This was an incredibly tough piece to write. I never met my grandfather who was shot to death in his store on the corner of Rindge Avenue and Montgomery Street in the spring of 1975. My sister was 9, my brother was less than a year old. The murder was never solved, so our family has never had real closure over this issue. Were you to make me king for the day with absolute power, for the sake of my mother and the 33,000 Americans who lose their lives to guns every year and their families, the first thing I would do is get rid of the Second Amendment.
I wouldn’t pass a background check, those wouldn’t have stopped Newtown. I wouldn’t pass an assault weapons ban, those wouldn’t have stopped Charleston. I wouldn’t pass a gun registry, it wouldn’t have stopped yesterday’s massacre. I wouldn’t pass a mental health requirement, it wouldn’t have stopped the Navy yard shooting. I wouldn’t pass a gun buyback scheme, unlike Australia, America has more guns than people, so such a scheme is fiscally unworkable. The only effective form of gun control that would make America fully massacre free is the kind Britain has. And there is a reason that constitutional monarchy passed what America could not, and I am now increasingly convinced, will be unable to do for decades.
The Constitution disproportionately empowers gun owners. The first roadblock is that pesky second amendment itself, which even if you interpret the well regulated militia clause to narrow the definition of gun ownership, still enshrines it in some capacity and limits what government can do. The second roadblock is giving every state two Senators, including small, largely unpopulated rural states where gun control is policy non grata. I think these two roadblocks alone are sufficient enough to prevent the kind of actually effective gun control we need at the federal level, barring a major Constitutional change, or a major shift on the Supreme Court.
In the meantime, gun violence will continue. 33,000 casualties last year, eclipsing anything ISIS or Al Qaeda has ever committed against Americans, eclipsing the total number of soldiers lost in either war over seas, and eclipsing even the kind of casualties Americans see in natural disasters. The vast majority of these gun deaths can be prevented now, without federal gun control.
Let me be absolutely clear, federal gun control is something I strongly support, not just as a progressive, not just as a policy, but as a personal value. The Human Life Amendment is something the right has sought for over 40 years, as part of their values. Imagine the amount of political and financial capital wasted on banning abortion that could’ve expanded adoption services? My sister in law shared an article yesterday showing that just in Massachusetts, there is a backlog of over a thousand kids from broken homes waiting to be adopted. Imagine if the dollars wasted on the pro-life cause went to finding them a home? How much better would the world be?
It is in that spirit that I strongly urge all of us to advocate for reducing gun violence in the here and now. We should never change our values on this issue, but we should change our policy focus.
Pro Publica had a great piece on a black pastor’s efforts to get the Obama Administration to focus on reducing inner city violence. The story was telling, and in some views, damning of our focus on the high profile mass killings of racially diverse crowds at the expense of workable policies that would save thousands of black lives now.
In Boston, the city that developed Ceasefire, the average monthly number of youth homicides dropped by 63 percent in the two years after it was launched.
Let’s focus on reducing violence in our urban communities. 15 out of 30 daily gun homicides are young black men getting killed in their own communities. Let’s help community activists like Berkeley pastor Michael McBride, who went to Obama and Biden hand in gloove after Newtown:
McBride supported universal background checks. He supported an assault weapons ban. But he also wanted something else: a national push to save the lives of black men. In 2012, 90 people were killed in shootings like the ones in Newtown and Aurora, Colorado. That same year, nearly 6,000 black men were murdered with guns.
Chicago loses more school aged children per year than 10 Columbines combined. Mass shootings are still a rare occurrence, not rare enough, but we know the solutions to that problem are not coming down the pipeline soon. The solutions to inner city violence are. They are proven to work, and they aren’t even that expensive.
Gun control advocates and politicians frequently cite the statistic that more than 30 Americans are murdered with guns every day. What’s rarely mentioned is that roughly 15 of the 30 are black men.
Avoiding that fact has consequences. Twenty years of government-funded research has shown there are several promising strategies to prevent murders of black men, including Ceasefire. They don’t require passing new gun laws, or an epic fight with the National Rifle Association. What they need—and often struggle to get—is political support and a bit of money.
Just $500 million is a drop in the bucket in the federal till, an appropriation we can surely find if we can find billions to bail out bankers and wage war, to work for peace in our own broken communities.
McBride wanted President Obama to make Ceasefire and similar programs part of his post-Newtown push to reduce gun violence. He had brought a short memo to give to White House staffers, outlining a plan to devote $500 million over five years to scaling such programs nationwide. His pitch to Biden that day was even simpler: Don’t ignore that black children are dying, too.
I am confident that even in this climate, these efforts can get national support. Broad bipartisan support, even from Republicans, maybe even from the NRA itself. It allows all the stakeholders involved to unite and come together on the idea of reducing the violence that makes up the bulk of our annual gun death tally. These programs could be expanded to also reduce incidents of domestic violence, suicides, and gun violence in the home. Suicides by themselves are 60% of all gun deaths in the United States, but suicide prevention efforts are largely done on a voluntary basis and are strapped for funds. Just in Massachusetts they are funded at paltry levels, and largely ignored. Taken together, we could make a real dent in these numbers without altering a single gun law.
Here in Boston the Ceasefire initiative ended because of political infighting-let’s get Marty Walsh and Charlie Baker to take it up again. We already have some of the strictest gun laws in America, let’s focus on doing what we can to reduce gun deaths locally in the here and now.
Other cities have tried Ceasefire, or half-tried it, and then abandoned it. The strategy requires resources, political buy-in, and ongoing trust between unlikely partners. The effort in Boston had “black and Latin and Cape Verdean clergy working with white Irish Catholic cops in a city that had a history of race relations leading up to that point that was abysmal,” Brown said. “It was really a shift in behavior, in the way we did business.”
Michael McBride, a pastor from Berkeley, California, says, “Any meaningful conversation about addressing gun violence has to include urban gun violence.”
These partnerships can be fragile. Boston’s own Ceasefire effort fell apart in 2000, researchers said. There was infighting and the police official who led it got another assignment. In subsequent years, homicides of young men crept up again.
We shouldn’t give up the fight, I am not waving the white flag, and never will. What I am saying is, realistically those wins are 10-20 years down the road, at best. Let’s enact policies that could be implemented, today, in the policy reality we have while trying to change that reality everyday. That will save real lives now. That will show that black lives matter, now. That will reform communities, now. Saving one life from gun violence can make a world of difference to the people that are affected by it. Believe me, I know.
Want to save lives from gun violence now?
Donate to Chicago Citizens for Change, led by my fiancee’s former boss and a family friend, they are saving lives now at great personal cost.
Connect with Operation Lipstick, an organization a classmate of mine is involved in, that is saving lives in Boston now.
Feel free to add other organizations as well. I would argue, if we believe black lives matter, if we want to reduce gun violence now, we should focus on these efforts first. As much as it pains me to write this, The Brady Campaign won’t see a policy victory for the next 10-15 years, let’s spend our money and capital to save lives now.
whoaitsjoe says
I always thought you were in your mid-20s. You read like a very young man.
jconway says
I’m 27, the incident at the start of this thread happened 13 years before I was born. But it’s been a part of my family history ever since.
whoaitsjoe says
That’s quite an age gap. Makes the 12 years between myself and my oldest sister seem small!
thebaker says
Are you studying to be a doctor?
jconway says
I became an uncle at 11 months!
thebaker says
Let’s focus on reducing violence in our urban communities! Our urban communities are complete shit holes and the people that live there deserve better.
JimC says
Not instead, in addition to.
jconway says
I think Bloomberg’s money would go farther helping out programs like Operation Ceasefire. The pastor in the Pro Publica piece was asking for $500 million, which Bloomberg could write a check for tomorrow to set up organizations in every major American city. It would do more to lower the 33,000 deaths per year than any gun control that would have even a smidgens chance of passing in the next ten years. Just as the pro-life movement should work on adoption and reducing abortions, the gun safety movement should focus on reducing gun violence first.
I am not saying that the other fight is lost, I am saying, give then scarcity of resources and financial and political capital, prioritizing violence reduction would save more lives in the long run while we wait for other reforms to happen. I don’t see meaningful federal gun control passing before we achieve filibuster reform, get money out of politics, or win the 2020 redistricting cycle. All three have to happen first for any meaningful federal effort to be viable.
Christopher says
The extremist interpretation a la Heller is. I’ve read quite a bit to the effect that the decision grossly misreads history and precedent. I DO think the states have a lot of latitude to well-regulate their militia. They can determine qualifications and requirements to serve in that militia, and which weapons they will accept for use in that militia. Conservatives like to talk of original intent, well here it is. Not to mention they were dealing with muskets which took 30 seconds to shove the next ball down the barrel before firing again. To be fair, let’s not ban those:) Maybe someone who doesn’t really care about winning an election can propose amending the Constitution. I’m not convinced it needs to be amended, but it would force the other side to come out from behind the Bill of Rights and debate gun control on its merits.
jconway says
When are we going to get a court to overturn Heller, which I might add, plenty of Democrats like Obama and civil libertarians like the ACLU signed amicus briefs on behalf of the gun owner? 10 years? 20 years?
Partisansh polarization has broken the Madisonian model of government. It is not a coincidence that It is unlikely we will see full party control of Congress with a 60 vote filibuster proof Senate majority in favor of meaningful gun control in the next 10 years, and impossible in the next 5. Let’s give money to groups that desperately need it to save lives now. Let’s spend political capital there. Walsh and Baker could get together tommorrow and drag DeLeo into funding and restarting Operation Ceasefire. It would save far more lives than the Ken Gordon bill.
My fiancees old boss had to fight with other groups to get crumbs from broke ass Springfield and had to change her mission focus to partner with Fr. Pfleger’s group. Why can’t Bloomberg and all the other rich liberals invested in this issue pump money into those communities? Mass shootings are still a rare occurrence and a small portion of the total gun deaths a year, but 15 out of 30 daily gun deaths happen in inner city communities and show no sign of stopping. 6 out of 10 gun deaths are suicides.
We are doing next to nothing on suicide prevention, domestic violence prevention, and the community building restorative justice work that cut gang violence in Boston by 63%.
Don’t get me wrong, I would vote for every gun control bill before Congress if I was there. I will not support candidates voting against it. But let’s be honest, it isn’t going to fucking happen anytime soon. No matter what we do. So let’s focus on battles we can win and the people, largely of color, we can save right now.
Christopher says
We need to fight the long game too, creating the conditions at the federal level which will make this happen even if it does not come to pass for a few years. After all, the NRA did not acquire its political muscle overnight either. Speaking of the NRA, just like we have been discussing on another thread the need to forcibly and consistently call out people who may stoke violence-inducing hatred of abortion providers, we must likewise treat the ravings of Wayne LaPierre who IMO has at least as much blood on his hands.
jconway says
One lane that leads to a reduction in gun violence and one lane that leads nowhere.
We mock the GOP for 50 votes and counting to repeal Obamacare, but that is about as many votes as we will have for a myriad of gun control schemes, none of which solves the problem of mass shooting on it’s own. The DSCC will be getting rid of pro-gun control Republicans, or trying to, in the 2016 cycle and likely running pro-gun Democrats as well.
So we can post as many snarky memes from the BBC news coverage, as many Vox articles on how Europe solved this problem, and we can mock people of faith praying for a solution all we want-those prayers have a better chance of being answered than meaningful gun control passing the United States Congress in the next decade. Part of being reality based is pursuing policies that will have a chance in hell of being implemented. Federal gun control does not and will not for quite sometime. Better to spend the money and capital on saving inner city lives in communities of color. Obama turned down Pastor McBride and rolled the dice on measly background checks, he lost, time to go back to the drawing board and find solutions that work.
Christopher says
There are plenty of people who can work on the ground on what you’re proposing while others keep pushing to CREATE the political reality necessary to make progress at the higher levels.
merrimackguy says
and the Pro Publica article was great.
dave-from-hvad says
and well researched, it seems somewhat contradictory. Yoy say, on the one hand, that you support gun control, but that it’s not worth pursuing only because Congress, as currently constituted, will never pass it. But you also say that you personally would not pass an assault weapons ban because it wouldn’t have prevented a particular tragedy; and you wouldn’t pass a background check because it wouldn’t have stopped a different tragedy, etc.
Those latter statements are also used by the NRA and other opponents of gun control, particularly after each mass shooting occurs. So, if you personally support gun control, I don’t see why you are using selected examples apparently to broadly invalidate it. Maybe an assault weapons ban wouldn’t work in one particular case, but are you saying it will therefore not work in any cases?
Maybe more to the point, I agree with Christopher that campaigning for gun control and campaigning for programs to reduce inner-city violence are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Moreover, even though a worthwhile cause may seem unachievable in the near or even foreseeable future, I think progress in these areas is usually made via consistent and prolonged effort and pressure. The civil rights laws were enacted only after a long struggle.
So, I’m not going to begrudge or second-guess Bloomberg for the money and effort he has put into enacting gun control, or Gabby Giffords, for that matter, or the late James Bradey. All of those people are or have fought a necessary fight for this cause.
jconway says
It was a really long post, I wouldn’t fault you for misinterpreting some of it. I’ll try and lay out a shorter case.
When it comes to stopping mass shootings those types of gun control won’t work, they are too weak, but opposition to gun control is so strong the weakest kind routinely fails to pass. Viewing this reality why spend all our political capital on the lowest hanging fruit of the gun control tree when we can possibly work with the Republicans on a different initiative that saves lives now?
Do you think the 50 votes to repeal Obamacare have done anything constructive? Do you think another 50 or another 100 would do the trick? I think all of us view it as a waste of time. Why? Because Obama will veto, the SCOTUS upheld it twice, and the people voted Obama back in. It’s inverted for gun control. We have a Congress that will always veto Obama’s gun control, no matter how marginal or insignificant it is, a Supreme Court that permanently altered how the 2nd amendment is interpreted, and neither will go away anytime soon,
A Senate majority will be built on the backs of ousting the very Republicans we need for bipartisan gun control and filibuster proofing the bill. The House majority isn’t going away until 2022 at the latest, 2020 at the soonest. That’s five years away. We can do a whole lot more to reduce or even eliminate inner city gun violence in the next five years than continue to fail at passing gun control at the federal level.
dave-from-hvad says
Certainly it would prevent some of them. Also, random, mass shootings are a separate problem from inner-city violence. Spending political capital on one does not use it up for the other.
jconway says
The ProPublica piece, hardly a right wing rag I might add, seems to indicate that it has. Operation Ceasfire has been allowed to wither on the vine in a state that has the strictest gun laws in the country: ours. Pastor McBride and his effort to get a national campaign was ignored by Obama and Biden in favor of yet another quixotic vote in the Senate to pass universal background checks. The weakest gun control I might add that would still have allowed many of the prominent mass shooters access to firearms.
Root and Lanza still would’ve massacred their victims even with background checks and an assault weapons ban. Columbine happened under the Brady Bill. Even this year, less than 1% of the gun deaths this year came from mass shootings. Why waste the bulk of the political capital fighting that effort when we can cut 30% of gun deaths now for a significant fraction of the political and financial cost?
Nothing short of a total handgun ban would effectively stop mass shootings. But with comparatively modest levels of funding we can ensure a steep reduction in suicides, and reduce the one on one gun homicides like the kind that killed my grandpa without adopting stricter gun control. I am not arguing giving up, I am saying we have diverted no money or attention to a larger component of this problem that’s easier to solve, which doesn’t make any sense from a reality based perspective.
dave-from-hvad says
but it sounds as though you’re saying that a program to reduce inner-city violence would have prevented it. Even if that’s the case, you haven’t made the case for your assertion that only a total gun ban (I assume you aren’t limiting it to handguns) would effectively stop mass shootings.
And you also haven’t made the case, it seems to me, that gun violence in inner cities is the same problem as mass shootings, which are happening all over the country. This is the main issue I have with your post. You are conflating two different problems, which have different causes.
I think there is some agreement that inner-city violence is the result of poverty and the de-facto segregation of blacks in inner cities, which stifles economic opportunity. The random, mass shootings are almost invariably committed by white males. We’ve hardly begun to understand the causes of those shootings, but poverty and segregation are certainly not among those causes.
So, I don’t think that programs to stop inner-city violence, like Operation Ceasefire, would have any effect in reducing the mass shootings that have occurred in Newtown, San Bernardino, Aurora, and so many other places. But gun control measures, no matter how limited, would stop at least some of them.
jconway says
1. Mass Shootings
They have killed 462 people this year. The majority of this years mass shooters had passed background checks and purchased their guns legally, including the San Bernadino pair over the weekend and Dylan Root. Root used hand guns exclusively, meaning were an assault weapons ban in effect that massacre still happens and those people still die. A hand gun ban is widely opposed by the majority of Americans.
When we cite Britain or France as a model we have to recognize the their proposed remedy is far tougher than the one that failed to pass a Democratic Senate and is unlikely to pass a Republican Congress anytime soon. I agree with every effort, from background checks to a hand gun ban, to stop Americans from killing each other. I am arguing we should focus on the wider issue of inner city violence where more Americans are killing each other more frequently than mass shootings and where remedies that are cheaper and more politically feasible than gun control have already been proven to cut those rates in half.
2. Inner City Gun Violence
Chicago had 7 deadly shootings over the weekend that resulted in deaths. That’s four more casualties than Planned Parenthood and half the losses at San Bernadino. It was the third story on the local news after the Bears win and Black Friday. Anderson Cooper didn’t helicopter in, there have been no editorials and I don’t see politicians lining up to do something.
15 out of 30 daily gun deaths are young black men killing one another. Restorative justice and community intervention programs like Operation Ceasefire are proven to work, that program reduced gun homicide levels by 63% in Boston alone. We lose 12,000 Americans a year to single shooting homicides, 6,000 of them are young black men. If we can reduce those deaths by 63% nationally we are saving far more lives than gun control efforts that have no near term chance of success.
I am not arguing Operstion Ceasfire will do anything to stop mass shootings at all, I’m saying inner city America loses an Aurora a day on average, and this program is a proven life saver. I am saying mass shootings get a disproportionate amount of the coverage and attention and are a small fraction of the total gun deaths in America. And it’s a social justice issue.
My grandfather was killed by a hand gun in an armed robbery in his corner store across the street from a housing project. My co-workers who live in Gary and Englewood have buried their childrens friends. Those are the kinds of gun violence we view as routine, and have for far too long and do too little about. The irony is, those crimes can be stopped by methods that are effective, affordable, and aren’t opposed by the gun lobby. Let’s work on both problems at once, but let’s prioritize the bigger problem that’s easier to solve.
Bob Neer says
A return to the originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment (no protection for private gun ownership) is just one or two Court appointments and some political pressure away. As to the broader consensus larger changes have happened in less time in our history: marriage equality, the end of segregation, and women’s suffrage and three examples of many. I wouldn’t be surprised if a mandatory national gun registry followed by a ban on private ownership of semi-automatic weapons and, finally, a ban on private ownership of handguns was enacted in our lifetime. Why should the powers that be tolerate daily mass murders? It’s bad for business, and only benefits the gun manufacturers who are a tiny fraction of the economy. Over time, this truth will out. In the meantime, we should certainly adopt your common-sense suggestions.
jconway says
That’s another 5-10 years. Possibly a lot of political capital if we are dealing with a Republican majority. My common sense suggestions can happen nowZ They’ve been proven to work and require little appropriations in the shade me of our federal budget. So the question is, why aren’t our leaders implementing them? Where’s Baker and Walsh? Where’s Obama? Where’s Hillary? 63% drop in Boston gun homicides is a pretty big deal, something we should get back to locally and a model for the country.
I think the answer is partly that black lives don’t matter to CNN or to the rest of America. The BBC saying another day in America or people saying this is a new reality haven’t been keeping in touch with black America, which endures a Columbine a day in lost young lives to guns. And has been for decades. A story nobody reports on with wall to wall coverage or cares to solve, even though the solution is in front of us opposed by no powerful lobby like the NRA. Just do it already, and worry about federal gun control when we actually have the votes. We won’t for awhile.
SomervilleTom says
I applaud the motivation for your suggestion. I have to say that I suspect that whatever benefits accrue from such programs have more to do with the placebo effect than with any substantive changes such programs cause in their communities.
This is not a bad thing. Any good healer (whether certified AMA-registered physician or wise and venerated Native American shaman) knows that leveraging the placebo effect — the inherent desire of people to heal — is a key part of any successful treatment.
Nevertheless, in my view we are pissing in the wind when we wring our hands and pray about gun violence while our US weapons manufactures produce TEN MILLION GUNS PER YEAR. No amount of drugs, therapy, herbal supplements, radiation, or prayer is going to make ANY difference at all in the prognosis of a person who smokes three and half packs of cigarettes per day. The same is true for a nation who manufactures this number of guns.
It is similarly delusional, at best, to wring our hands and pray about the awful victims of ISIS terrorism and bemoan the international conflict while we are far and away the largest arms exporter in the WORLD. This is like the smack dealer who dutifully contributes to drug treatment programs and reads intercessory prayers for the afflicted every Sunday morning.
We have to stop kidding ourselves about who we have become. However noble and glorious America was more than two hundred years ago (when the relevant constitutional provisions were written), in TODAY’S world we are exporters of death. We celebrate death at every excuse. We zealously protect and encourage the industry that produces the instruments of death. We react with righteous outrage when somebody else commits war crimes (often using armaments that we manufacture), then find a long list of reasons why we should do nothing when our own President and his administration orders those same war crimes.
I’m tired of the praying and the mourning and the grieving. I get that I am, individually, powerless to stop this evil. I suggest that a nation that claims to be a representative democracy is fundamentally broken when its government cannot make changes supported by MORE THAN NINETY PERCENT of its population.
I am not receptive to a suggestion that I should put my outrage aside so that I can attempt to offer palliative care to the millions of victims of this outrage. I think we need to acknowledge that our government IS dysfunctional. It is BROKEN, and needs to be repaired.
I think we need to start calling our garden implements for moving dirt the spades that they are.
jconway says
I am saying local policy makers in the bluest of states with no strong gun lobby and some of the strictest gun control efforts let a policy, proven to reduce homicide rates by 63% wither on the vine. I am saying Dianne Feinstein has tried to pass the same damn bill for the past 25 years with no success. To be honest, I think Rev. Johnson, Rev. McBridge, and the hundreds of other community activists across the country will prevent more gun deaths this year than Dianne Feinstein and her dead as a doornail bill.
By no means is this reality her fault or the fault of any of the policymakers pushing forward noble bills. I praise Katherine Clark and Seth Moulton for their no fly list bill, but it will solve a minute part of this problem if it is ever passed at all. The bulk of our gun deaths come from suicides and single gun homicides. These issues are not getting any attention at the federal level, data based programs that are proven to reduce single gun homicides are not being implemented at the federal level. I am saying maybe they should be, maybe this is another route that has a better chance of success than doing the same thing over and over again with no luck. We mock the Republicans for voting on the same damn bill 50 times they know Obama will veto, does it save any lives for our side to do the same thing on gun control? Let’s try something different and see if it works.
The federal government is so damn dysfunctional it might not, the NRA might be so extremist it would oppose pastors teaching gangbangers to love one another instead of shoot one another. The GOP might be so racist it would rather use black on black crime as a crutch against change rather than actually solve a problem it always talks about. I don’t know, we haven’t even attempted this route of action and they may live up to our worst impression of them.
I am convinced that locally Gov. Baker and Marty Walsh could get together and get this done, as Menino got it done in 2003. Let’s restart it in our own communities. A 63% homicide reduction isn’t a placebo, it’s a substantial number of black lives saved instead of lost. My friend Shante, a single mom living in Roxbury, is part of a network of black female activists fighting the gun trafficking trade entirely on their own. My friend, the Rev. Susan Johnson is begging Springfield for crumbs. Let’s have their back for a change instead of waiting for a billionaire like Bloomberg to helicopter in and save us at the federal level.
thebaker says
The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result … We need smart leadership, not dumb leadership. der
SomervilleTom says
I’m all in favor of doing whatever we can to prevent suicides and such.
I agree that the nibbling-around-the-edges strategy we’ve been trying at the national level won’t work. It won’t work because today’s GOP is nothing but a bunch of delusional bullies and thugs.
Our “democracy” is broken. Period. We need to fix it.
merrimackguy says
All Republican mayors and city councilors should be voted out. I can’t believe urban dwellers are such idiots to keep electing them. Another problem is bad policing. The unholy alliance between the police unions and the GOP must end. Let’s not forget the the root of violence is poor education. Again, if the teachers and the GOP weren’t in bed together, and the Republican city administrations cared about education we wouldn’t be in this fix.
What we need is an African American president who comes from an urban area. Until you get that, you’ll never see real change.
thebaker says
LOL – so true ho ho ho so true!
jconway says
$500 million to take it nationally, it’s a faith based, community oriented program that is not another government agency, and it reduced the homicide rate in Boston by 63%. This is the kind of stuff Speaker Ryan should be pushing through Congress today, if he really believes his rhetoric that his party cares about cities.
merrimackguy says
Relatively low cost program with proven effectiveness. No brainer.
jconway says
Immigration reform is vitally necessary, it’s not passing anytime soon, but we can help 9 million people from being deported with an executive order. So Obama did it. We won’t be able to get meaningful gun control until progressives are fully in control of Washington, but in the meantime, let’s at least pass this easy fix and easy win. It’s such a better use of our time than the endless op ed’s and endless bills filed that will never pass. It’s a form of dishonesty to victims and their families, that this bill will fix everything when it won’t if it passes and won’t even pass. Especially when an easy win is in reach but nobody seems interested in it since you it helps inner city blacks and they get more publicity tilting at windmills that aren’t going away anytime soon.
Christopher says
Surely there are things Obama can command about how the ATF does its job that will have some effect.
fredrichlariccia says
and reducing gun violence at the same time.
And I don’t see the two as mutually exclusive of each other.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
jconway says
I think we have focused 99% of our media’s attention and our movements political and financial capital on legislative initiatives that have no chance of passing to solve close to 1% of the annual gun casualties. We don’t have to take it down to zero, but surely the other 99% of gun casualties deserve our attention. Especially when data based efforts have reduced them by more than half, in Boston and could serve as a real national effort to reduce them by similar numbers nationwide.
Quixotic gun control gets on the back burner until the next mass shooting, we propose it in response, the Republicans reject it, and we all forget about it until the next one. Rinse and repeat. I’m tired of it. Black lives should matter too, they are losing 15 people a day in their communities. Chicago loses 10 columbines a year in school aged children getting killed in one on one homicides. I agree mass shootings are awful and only the strictest gun control laws could stop it, but this violence is a daily reality for far too many Americans and deserves the bulk of our attention and effort. We have been focused on mass shootings to the exclusion of inner city violence for far too long and the numbers and proposed remedies don’t justify those proportions.
scott12mass says
If you look at each state having two senators as a roadblock this bunch is way farther to the left than I thought possible. That would start a crack in the foundation which could never be repaired.
jconway says
I’m just pointing out that everyone who points to Australia or the UK as gun control models, me included, has to reconcile the fact that our government has far more gridlock built into it by design and is significantly less responsive to mass opinion on a given issue. A unicameral parliament, usually controlled entirely by a majority party, can more swiftly pass laws than our system. It can react to public opinion and pass those laws immediately after massacres. We have to recognize that our Senate, by design, is supposed to be insulated from mass opinion. This can be a good thing or a bad thing, but we can’t deny that it is a real thing, and a real barrier to progress on this particular issue.
nopolitician says
Not to go too off-topic, it is at least worth discussing whether our unique model of government is serving the same purpose as it was when our country was founded.
The Great Compromise was done at a time when states were far closer to being independent countries than they are today. Giving “small states” a safety valve against “large states” made perfect sense in that context because the balance of power was mostly concerned with those two polar opposites, and issues usually centered around impacts to individual states.
Today, the two-senator feature of our government has been intertwined with political ideologies. Instead of giving Wyoming and Idaho more footing to prevent larger states from passing policies that made life worse for smaller states, senatorial equal representation gives a massive advantage to a very specific partisan ideological minority. In the Senate, the 584,153 voters in Wyoming have the same weight as the 38,800,000 voters in California. The population size differences in 1787 were nowhere near those proportions.
Also, due to the fixed number of representatives in the House (the number used to rise gradually with the population until 1910, those 584,153 people in Wyoming’s single congressional district have the same weight as the over 1,000,000 people in Montana.
The filibuster rule serves to amplify that effect. I suppose you could argue that this rule should be removed before we discuss whether our system of government is functionally obsolete, but that shouldn’t stop us from at least pointing out that the Great Compromise is not functioning in the same manner as our founders intended it.
I personally think that the modern-day equivalent of the Great Compromise would be to divide the Senate up equally by political party – 50 Republicans, 50 Democrats, never changing.
jconway says
If you look pass the overly alarmist title and conclusion, Matt Yglesias makes some compelling pointsin this piece about how the Madisonian model may be outmoded and contributing to permanent inertia on addressing major issues. That’s part of my point.
I absolutely believe we should pass gun control at the federal level, and I am absolutely convinced it will be incredibly difficult to do so before we pass fundamental reforms to our broken government to make it representative again. Recognizing that, let’s work on a far more pressing element of this problem that can be immediately solved within the political framework we have. Locally, and federally, we can pass this program to save thousands of lives from preventable gun deaths a year, now, without worrying about gridlock or the gun lobby. Those are still fights worth fighting, but these lives are worth saving now.
scott12mass says
the two party system. I want other parties to emerge. I vote Libertarian when I can, but I’ve also voted Green-Rainbow.
thebaker says
What do you think of Jill Stein?
I always thought she was dedicated enough, but just not electable. Is there anyone coming up that could lead that party, maybe get them on the ballot in 2020 if Trump wins the general in 2016?
I’m not a Roseanne Barr or Cheri Honkala fan and I’m hoping they have someone coming up. It would be good to see them in the mix.
johnk says
and the Republican nominee and fight to out stupid each other and the Democrat (adult) will win.
scott12mass says
Would like to see 5 parties.
Green-Rainbow, Democrat, Libertarian, Republican, Tea Party.
thebaker says
I bet more people would pay attention, and the debates would be great!
nopolitician says
The two-party system is already entrenched because of the way our representation works. Look at what has happened in Maine governor’s space – three candidates running in the general election – two liberal, one conservative. The conservative wins by a plurality. Any disagreement by the voters over similarly aligned candidates results in electing the exact opposite of what you stand for.
Christopher says
The 17th amendment largely obscured this distinction, but the idea was that the House represents the people and the Senate represents the states as semi-sovereign entities. I understand the motivation behind the 17th amendment and I wouldn’t go as far as push for repeal, but the historian in me feels compelled to point out that we threw the system out of balance a bit by its passage.
jconway says
Why we continue to have a Senate at all? If we made the bargain that the people’s voices are what ultimately matters, than why not have a unicameral legislature? A lot of the Westminster nations have vestigial upper houses, but they are far less powerful than ours.
Not saying I agree with abolishing the Senate, but there are days I wonder if we could start from scratch what form of government would work better. The historian in me has a tremendous amount of respect and reverence for the Senate, but the political scientist in me thinks the Madisonian model might be permanently broken and in need of a redo of some kind.
SomervilleTom says
The problem is that the GOP is almost entirely dominated by dishonest, delusional and ignorant thugs who have ZERO regard for truth, rationality, fairness, justice, or anything else besides what they and their owners want.
The fundamental breakdown in our governance is not caused by flaws in the Constitution and will not be solved by amending the Constitution. It is no harder to bridge the partisan gap between the Democrats and the GOP today than it was when both parties had had enough of Senator Joe McCarthy, during the cold war, or during the civil rights and Vietnam war eras. The difference is that an informed and literate electorate wanted elected representatives who WANTED to bridge that gap.
The GOP has, at least since the Bill Clinton administration, pursued a scorched-earth approach to governance that starts with the insistence that any Democratic President be destroyed regardless of his or her policy proposals. It is accompanied by the wholesale ownership of the mainstream media combined with the GOP-led reversal of the Fairness Doctrine.
The Madisonian model is, in my view, not any more broken than it has ever been. It is the miscreants in the GOP that have destroyed our government and are doing their best to do the same to our society.
Christopher says
I think we have elected officials who are not committed to it. The Framers did not envision some bodies simply refusing to do their jobs.
jconway says
Since they could form coalitions and work with one another more productively than they do now. Most parliamentary governments still have a center right and center left main two parties, but the third parties can have more of an influence. The Liberal Democrats made Cameron prime minister, probably to their eternal chagrin, but they were the kingmakers there.
It’s a lot harder for third parties to be kingmakers in the US. At the state level, the Alaska Independent Party had some success in the past, as has the Progressive Party in Vermont. In New York where parties can cross endorse, state based parties have had a large impact as well.
I am very optimistic that Evan Falchuk is a significantly more serious party builder than Jill Stein and is working the hard way to stay on the ballot and get some of his members into legislative seats. Time will tell if his effort is successful, but he almost a few votes shy of getting an at large councilor in Pittsfield which is more than the Greens have ever done.
Christopher says
…as it is proportional representation vs. single-member districts.
jconway says
Our bicameral legislature is designed to allow one house to check another and to have both check the President. They still have to caucus, as independent Bernie Sanders has done, with one party or the other. PR is much easier to do in a unicameral parliamentary democracy, I am not sure if it has ever been done in a presidential republic such as ours.
spence says
that the guy from Falchuk’s party was almost a few votes shy of getting in? It was more like 2,000 votes shy, needing about 5,500 and getting about 3,500 for a distant 6th out of 7 candidates.
I agree that there is little hope for the Greens to become a true system-changer, but they have won some local offices.
jconway says
Turner in Boston is gone, my friend Luc Shuster has left the party and isn’t in office anymore-who’s left? I’m interested to know. I also don’t recall them pursuing state legislative offices the way Falchuk is.
I was under the impression he was somewhat close to getting on the council, thanks for correcting that.