“This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
Donald J. Trump Inaugural Speech, 2017
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“We trust what we know in our hearts to be right,” he said. “We trust our freedom. In this uncertain world, surrounded by lies and corruption everywhere you look, there is no greater freedom than the right to survive and protect our families with all the rifles, shotguns and handguns we want.”
Wayne LaPierre, National Rifle Association.
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The American politicians who enjoy support from the National Rifle Association (NRA) are not bad people – well, at least most are not bad people – but they are scared. Scared of the gun lobby, scared of their constituents, scared to confront the reality that the types of guns that would not be out of place on an Afghan battlefield have no place in a Las Vegas high rise hotel.
Fear – unbridled, unreasoning fear of unreasonable political forces – is a very, very powerful thing. The NRA has made fear a lucrative business and arguably the most powerful lobby in the country.
Yet I suspect in the wake of the latest horrific mass murder, in which the gunman used a modified automatic weapon, there is also something else at play with those politicians who have sold their souls to the NRA. They are embarrassed; embarrassed by the immorality of their nation – alone in the world by the way – that tolerates frequent mass murder and catastrophic injury by guns.
As the Washington Post noted in a gruesome story about the gun shot injuries suffered by the victims of the Las Vegas massacre: “Gun deaths are this nation’s third-leading cause of injury-related fatalities, with the most recent data showing that firearms accounted for more than 36,200 deaths in 2015. Over a nine-year period, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost 971,000 people were hurt or killed by firearms in the United States — with a just-released study finding that such injuries cost nearly $25 billion in hospital emergency and inpatient care from 2006 to 2014.”
Imagine being a member of Congress whose only response to the deaths of 59 fellow Americans and the horrible injuries to hundreds more is to say, as South Dakota Senator John Thune said: “I think people are going to have to take steps in their own lives to take precautions to protect themselves. And in situations like that, you know, try to stay safe. As somebody said — get small.”
No other aspect of American political life, no other amendment to the Constitution is as off-limits to debate, reflection or reform as the gun amendment – The Second Amendment. The NRA and its wholly owned minions in Congress and the White House – the NRA spent $30,000,000 to elect Donald Trump and $27 million to support GOP senators who vote with the organization – remind me of the pre-Civil War defenders of American slavery. For years prior to the unraveling of the nation due to the Civil War a “gag rule” prohibiting talk about slavery was in effect in the House of Representatives. The rule, instituted in 1835 decreed that “all petitions, memorials, or resolutions regarding slavery should automatically be tabled and that no further action be taken upon them.”
The NRA’s gun restriction “gag rule,” enforced through a massive political war chest and an ability at a moment’s notice to mobilize a grassroots army of gun right fanatics, now prohibits all but the most cursory discussion of the national disease of gun violence.
As Esquire columnist Charles P. Pierce noted this week: “We hear serious arguments about all the other parts of the Bill of Rights: that the First Amendment has limits on what T-shirts high-school students (“Bong Hits 4 Jesus!”) can wear; that the Fourth Amendment has limits that allow wiretaps without warrants; that the Fifth Amendment has limits that allow drug-testing without cause; that the Sixth Amendment has limits that allows the states to poison convicts to death. But only with the Second Amendment do we hear the argument that the only tolerable limit on its exercise is that there are no limits. Only with the Second Amendment do we hear that the price of freedom is the occasional Stephen Paddock, locked away in his own madness on the 32nd floor of a luxury hotel and casino, deciding coolly whose brains he will blow out next a few blocks away in the 273rd such unfortunate exercise of Second Amendment rights this year.”
The NRA has largely succeed through propaganda, political intimidation and encouragement of social division – the organization regularly promotes conspiracy theories about the inevitable need for a gun toting population to rise up against an authoritarian government – to regularize the murder of little children in classrooms, movie fans at a cineplex, church goers in a sanctuary, people at a nightclub and music fans at an outdoor concert.
In the aftermath of the worst mass murder in modern American history the NRA appears ready to entertain a tiny, tiny tweak of gun laws by endorsing a move to regulate so called “bump stocks” of the type that turned the Las Vegas shooter’s guns into fully automatic weapons. This would constitute the most modest step away from the NRA’s absolutist doctrine, but perhaps it is an indicator that the gun lobby can read the polls as well as the rest of us.
Most Congressional Republicans have willingly embraced the Faustian bargain that demands unflinching support for an incompetent, dangerous president. In the glaring light of the post-Las Vegas massacre it remains all too clear that the NRA, through fear and intimidation, has succeed in creating another awful bargain for the GOP.
As my friend Bob Mann wrote recently in the New Orleans Times-Picayune: “The NRA has persuaded its members and many politicians that nothing can be done about mass killings. Forget the other tragedies and calamities we have addressed. Stopping gun violence, it seems, is an impossible feat for a great nation that eradicated polio and put men on the moon.
“As someone observed on Twitter the other day after a gunman in Las Vegas murdered 59 people and wounded another 527: ‘American can-do vanishes when the @NRA check arrives.'”
In the beating heart of every politician, well almost every politician, is something most of us live with every day – a conscience. In the privacy of their conscience – in their hearts – it must be a daily embarrassment for these people to repeatedly make excuses for the inexcusable.