Is the response of the GOP and the National Rifle Association still that the students should have been armed?
Would someone with a death wish be deterred by knowing that many of his victims may be armed?
Are we reaching the tipping point where we are more in danger from renegade gunmen than we are from organized criminals?
How come other developed countries are more progressive than us on gun control, health care, energy efficiency, environmental protection, social safety nets, separation of church and state, acceptance of evolution, science and math education…
Vice President Richard Cheney, parting company with the official Bush Administration position on the test case before the Supreme Court on the Second Amendment, signed onto a brief Friday urging the Justices to strike down the District of Columbia handgun ban without ordering any further proceedings.
The brief — representing the views of a majority of the members of the Senate and of the House — explicitly endorsed the “categorical approach” that the D.C. Circuit Court used in declaring the pistol ban invalid under the Second Amendment. That decision, the brief argued, should simply be affirmed, thus nullifying outright the local law. The brief can be downloaded here.
In contrast, the Justice Department — speaking for the Administration — told the Court on Jan. 11 that the Circuit Court had used too strict a constitutional standard, and should be told to reconsider its decision. The government filing took no direct position on the validity of the D.C. law. The Circuit Court should reconsider that question, the Department contended, using a “more flexible standard of review.” The Department did urge the Court, though, to rule now that the Second Amendment does protect an individual right to have a gun for private use. The filing was not labeled as a supporting brief for either side in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller (07-290), now scheduled for argument March 18.
This dual-role thing that Cheney gets to fulfill, even though prior Vice Presidents have done the same, has just always felt so…improper. Can anyone tell me why Read the rest of this entry »
Washington’s Walking Embarrassment is still sitting proudly in his Senate seat and, along with his Idaho colleague, Michael Crapo, is blocking President Bush’s nomination of Michael Sullivan to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
According to the Editorial Board blog of the New York Times, “Mr. Crapo’s spokesman said his boss is hearing from gun owners and dealers with ‘concerns about ATF policies regarding gun sales and even ownership.’ It may be, he said, ‘that the federal government is getting a little too aggressive with people who haven’t done anything wrong.’
“It’s a remarkable claim to make in a month in which a young gunman in Nebraska shot 11 people, killing eight of them, at an Omaha shopping mall, and another killed four young people in two attacks on religious organizations in Colorado, before taking his own life.
“The Colorado gunman, according to the Denver Post, spent a year buying guns and ammunition…and all of his purchases were within the law. When a large shipment of ammunition was sent to a post office box owned by the gunman, the authorities were alerted, the paper reports–and specifically determined that he had a legal right to receive it.”
Awaiting action by the Senate Ethics Committee on his little Minneapolis men’s room misunderstanding, Sen. Craig is maintaining the record that earned him an A+ from the National Rifle Association. The voters who saw him inducted into Idaho’s Hall of Fame this fall must be proud.
It’s among the most well-known and often-implemented strategies in the universe of presidential politics: appeal to the party’s base during the primaries and tack back towards the center during the run-up to the general election. This process doesn’t necessarily dictate that the presidential candidate “flip-flop” on any of his or her positions. He or she merely emphasizes one set of policies for the partisans who will be voting in the presidential primaries and then, several months later, emphasizes a different set of policies for the American electorate at large.
However, in recent years, a somewhat different tactic has emerged as a favorite among presidential candidates: the art of flip-flopping by presidential candidates who staked out positions that were popular when running for statewide office but became politically inconvenient when faced with appealing to the party base in the run up to presidential primaries.
This has certainly been the case with Mitt Romney, who repeated advocated his support for abortion rights when governor of Massachusetts (a state in which voters are overwhelming pro-choice) but conveniently converted to the pro-life a couple of years before the Republican presidential primaries (which are dominated by a party base which is overwhelmingly pro-life). It was also true—to a certain extent—with John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, both of whom supported the 2002 resolution granting the president the authority to invade Iraq and began to backtrack from their positions as the 2004 and 2008 Democratic Presidential primaries approached.
In yet another example of a politician advocating one position while running for state or local office and a completely different one upon running for president, Rudy Giuliani has decided that he now supports a very strict interpretation of the Second Amendment. While Giuliani’s critics have been quick to point out Giuliani’s sudden change of heart with regards to gun control, Giuliani’s defenders have argued that Giuliani’s positions are consistent with the principle of federalism—arguing that while he may have supported strict gun control laws for New York City, he believes that individual states have the right to reject such gun control laws.
Unfortunately for Giuliani and his supporters, Giuliani’s current “federalist” interpretation of the Second Amendment directly contradicts his gun control record as mayor of New York, a period during which he championed federal gun control laws:
In May of 1994, Mayor Giuliani spoke out in favor of the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban, arguing that assault weapons “have no legitimate purpose.”
In March of 1997, following an incident in which a Palestinian gunman opened fire within the Empire State Building, Mayor Giuliani issued a public address in which he argued:
We need a federal law that bans all assault weapons, and if in fact you do need a handgun you should be subjected to at least the same restrictions—and really stronger ones—that exist for driving an automobile. The United States Congress needs to pass uniform licensing for everyone carrying a gun.
In June of 2000, Mayor Giuliani filed gun control manufacturers and distributors, alleging a number of illegal practices on the part of the gun manufacturers, including:
Deliberately manufacturing many more firearms than can be bought for legitimate purposes such as hunting and law enforcement, and knowingly targeting these excess guns to criminals, youths and other persons unqualified to buy firearms
Deliberately undermining New York City’s gun control laws by flooding other markets which have less stringent gun laws with firearms that the manufacturers know are destined to be illegally resold in New York City.
Ignoring the illegal practices of gun distributors, many of whom openly engage in the above practices.
Refusing to manufacture safer guns, with features such as trigger locks and “personalization” measures that allow only authorized persons to fire the weapon.
The most stark example in which Giuliani was called out on his flip-flopping on the gun control, surprisingly enough, came during a Fox News Sunday interview with Chris Wallace on May 13, 2007:
The news from bloody Philadelphia just gets more and more horrifying.
I note that the city’s TV newscasts are cast in the “If It Bleeds It Leads” mold, but the mayhem one day this week was so bad that it soaked up 18 minutes of the 30-minute evening newscast on one station, barely leaving any time for really important stuff like the weather and sports.
The mayhem included incidents in which police Officer Charles Cassidy was shot in the head outside a previously robbed Dunkin’ Donuts by a perp who then stole his service revolver, another incident in which four people were wounded, including another officer, by an ex-con who drowned trying to escape his dragnet, and a lock-down at one of the city’s largest high schools.
Officer Cassidy, a 25-year veteran, has died. He was the fourth Philadelphia police officer shot this year, the third this week, and the second in just 12 hours in a city that is chronically poor, undereducated and violent — and shows no sign of coming to come to grips with its demons.
Mayor John Street led the Greek chorus that chimed in on cue after these latest war-zone convulsions in calling for stronger gun laws in a state where local jurisdictions are at the mercy of an adamantly pro-gun majority in the Legislature.
“Unless we can get control over the proliferation of illegal guns, then the people who are most at risk are, of course, the members of the Police Department,” Street said with practiced angst.
Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson belabored the obvious in saying that his officers are being “basically assassinated” by armed and violent criminals.
“The availability of weapons in our city . . . the availability of guns are really completely out of hand here in the city of Philadelphia,” he said. “Legislators have to realize that we have a gun problem.”
That “problem” has resulted in 325 murders in the first 10 months of the year, the highest big-city homicide rate per capita in the U.S., although the pace recently has slowed slightly from the 2006 rate, which resulted in 406 murders.
Meanwhile, New York City, with five times Philadelphia’s population and once America’s murder mecca, has had “only” 220 murders. Chicago and Los Angeles also lag far behind.
This weekend’s TV talkathon has been about New York’s Mayor leaving the Republican Party to run for President as an Independent. But as this politically dissonant year goes on, it may make more sense for Mike Bloomberg to go for the Democratic nomination.
Anyone willing to spend half a billion dollars on a campaign, as Bloomberg is, should not be eager to put a sizable portion of it into creating an organization and getting on the ballot in every state.
A lifelong Democrat, Bloomberg became a Republican for tactical reasons in 2001 to run for Mayor. Now he has changed his registration to “unaffiliated.â€
For the past six years, the Mayor has been a Republican in name only. A leading Democratic political consultant said about him this week: “If you closed your eyes and you were told that someone was pro-public education, pro-choice, pro-immigration rights, pro-gun control, pro-civil rights, pro-gay rights and pro-women’s rights–you would be pretty happy if you were a Democrat.â€
When that candidate has been called America’s “leading centrist†by George Will and potentially “the most efficient President†by media baron and fellow billionaire Rupert Murdoch, visions of a political realignment began to seem possible: the Democratic center freed from the stigma of “special interests†coupled with traditional pre-Bush Republicans who want to take back their party from the radical right allied with voters so disgusted with both parties that they call themselves Independent.
Two big but not insurmountable obstacles to the Democratic nomination are Hillary Clinton and the war in Iraq, and it may be their nexus that could open the door for Bloomberg…
April 21st, 2007 By SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
The following leader in The Economist is likely to raise the hackles (yet again) of the gun lobby in the US.
“In the aftermath of the massacre at Virginia Tech university on April 16th, as the nation mourned a fresh springtime crop of young lives cut short by a psychopath’s bullets, President George Bush and those vying for his job offered their prayers and condolences. They spoke eloquently of their shock and sadness and horror at the tragedy. The Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives called for a ‘moment of silence’. Only two candidates said anything about guns, and that was to support the right to have them.
“The Democrats have been the most disappointing, because until recently they had been the party of gun control…Mr Bush, however, has done active damage. On his watch the assault-weapons ban was allowed to lapse in 2004. New laws make it much harder to trace illegal weapons and require the destruction after 24 hours of information gathered during checks of would-be gun-buyers. The administration has also reopened debate on the second amendment, which enshrines the right to bear arms. Last month an appeals court in Washington, DC, overturned the capital’s prohibition on handguns, declaring that it violates the second amendment. The case will probably go to the newly conservative Supreme Court, which might end most state and local efforts at gun control…”
NEWARK, Delaware — Even though there still is a chill in the air hereabouts, I dug into the back of my clothes closet this morning while getting dressed for work and pulled out a T-shirt with this image on it. Wearing this particular shirt seemed appropriate given the week we’ve just been through. Besides which, my boss is out of town.
The week began, of course, with the horrific massacre of 32 students at Virginia Tech University at the hands of a lunatic poster boy for gun control. That was followed in short order by the death and dismemberment of over 200 people in the heart of Baghdad in a series of insurgent car bombings that further put the lie to the notion that the last-gasp surge strategy was working. And then the partial-birth abortion ruling by a Supreme Court majority that blathered about the sanctity of life at a time when the man in the Oval Office has been so utterly unconcerned about the lives of American soldiers, Iraqi civilians and hurricane survivors, among many others.
But then the impossible happpened. Something that was so comically Orwellian that I briefly forgot about the triad of tragedies.
That, of course, was the long-awaited appearance of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
There have been many watershed events in the six-plus years since that smirking frat boy from the Texas oil patch arrived in Washington, none of them good. But it is not being hyperbolic to say that we can look back on Thursday, April 19, 2007 as the day the wheels finally came completely off the Bush administration’s wagon.
Up on Capitol Hill, Gonzales parsed, obfuscated and outright lied his way through hours of grilling over the latest of the serial scandals in the Age of Bush — the rank politicization of the Department of Justice stage-managed by the shadow attorney general — White House consigliere Karl Rove.
The White House response to the testimony of a man who is far less competent than the U.S. attorneys that he fired was that:
President Bush was pleased with the Attorney General’s testimony today. After hours of testimony in which he answered all of the Senators’ questions and provided thousands of pages of documents, he again showed that nothing improper occurred. . . . The Attorney General has the full confidence of the President, and he appreciates the work he is doing at the Department of Justice to help keep our citizens safe from terrorists, our children safe from predators, our government safe from corruption, and our streets free from gang violence.
Have a good weekend, folks. Dog only knows what next week will bring.
I find the American obsession with guns intriguing/fascinating. Whenever there is a major killing the pro and anti gun control groups clash and an emotional, almost violent, debate sweeps the US landscape/mindscape.
Yet another interesting Reuters story on this issue:
“The Virginia Tech killings have set off calls for tighter U.S. gun laws but anyone wanting to know why those demands likely will make little headway should visit Kennesaw, a town where owning a gun is both popular and mandatory.
“The town north of Atlanta had little prominence until it passed a gun ordinance in 1982 that required all heads of a household to own a firearm and ammunition.
“Kennesaw’s law was a response to Morton Grove, Illinois, which had passed a gun ban earlier that year as a step to reduce crime…”
In one of my posts earlier, one commentator gave me a friendly advice which amounted to something like this…”OK you fella! You live so far away from the US in a different world and have no clue about our ‘civilization’ and ‘culture’. So why do you waste your breath/energy writing about us?”
Point well made…and taken!!!
I made the following comment on the subject earlier in The TMV…
“Violence cannot be stopped by just banning guns. A majority of Americans seem to lean on arms owing to a fear psychosis that can be perhaps traced to the memories of being the settlers in an alien land not very long ago in history.
There are those who have, consciously or unconsciously, developed a macho trait to overcome this fear. These traits become more visible whenever the nation responds to a major crisis, such as the present shocking killings in the American campus, or when muscle power is used outside the USA.
There is no easy solution when fear and violence take possession of one’s mind and thought. Banning this, or having more and more strict legislation, alone would not help much.
9/11 has further complicated things for an average American. The past four years have clearly displayed that violent response to violent acts creates more fear.
Now add to all this the growing confusion in the minds of the people when things don’t work out in the ‘desired’ fashion despite having all the muscle power.
And we have the heady cocktail of fear, macho trait and confusion. A deadly combination that can sap the strength of the mightiest person/nation.
Violence (or fear or greed or whatever) is in the mind…and it is from there it has to be healed or removed. Otherwise a person/nation continues to suffer, and makes others suffer.”
“The Roots of Violence: Wealth without Work, Pleasure without Conscience, Knowledge without Character, Commerce without Morality, Science without Humanity, Worship without Sacrifice, Politics without Principles.� — Mahatma Gandhi
April 18th, 2007 By DAVID SCHRAUB, Assistant Editor
A video of a DEA agent shooting himself in the foot (literally) while giving a presentation on gun safety to a group of Florida children. This occurs right after he tells them that he’s the only one in the room qualified to handle the handgun he’s carrying.
I’d mock him, but to be honest I’m impressed that he carried on the presentation relatively calmly after having shot himself.
