what causes America’s gun violence problem. Why can’t we seem to do anything about it? Here are some of the most popular and persuasive explanations.
-
It was a statement that exemplified a common strain of thought among gun control proponents, one that casts the N.R.A. as the sine qua non of our national deadlock on the issue. As my colleague Nicholas Kristof has explained, the N.R.A. used to be a more moderate organization: It favored tighter gun laws in the 1920s and 1930s, and as recently as the 1960s supported — albeit more grudgingly — some limits on guns.
-
he different stories Americans tell themselves about the roots of gun violence preclude shared understanding: As long as they disagree about the cause of the problem, they will disagree about how to fix it. “Given the significant proportion of citizens who own guns,” the authors conclude, “the prospect for policy changes that address gun‐related causes of mass shootings is unlikely.”
- ...6 more annotations...
-
Already a counter-majoritarian institution, the Senate was made even more so by the rise of the modern filibuster in the 20th century, which allows a minority to block majority-supported legislation. That means most substantive legislation must get 60 votes in the Senate to pass — often an exceedingly difficult threshold to reach.
-
In the minds of many gun control proponents, American life has become — or perhaps always was — a zero-sum game in which one party’s freedom to exist in peace has lost out to another’s prerogative to kill. In this view, mass death is simply the cost gun owners are willing to inflict on the country for the right to bear arms.
-
“The N.R.A. is powerful for precisely the reason most potent progressive organizations are powerful,” David French has written in National Review. “Like those progressive counterparts, the N.R.A. is an effective part of a larger community, and it is effective precisely because it persuasively expresses the will of its members and allies.” In his view, the N.R.A. does not manipulate people into supporting gun rights; rather, it reflects and channels the desires of people who already do
-
Gun control proponents often argue that the Second Amendment was meant to protect the right of state militias, not individuals, to bear arms. This interpretation is disputed by gun rights proponents, but not exclusively: The historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who favors the Second Amendment’s repeal, has argued that it was expressly designed to enshrine not only the right but also the obligation of individual colonial settlers to violently appropriate Native land and to control Black populations, both free and enslaved.
-
This interpretive turn has led to calls for the Second Amendment’s repeal, including from the retired justice John Paul Stevens. Justice Stevens was one of the four dissenters in the Heller case, whose ruling he believed could be overturned only with a new constitutional amendment that voided the second. Doing so, he wrote in The Times in 2018, “would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.”
-
But none of them — not universal background checks, not red flag laws, not even a ban on assault-style weapons — would confront the core issue: America simply has too many guns.That is the view of Mr. Lopez, who contends that stamping out gun violence would require a Green New Deal-size plan that offers solutions at the scale of the problem. “If the key difference between America and other countries is how many more guns the U.S. has, then something has to be done to quickly reduce the number of firearms here,” he writes. “It could mean banning more types of guns — perhaps all semiautomatic weapons or all handguns — and coupling that with an Australian-style mandatory buyback program, which the research supports.”
6More
GOP lawmaker calls it quits after being 'annihilated' for backing gun control - 0 views
-
A New York Republican who was endorsed by the National Rife Association just two years ago announced Friday he would no longer seek re-election, saying his recent support for gun control had effectively eliminated any chance of winning the GOP primary.
-
“If you stray from a party position, you are annihilated,” Jacobs said. “For the Republicans, it became pretty apparent to me over the last week that that issue is gun control — any gun control.”
-
He said Friday those shootings made him realize a small percentage of people, when armed weapons like an AR-15, "can become killing machines.”
- ...3 more annotations...
-
Jacobs, who has described his district as a rural community where gun and shooting clubs are an integral part of life, faced immediate backlash from Republicans last week after announcing his new position.
-
Donald Trump Jr. accused him of caving to "gun-grabbers," while others called him a "RINO," an acronym for Republican In Name Only.
-
“I knew that there was going to be a high level of backlash, but look, if you’re not going to take a stand on this I don't know what you're going to take a stand on,” he added.