Tuesday, January 01, 2013 3:06:29 PM
Silencers: The NRA’s latest big lie
Silencers could give the next Adam Lanza even more time to kill -- but to the NRA, they protect kids' hearing
By Alexander Zaitchik
Sunday, Dec 30, 2012 06:00 AM CST
A gruesome holiday season exercise: Think of some firearms and accessories that might have added to the body counts of Aurora and Newtown. More starkly, imagine the means by which coming Auroras and Newtowns will be made more deadly.
The exercise starts with a militarized baseline, as both shooters unloaded designed-for-damage rounds from high-capacity magazines loaded into assault rifles. Improving their killing efficiency would require one of two things: the ability to shoot more bullets faster, or more time. A fully automatic machine gun would provide the first. More minutes to hunt, meanwhile, might be gained by employing a noise suppressor, those metallic tubes better known as silencers. By muffling the noise generated with every shot by sonic booms and gas release, a silencer would provide a new degree of intimacy for public mass murder, delaying by crucial seconds or minutes the moment when someone calls the police after overhearing strange bangs coming from Theater 4 or Classroom D. The same qualities that make silencers the accessory of choice for targeted assassination offer advantages to the armed psychopath set on indiscriminate mass murder.
It should surprise no one that the NRA has recently thrown its weight behind an industry campaign to deregulate and promote the use of silencers. Under the trade banner of the American Silencer Association [ http://americansilencerassociation.com/ ], manufacturers have come together with the support of the NRA to rebrand the silencer as a safety device belonging in every all-American gun closet. To nurture this potentially large and untapped market, the ASA last April sponsored the first annual all-silencer gun shoot [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAZ0KSZQG_U (next below)]
In case you’re wondering, the answer is yes, the gun lobby’s grand strategy rests grotesquely on fake concern for child hearing health. Among the opening shots in the campaign was a feature in the February 2011 issue of Gun World, “Silence is Golden,” penned by the veteran gun writer Jim Dickson. “One only has to look at children in the rest of the world learning to shoot with silencers, protecting their tender young ears, to see what an innocent safety device we are talking about here,” writes Dickson. “To use an overworked propaganda phrase, legalize silencers ‘for the sake of the children.’” [Emphasis mine.]
Proponents of healthy hearing will be heartened to know the NRA shares Gun World’s concern for America’s tender young ears. The organization officially entered the silencer-awareness fray in November of 2011, around the time the Utah-based American Silencer Association was founded. It’s opening statement took the form of an article posted to its lobbying division website: “Suppressors: Good for our hearing… And for the shooting sports.” With this piece, the NRA finally acknowledged the relationship between health care costs and guns.
“Billions of dollars are spent every year in our healthcare system for hearing loss conditions, such as shooting-related tinnitus,” explained the NRA. It was a very important point that had long been overlooked in the gun control debate; because if there is a single pressing gun safety issue in America today, it is the hearing, comfort and convenience of recreational shooters who find orange earplugs unsightly. The NRA is also extremely concerned about the fright children may receive from shooting or standing near the reports of high-caliber weapons. These jolts could have a lasting and detrimental developmental impact, possibly imbuing America’s impressionable and tender young brains with the notion that guns are loud, dangerous things. The NRA firmly believes that American freedom is best served by giving 9mm gunfire the feel and sound of a toy cap gun. As the NRA’s Lacey Biles put it during last April’s Dallas Silencer Shoot, silencers are good for “getting younger folks involved [in guns]. They’re less afraid of the loud bang.”
For these reasons, the NRA believes America must “move to eliminate the laws, regulations and policies that discourage or prohibit suppressor use.”
And move we have. The NRA has enjoyed state-level success chipping away at restrictions on the use of silencers around the country, an effort that has proceeded largely unnoticed in the shadows of higher-profile battles over the spread of Concealed Carry and Stand Your Ground laws. Silencers are currently legal with permit in 40 states, a growing number of which are rescinding bans on their use while hunting.
The gun lobby’s silencer campaign has bigger prey in mind than state hunting laws. Silencers are among the few accessories regulated by the National Firearms Act. To purchase or transfer a silencer, you must acquire a special license, enter the serial number in a federal registry, and pay a $200 fee. (The fee, which equaled a de facto ban in 1934, has not been adjusted for inflation in 79 years.) For gun extremists who struggle with introductory-level American history [ http://consortiumnews.com/2012/12/15/the-2nd-amendment-and-killing-kids/ ] and political theory [ http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/12/20121226104857715225.html ], the licensing regime is half Stamp Act, half Yellow Badge. What most outrages the manufacturers about the regime is that it works. By licensing silencers, tracking and taxing their exchange, the government has kept them from flooding the market like so many other military-market gun accessories with cameos in recent massacres and serial sniper attacks. “Simple licensing requirements weeds out both blatant criminals and a certain kind of stockpiling insurrectionist who refuses to engage with the federal government,” says Ladd Everitt of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “The law has been effective.”
Aside from offering a very expensive alternative to earplugs, what conceivable sporting or personal-defense purpose is served by pouring silencers into a gun market dominated by semi-automatic pistols and assault rifles? If history offers any useful clues, and it usually does, the answer is none. The history of the silencer is a twentieth century tale populated by Mafiosi hits, hidden snipers, and special ops ambush teams. It all adds up to decades worth of “negative branding baggage” that the gun lobby is now trying to scrub away like a used car-salesman winding back the speedometer on a lemon.
The silencer began innocently enough. When Hiram Percy Maxim patented the first silencer in 1908, he was just a nice fellow working in the family business, a guy who simply enjoyed finding ways to make loud things quiet. Among Maxim’s many other inventions was an early muffler design for car engines. A quarter-century later, silencers still hadn’t acquired the bad rep they have today. Their best-known criminal use at the time of the 1934 law was as an aid in late-night poaching.
Society did not form its lasting perceptions of the silencer in the decades of Percy’s .22 pistols and midnight pig poaching. The image the NRA must scrub is the one that formed early in what might be called the Second Silencer Age, when a new breed of steel “cans” emerged and became associated with rapid, discreet, controlled killing. The silencers the gun lobby is trying to mainstream can make ninjas of high-caliber handguns, long-barrel sniper rifles, and assault weapons, all commonly featured in military-themed silencer ads. The Second Age that produced these tools was commenced not by a charming dynastic American industrial engineer with wide interests like Percy Maxim. Rather, it was born in the rural Georgia kill-gadget lab of a notoriously cracked and ruthless CIA black ops contractor, known in gun circles as the Wizard of Whistling Death.
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Mitch WerBell gained his reputation for cold-blooded efficiency during his days with the CIA’s wartime precursor, the OSS. After the war he maintained his ties to the Agency as a man who could be depended on to figure out how make problems go away. His accomplished his revolutionary leap in silencer technology in 1967, during a short break from international intrigue. The previous year, federal agents raided WerBell’s mercenary training camp in Florida, where he was in the final stages of preparing an army of Miami-based Cubans to invade Haiti and oust “Papa Doc” François Duvalier [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Duvalier ].
WerBell patented his silencer under the name of his boutique weapons development firm, SIONICS, or Studies In the Operational Negation of Insurgents and Counter-Subversion. WerBell’s silencer was the first to successfully muffle automatic and semi-automatic weapons fire. On some weapons, the silencer also increased accuracy and power. Knowing he had a big breakthrough on his hands, WerBell convinced a group of rich investors that his invention would make them new fortunes, and just maybe win the Cold War for the West along the way. Oddly, the gang of investors included the eccentric and liberal antiwar philanthropist Stewart R. Mott. According to some accounts, WerBell sold Mott by telling him the principles behind the silencer could be adapted to lawn mowers and other devices to reduce suburban noise pollution.
WerBell’s silencer not only decreased the volume of the gun’s report and increased its accuracy; it also reduced the powder flash of machine gun fire, opening up new possibilities for nighttime ambush and assassination missions. WerBell packed his silencer and flew to Indochina, where he wowed American and South Vietnamese brass. Orders from the Pentagon soon followed, and in 1968 WerBell began large-scale production of his silencers under a SIONICS subsidiary he named Environmental Industries, a sarcastic reference to his intended contribution to solving the strains of overpopulation.
The timing of the new silencer’s introduction to Vietnam was just right for business. By 1968, the U.S. had pivoted from away from its early strategy that included an effort to “win hearts and minds,” and had embraced a model of search-and-destroy exemplified by the death squads of the CIA’s Phoenix Program. The M-16s carried by these special units were retrofitted with SIONICS silencers. They soon reported increased lethality and accuracy in ambushes and targeted killings. In his out-of-print 1978 masterpiece, “Spooks,” former Harper’s editor Jim Hougan reports that Green Beret officers singled WerBell’s invention out for praise in Congressional budget hearings.
According to Hougan, WerBell consumed the Army’s official kill counts like a 12-year-old reads box scores. From his compound in Georgia, he relished Pentagon data demonstrating his silencer’s economy and lethality. In the late 1970s, he boasted to Hougan that Army rifles equipped with his silencers helped kill nearly 2,000 Vietcong in the first six months, and reduced the number of bullets per kill to one-point-three rounds, a feat he boasted was “the greatest cost-effectiveness the Army’s ever known.” Whatever the actual numbers, the SIONICS silencer was widely recognized as a huge advance in the science of killing. WerBell emerged from the shadows to become a patriotic cult hero to the fathers of those now agitating for silencer deregulation. In 1972, WerBell played a starring role in David Truby’s admiring study of these new tools and their uses, “Silencers, Snipers, and Assassins: An Overview of Whispering Death.”
WerBell didn’t stop tinkering after reinventing the silencer. He also developed the gun he thought his silencer deserved. The result was the ultimate greaser. The ultra-sleek and compact MAC 11 weighed and sized little more than a conventional pistol and spat 14 bullets per second, or 850 a minute. Had WerBell been working today, he might have produced a semi-automatic version for the civilian market. In the early 1970s, the Pentagon was the only game in town. WerBell fought hard for but failed to land a massive contract to make the MAC a standard-issue weapon. Had he succeeded, SIONICS might be a household name today. (This is how gun empires are born. Gaston Glock designed his first gun competing in an open tender bid to produce a sidearm for the Austrian Army.)
The Pentagon’s rejection was the first of two that deepened WerBell’s bitterness at the government he served for so long. As he courted clients among foreign intelligence agencies, the State Department denied him an export license, arguing that the spread of WerBell’s silencers was likely to increase the risk of assassinations around the world. A sign of saner times gone by, there was in the early 1970s no American Silencer Association to help WerBell market his products to preppers with “bugout bags,” and no Wayne LaPierre or Chris Cox to strategize state and national-level assaults on the National Firearms Act. Instead, WerBell the Wizard of Whistling Death hit the road to peddle his remaining inventory on the global grey and black markets. He sold his wares out of a suitcase like the house-calling gun dealer in Taxi Driver, shooting up stacks of telephone books before giddy prospective clients who marveled over the little machine gun emitting such seductive sibilance, ssyyyt ssyyyt ssyyyt, the contract killer’s lullaby.
Before leaving the sideshow stage of history, WerBell made one last lunge for greatness. His hopes of building a gun empire stymied, in 1972 WerBell began planning an amphibious invasion of a tiny Bahamanian archipelago known as Abaco, which was home to a small separatist movement. WerBell enlisted financial support from real estate mogul and Libertarian Party leader Mike Oliver, whose Phoenix Foundation existed to seed utopic Libertarian projects like the one WerBell imagined on the beaches of Abaco — an independent global tax haven, home of SIONICS headquarters, and the Undisputed Silencer Capital of the World. As with his planned invasion of Haiti eight years prior, WerBell was still training his mercenaries when the whole thing fell apart from infighting and a surprise visit from the Feds.
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Telling Mitch WerBell’s story is just a long way of demonstrating why the new NRA-backed Hearing Heath First! silencer-promotion campaign is a particularly hideous and towering architectural example of the Gun Lobby’s Nouveau Bat Shit Style, which if not ridiculed and condemned is guaranteed to crash down on all of us, leading to new and yet more lethal mutations in our national plague of gun violence.
There are very good reasons why the silencer industry is contending with a nasty case of Vietnam Syndrome. The reason the public associates silencers with death squads, assassination raids, and mafia hits is because these were the uses WerBell had in mind when he engineered them. They are also the uses to which they are best suited and most needed, if that’s the word. It wasn’t all that long ago that even the Freaks of Fairfax understood that the silencer’s dark reputation was deep and well deserved. As recently as 2000, the NRA showed a rare sensitivity for public perceptions and forbade a silencer manufacturer from exhibiting its wares at the NRA’s national convention. Kevin Brittingham, of the silencer maker Advanced Armament Co., says the NRA’s executive office called him [ http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2011/11/foghorn/nra-supports-silencers-finally/ ] before the millennial year convention in Charlotte and told him not to come. “We don’t want the news media focusing on your table and putting guns in a bad light,” the NRA explained.
A decade later, the NRA has cozied up to the industry view that everyone should have a silencer, and that the days are over when WerBell’s toys were the accessory love that dare not speak its name. The NRA now sees the widespread negative view of silencers as a branding problem to be corrected through advertising and public relations.
Toward this end, the gun lobby is on multiple fronts advancing the argument that silencer-phobia is the product of popular culture demonization and sensationalism.
“Unfortunately, too many Americans (including some gun owners) still fall victim to the unfair portrayals of silencers by Hollywood,” the NRA-ILA gently chides its members. Gun World’s Jim Dickson, meanwhile, prays for an America that allows its film industry to assist in “the transformation of an innocuous safety and noise-reduction device to a sinister assassin’s tool in the public mind.”
If anybody reading this needs one more nudge before abandoning in finality the idea of any kind of “dialogue” with the gun lobby, I suggest reading the NRA and the gun press bleat about the way violent movies have besmirched the good name of the honorable American silencer. They’re pointing to the same Hollywood gun makers routinely employ to product-place its wares, from best-selling pistols [ http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/02/24/most-product-placement-in-a-top-film-for-2010-and-the-award/ ; http://www.brandchannel.com/home/post/2011/01/12/How-A-Once-Exotic-German-Pistol-Brand-Became-A-Common-Staple-Of-American-Shooting-Massacres-DRAFT.aspx ] to fully automatic shotguns [ http://www.brandchannel.com/home/post/2010/07/07/AA-12-Product-Placement.aspx ]. (In 2011, Glock handguns made corporate cameos in 15 percent of No. 1 films.) The gun lobby pointing to Hollywood is as rich as Wayne LaPierre censuring video games, which thrives at the service of the gun-industry [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/25/business/real-and-virtual-firearms-nurture-marketing-link.html?pagewanted=all ] in ways we’re just now beginning to understand.
If the current campaign succeeds in delisting silencers from NFA regulation, the gun lobby likely won’t wait long before targeting the remaining regulatory regimes limiting the circulation of fully automatic machine guns and even hand grenades. Do not be surprised when you see a 2014 Gun World feature extolling freshwater blast fishing as a great way to connect kids and nature, while reducing the risks of fishing with sharp steel hooks, some of which have dangerous double jags. If you can’t see the safety rationale here, or the Freedom Logic that undergirds it, then you obviously do not care about America’s children and their millions of young tender fingers.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/30/silencers_the_nras_latest_big_lie/ [with comments]
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Oil Filter Suppressor-FULL AUTO
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Babes in Arms
Nicholas Blechman
By BILL KELLER
Published: December 30, 2012
From: David Keene, president
To: Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president
Re: “Good Guys With Guns” Campaign, Phase Two
Dear Wayne,
Phase One of our plan to defuse that P.R. disaster in Newtown has had great results. Your performance at the news conference and on the weekend talk shows was masterly. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” It gave me goose bumps! We have answered the old bleeding-heart fallacy (guns are the problem) with a bold Second-Amendment response (guns are the solution). “Good guys with guns” (cc’ing Legal to see if we can TM) is undoubtedly the best slogan we’ve come up with since “Guns don’t kill people ...” and “If guns are outlawed ...” While the old slogans simply changed the subject, the new approach is positive and proactive. We’re actually for something now.
The polling team and psych consultants love that we have made “more guns in schools” a serious subject of mainstream discussion. We’re particularly proud of the idea that advertising a “gun-free school” is an open invitation to homicidal crazies. Take THAT Michael Bloomberg! For years we have owned the issue of freedom. Now we stand a good chance of owning the issue of safety.
And it should not go unmentioned that this whole project has been greeted with appreciation by our friends in the manufacturing and sales community. First, by reviving the fear of confiscation, we helped generate a nice little just-in-case pre-Christmas bump in firearm sales. And of course more guns in schools will mean a significant boost in demand. I have the Development team stepping up its outreach to a grateful industry.
Still, the issue has not receded as quickly as we anticipated. As you know, Research estimates that the mean lapsed time from a high-body-count firearm event to baseline apathy is nine days. Yet this particular event has continued to receive media attention through the Christmas season, the clamor on the pro-disarmament editorial pages continues, and the polling metrics continue to be unfavorable. A few of our friends on the Hill are wobbly.
Therefore I think we need to gear up for Phase Two, with the option of executing early in the new year if the public fails to return to its standard level of indifference.
To recap, Phase Two is tentatively called Arm Our Kids — A.O.K. — and its objective is a comprehensive K-12 carry program. If an armed guard in every school is prudent, how much more secure will we feel to have a Smith & Wesson in every cubby? We all know (as the media scolds keep pointing out) there was an armed sheriff’s deputy on duty at Columbine High School the day Harris and Klebold committed their mayhem; but he was eating lunch. So let’s up the ante to full coverage, from toddler to teen, from assembly to dismissal. Even the most deranged killer will think twice about entering a classroom knowing any of those adorable youngsters could be a licensed, trained, locked and loaded, Glock-packing Good Guy.
I know a few board members have expressed concern that this campaign could encounter significant backlash, and not just from the nanny-state brigade. But it is the logical evolution of our safety argument, and it appeals to a core American value, individual responsibility. I anticipate that with our usual combination of messaging and political muscle, we can enroll a significant number of school districts. But even if we fall short on penetration, A.O.K. will give the chatterers something to chatter about besides ammo clips and the gun-show loophole.
Research has promised data by next week on how many jobs would be created by a comprehensive program, including not only ramped-up firearms and accessories production but also new demand for trainers, shooting-range operators, and engineers to develop new lines of weapons for little fingers.
Here are a few other issues for consideration:
Spokesman. There will never be a frontman to match Charlton Heston, God rest his soul. Former Congressman Asa Hutchinson [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57560684/asa-hutchinson-digs-in-on-arming-schools/ ], as the head of our National School Shield Program, has struck just the right note of smooth, always-on-message reasonableness. The man could sell snake oil to snakes. But for the next phase we need mom appeal. Is Sarah Palin too obvious? Maybe one of the doctor-moms on “Grey’s Anatomy” — Hey! The pregnant one!
Curriculum. We will be presenting this as not just a safety program but an educational opportunity, with training to improve situational awareness and quick judgment. (Can we get that “Blink” guy to do a testimonial?) Also, I am sure Rick Perry would happily tell the Texas State Board of Education to work with us on a line of animated textbooks that restores firearms to their proper place in American history and integrates issues like caliber and muzzle velocity into the math curriculum.
Merchandising. Marketing is confident that we will have no problem migrating the boy market from toy guns and video arcades to live fire. The Cub Scouts already promote BB-gun skills [ http://www.scouting.org/scoutsource/HealthandSafety/GSS/gss07.aspx ]. We’re checking to see whether they’re willing to expand into pistols and rifles, perhaps with a Good Guy merit badge. But much remains to be done on the girl front. I’m attaching the early test-market results from the “My Little Colt” product (comes in a rainbow of colors, but pink is still the clear winner). We’ve been in touch with half a dozen makers of bulletproof backpacks [ http://www.theage.com.au/world/sales-of-bulletproof-school-bags-soar-20121224-2bul0.html ], including one with a Disney Princess line. We’ve also scheduled meetings with a few more companies to propose branding opportunities. How about a “Little House on the Prairie” holster line? Or, from the makers of the Easy-Bake Oven, a line of Easy-Cast home bullet-making kits?
Military tie-in. The Pentagon has not been terribly responsive to our proposal to embrace this as a boon to the volunteer military, but we will continue to work that angle. Meanwhile, I’ve had a strange call from someplace in Africa — is there a country called Sergio Leone? — where they claim to have had a whole ARMY of kids who really did the job. We need to check that out.
Endorsements. A board member suggested we align ourselves with Mike Huckabee, who, as you know, linked the Newtown killings to the abolition of prayer in schools. The idea would be to add a little First Amendment kick to our Second Amendment campaign — first they get rid of God, then they get rid of guns, or something like that. Worth exploring. Although, between us, personally I find these religious zealots a little creepy.
Happy New Year!
David
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Related
N.R.A. Envisions ‘a Good Guy With a Gun’ in Every School (December 22, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/us/nra-calls-for-armed-guards-at-schools.html
Times Topic: National Rifle Association
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_rifle_association/index.html
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© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/opinion/keller-babes-in-arms.html [with comments]
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Gun Sales Surge In Wake Of Newtown Shooting As Panicked Enthusiasts Rush To Stock Up
By JOSEPH PISANI
12/28/12 08:57 PM ET EST
NEW YORK -- The phones at Red's Trading Post wouldn't stop ringing. Would-be customers from as far away as New York wanted to know if the Twin Falls, Idaho gun shop had firearms in stock. Others clamored to find out if their orders had been shipped.
Overwhelmed, gun store manager Ryan Horsley had to do what no employee would ever think of doing just days before Christmas: He disconnected the phone lines for three whole days.
"We had to shut everything off," says Horsley, whose family has owned Red's Trading Post, the state's oldest gun shop, since 1936. "We were swamped in the store and online."
The phones at gun shops across the country are ringing off the hook. Demand for firearms, ammunition and bulletproof gear has surged since the Dec. 14 massacre in Newtown, Conn., that took the lives of 20 schoolchildren and six teachers and administrators. The shooting sparked calls for tighter gun control measures, especially for military-style assault weapons like the ones used in Newtown and in the Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooting earlier this year. The prospect of a possible weapons ban has sent gun enthusiasts into a panic and sparked a frenzy of buying at stores and gun dealers nationwide.
Assault rifles are sold out across the country. Rounds of .223 bullets, like those used in the AR-15 type Bushmaster rifle used in Newtown, are scarce. Stores are struggling to restock their shelves. Gun and ammunition makers are telling retailers they will have to wait months to get more.
Store owners who have been in the business for years say they have never seen demand like this before.
When asked how much sales have increased in the past few weeks, Horsley just laughed.
"We haven't even had a chance to look at it," he says. Horsley spends his days calling manufacturers around the country trying to buy more items for the store. Mainly, they tell him he has to wait.
Franklin Armory, a firearm maker in Morgan Hill, Calif., is telling dealers that it will take six months to fulfill their orders. The company plans to hire more workers and buy more machines to catch up, says Franklin Armory's President Jay Jacobson.
The shortage is leaving many would-be gun owners empty handed.
William Kotis went to a gun show in Winston-Salem, N.C., last weekend hoping to buy a rifle for target shooting. Almost everything was sold out.
"Assault rifles were selling like crazy," says Kotis, who is president and CEO of Kotis Holdings, a real estate development company based in Greensboro. "People are stockpiling."
He left without buying anything.
Luke Orlando's parents were able to get him the 12-gauge shotgun he wanted for Christmas to bird hunt, but his uncle wasn't as lucky.
"At Christmas dinner, my uncle expressed outrage that after waiting six months to use his Christmas bonus to purchase an AR-15, they are sold out and back ordered over a year," says Orlando, 18, a student at the University of Texas.
No organization publicly releases gun sales data. The only way to measure demand is by the number of background checks that are conducted when someone wants to buy a firearm. Those numbers are released by the Federal Reserve Bureau every month. Data for December is not out yet. But the Federal Bureau of Investigation says that it did 16.8 million firearm background checks as of the end of November, up more than 2 percent from a year ago.
The Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which handles background checks for the state, can't keep up with the number of requests it is getting. The bureau has pulled staff from other units and increased its hours, says spokesperson Susan Medina.
Many firearm dealers and manufacturers say that Obama's comments since the Newtown school shooting are driving demand.
James Zimmerman of SelwayArmory.com, a website that sells guns, ammunition and knives, says that sales really took off on Dec. 19 after President Barack Obama held a White House press conference announcing that Vice President Joe Biden would lead a team tasked with coming up with "concrete proposals" to curb gun violence.
That day, one customer ordered 32,000 rounds of ammunition from SelwayArmory.com, worth close to $18,000. The order had to be shipped from the company's Lolo, Mont., office to Kentucky on a freight truck.
"I've done more sales in the week after the 19th than I have the whole year," says Zimmerman, who launched SelwayArmory.com in 2009.
At Lady Liberty Gunsmithing LLC in Atlantic City, N.J., a customer called last week asking if a pistol he wanted was available. When he was told there was only one left, he drove more than two hours from Newark, N.J., to buy it that same day.
"People want guns now even more than ever," says Guy Petinga II, whose father opened the store above his home in 1996.
Others saw demand immediately after the shooting.
Bullet Blocker, which makes bulletproof vests, briefcases and insert panels, saw sales of its children's backpacks suddenly jump.
"That's how I found out about the tragedy. I saw the sales rise and then turned on CNN," says Elmar Uy, vice president of business operations at the Billerica, Mass., company.
Bullet Blocker has sold about 50 to 100 bulletproof backpacks a day since the shooting, up from about 10 to 15 in a regular week. The children's backpacks, which are designed to be used as shields, cost over $200 each.
"I've never seen numbers like this before," says Uy.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/29/gun-sales-surge_n_2380738.html [with embedded video report, and (over 23,000) comments]
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Neighbour’s daughter bought Spengler guns used in firefighter ambush
The Associated Press and 680News staff
Dec 28, 2012 05:33:53 PM
The convicted felon, William Spengler, ambushed firefighters on Christmas Eve, killing two, couldn’t legally buy the guns he used.
He did however, pick out the semiautomatic rifle and shotgun and was in the sporting goods store with a neighbour’s daughter when she bought them for him, police said Friday.
The woman, Dawn Nguyen of Rochester, was arrested Friday.
Nguyen faces a federal charge of knowingly making a false statement for signing a form indicating she would be the legal owner of the guns, U.S. Attorney William Hochul said.
She also was charged with a state count of filing a falsified business record, State Police Senior Investigator James Newell said.
Newell said the charges are connected to the purchase of an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and a 12-gauge shotgun that William Spengler had with him Monday when firefighters Michael Chiapperini and Tomasz Kaczowka were gunned down.
Three other people were wounded before the 62-year-old Spengler killed himself. He also had a .38-calibre revolver, but Nguyen is not connected to that gun, Newell said.
Hochul said Nguyen bought the guns on June 6, 2010, on behalf of Spengler, who as a convicted felon was barred from possessing weapons.
“She told the seller of these guns, Gander Mountain in Henrietta, New York, that she was to be the true owner and buyer of the guns instead of William Spengler,” he said. “It is absolutely against federal law to provide any materially false information related to the acquisition of firearms.”
“It is sometimes referred to acting as a straw purchaser and that is exactly what today’s complaint alleges,” Hochul said.
The .223-calibre Bushmaster rifle, which had a combat-style flash suppressor, is similar to the one used by the gunman who massacred 20 children and six women in a Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school earlier this month.
Nguyen and her mother, Dawn Welsher, lived next door to Spengler in 2008.
On Wednesday and again on Friday, shortly before her arrest, she answered her cellphone and told The Associated Press that she didn’t want to talk about Spengler.
Her brother, Steven Nguyen, told the Democrat and Chronicle newspaper of Rochester that Spengler stole the guns from Dawn Nguyen.
A number listed in the name of her lawyer, David Palmiere, was disconnected.
Spengler set a car on fire and touched off an inferno in his Webster home on a strip of land along the Lake Ontario shore, took up a sniper’s position and opened fire on the first firefighters to arrive at about 5:30 a.m. on Christmas Eve, authorities said.
He wounded two other firefighters and an off-duty police officer who was on his way to work.
A Webster police officer who had accompanied the firefighters shot back at Spengler with a rifle in a brief exchange of gunfire before the gunman killed himself.
Spengler spent 17 years in prison for killing his grandmother in 1980.
Investigators still haven’t released the identity of remains found in William Spengler’s burned house.
They have said they believe the remains are those of his 67-year-old sister, Cheryl Spengler, who also lived in the house near Rochester and has been unaccounted for since the killings.
The Spengler siblings had lived in the home with their mother, Arline Spengler, who died in October. In all, seven houses were destroyed by the flames.
Investigators found a rambling, typed letter laying out Spengler’s intention to destroy his neighbourhood and “do what I like doing best, killing people.”
He had been released from parole in 2006 on the manslaughter conviction, and authorities said they had had no encounters with him since.
The federal charges carry a maximum penalty of ten years imprisonment, a fine of $250,000 or both.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press and Rogers Communications
http://www.680news.com/2012/12/28/neighbours-daughter-bought-spengler-guns-used-in-firefighter-ambush/ [no comments yet]
===
Rob Woodall: End Federal Gun Laws
Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Ga.) said in June that all federal gun laws should be eliminated.
12/28/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/28/rob-woodall-gun-laws_n_2375476.html [with comments]
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How Big Data Can Solve America's Gun Problem
The private sector has all the tools we need to flag rapid weapons build-ups and suspicious purchases. All that's needed is the political will to build the most basic database.
Dec 27 2012
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/12/how-big-data-can-solve-americas-gun-problem/266633/ [with comments]
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The N.R.A. at the Bench
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
December 26, 2012, 9:00 pm
There has been plenty written about the National Rifle Association in recent days. But nothing that I’ve seen has focused on the gun lobby’s increasingly pernicious role in judicial confirmations. So here’s a little story.
Back in 2009, when President Obama chose Judge Sonia Sotomayor as his first Supreme Court nominee, the White House expected that her compelling personal story, sterling credentials, and experience both as a prosecutor and, for 17 years, as a federal judge would win broad bipartisan support for her nomination. There was, in fact, no plausible reason for any senator to vote against her.
The president’s hope was Senator Mitch McConnell’s fear. In order to shore up his caucus, the Senate Republican leader asked a favor of his friends at the National Rifle Association: oppose the Sotomayor nomination and, furthermore, “score” the confirmation vote. An interest group “scores” a vote when it adds the vote on a particular issue to the legislative scorecard it gives each member of Congress at the end of the session. In many states, an N.R.A. score of less than 100 for an incumbent facing re-election is big trouble.
Note that the N.R.A. had never before scored a judicial confirmation vote. Note also that Sonia Sotomayor had no record on the N.R.A.’s issues. (True, she voted with an appeals court panel to uphold New York State’s ban on nunchucks, a martial-arts weapon consisting of two sticks held together with a chain or rope, commonly used by gang members and muggers. The appeals court didn’t even reach the interesting issue of whether the Second Amendment guaranteed the right to keep and bear nunchucks, ruling instead that the amendment didn’t apply to the states – which, before the Supreme Court later ruled otherwise [ http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-1521.pdf ] by a vote of 5 to 4, it didn’t.)
Never mind. The N.R.A. had all the reason it needed to oppose Sonia Sotomayor: maintenance of its symbiotic relationship with the Republican Party. Once it announced its opposition and its intention to score the vote, Republican support for the nominee melted away. Only seven Republicans voted for confirmation.
One senator, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, said by way of explaining her “no” vote that her constituents had expressed “overwhelming concern” about Judge Sotomayor’s views on the Second Amendment. However, Senator Murkowski told the National Journal at the time, “I am a bit concerned that the N.R.A. weighed in and said they were going to score this.” She added, “I don’t think that was appropriate.”
The following year, after the N.R.A. opposed Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court and announced [ http://www.nraila.org/kagan ] that “this vote matters and will be part of future candidate evaluations,” Republican support for another nominee without a record on gun issues shrank to five senators.
At least Supreme Court confirmation debates take place in the light of day. Members of the public can tune in and decide whether they are persuaded that Elena Kagan represents “a clear a present danger to the right to keep and bear arms,” to quote the N.R.A.’s statement of opposition to her nomination. (Justice Kagan had never owned or shot a gun, but since joining the court has taken lessons and gone hunting with Justice Antonin Scalia, pronouncing the experience “kind of fun [ http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/kagan_fulfills_a_promise_and_goes_hunting_with_justice_scalia/ ].”)
But the N.R.A. has begun to involve itself in lower court nominations as well, where it can work its will in the shadows. It has effectively blocked President Obama’s nomination of Caitlin J. Halligan to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that has been vacant since September 2005, when John G. Roberts Jr. moved to a courthouse up the street. The president has submitted the name of the superbly qualified Ms. Halligan to the Senate three times.
When the Democrats’ effort to break a Republican filibuster failed last year, Senator Murkowski was the only Republican to vote for cloture, perhaps liberated by the fact that she won her last election as a write-in candidate, thus freeing herself of party discipline – which in the Republicans’ case effectively means discipline by the N.R.A. In this year’s Republican Senate primary in Indiana, the N.R.A. spent $200,000 toward the successful effort to defeat the incumbent, Richard Lugar, attacking the six-term senator [ http://www.nrapvf.org/DefeatLugar ] for, among other sins, having voted to confirm “both of Barack Obama’s anti-gun nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
When I wrote a year ago [ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/rock-bottom/ ] about the fate of Caitlin Halligan’s appeals court nomination, I tried to puzzle out the basis for the opposition. Silly me, I thought it had something to do with Republicans not wanting a young (she had just turned 45), highly qualified judge sitting in the D.C. Circuit’s famous launch position (hello, John Roberts, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Warren Burger . . .)
Now I realize it’s not about anything so sophisticated. It’s about the N.R.A., which announced its opposition [ http://www.nraila.org/legislation/federal-legislation/2011/12/nra-opposes-the-nomination-of-caitlin-h.aspx ] days before the cloture vote last December. It was only the second time in the organization’s history that it had opposed a nomination at the non-Supreme Court level. (The first was Abner Mikva in 1979, a former member of Congress from Chicago who won confirmation and who later served as President Bill Clinton’s White House counsel.) In a previous job as New York State’s solicitor general, Ms. Halligan, a former Supreme Court law clerk who is now general counsel to the Manhattan district attorney, had represented the state in a lawsuit against gun manufacturers. So much for her.
So that’s my N.R.A. story. The question is what anyone can do about it. The N.R.A. has embedded itself so deeply into the culture of Republican politics that it would take a cataclysm to break the bonds of money and fear that keep Republican office holders captive to the gun lobby’s agenda.
Well, a cataclysm just occurred, a few dozen miles from my office at Yale Law School. (My late father-in-law was born on a farm in the Sandy Hook neighborhood of Newtown.) There will be legislative proposals, and members of the Senate and House will debate them, maybe even enact a few, and people back home can decide what they think. How to get a handle on the gun problem is not my point. Rather, I want to offer the judicial nomination story as a canary in the mine, a warning about the depths to which the power of the gun lobby has brought the political system.
My point is this: It is totally unacceptable for the N.R.A., desperate to hang on to its mission and its members after achieving its Second Amendment triumph [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/07-290.ZS.html ] at the Supreme Court four years ago, to be calling the tune on judicial nominations for an entire political party. Free the Republican caucus. Follow Lisa Murkowski’s lead. Recognize a naked power play for what it is. Voters who think they care about the crisis of gun violence in America are part of the problem, not the solution – they are enablers if they aren’t willing to help their elected representatives cast off the N.R.A.’s chains. Call for an end to the cowardly filibuster against Caitlin Halligan, whose nomination the president resubmitted in September. The next time a senator announces opposition to a judicial nominee, demand something other than incoherent mumbo-jumbo. Tell the senator to fill in the blank: “I oppose this nominee because ____.” If there’s an answer of substance, fine. That’s advise-and-consent democracy. But if, upon inspection, the real answer is “because the N.R.A. told me to,” we have a problem. Based on these last few years, I think we do.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/the-n-r-a-at-the-bench/ [with comments]
===
I Was a Teenage Gun Nut
Eddie Adams/AP Images
By Andy Hinds
Dec 28 2012, 2:12 PM ET
Ducking behind a concrete wall, I brushed the hot barrel of the M16 against my ear and yelped in pain. The barrel glowed orange against the black sky. They said you could melt the barrel if you fired on full-auto for too long. One of my buddies saw what I had done and shook his head in disdain. We were a rag-tag squad, in hand-me-down fatigues of every style, festooned with canteens and ammo pouches that smelled like mothballs and surplus store mold. Most of us had barely started shaving, and few of us were old enough to drive.
When I was a freshman in high school, I didn't know anyone who owned an assault weapon. No one I knew had parents who owned military-style rifles; or, if they did, the kids didn't talk about it. There were no pop songs that called out brand names of guns, and, if there was such a thing as a first-person shooter videogame back in 1982, they didn't have it at the bowling alley near my suburban townhouse—the only place my friends and I ever played games more sophisticated than Pong.
Guys I went to high school with got drunk, smoked pot, got in fistfights, crashed cars, got bored, stole things, got girls pregnant, and did all the other stupid stuff boys do today. But they didn't really play with guns, or even talk about guns much. Of course, living in the suburbs of D.C., which at the time was essentially still the Virginia countryside, some of my classmates were hunters; but that was considered too rural to be cool. Far more boys would have known that Edelbrock made carburetors than would have recognized Glock as the brand name of a pistol. If you wanted to mess around with military weapons, or simply geek out about them with like-minded peers, you needed to go out of your way.
Today, kids (especially boys) grow up interacting with gun violence in ways that makes it seem sexy and exciting, and they grow up knowing that it will be easy to acquire real guns like the ones they see in movies and games, legally as soon as they're old enough, or illegally whenever they want. Since the 1980s, firearms manufacturers have reacted to declines in demand for hunting rifles by increasingly focusing their production and marketing on pistols and "assault weapons" [ http://www.vpc.org/press/1106atf.htm ] (a term gun advocates hate, but which I will use here for lack of a better one). And increasingly hyper-realistic videogames have featured recognizable incarnations of those weapons, sometimes even providing links to the manufacturers' website [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/25/business/real-and-virtual-firearms-nurture-marketing-link.html?pagewanted=all ] in a macabre product placement scheme. Along with more gun porn in music, movies, and TV, the combination of weapons marketing and violent videogames has helped to make gun fetishism mainstream within the last few decades. However, it was not that long ago when the idea that a civilian would have a desire to own an assault weapon seemed suspicious, or at the very least, odd.
Being an old guy, I can only speak to current attitudes about guns among young people based on my stint teaching high school, and on what I have read about the topic. But I can attest first-hand to the fact that enthusiasm about tactical weapons was not considered normal when I was a 15-year old.
My road to joining a paramilitary scouting group was tortuous. The short version is that I had been a debauched 13-year-old punk rocker, who had become a 14-year-old "straight-edge" (anti-drugs and drinking) punk, and finally an angry 15-year-old with nationalistic views and an aching desire to blow shit up. This is a simplified version of the 15-year-old me: My parents would tell you that I was a friendly, funny, helpful kid who loved playing with his dog and chopping firewood, and that would be true, too.
But I was dealing with a dangerous combination of testosterone, suburban isolation, and an attitude that made it difficult for me to channel the aggression that a lot of teen boys sublimate in socially acceptable ways. I wasn't great at team sports, and so I decided that sports were stupid. I played guitar and bass, but everybody else at my school that I might have played in a band with liked popular (i.e. stupid) music. I had a weight bench in the basement that I used faithfully, and that helped. If I was lucky enough to catch a ride with an older friend to a punk show in D.C., flailing in the pit went a long way toward bleeding off the unfocused anger. When idle, though, I stewed in hatred toward the TV programming that I endlessly stared at out of boredom, the jocks and rednecks who beat me up for being a punk, the stoners who listened to irrelevant classic rock, the girls who wouldn't have anything to do with me, the grownups who oppressed me, and the posers who tried to be friends with me.
So when one of my classmates, a nerdy reject I tolerated because he liked punk rock and, like me, hated everyone in our school, told me about this group he was in where they got to shoot real assault rifles and machine guns, my interest was piqued.
Despite being an avowed non-joiner, I signed up for the chapter of Explorer scouts that was attached to the National Guard unit in Manassas, Virginia. Most Explorer troops back then were associated with law enforcement and firefighting (these days they also work with Border Patrol and FBI [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/us/14explorers.html ]), with the aim of getting kids interested in careers in those fields. Our troop existed as a recruiting tool for the military.
My friend's mom and my mom took turns driving us (an hour each way) out to the National Guard Armory for our weekly meetings. The meetings took about two hours and consisted of a short lesson on military procedures by either a guest speaker or our sponsor, a young lieutenant with a wispy mustache. The adults would then disappear, leaving us to drill under the command of the older scouts, one of whom often broke into a broad German accent and made us goose-step and Sieg Heil. We would practice marching and standing in various positions until the higher-ranking kids got bored, at which point we would talk about the most violent war movies available at Erol's Video and pass around copies of Soldier of Fortune magazine so we could take turns ogling pictures of pistols, assault rifles, and machine guns, and reading longingly about mercenaries in far-flung military conflicts. Some guys brought in Guns & Ammo as well, but it was too tame in those days, featuring endless photos of shotguns and dead bucks. Whoever's mom had driven that week waited in the car, happy that my friend and I were participating in a legitimate extra-curricular activity for once.
The main reason we went to the meetings, aside from our common infatuation with firearms, was that attendance was mandatory for scouts who wanted to go on weekend maneuvers with the Guard once a month. Those weekends were when we got to fire live rounds from M16s, M60 machine guns, and M203 grenade launchers. Maneuvers would take place at one of several different military bases. The best location was Marine Corps Base Quantico, where we would have urban firefights (shooting blanks, of course) in Combat Town, a warren of concrete buildings designed for just that purpose. The exercise always devolved into a free-for-all, with all of us weekend warriors emptying clip after clip of blanks until we couldn't see past the end of our rifles for all the smoke in the air. After the battle, we would snuggle up with the rifles we had checked out from the armory, and camp out under our rain ponchos. But I could never get to sleep with all the adrenaline buzzing around in my head.
Between drill weekends, my friend and I watched movies about the Vietnam War, studied Army field manuals with pictures and specifications of different weapons, and used my dad's tools to build wooden versions of our favorite assault rifles for playing war. We even recruited other kids from school to go on "missions" with us in the middle of the night, sneaking out of our houses, creeping around in the woods, and inflicting minor damage on our largely inanimate "targets."
My gun obsession was not considered cool back at school, though. Classmates found my interest in firearms even weirder than my love of bands that didn't sound anything like Journey. And on the day that the four or five of us from my school who had joined the Explorers showed up for first period in fatigues and camo face-paint in an effort to recruit more students, even the administrators were worried. I don't think anyone thought we were armed or meant harm to our classmates, because that kind of thing was unheard of. They just thought it was disturbing and disruptive. They made us wash our faces and sent us off to class.
In 2013, if a handful of students showed up to school in camouflage face-paint, the campus would go on lockdown, and rightly so. In the context of 1982, though, the decision the administrators at my school made was sensible. School shootings, or at least the indiscriminately lethal sieges that have happened with such regularity in the past 15 years or so, were virtually unheard of. Other factors contributed to the relative scarcity of these tragedies, of course. But before firearms manufacturers started pushing to normalize ownership of military weapons by civilians, the idea that a kid might have access to a gun specifically designed to kill people wouldn't have seemed like a serious possibility.
As much as I was infatuated by military guns and the idea of someday using them in my future career as a mercenary (a dream that lost its luster once I got a driver's license and learned how to be less repulsive to girls), I would have had no idea where to begin trying to get my hands on one. The only assault rifles I had ever seen in real life were locked up in the armory whenever they were not in use. Thankfully, the gun industry had not yet enticed ordinary citizens into thinking they needed M16s—a version of the AR-15, which is not just a favorite weapon of mass-shooters, but also the best-selling rifle in the country today—in their homes.
*
Related Story
The Gender Divide on Gun Control
http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/the-gender-divide-on-gun-control/266612/
*
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/i-was-a-teenage-gun-nut/266687/ [with comments]
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On Living Armed
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Dec 27 2012, 12:53 PM ET
Yesterday in the conversation between me and Jeff [ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/more-guns-less-crime-a-dialogue/266576/ ], the following quote appeared from me:
And the fact is that I would actually rather die by shooting than live armed.
One thing that happens in writing is sometimes you say something that its "catchy" and it gets repeated outside of the context in which it was actually said. To get clear, I think it's important to understand that I was responding to a question, and the question was not "What is your position on gun control? or "Do you think guns should be banned?" The question was:
If you were confronted with an "active shooter," do you think, in that moment, you might wish you had a gun?
And my response was:
I think that last question gets to the heart of a difference. I actually wouldn't wish I had a gun. I've shot a rifle at camp once, but that's about it. If I had a gun, there is a good chance I would shoot myself, thus doing the active shooter's work for him (it's usually "him.") But the deeper question is, "If I were confronted with an active shooter, would I wish to have a gun and be trained in its use?" It's funny, but I still don't know that I would. I'm pretty clear that I am going to die one day. That moment will not be of my choosing, and it almost certainly will not be too my liking. But death happens. Life -- and living -- on the other hand are more under my control. And the fact is that I would actually rather die by shooting than live armed.
This is not mere cant. It is not enough to have a gun, anymore than it's enough to have a baby. It's a responsibility. I would have to orient myself to that fact. I'd have to be trained and I would have to, with some regularity, keep up my shooting skills. I would have to think about the weight I carried on my hip and think about how people might respond to me should they happen to notice. I would have to think about the cops and how I would interact with them, should we come into contact. I'd have to think about my own anger issues and remember that I can never be an position where I have a rage black-out. What I am saying is, if I were gun-owner, I would feel it to be really important that I be a responsible gun-owner, just like, when our kids were born, we both felt the need to be responsible parents. The difference is I like "living" as a parent. I accept the responsibility and rewards of parenting. I don't really want the responsibilities and rewards of gun-ownership. I guess I'd rather work on my swimming. And I think, given the concentration of guns in a smaller and smaller number of hands, there's some evidence that society agrees.
Which is not to say those of us who don't own guns don't want to live. We do. But it's not clear that this particular way of living will even be effective. I think about the shooter down at the Empire State Building a few months back. The police showed up to protect the public and ended in a shoot-out with a guy. Nine bystanders were wounded -- all at the hands of the police. It's just not clear to me that this sort of situation wouldn't repeat itself, but with citizens doing the wounding. With that kind of risk, perhaps it's better to handle "gun safety" before we get to the moment of an "active shooter."
I can't really make people not pick a phrase out and deploy it. But I want to ask that people consider the argument as a whole, and consider what, exactly, the comment is a response to.
For some time now, this blog has spent a good deal of time discussing the morality of violence. For the most part this is about blackness. That's what leads me to ask whether Nat Turner was right [ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/was-nat-turner-right/263068/ ] and whether the death of 600,000 people in the Civil War was actually tragic [ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/08/the-civil-war-isnt-tragic-cont/243713/ ]. That's what leads me to look at the violence which African-Americans regularly contend with -- whether its the intimate violence of spanking our kids [ http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2010/01/race-parenting-and-punishment/34005/ ], the intra-community violence of crime [ http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2009/09/the-limits-of-compassion/27411/ ], the extra-community violence of the police [ http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2009/03/a-little-more-on-prince-jones/6967/ ]. And from all thought I've sought to understand what violence does to the actual individual -- how black people (black males, specifically) alter their behaviors to cope [ http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Struggle-Father-Unlikely-Manhood/dp/0385527462 ], and how that alteration fares out in the larger world [ http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2010/10/a-culture-of-poverty/64854/ ].
My working conclusion has basically been that violence is sometimes not only necessary, but essential. In those moments (like the Civil War), I tend to dislike the tragic-mournful pose, not because I love violence but because I have found that the "tragic-mournful pose" is almost always selectively applied. This is not just a matter of the Civil War. It's pretty routine to condemn the violent street pose of young black men, without granting that the pose is the product of an intelligent assessment of one's surroundings. (I've written on all of those. It's all linked.)
But I also believe that one does not simply do violence -- or live prepared for violence -- and remain the same. I carry all of West Baltimore with me, and I am in constant conversation over the fact that that part of me is wholly inappropriate for this world. That part -- the part that is analyzing every person who walks up on me, who is trying to figure out every angle, who sees a crowd and walks the other way -- is fit for a world of violence. That pose is totally draining. (It has no time to go off and learn French.)
So if you ask me if I wished to have a gun when an active shooter is present, then I will tell you that guns don't magically appear in the holster, that the capacity to do lethal violence requires an expense of time, energy, and responsibility, which I I would rather not make. I would tell you that I have, already, spent too much of my life preparing for violence. I would say that the person who should wish to have a gun in that situation, should be a person capable of shooting a gun, and a person comfortable with the responsibility of carrying a gun during the 99.9 percent of the time when violence -- much less lethal violence -- is wholly inappropriate.
A gun is power. And power demands responsibility. I don't want to spend my time that way. I am tired of assessing the angle of random dudes. I'm more interested in the angle on this Augustine fellow.
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/on-living-armed/266658/ [with comments]
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3-year-old in Oklahoma fatally shoots himself in accident after finding his state trooper uncle's loaded gun
Ryder Rozier, 3, fatally shot himself accidentally on Saturday after finding a loaded firearm at his uncle’s home. His uncle, Ian Rozier, had several guns in his house near Guthrie, Okla.
December 18, 2012
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/boy-3-killed-playing-uncle-gun-article-1.1223270 [with comments]
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North Carolina man shoots brother to death in chest after believing he was an intruder: police
December 30, 2012
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/n-man-fatally-shoots-brother-chest-police-article-1.1229825 [with comments]
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Alabama boy, 15, accidentally shot in head during prank
October 15, 2012
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ala-teen-accidentally-shot-prank-article-1.1183592 [with comments]
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Chicago father fires gun at daughter’s boyfriend, strikes her by accident
December 2, 2012
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/father-fires-gun-daughter-boyfriend-strikes-accident-article-1.1211832 [with comments]
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Albert Einstein vs. the National Assault Rifle Association
12/30/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-b-cohen-esq/nra-assault-rifles_b_2385592.html [with comments]
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Sheriff Arpaio Wants Armed Volunteers at Schools
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio speaks to Republican Party supporters at a festival in Mesa, Arizona in October 2012.
Dec. 28, 2012
[...]
"It doesn't matter whether they like it or don't like it," Arpaio said, regarding whether schools want armed guards. "I'm still going to do it. I can't imagine criticism coming when they're given free protection."
[...]
http://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/Politics/sheriff-arpaio-armed-volunteers-schools/story?id=18084500 [with comments]
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Joe Arpaio accepted award from neo-Confederate group
Exclusive: The infamous sheriff "gratefully accepted" an award from the Sons of Confederate Veterans last year
Dec 27, 2012
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/27/joe_arpaio_accepted_award_from_neo_confederate_group/ [with comments]
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Michele Bachmann Wins WND's 'Woman Of The Year' Award
By Nick Wing
Posted: 12/28/2012 3:20 pm EST | Updated: 12/29/2012 1:23 am EST
After examining Earth's female population in search of a candidate deserving of its "Woman of the Year" award, rightwing outlet WorldNetDaily has chosen [ http://www.wnd.com/2012/12/gop-rock-star-named-woman-of-the-year/ ] Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) as the planet's most worthy recipient.
Judging women based on the qualities of "goodness, womanliness, perseverance and character," WND lauds Bachmann for being a "gutsy, pro-life fiscal conservative who dared to vote against raising the debt ceiling."
WND continues: "She’s a God-fearing, gun-loving advocate of tax cuts and domestic oil drilling -- and has proven to be one of Obamacare’s worst nightmares."
Bachmann bested runner-ups Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R), German Chancellor Angela Merkel and outspoken conservative antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly, among others, to win the honor.
The congresswoman tells WND that the biggest story of the year for her was witnessing the Supreme Court rule that President Barack Obama's health care reform was constitutional, the implications of which, she said, would be be "felt for years to come."
In making this claim, Bachmann is overlooking some of her own biggest headlines of 2012. She began the year as a presidential candidate, only to drop out [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/04/michele-bachmann-concedes-iowa-caucus_n_1182490.html ] after finishing in a disappointing sixth place in the Iowa caucuses. Over the summer she drew widespread criticism for mounting a crusade against Obama administration personnel -- including Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- who Bachmann claimed had nefarious ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Bachmann rounded out the year with an electoral victory in November, however, narrowly defeating Democratic challenger Jim Graves to retain her seat in Congress, after outspending him 12 to 1 [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/02/michele-bachmann-jim-graves_n_2067274.html?utm_hp_ref=elections-2012 ].
For Bachmann's entire interview, as well as a picture of the Bachmann family Christmas card, click over to WND [ http://www.wnd.com/2012/12/gop-rock-star-named-woman-of-the-year/ ].
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/28/michele-bachmann-wnd_n_2376965.html [with comments]
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Woman Is Charged With Murder as a Hate Crime in a Fatal Subway Push
Erika Menendez, 31, charged with second-degree murder as a hate crime, was led out of the 112th Precinct in Queens on Saturday.
December 29, 2012
A 31-year-old woman was arrested on Saturday and charged with second-degree murder as a hate crime in connection with the death of a man who was pushed onto the tracks of an elevated subway station in Queens and crushed by an oncoming train.
The woman, Erika Menendez, selected her victim because she believed him to be a Muslim or a Hindu, Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney, said.
“The defendant is accused of committing what is every subway commuter’s nightmare: Being suddenly and senselessly pushed into the path of an oncoming train,” Mr. Brown said in an interview.
In a statement, Mr. Brown quoted Ms. Menendez, “in sum and substance,” as having told the police: “I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up.” Ms. Menendez conflated the Muslim and Hindu faiths in her comments to the police and in her target for attack, officials said.
The victim, Sunando Sen, was born in India and, according to a roommate, was raised Hindu.
Mr. Sen “was allegedly shoved from behind and had no chance to defend himself,” Mr. Brown said. “Beyond that, the hateful remarks allegedly made by the defendant and which precipitated the defendant’s actions should never be tolerated by a civilized society.”
[...]
Mr. Sen, after years of saving money, had opened a small copying business on the Upper West Side this year.
Ar Suman, a Muslim, and one of three roommates who shared a small first-floor apartment with Mr. Sen in Elmhurst, said he and Mr. Sen often discussed religion.
Though they were of different faiths, Mr. Suman said, he admired the respect that Mr. Sen showed for those who saw the world differently than he did. Mr. Suman said he once asked Mr. Sen why he was not more active in his faith and it resulted in a long philosophical discussion.
“He was so gentle,” Mr. Suman said. “He said in this world a lot of people are dying, killing over religious things.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/nyregion/woman-is-held-in-death-of-man-pushed-onto-subway-tracks-in-queens.html
===
Raymond Bell, Pastor Of The Cowboy Church of Virginia, Claims Stroking Horses Can 'Cure' Homosexuality
12/31/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/29/raymond-bell-cowboy-church-of-virginia-horses-gay_n_2381028.html [with comments]
===
Florida's Long Lines On Election Day Discouraged 49,000 People From Voting: Report
12/29/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/29/floridas-long-lines-election-voting_n_2381482.html [with (over 10,000) comments]; also http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/politics/os-discouraged-voters-20121229,0,215136.story [with comments]
===
Danny Hafley, Kentucky Man, Defends Watermelon-Eating Obama Display: He 'Might Get Hungry'
Posted: 12/27/2012 9:14 pm EST | Updated: 12/28/2012 8:21 pm EST
Danny Hafley of Casey County, Ky. said this week that people are reading the mannequin in his front yard depicting President Barack Obama eating a watermelon completely wrong.
"The way I look at it, it's freedom of speech," Hafley told Lex 18 in a recent interview [ http://www.lex18.com/news/casey-county-man-defends-controversial-obama-display/ ], going on to state that he had included the watermelon not in attempt to play to any racist stereotypes, but because the statue "might get hungry standing out here."
According to Hafley, the display is "popular" and a frequent draw for people passing by to stop and take pictures.
(Watch a video report [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTVy07XVeAI (above; article has the longer complete version of the report embedded)] from Lex 18 reporter Adam Yosim)
Watermelon imagery has been utilized in anti-Obama efforts in the past, usually by those claiming there is no racist sentiment behind the choice.
In 2009, a mayor of Los Alamitos, Calif. resigned his post [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/27/mayor-who-sent-obama-wate_n_170492.html ] after sending an e-mail showing watermelons in front of the White House, alongside the text "No Easter egg hunt this year." He maintained that he wasn't aware of the racial stereotype that African Americans like watermelon.
And earlier this year, a resident of Santa Clara, Calif. included a watermelon [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/09/obama-empty-chair-california_n_1951000.html ] in his anti-Obama display that also featured an empty chair -- a reference to Hollywood star Clint Eastwood's bizarre Republican National Convention speech [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/30/clint-eastwood-speech_n_1844908.html ] -- a noose, and a sign telling the president to "go back to Kenya you idiot." The owner of that setup declined to comment at the time.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/27/danny-hafley-kentucky-obama_n_2372920.html [with comments]
===
The 9 Wildest Things Fox News Said In 2012
===
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Silencers could give the next Adam Lanza even more time to kill -- but to the NRA, they protect kids' hearing
By Alexander Zaitchik
Sunday, Dec 30, 2012 06:00 AM CST
A gruesome holiday season exercise: Think of some firearms and accessories that might have added to the body counts of Aurora and Newtown. More starkly, imagine the means by which coming Auroras and Newtowns will be made more deadly.
The exercise starts with a militarized baseline, as both shooters unloaded designed-for-damage rounds from high-capacity magazines loaded into assault rifles. Improving their killing efficiency would require one of two things: the ability to shoot more bullets faster, or more time. A fully automatic machine gun would provide the first. More minutes to hunt, meanwhile, might be gained by employing a noise suppressor, those metallic tubes better known as silencers. By muffling the noise generated with every shot by sonic booms and gas release, a silencer would provide a new degree of intimacy for public mass murder, delaying by crucial seconds or minutes the moment when someone calls the police after overhearing strange bangs coming from Theater 4 or Classroom D. The same qualities that make silencers the accessory of choice for targeted assassination offer advantages to the armed psychopath set on indiscriminate mass murder.
It should surprise no one that the NRA has recently thrown its weight behind an industry campaign to deregulate and promote the use of silencers. Under the trade banner of the American Silencer Association [ http://americansilencerassociation.com/ ], manufacturers have come together with the support of the NRA to rebrand the silencer as a safety device belonging in every all-American gun closet. To nurture this potentially large and untapped market, the ASA last April sponsored the first annual all-silencer gun shoot [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAZ0KSZQG_U (next below)]
and trade show in Dallas. America’s silencer makers are each doing their part. SWR Suppressors is asking survivalists to send a picture of their “bugout bag” for a chance to win [ http://swrsuppressors.com/blog/are-you-prepared/ ] an assault rifle silencer. The firm Silencerco [ http://www.silencerco.com/ ] — “We Dig Suppressors and What They Do” — has put together a helpful “Silencers Are Legal [ http://www.silencersarelegal.com/ ]” website and produced a series of would-be viral videos featuring this asshole [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx8EJpL1Uhk (next below)].
This Silencer Awareness Campaign is today’s gun lobby in a bottle. The coordinated effort brings together the whole family: manufacturers, dealers, the gun press, rightwing lawmakers at every level of government, and the NRA. Each are doing their part to chip away at federal gun regulation in the name of profits and ideology. Together, they plan to strip the longstanding regulatory regime around silencers, and reintroduce them to the gun-buying public as wholesome, children-friendly accessories, as harmless as car mufflers.
In case you’re wondering, the answer is yes, the gun lobby’s grand strategy rests grotesquely on fake concern for child hearing health. Among the opening shots in the campaign was a feature in the February 2011 issue of Gun World, “Silence is Golden,” penned by the veteran gun writer Jim Dickson. “One only has to look at children in the rest of the world learning to shoot with silencers, protecting their tender young ears, to see what an innocent safety device we are talking about here,” writes Dickson. “To use an overworked propaganda phrase, legalize silencers ‘for the sake of the children.’” [Emphasis mine.]
Proponents of healthy hearing will be heartened to know the NRA shares Gun World’s concern for America’s tender young ears. The organization officially entered the silencer-awareness fray in November of 2011, around the time the Utah-based American Silencer Association was founded. It’s opening statement took the form of an article posted to its lobbying division website: “Suppressors: Good for our hearing… And for the shooting sports.” With this piece, the NRA finally acknowledged the relationship between health care costs and guns.
“Billions of dollars are spent every year in our healthcare system for hearing loss conditions, such as shooting-related tinnitus,” explained the NRA. It was a very important point that had long been overlooked in the gun control debate; because if there is a single pressing gun safety issue in America today, it is the hearing, comfort and convenience of recreational shooters who find orange earplugs unsightly. The NRA is also extremely concerned about the fright children may receive from shooting or standing near the reports of high-caliber weapons. These jolts could have a lasting and detrimental developmental impact, possibly imbuing America’s impressionable and tender young brains with the notion that guns are loud, dangerous things. The NRA firmly believes that American freedom is best served by giving 9mm gunfire the feel and sound of a toy cap gun. As the NRA’s Lacey Biles put it during last April’s Dallas Silencer Shoot, silencers are good for “getting younger folks involved [in guns]. They’re less afraid of the loud bang.”
For these reasons, the NRA believes America must “move to eliminate the laws, regulations and policies that discourage or prohibit suppressor use.”
And move we have. The NRA has enjoyed state-level success chipping away at restrictions on the use of silencers around the country, an effort that has proceeded largely unnoticed in the shadows of higher-profile battles over the spread of Concealed Carry and Stand Your Ground laws. Silencers are currently legal with permit in 40 states, a growing number of which are rescinding bans on their use while hunting.
The gun lobby’s silencer campaign has bigger prey in mind than state hunting laws. Silencers are among the few accessories regulated by the National Firearms Act. To purchase or transfer a silencer, you must acquire a special license, enter the serial number in a federal registry, and pay a $200 fee. (The fee, which equaled a de facto ban in 1934, has not been adjusted for inflation in 79 years.) For gun extremists who struggle with introductory-level American history [ http://consortiumnews.com/2012/12/15/the-2nd-amendment-and-killing-kids/ ] and political theory [ http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/12/20121226104857715225.html ], the licensing regime is half Stamp Act, half Yellow Badge. What most outrages the manufacturers about the regime is that it works. By licensing silencers, tracking and taxing their exchange, the government has kept them from flooding the market like so many other military-market gun accessories with cameos in recent massacres and serial sniper attacks. “Simple licensing requirements weeds out both blatant criminals and a certain kind of stockpiling insurrectionist who refuses to engage with the federal government,” says Ladd Everitt of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “The law has been effective.”
Aside from offering a very expensive alternative to earplugs, what conceivable sporting or personal-defense purpose is served by pouring silencers into a gun market dominated by semi-automatic pistols and assault rifles? If history offers any useful clues, and it usually does, the answer is none. The history of the silencer is a twentieth century tale populated by Mafiosi hits, hidden snipers, and special ops ambush teams. It all adds up to decades worth of “negative branding baggage” that the gun lobby is now trying to scrub away like a used car-salesman winding back the speedometer on a lemon.
The silencer began innocently enough. When Hiram Percy Maxim patented the first silencer in 1908, he was just a nice fellow working in the family business, a guy who simply enjoyed finding ways to make loud things quiet. Among Maxim’s many other inventions was an early muffler design for car engines. A quarter-century later, silencers still hadn’t acquired the bad rep they have today. Their best-known criminal use at the time of the 1934 law was as an aid in late-night poaching.
Society did not form its lasting perceptions of the silencer in the decades of Percy’s .22 pistols and midnight pig poaching. The image the NRA must scrub is the one that formed early in what might be called the Second Silencer Age, when a new breed of steel “cans” emerged and became associated with rapid, discreet, controlled killing. The silencers the gun lobby is trying to mainstream can make ninjas of high-caliber handguns, long-barrel sniper rifles, and assault weapons, all commonly featured in military-themed silencer ads. The Second Age that produced these tools was commenced not by a charming dynastic American industrial engineer with wide interests like Percy Maxim. Rather, it was born in the rural Georgia kill-gadget lab of a notoriously cracked and ruthless CIA black ops contractor, known in gun circles as the Wizard of Whistling Death.
* * *
Mitch WerBell gained his reputation for cold-blooded efficiency during his days with the CIA’s wartime precursor, the OSS. After the war he maintained his ties to the Agency as a man who could be depended on to figure out how make problems go away. His accomplished his revolutionary leap in silencer technology in 1967, during a short break from international intrigue. The previous year, federal agents raided WerBell’s mercenary training camp in Florida, where he was in the final stages of preparing an army of Miami-based Cubans to invade Haiti and oust “Papa Doc” François Duvalier [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Duvalier ].
WerBell patented his silencer under the name of his boutique weapons development firm, SIONICS, or Studies In the Operational Negation of Insurgents and Counter-Subversion. WerBell’s silencer was the first to successfully muffle automatic and semi-automatic weapons fire. On some weapons, the silencer also increased accuracy and power. Knowing he had a big breakthrough on his hands, WerBell convinced a group of rich investors that his invention would make them new fortunes, and just maybe win the Cold War for the West along the way. Oddly, the gang of investors included the eccentric and liberal antiwar philanthropist Stewart R. Mott. According to some accounts, WerBell sold Mott by telling him the principles behind the silencer could be adapted to lawn mowers and other devices to reduce suburban noise pollution.
WerBell’s silencer not only decreased the volume of the gun’s report and increased its accuracy; it also reduced the powder flash of machine gun fire, opening up new possibilities for nighttime ambush and assassination missions. WerBell packed his silencer and flew to Indochina, where he wowed American and South Vietnamese brass. Orders from the Pentagon soon followed, and in 1968 WerBell began large-scale production of his silencers under a SIONICS subsidiary he named Environmental Industries, a sarcastic reference to his intended contribution to solving the strains of overpopulation.
The timing of the new silencer’s introduction to Vietnam was just right for business. By 1968, the U.S. had pivoted from away from its early strategy that included an effort to “win hearts and minds,” and had embraced a model of search-and-destroy exemplified by the death squads of the CIA’s Phoenix Program. The M-16s carried by these special units were retrofitted with SIONICS silencers. They soon reported increased lethality and accuracy in ambushes and targeted killings. In his out-of-print 1978 masterpiece, “Spooks,” former Harper’s editor Jim Hougan reports that Green Beret officers singled WerBell’s invention out for praise in Congressional budget hearings.
According to Hougan, WerBell consumed the Army’s official kill counts like a 12-year-old reads box scores. From his compound in Georgia, he relished Pentagon data demonstrating his silencer’s economy and lethality. In the late 1970s, he boasted to Hougan that Army rifles equipped with his silencers helped kill nearly 2,000 Vietcong in the first six months, and reduced the number of bullets per kill to one-point-three rounds, a feat he boasted was “the greatest cost-effectiveness the Army’s ever known.” Whatever the actual numbers, the SIONICS silencer was widely recognized as a huge advance in the science of killing. WerBell emerged from the shadows to become a patriotic cult hero to the fathers of those now agitating for silencer deregulation. In 1972, WerBell played a starring role in David Truby’s admiring study of these new tools and their uses, “Silencers, Snipers, and Assassins: An Overview of Whispering Death.”
WerBell didn’t stop tinkering after reinventing the silencer. He also developed the gun he thought his silencer deserved. The result was the ultimate greaser. The ultra-sleek and compact MAC 11 weighed and sized little more than a conventional pistol and spat 14 bullets per second, or 850 a minute. Had WerBell been working today, he might have produced a semi-automatic version for the civilian market. In the early 1970s, the Pentagon was the only game in town. WerBell fought hard for but failed to land a massive contract to make the MAC a standard-issue weapon. Had he succeeded, SIONICS might be a household name today. (This is how gun empires are born. Gaston Glock designed his first gun competing in an open tender bid to produce a sidearm for the Austrian Army.)
The Pentagon’s rejection was the first of two that deepened WerBell’s bitterness at the government he served for so long. As he courted clients among foreign intelligence agencies, the State Department denied him an export license, arguing that the spread of WerBell’s silencers was likely to increase the risk of assassinations around the world. A sign of saner times gone by, there was in the early 1970s no American Silencer Association to help WerBell market his products to preppers with “bugout bags,” and no Wayne LaPierre or Chris Cox to strategize state and national-level assaults on the National Firearms Act. Instead, WerBell the Wizard of Whistling Death hit the road to peddle his remaining inventory on the global grey and black markets. He sold his wares out of a suitcase like the house-calling gun dealer in Taxi Driver, shooting up stacks of telephone books before giddy prospective clients who marveled over the little machine gun emitting such seductive sibilance, ssyyyt ssyyyt ssyyyt, the contract killer’s lullaby.
Before leaving the sideshow stage of history, WerBell made one last lunge for greatness. His hopes of building a gun empire stymied, in 1972 WerBell began planning an amphibious invasion of a tiny Bahamanian archipelago known as Abaco, which was home to a small separatist movement. WerBell enlisted financial support from real estate mogul and Libertarian Party leader Mike Oliver, whose Phoenix Foundation existed to seed utopic Libertarian projects like the one WerBell imagined on the beaches of Abaco — an independent global tax haven, home of SIONICS headquarters, and the Undisputed Silencer Capital of the World. As with his planned invasion of Haiti eight years prior, WerBell was still training his mercenaries when the whole thing fell apart from infighting and a surprise visit from the Feds.
* * *
Telling Mitch WerBell’s story is just a long way of demonstrating why the new NRA-backed Hearing Heath First! silencer-promotion campaign is a particularly hideous and towering architectural example of the Gun Lobby’s Nouveau Bat Shit Style, which if not ridiculed and condemned is guaranteed to crash down on all of us, leading to new and yet more lethal mutations in our national plague of gun violence.
There are very good reasons why the silencer industry is contending with a nasty case of Vietnam Syndrome. The reason the public associates silencers with death squads, assassination raids, and mafia hits is because these were the uses WerBell had in mind when he engineered them. They are also the uses to which they are best suited and most needed, if that’s the word. It wasn’t all that long ago that even the Freaks of Fairfax understood that the silencer’s dark reputation was deep and well deserved. As recently as 2000, the NRA showed a rare sensitivity for public perceptions and forbade a silencer manufacturer from exhibiting its wares at the NRA’s national convention. Kevin Brittingham, of the silencer maker Advanced Armament Co., says the NRA’s executive office called him [ http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2011/11/foghorn/nra-supports-silencers-finally/ ] before the millennial year convention in Charlotte and told him not to come. “We don’t want the news media focusing on your table and putting guns in a bad light,” the NRA explained.
A decade later, the NRA has cozied up to the industry view that everyone should have a silencer, and that the days are over when WerBell’s toys were the accessory love that dare not speak its name. The NRA now sees the widespread negative view of silencers as a branding problem to be corrected through advertising and public relations.
Toward this end, the gun lobby is on multiple fronts advancing the argument that silencer-phobia is the product of popular culture demonization and sensationalism.
“Unfortunately, too many Americans (including some gun owners) still fall victim to the unfair portrayals of silencers by Hollywood,” the NRA-ILA gently chides its members. Gun World’s Jim Dickson, meanwhile, prays for an America that allows its film industry to assist in “the transformation of an innocuous safety and noise-reduction device to a sinister assassin’s tool in the public mind.”
If anybody reading this needs one more nudge before abandoning in finality the idea of any kind of “dialogue” with the gun lobby, I suggest reading the NRA and the gun press bleat about the way violent movies have besmirched the good name of the honorable American silencer. They’re pointing to the same Hollywood gun makers routinely employ to product-place its wares, from best-selling pistols [ http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/02/24/most-product-placement-in-a-top-film-for-2010-and-the-award/ ; http://www.brandchannel.com/home/post/2011/01/12/How-A-Once-Exotic-German-Pistol-Brand-Became-A-Common-Staple-Of-American-Shooting-Massacres-DRAFT.aspx ] to fully automatic shotguns [ http://www.brandchannel.com/home/post/2010/07/07/AA-12-Product-Placement.aspx ]. (In 2011, Glock handguns made corporate cameos in 15 percent of No. 1 films.) The gun lobby pointing to Hollywood is as rich as Wayne LaPierre censuring video games, which thrives at the service of the gun-industry [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/25/business/real-and-virtual-firearms-nurture-marketing-link.html?pagewanted=all ] in ways we’re just now beginning to understand.
If the current campaign succeeds in delisting silencers from NFA regulation, the gun lobby likely won’t wait long before targeting the remaining regulatory regimes limiting the circulation of fully automatic machine guns and even hand grenades. Do not be surprised when you see a 2014 Gun World feature extolling freshwater blast fishing as a great way to connect kids and nature, while reducing the risks of fishing with sharp steel hooks, some of which have dangerous double jags. If you can’t see the safety rationale here, or the Freedom Logic that undergirds it, then you obviously do not care about America’s children and their millions of young tender fingers.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/30/silencers_the_nras_latest_big_lie/ [with comments]
--
Oil Filter Suppressor-FULL AUTO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haiqFcIXTqs
===
Babes in Arms
Nicholas Blechman
By BILL KELLER
Published: December 30, 2012
From: David Keene, president
To: Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president
Re: “Good Guys With Guns” Campaign, Phase Two
Dear Wayne,
Phase One of our plan to defuse that P.R. disaster in Newtown has had great results. Your performance at the news conference and on the weekend talk shows was masterly. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” It gave me goose bumps! We have answered the old bleeding-heart fallacy (guns are the problem) with a bold Second-Amendment response (guns are the solution). “Good guys with guns” (cc’ing Legal to see if we can TM) is undoubtedly the best slogan we’ve come up with since “Guns don’t kill people ...” and “If guns are outlawed ...” While the old slogans simply changed the subject, the new approach is positive and proactive. We’re actually for something now.
The polling team and psych consultants love that we have made “more guns in schools” a serious subject of mainstream discussion. We’re particularly proud of the idea that advertising a “gun-free school” is an open invitation to homicidal crazies. Take THAT Michael Bloomberg! For years we have owned the issue of freedom. Now we stand a good chance of owning the issue of safety.
And it should not go unmentioned that this whole project has been greeted with appreciation by our friends in the manufacturing and sales community. First, by reviving the fear of confiscation, we helped generate a nice little just-in-case pre-Christmas bump in firearm sales. And of course more guns in schools will mean a significant boost in demand. I have the Development team stepping up its outreach to a grateful industry.
Still, the issue has not receded as quickly as we anticipated. As you know, Research estimates that the mean lapsed time from a high-body-count firearm event to baseline apathy is nine days. Yet this particular event has continued to receive media attention through the Christmas season, the clamor on the pro-disarmament editorial pages continues, and the polling metrics continue to be unfavorable. A few of our friends on the Hill are wobbly.
Therefore I think we need to gear up for Phase Two, with the option of executing early in the new year if the public fails to return to its standard level of indifference.
To recap, Phase Two is tentatively called Arm Our Kids — A.O.K. — and its objective is a comprehensive K-12 carry program. If an armed guard in every school is prudent, how much more secure will we feel to have a Smith & Wesson in every cubby? We all know (as the media scolds keep pointing out) there was an armed sheriff’s deputy on duty at Columbine High School the day Harris and Klebold committed their mayhem; but he was eating lunch. So let’s up the ante to full coverage, from toddler to teen, from assembly to dismissal. Even the most deranged killer will think twice about entering a classroom knowing any of those adorable youngsters could be a licensed, trained, locked and loaded, Glock-packing Good Guy.
I know a few board members have expressed concern that this campaign could encounter significant backlash, and not just from the nanny-state brigade. But it is the logical evolution of our safety argument, and it appeals to a core American value, individual responsibility. I anticipate that with our usual combination of messaging and political muscle, we can enroll a significant number of school districts. But even if we fall short on penetration, A.O.K. will give the chatterers something to chatter about besides ammo clips and the gun-show loophole.
Research has promised data by next week on how many jobs would be created by a comprehensive program, including not only ramped-up firearms and accessories production but also new demand for trainers, shooting-range operators, and engineers to develop new lines of weapons for little fingers.
Here are a few other issues for consideration:
Spokesman. There will never be a frontman to match Charlton Heston, God rest his soul. Former Congressman Asa Hutchinson [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57560684/asa-hutchinson-digs-in-on-arming-schools/ ], as the head of our National School Shield Program, has struck just the right note of smooth, always-on-message reasonableness. The man could sell snake oil to snakes. But for the next phase we need mom appeal. Is Sarah Palin too obvious? Maybe one of the doctor-moms on “Grey’s Anatomy” — Hey! The pregnant one!
Curriculum. We will be presenting this as not just a safety program but an educational opportunity, with training to improve situational awareness and quick judgment. (Can we get that “Blink” guy to do a testimonial?) Also, I am sure Rick Perry would happily tell the Texas State Board of Education to work with us on a line of animated textbooks that restores firearms to their proper place in American history and integrates issues like caliber and muzzle velocity into the math curriculum.
Merchandising. Marketing is confident that we will have no problem migrating the boy market from toy guns and video arcades to live fire. The Cub Scouts already promote BB-gun skills [ http://www.scouting.org/scoutsource/HealthandSafety/GSS/gss07.aspx ]. We’re checking to see whether they’re willing to expand into pistols and rifles, perhaps with a Good Guy merit badge. But much remains to be done on the girl front. I’m attaching the early test-market results from the “My Little Colt” product (comes in a rainbow of colors, but pink is still the clear winner). We’ve been in touch with half a dozen makers of bulletproof backpacks [ http://www.theage.com.au/world/sales-of-bulletproof-school-bags-soar-20121224-2bul0.html ], including one with a Disney Princess line. We’ve also scheduled meetings with a few more companies to propose branding opportunities. How about a “Little House on the Prairie” holster line? Or, from the makers of the Easy-Bake Oven, a line of Easy-Cast home bullet-making kits?
Military tie-in. The Pentagon has not been terribly responsive to our proposal to embrace this as a boon to the volunteer military, but we will continue to work that angle. Meanwhile, I’ve had a strange call from someplace in Africa — is there a country called Sergio Leone? — where they claim to have had a whole ARMY of kids who really did the job. We need to check that out.
Endorsements. A board member suggested we align ourselves with Mike Huckabee, who, as you know, linked the Newtown killings to the abolition of prayer in schools. The idea would be to add a little First Amendment kick to our Second Amendment campaign — first they get rid of God, then they get rid of guns, or something like that. Worth exploring. Although, between us, personally I find these religious zealots a little creepy.
Happy New Year!
David
*
Related
N.R.A. Envisions ‘a Good Guy With a Gun’ in Every School (December 22, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/us/nra-calls-for-armed-guards-at-schools.html
Times Topic: National Rifle Association
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_rifle_association/index.html
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/opinion/keller-babes-in-arms.html [with comments]
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Gun Sales Surge In Wake Of Newtown Shooting As Panicked Enthusiasts Rush To Stock Up
By JOSEPH PISANI
12/28/12 08:57 PM ET EST
NEW YORK -- The phones at Red's Trading Post wouldn't stop ringing. Would-be customers from as far away as New York wanted to know if the Twin Falls, Idaho gun shop had firearms in stock. Others clamored to find out if their orders had been shipped.
Overwhelmed, gun store manager Ryan Horsley had to do what no employee would ever think of doing just days before Christmas: He disconnected the phone lines for three whole days.
"We had to shut everything off," says Horsley, whose family has owned Red's Trading Post, the state's oldest gun shop, since 1936. "We were swamped in the store and online."
The phones at gun shops across the country are ringing off the hook. Demand for firearms, ammunition and bulletproof gear has surged since the Dec. 14 massacre in Newtown, Conn., that took the lives of 20 schoolchildren and six teachers and administrators. The shooting sparked calls for tighter gun control measures, especially for military-style assault weapons like the ones used in Newtown and in the Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooting earlier this year. The prospect of a possible weapons ban has sent gun enthusiasts into a panic and sparked a frenzy of buying at stores and gun dealers nationwide.
Assault rifles are sold out across the country. Rounds of .223 bullets, like those used in the AR-15 type Bushmaster rifle used in Newtown, are scarce. Stores are struggling to restock their shelves. Gun and ammunition makers are telling retailers they will have to wait months to get more.
Store owners who have been in the business for years say they have never seen demand like this before.
When asked how much sales have increased in the past few weeks, Horsley just laughed.
"We haven't even had a chance to look at it," he says. Horsley spends his days calling manufacturers around the country trying to buy more items for the store. Mainly, they tell him he has to wait.
Franklin Armory, a firearm maker in Morgan Hill, Calif., is telling dealers that it will take six months to fulfill their orders. The company plans to hire more workers and buy more machines to catch up, says Franklin Armory's President Jay Jacobson.
The shortage is leaving many would-be gun owners empty handed.
William Kotis went to a gun show in Winston-Salem, N.C., last weekend hoping to buy a rifle for target shooting. Almost everything was sold out.
"Assault rifles were selling like crazy," says Kotis, who is president and CEO of Kotis Holdings, a real estate development company based in Greensboro. "People are stockpiling."
He left without buying anything.
Luke Orlando's parents were able to get him the 12-gauge shotgun he wanted for Christmas to bird hunt, but his uncle wasn't as lucky.
"At Christmas dinner, my uncle expressed outrage that after waiting six months to use his Christmas bonus to purchase an AR-15, they are sold out and back ordered over a year," says Orlando, 18, a student at the University of Texas.
No organization publicly releases gun sales data. The only way to measure demand is by the number of background checks that are conducted when someone wants to buy a firearm. Those numbers are released by the Federal Reserve Bureau every month. Data for December is not out yet. But the Federal Bureau of Investigation says that it did 16.8 million firearm background checks as of the end of November, up more than 2 percent from a year ago.
The Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which handles background checks for the state, can't keep up with the number of requests it is getting. The bureau has pulled staff from other units and increased its hours, says spokesperson Susan Medina.
Many firearm dealers and manufacturers say that Obama's comments since the Newtown school shooting are driving demand.
James Zimmerman of SelwayArmory.com, a website that sells guns, ammunition and knives, says that sales really took off on Dec. 19 after President Barack Obama held a White House press conference announcing that Vice President Joe Biden would lead a team tasked with coming up with "concrete proposals" to curb gun violence.
That day, one customer ordered 32,000 rounds of ammunition from SelwayArmory.com, worth close to $18,000. The order had to be shipped from the company's Lolo, Mont., office to Kentucky on a freight truck.
"I've done more sales in the week after the 19th than I have the whole year," says Zimmerman, who launched SelwayArmory.com in 2009.
At Lady Liberty Gunsmithing LLC in Atlantic City, N.J., a customer called last week asking if a pistol he wanted was available. When he was told there was only one left, he drove more than two hours from Newark, N.J., to buy it that same day.
"People want guns now even more than ever," says Guy Petinga II, whose father opened the store above his home in 1996.
Others saw demand immediately after the shooting.
Bullet Blocker, which makes bulletproof vests, briefcases and insert panels, saw sales of its children's backpacks suddenly jump.
"That's how I found out about the tragedy. I saw the sales rise and then turned on CNN," says Elmar Uy, vice president of business operations at the Billerica, Mass., company.
Bullet Blocker has sold about 50 to 100 bulletproof backpacks a day since the shooting, up from about 10 to 15 in a regular week. The children's backpacks, which are designed to be used as shields, cost over $200 each.
"I've never seen numbers like this before," says Uy.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/29/gun-sales-surge_n_2380738.html [with embedded video report, and (over 23,000) comments]
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Neighbour’s daughter bought Spengler guns used in firefighter ambush
The Associated Press and 680News staff
Dec 28, 2012 05:33:53 PM
The convicted felon, William Spengler, ambushed firefighters on Christmas Eve, killing two, couldn’t legally buy the guns he used.
He did however, pick out the semiautomatic rifle and shotgun and was in the sporting goods store with a neighbour’s daughter when she bought them for him, police said Friday.
The woman, Dawn Nguyen of Rochester, was arrested Friday.
Nguyen faces a federal charge of knowingly making a false statement for signing a form indicating she would be the legal owner of the guns, U.S. Attorney William Hochul said.
She also was charged with a state count of filing a falsified business record, State Police Senior Investigator James Newell said.
Newell said the charges are connected to the purchase of an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and a 12-gauge shotgun that William Spengler had with him Monday when firefighters Michael Chiapperini and Tomasz Kaczowka were gunned down.
Three other people were wounded before the 62-year-old Spengler killed himself. He also had a .38-calibre revolver, but Nguyen is not connected to that gun, Newell said.
Hochul said Nguyen bought the guns on June 6, 2010, on behalf of Spengler, who as a convicted felon was barred from possessing weapons.
“She told the seller of these guns, Gander Mountain in Henrietta, New York, that she was to be the true owner and buyer of the guns instead of William Spengler,” he said. “It is absolutely against federal law to provide any materially false information related to the acquisition of firearms.”
“It is sometimes referred to acting as a straw purchaser and that is exactly what today’s complaint alleges,” Hochul said.
The .223-calibre Bushmaster rifle, which had a combat-style flash suppressor, is similar to the one used by the gunman who massacred 20 children and six women in a Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school earlier this month.
Nguyen and her mother, Dawn Welsher, lived next door to Spengler in 2008.
On Wednesday and again on Friday, shortly before her arrest, she answered her cellphone and told The Associated Press that she didn’t want to talk about Spengler.
Her brother, Steven Nguyen, told the Democrat and Chronicle newspaper of Rochester that Spengler stole the guns from Dawn Nguyen.
A number listed in the name of her lawyer, David Palmiere, was disconnected.
Spengler set a car on fire and touched off an inferno in his Webster home on a strip of land along the Lake Ontario shore, took up a sniper’s position and opened fire on the first firefighters to arrive at about 5:30 a.m. on Christmas Eve, authorities said.
He wounded two other firefighters and an off-duty police officer who was on his way to work.
A Webster police officer who had accompanied the firefighters shot back at Spengler with a rifle in a brief exchange of gunfire before the gunman killed himself.
Spengler spent 17 years in prison for killing his grandmother in 1980.
Investigators still haven’t released the identity of remains found in William Spengler’s burned house.
They have said they believe the remains are those of his 67-year-old sister, Cheryl Spengler, who also lived in the house near Rochester and has been unaccounted for since the killings.
The Spengler siblings had lived in the home with their mother, Arline Spengler, who died in October. In all, seven houses were destroyed by the flames.
Investigators found a rambling, typed letter laying out Spengler’s intention to destroy his neighbourhood and “do what I like doing best, killing people.”
He had been released from parole in 2006 on the manslaughter conviction, and authorities said they had had no encounters with him since.
The federal charges carry a maximum penalty of ten years imprisonment, a fine of $250,000 or both.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press and Rogers Communications
http://www.680news.com/2012/12/28/neighbours-daughter-bought-spengler-guns-used-in-firefighter-ambush/ [no comments yet]
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Rob Woodall: End Federal Gun Laws
Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Ga.) said in June that all federal gun laws should be eliminated.
12/28/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/28/rob-woodall-gun-laws_n_2375476.html [with comments]
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How Big Data Can Solve America's Gun Problem
The private sector has all the tools we need to flag rapid weapons build-ups and suspicious purchases. All that's needed is the political will to build the most basic database.
Dec 27 2012
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/12/how-big-data-can-solve-americas-gun-problem/266633/ [with comments]
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The N.R.A. at the Bench
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
December 26, 2012, 9:00 pm
There has been plenty written about the National Rifle Association in recent days. But nothing that I’ve seen has focused on the gun lobby’s increasingly pernicious role in judicial confirmations. So here’s a little story.
Back in 2009, when President Obama chose Judge Sonia Sotomayor as his first Supreme Court nominee, the White House expected that her compelling personal story, sterling credentials, and experience both as a prosecutor and, for 17 years, as a federal judge would win broad bipartisan support for her nomination. There was, in fact, no plausible reason for any senator to vote against her.
The president’s hope was Senator Mitch McConnell’s fear. In order to shore up his caucus, the Senate Republican leader asked a favor of his friends at the National Rifle Association: oppose the Sotomayor nomination and, furthermore, “score” the confirmation vote. An interest group “scores” a vote when it adds the vote on a particular issue to the legislative scorecard it gives each member of Congress at the end of the session. In many states, an N.R.A. score of less than 100 for an incumbent facing re-election is big trouble.
Note that the N.R.A. had never before scored a judicial confirmation vote. Note also that Sonia Sotomayor had no record on the N.R.A.’s issues. (True, she voted with an appeals court panel to uphold New York State’s ban on nunchucks, a martial-arts weapon consisting of two sticks held together with a chain or rope, commonly used by gang members and muggers. The appeals court didn’t even reach the interesting issue of whether the Second Amendment guaranteed the right to keep and bear nunchucks, ruling instead that the amendment didn’t apply to the states – which, before the Supreme Court later ruled otherwise [ http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-1521.pdf ] by a vote of 5 to 4, it didn’t.)
Never mind. The N.R.A. had all the reason it needed to oppose Sonia Sotomayor: maintenance of its symbiotic relationship with the Republican Party. Once it announced its opposition and its intention to score the vote, Republican support for the nominee melted away. Only seven Republicans voted for confirmation.
One senator, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, said by way of explaining her “no” vote that her constituents had expressed “overwhelming concern” about Judge Sotomayor’s views on the Second Amendment. However, Senator Murkowski told the National Journal at the time, “I am a bit concerned that the N.R.A. weighed in and said they were going to score this.” She added, “I don’t think that was appropriate.”
The following year, after the N.R.A. opposed Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court and announced [ http://www.nraila.org/kagan ] that “this vote matters and will be part of future candidate evaluations,” Republican support for another nominee without a record on gun issues shrank to five senators.
At least Supreme Court confirmation debates take place in the light of day. Members of the public can tune in and decide whether they are persuaded that Elena Kagan represents “a clear a present danger to the right to keep and bear arms,” to quote the N.R.A.’s statement of opposition to her nomination. (Justice Kagan had never owned or shot a gun, but since joining the court has taken lessons and gone hunting with Justice Antonin Scalia, pronouncing the experience “kind of fun [ http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/kagan_fulfills_a_promise_and_goes_hunting_with_justice_scalia/ ].”)
But the N.R.A. has begun to involve itself in lower court nominations as well, where it can work its will in the shadows. It has effectively blocked President Obama’s nomination of Caitlin J. Halligan to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that has been vacant since September 2005, when John G. Roberts Jr. moved to a courthouse up the street. The president has submitted the name of the superbly qualified Ms. Halligan to the Senate three times.
When the Democrats’ effort to break a Republican filibuster failed last year, Senator Murkowski was the only Republican to vote for cloture, perhaps liberated by the fact that she won her last election as a write-in candidate, thus freeing herself of party discipline – which in the Republicans’ case effectively means discipline by the N.R.A. In this year’s Republican Senate primary in Indiana, the N.R.A. spent $200,000 toward the successful effort to defeat the incumbent, Richard Lugar, attacking the six-term senator [ http://www.nrapvf.org/DefeatLugar ] for, among other sins, having voted to confirm “both of Barack Obama’s anti-gun nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
When I wrote a year ago [ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/rock-bottom/ ] about the fate of Caitlin Halligan’s appeals court nomination, I tried to puzzle out the basis for the opposition. Silly me, I thought it had something to do with Republicans not wanting a young (she had just turned 45), highly qualified judge sitting in the D.C. Circuit’s famous launch position (hello, John Roberts, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Warren Burger . . .)
Now I realize it’s not about anything so sophisticated. It’s about the N.R.A., which announced its opposition [ http://www.nraila.org/legislation/federal-legislation/2011/12/nra-opposes-the-nomination-of-caitlin-h.aspx ] days before the cloture vote last December. It was only the second time in the organization’s history that it had opposed a nomination at the non-Supreme Court level. (The first was Abner Mikva in 1979, a former member of Congress from Chicago who won confirmation and who later served as President Bill Clinton’s White House counsel.) In a previous job as New York State’s solicitor general, Ms. Halligan, a former Supreme Court law clerk who is now general counsel to the Manhattan district attorney, had represented the state in a lawsuit against gun manufacturers. So much for her.
So that’s my N.R.A. story. The question is what anyone can do about it. The N.R.A. has embedded itself so deeply into the culture of Republican politics that it would take a cataclysm to break the bonds of money and fear that keep Republican office holders captive to the gun lobby’s agenda.
Well, a cataclysm just occurred, a few dozen miles from my office at Yale Law School. (My late father-in-law was born on a farm in the Sandy Hook neighborhood of Newtown.) There will be legislative proposals, and members of the Senate and House will debate them, maybe even enact a few, and people back home can decide what they think. How to get a handle on the gun problem is not my point. Rather, I want to offer the judicial nomination story as a canary in the mine, a warning about the depths to which the power of the gun lobby has brought the political system.
My point is this: It is totally unacceptable for the N.R.A., desperate to hang on to its mission and its members after achieving its Second Amendment triumph [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/07-290.ZS.html ] at the Supreme Court four years ago, to be calling the tune on judicial nominations for an entire political party. Free the Republican caucus. Follow Lisa Murkowski’s lead. Recognize a naked power play for what it is. Voters who think they care about the crisis of gun violence in America are part of the problem, not the solution – they are enablers if they aren’t willing to help their elected representatives cast off the N.R.A.’s chains. Call for an end to the cowardly filibuster against Caitlin Halligan, whose nomination the president resubmitted in September. The next time a senator announces opposition to a judicial nominee, demand something other than incoherent mumbo-jumbo. Tell the senator to fill in the blank: “I oppose this nominee because ____.” If there’s an answer of substance, fine. That’s advise-and-consent democracy. But if, upon inspection, the real answer is “because the N.R.A. told me to,” we have a problem. Based on these last few years, I think we do.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/the-n-r-a-at-the-bench/ [with comments]
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I Was a Teenage Gun Nut
Eddie Adams/AP Images
By Andy Hinds
Dec 28 2012, 2:12 PM ET
Ducking behind a concrete wall, I brushed the hot barrel of the M16 against my ear and yelped in pain. The barrel glowed orange against the black sky. They said you could melt the barrel if you fired on full-auto for too long. One of my buddies saw what I had done and shook his head in disdain. We were a rag-tag squad, in hand-me-down fatigues of every style, festooned with canteens and ammo pouches that smelled like mothballs and surplus store mold. Most of us had barely started shaving, and few of us were old enough to drive.
When I was a freshman in high school, I didn't know anyone who owned an assault weapon. No one I knew had parents who owned military-style rifles; or, if they did, the kids didn't talk about it. There were no pop songs that called out brand names of guns, and, if there was such a thing as a first-person shooter videogame back in 1982, they didn't have it at the bowling alley near my suburban townhouse—the only place my friends and I ever played games more sophisticated than Pong.
Guys I went to high school with got drunk, smoked pot, got in fistfights, crashed cars, got bored, stole things, got girls pregnant, and did all the other stupid stuff boys do today. But they didn't really play with guns, or even talk about guns much. Of course, living in the suburbs of D.C., which at the time was essentially still the Virginia countryside, some of my classmates were hunters; but that was considered too rural to be cool. Far more boys would have known that Edelbrock made carburetors than would have recognized Glock as the brand name of a pistol. If you wanted to mess around with military weapons, or simply geek out about them with like-minded peers, you needed to go out of your way.
Today, kids (especially boys) grow up interacting with gun violence in ways that makes it seem sexy and exciting, and they grow up knowing that it will be easy to acquire real guns like the ones they see in movies and games, legally as soon as they're old enough, or illegally whenever they want. Since the 1980s, firearms manufacturers have reacted to declines in demand for hunting rifles by increasingly focusing their production and marketing on pistols and "assault weapons" [ http://www.vpc.org/press/1106atf.htm ] (a term gun advocates hate, but which I will use here for lack of a better one). And increasingly hyper-realistic videogames have featured recognizable incarnations of those weapons, sometimes even providing links to the manufacturers' website [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/25/business/real-and-virtual-firearms-nurture-marketing-link.html?pagewanted=all ] in a macabre product placement scheme. Along with more gun porn in music, movies, and TV, the combination of weapons marketing and violent videogames has helped to make gun fetishism mainstream within the last few decades. However, it was not that long ago when the idea that a civilian would have a desire to own an assault weapon seemed suspicious, or at the very least, odd.
Being an old guy, I can only speak to current attitudes about guns among young people based on my stint teaching high school, and on what I have read about the topic. But I can attest first-hand to the fact that enthusiasm about tactical weapons was not considered normal when I was a 15-year old.
My road to joining a paramilitary scouting group was tortuous. The short version is that I had been a debauched 13-year-old punk rocker, who had become a 14-year-old "straight-edge" (anti-drugs and drinking) punk, and finally an angry 15-year-old with nationalistic views and an aching desire to blow shit up. This is a simplified version of the 15-year-old me: My parents would tell you that I was a friendly, funny, helpful kid who loved playing with his dog and chopping firewood, and that would be true, too.
But I was dealing with a dangerous combination of testosterone, suburban isolation, and an attitude that made it difficult for me to channel the aggression that a lot of teen boys sublimate in socially acceptable ways. I wasn't great at team sports, and so I decided that sports were stupid. I played guitar and bass, but everybody else at my school that I might have played in a band with liked popular (i.e. stupid) music. I had a weight bench in the basement that I used faithfully, and that helped. If I was lucky enough to catch a ride with an older friend to a punk show in D.C., flailing in the pit went a long way toward bleeding off the unfocused anger. When idle, though, I stewed in hatred toward the TV programming that I endlessly stared at out of boredom, the jocks and rednecks who beat me up for being a punk, the stoners who listened to irrelevant classic rock, the girls who wouldn't have anything to do with me, the grownups who oppressed me, and the posers who tried to be friends with me.
So when one of my classmates, a nerdy reject I tolerated because he liked punk rock and, like me, hated everyone in our school, told me about this group he was in where they got to shoot real assault rifles and machine guns, my interest was piqued.
Despite being an avowed non-joiner, I signed up for the chapter of Explorer scouts that was attached to the National Guard unit in Manassas, Virginia. Most Explorer troops back then were associated with law enforcement and firefighting (these days they also work with Border Patrol and FBI [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/us/14explorers.html ]), with the aim of getting kids interested in careers in those fields. Our troop existed as a recruiting tool for the military.
My friend's mom and my mom took turns driving us (an hour each way) out to the National Guard Armory for our weekly meetings. The meetings took about two hours and consisted of a short lesson on military procedures by either a guest speaker or our sponsor, a young lieutenant with a wispy mustache. The adults would then disappear, leaving us to drill under the command of the older scouts, one of whom often broke into a broad German accent and made us goose-step and Sieg Heil. We would practice marching and standing in various positions until the higher-ranking kids got bored, at which point we would talk about the most violent war movies available at Erol's Video and pass around copies of Soldier of Fortune magazine so we could take turns ogling pictures of pistols, assault rifles, and machine guns, and reading longingly about mercenaries in far-flung military conflicts. Some guys brought in Guns & Ammo as well, but it was too tame in those days, featuring endless photos of shotguns and dead bucks. Whoever's mom had driven that week waited in the car, happy that my friend and I were participating in a legitimate extra-curricular activity for once.
The main reason we went to the meetings, aside from our common infatuation with firearms, was that attendance was mandatory for scouts who wanted to go on weekend maneuvers with the Guard once a month. Those weekends were when we got to fire live rounds from M16s, M60 machine guns, and M203 grenade launchers. Maneuvers would take place at one of several different military bases. The best location was Marine Corps Base Quantico, where we would have urban firefights (shooting blanks, of course) in Combat Town, a warren of concrete buildings designed for just that purpose. The exercise always devolved into a free-for-all, with all of us weekend warriors emptying clip after clip of blanks until we couldn't see past the end of our rifles for all the smoke in the air. After the battle, we would snuggle up with the rifles we had checked out from the armory, and camp out under our rain ponchos. But I could never get to sleep with all the adrenaline buzzing around in my head.
Between drill weekends, my friend and I watched movies about the Vietnam War, studied Army field manuals with pictures and specifications of different weapons, and used my dad's tools to build wooden versions of our favorite assault rifles for playing war. We even recruited other kids from school to go on "missions" with us in the middle of the night, sneaking out of our houses, creeping around in the woods, and inflicting minor damage on our largely inanimate "targets."
My gun obsession was not considered cool back at school, though. Classmates found my interest in firearms even weirder than my love of bands that didn't sound anything like Journey. And on the day that the four or five of us from my school who had joined the Explorers showed up for first period in fatigues and camo face-paint in an effort to recruit more students, even the administrators were worried. I don't think anyone thought we were armed or meant harm to our classmates, because that kind of thing was unheard of. They just thought it was disturbing and disruptive. They made us wash our faces and sent us off to class.
In 2013, if a handful of students showed up to school in camouflage face-paint, the campus would go on lockdown, and rightly so. In the context of 1982, though, the decision the administrators at my school made was sensible. School shootings, or at least the indiscriminately lethal sieges that have happened with such regularity in the past 15 years or so, were virtually unheard of. Other factors contributed to the relative scarcity of these tragedies, of course. But before firearms manufacturers started pushing to normalize ownership of military weapons by civilians, the idea that a kid might have access to a gun specifically designed to kill people wouldn't have seemed like a serious possibility.
As much as I was infatuated by military guns and the idea of someday using them in my future career as a mercenary (a dream that lost its luster once I got a driver's license and learned how to be less repulsive to girls), I would have had no idea where to begin trying to get my hands on one. The only assault rifles I had ever seen in real life were locked up in the armory whenever they were not in use. Thankfully, the gun industry had not yet enticed ordinary citizens into thinking they needed M16s—a version of the AR-15, which is not just a favorite weapon of mass-shooters, but also the best-selling rifle in the country today—in their homes.
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Related Story
The Gender Divide on Gun Control
http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/the-gender-divide-on-gun-control/266612/
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Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/i-was-a-teenage-gun-nut/266687/ [with comments]
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On Living Armed
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Dec 27 2012, 12:53 PM ET
Yesterday in the conversation between me and Jeff [ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/more-guns-less-crime-a-dialogue/266576/ ], the following quote appeared from me:
And the fact is that I would actually rather die by shooting than live armed.
One thing that happens in writing is sometimes you say something that its "catchy" and it gets repeated outside of the context in which it was actually said. To get clear, I think it's important to understand that I was responding to a question, and the question was not "What is your position on gun control? or "Do you think guns should be banned?" The question was:
If you were confronted with an "active shooter," do you think, in that moment, you might wish you had a gun?
And my response was:
I think that last question gets to the heart of a difference. I actually wouldn't wish I had a gun. I've shot a rifle at camp once, but that's about it. If I had a gun, there is a good chance I would shoot myself, thus doing the active shooter's work for him (it's usually "him.") But the deeper question is, "If I were confronted with an active shooter, would I wish to have a gun and be trained in its use?" It's funny, but I still don't know that I would. I'm pretty clear that I am going to die one day. That moment will not be of my choosing, and it almost certainly will not be too my liking. But death happens. Life -- and living -- on the other hand are more under my control. And the fact is that I would actually rather die by shooting than live armed.
This is not mere cant. It is not enough to have a gun, anymore than it's enough to have a baby. It's a responsibility. I would have to orient myself to that fact. I'd have to be trained and I would have to, with some regularity, keep up my shooting skills. I would have to think about the weight I carried on my hip and think about how people might respond to me should they happen to notice. I would have to think about the cops and how I would interact with them, should we come into contact. I'd have to think about my own anger issues and remember that I can never be an position where I have a rage black-out. What I am saying is, if I were gun-owner, I would feel it to be really important that I be a responsible gun-owner, just like, when our kids were born, we both felt the need to be responsible parents. The difference is I like "living" as a parent. I accept the responsibility and rewards of parenting. I don't really want the responsibilities and rewards of gun-ownership. I guess I'd rather work on my swimming. And I think, given the concentration of guns in a smaller and smaller number of hands, there's some evidence that society agrees.
Which is not to say those of us who don't own guns don't want to live. We do. But it's not clear that this particular way of living will even be effective. I think about the shooter down at the Empire State Building a few months back. The police showed up to protect the public and ended in a shoot-out with a guy. Nine bystanders were wounded -- all at the hands of the police. It's just not clear to me that this sort of situation wouldn't repeat itself, but with citizens doing the wounding. With that kind of risk, perhaps it's better to handle "gun safety" before we get to the moment of an "active shooter."
I can't really make people not pick a phrase out and deploy it. But I want to ask that people consider the argument as a whole, and consider what, exactly, the comment is a response to.
For some time now, this blog has spent a good deal of time discussing the morality of violence. For the most part this is about blackness. That's what leads me to ask whether Nat Turner was right [ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/was-nat-turner-right/263068/ ] and whether the death of 600,000 people in the Civil War was actually tragic [ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/08/the-civil-war-isnt-tragic-cont/243713/ ]. That's what leads me to look at the violence which African-Americans regularly contend with -- whether its the intimate violence of spanking our kids [ http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2010/01/race-parenting-and-punishment/34005/ ], the intra-community violence of crime [ http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2009/09/the-limits-of-compassion/27411/ ], the extra-community violence of the police [ http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2009/03/a-little-more-on-prince-jones/6967/ ]. And from all thought I've sought to understand what violence does to the actual individual -- how black people (black males, specifically) alter their behaviors to cope [ http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Struggle-Father-Unlikely-Manhood/dp/0385527462 ], and how that alteration fares out in the larger world [ http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2010/10/a-culture-of-poverty/64854/ ].
My working conclusion has basically been that violence is sometimes not only necessary, but essential. In those moments (like the Civil War), I tend to dislike the tragic-mournful pose, not because I love violence but because I have found that the "tragic-mournful pose" is almost always selectively applied. This is not just a matter of the Civil War. It's pretty routine to condemn the violent street pose of young black men, without granting that the pose is the product of an intelligent assessment of one's surroundings. (I've written on all of those. It's all linked.)
But I also believe that one does not simply do violence -- or live prepared for violence -- and remain the same. I carry all of West Baltimore with me, and I am in constant conversation over the fact that that part of me is wholly inappropriate for this world. That part -- the part that is analyzing every person who walks up on me, who is trying to figure out every angle, who sees a crowd and walks the other way -- is fit for a world of violence. That pose is totally draining. (It has no time to go off and learn French.)
So if you ask me if I wished to have a gun when an active shooter is present, then I will tell you that guns don't magically appear in the holster, that the capacity to do lethal violence requires an expense of time, energy, and responsibility, which I I would rather not make. I would tell you that I have, already, spent too much of my life preparing for violence. I would say that the person who should wish to have a gun in that situation, should be a person capable of shooting a gun, and a person comfortable with the responsibility of carrying a gun during the 99.9 percent of the time when violence -- much less lethal violence -- is wholly inappropriate.
A gun is power. And power demands responsibility. I don't want to spend my time that way. I am tired of assessing the angle of random dudes. I'm more interested in the angle on this Augustine fellow.
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/on-living-armed/266658/ [with comments]
===
3-year-old in Oklahoma fatally shoots himself in accident after finding his state trooper uncle's loaded gun
Ryder Rozier, 3, fatally shot himself accidentally on Saturday after finding a loaded firearm at his uncle’s home. His uncle, Ian Rozier, had several guns in his house near Guthrie, Okla.
December 18, 2012
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/boy-3-killed-playing-uncle-gun-article-1.1223270 [with comments]
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North Carolina man shoots brother to death in chest after believing he was an intruder: police
December 30, 2012
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/n-man-fatally-shoots-brother-chest-police-article-1.1229825 [with comments]
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Alabama boy, 15, accidentally shot in head during prank
October 15, 2012
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ala-teen-accidentally-shot-prank-article-1.1183592 [with comments]
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Chicago father fires gun at daughter’s boyfriend, strikes her by accident
December 2, 2012
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/father-fires-gun-daughter-boyfriend-strikes-accident-article-1.1211832 [with comments]
===
Albert Einstein vs. the National Assault Rifle Association
12/30/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-b-cohen-esq/nra-assault-rifles_b_2385592.html [with comments]
===
Sheriff Arpaio Wants Armed Volunteers at Schools
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio speaks to Republican Party supporters at a festival in Mesa, Arizona in October 2012.
Dec. 28, 2012
[...]
"It doesn't matter whether they like it or don't like it," Arpaio said, regarding whether schools want armed guards. "I'm still going to do it. I can't imagine criticism coming when they're given free protection."
[...]
http://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/Politics/sheriff-arpaio-armed-volunteers-schools/story?id=18084500 [with comments]
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Joe Arpaio accepted award from neo-Confederate group
Exclusive: The infamous sheriff "gratefully accepted" an award from the Sons of Confederate Veterans last year
Dec 27, 2012
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/27/joe_arpaio_accepted_award_from_neo_confederate_group/ [with comments]
===
Michele Bachmann Wins WND's 'Woman Of The Year' Award
By Nick Wing
Posted: 12/28/2012 3:20 pm EST | Updated: 12/29/2012 1:23 am EST
After examining Earth's female population in search of a candidate deserving of its "Woman of the Year" award, rightwing outlet WorldNetDaily has chosen [ http://www.wnd.com/2012/12/gop-rock-star-named-woman-of-the-year/ ] Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) as the planet's most worthy recipient.
Judging women based on the qualities of "goodness, womanliness, perseverance and character," WND lauds Bachmann for being a "gutsy, pro-life fiscal conservative who dared to vote against raising the debt ceiling."
WND continues: "She’s a God-fearing, gun-loving advocate of tax cuts and domestic oil drilling -- and has proven to be one of Obamacare’s worst nightmares."
Bachmann bested runner-ups Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R), German Chancellor Angela Merkel and outspoken conservative antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly, among others, to win the honor.
The congresswoman tells WND that the biggest story of the year for her was witnessing the Supreme Court rule that President Barack Obama's health care reform was constitutional, the implications of which, she said, would be be "felt for years to come."
In making this claim, Bachmann is overlooking some of her own biggest headlines of 2012. She began the year as a presidential candidate, only to drop out [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/04/michele-bachmann-concedes-iowa-caucus_n_1182490.html ] after finishing in a disappointing sixth place in the Iowa caucuses. Over the summer she drew widespread criticism for mounting a crusade against Obama administration personnel -- including Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- who Bachmann claimed had nefarious ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Bachmann rounded out the year with an electoral victory in November, however, narrowly defeating Democratic challenger Jim Graves to retain her seat in Congress, after outspending him 12 to 1 [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/02/michele-bachmann-jim-graves_n_2067274.html?utm_hp_ref=elections-2012 ].
For Bachmann's entire interview, as well as a picture of the Bachmann family Christmas card, click over to WND [ http://www.wnd.com/2012/12/gop-rock-star-named-woman-of-the-year/ ].
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/28/michele-bachmann-wnd_n_2376965.html [with comments]
--
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===
Woman Is Charged With Murder as a Hate Crime in a Fatal Subway Push
Erika Menendez, 31, charged with second-degree murder as a hate crime, was led out of the 112th Precinct in Queens on Saturday.
December 29, 2012
A 31-year-old woman was arrested on Saturday and charged with second-degree murder as a hate crime in connection with the death of a man who was pushed onto the tracks of an elevated subway station in Queens and crushed by an oncoming train.
The woman, Erika Menendez, selected her victim because she believed him to be a Muslim or a Hindu, Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney, said.
“The defendant is accused of committing what is every subway commuter’s nightmare: Being suddenly and senselessly pushed into the path of an oncoming train,” Mr. Brown said in an interview.
In a statement, Mr. Brown quoted Ms. Menendez, “in sum and substance,” as having told the police: “I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up.” Ms. Menendez conflated the Muslim and Hindu faiths in her comments to the police and in her target for attack, officials said.
The victim, Sunando Sen, was born in India and, according to a roommate, was raised Hindu.
Mr. Sen “was allegedly shoved from behind and had no chance to defend himself,” Mr. Brown said. “Beyond that, the hateful remarks allegedly made by the defendant and which precipitated the defendant’s actions should never be tolerated by a civilized society.”
[...]
Mr. Sen, after years of saving money, had opened a small copying business on the Upper West Side this year.
Ar Suman, a Muslim, and one of three roommates who shared a small first-floor apartment with Mr. Sen in Elmhurst, said he and Mr. Sen often discussed religion.
Though they were of different faiths, Mr. Suman said, he admired the respect that Mr. Sen showed for those who saw the world differently than he did. Mr. Suman said he once asked Mr. Sen why he was not more active in his faith and it resulted in a long philosophical discussion.
“He was so gentle,” Mr. Suman said. “He said in this world a lot of people are dying, killing over religious things.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/nyregion/woman-is-held-in-death-of-man-pushed-onto-subway-tracks-in-queens.html
===
Raymond Bell, Pastor Of The Cowboy Church of Virginia, Claims Stroking Horses Can 'Cure' Homosexuality
12/31/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/29/raymond-bell-cowboy-church-of-virginia-horses-gay_n_2381028.html [with comments]
===
Florida's Long Lines On Election Day Discouraged 49,000 People From Voting: Report
12/29/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/29/floridas-long-lines-election-voting_n_2381482.html [with (over 10,000) comments]; also http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/politics/os-discouraged-voters-20121229,0,215136.story [with comments]
===
Danny Hafley, Kentucky Man, Defends Watermelon-Eating Obama Display: He 'Might Get Hungry'
By Nick Wing
Posted: 12/27/2012 9:14 pm EST | Updated: 12/28/2012 8:21 pm EST
Danny Hafley of Casey County, Ky. said this week that people are reading the mannequin in his front yard depicting President Barack Obama eating a watermelon completely wrong.
"The way I look at it, it's freedom of speech," Hafley told Lex 18 in a recent interview [ http://www.lex18.com/news/casey-county-man-defends-controversial-obama-display/ ], going on to state that he had included the watermelon not in attempt to play to any racist stereotypes, but because the statue "might get hungry standing out here."
According to Hafley, the display is "popular" and a frequent draw for people passing by to stop and take pictures.
(Watch a video report [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTVy07XVeAI (above; article has the longer complete version of the report embedded)] from Lex 18 reporter Adam Yosim)
Watermelon imagery has been utilized in anti-Obama efforts in the past, usually by those claiming there is no racist sentiment behind the choice.
In 2009, a mayor of Los Alamitos, Calif. resigned his post [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/27/mayor-who-sent-obama-wate_n_170492.html ] after sending an e-mail showing watermelons in front of the White House, alongside the text "No Easter egg hunt this year." He maintained that he wasn't aware of the racial stereotype that African Americans like watermelon.
And earlier this year, a resident of Santa Clara, Calif. included a watermelon [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/09/obama-empty-chair-california_n_1951000.html ] in his anti-Obama display that also featured an empty chair -- a reference to Hollywood star Clint Eastwood's bizarre Republican National Convention speech [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/30/clint-eastwood-speech_n_1844908.html ] -- a noose, and a sign telling the president to "go back to Kenya you idiot." The owner of that setup declined to comment at the time.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/27/danny-hafley-kentucky-obama_n_2372920.html [with comments]
===
The 9 Wildest Things Fox News Said In 2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRGk6Wu75Zo [from/embedded at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/27/9-wildest-things-fox-mashup_n_2365592.html (with comments)]
===
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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