Liberals need to approach gun control how conservatives approach abortion.
It’s time to repeal the 2nd amendment, launch a federal buyback program, and criminalize possession of nearly all guns except a very limited few. Any other position from closing gun show loopholes to universal background checks should be the compromise position that is barely acceptable.
The NRA says “the democrats want to take away your guns” and our response is “no, that’s hyperbolic.”
Not anymore.
It’s about time we say “ yes we are going to take them because there’s no God damn good reason for anyone to own the type of weaponry being used in these terrorist attacks.” It’s about damn time that we start pushing our candidates to be the candidates that gun manufacturers are afraid of.
The fact is that we can no longer negotiate with a very small percentage of the population obsessed with guns because of their low self-esteem, fear of the outside world, and because they are easily manipulated by gun manufacturers/lobbyists who only care about profits.
This small group of conservatives live in a terrible fantasy world.
A world where immigrants are drug dealers and rapists and somehow can also steal your job. A world where using go fund me to pay for healthcare is better than a public option. A world where the decision to have an abortion is somehow easy. And finally a world where everyone needs a gun because everyone is trying to kill you.
These conservatives live in a world that is very scary but fortunately not real. However their fear is creating that reality because we refuse to push back. For some reason we are adamant about trying to negotiate with this small group of people.
Well I’m done negotiating with cowards and the manufacturers & lobbyists who make money off their insecurity. Repeal the second amendment and get rid of these guns.
15 to 20 million military assault – style weapons are currently in the hands of ‘ordinary’ Americans according to CBS Evening News tonight.
And prepare to lose “bigly”!
“Pukes have no principles but a spine. Dems have principles but no spine.” anon When are we going to grow a pair?
Winning or losing isn’t the point. The abortion analogy is spot on. They haven’t repealed Roe, but they’ve galvanized a grassroots movement that has chipped away at it for decades at the state and federal level. We have an unjust decision to overturn (Heller) via an amendment and this is exactly what will get our voters to the polls, our people to protests, and hold their feet to our fire.
The Right is also not obsessed with their appeal to the moderates and seeking the elusive centrist candidate who will be a viable choice for the mystical majority of voters who are evenly split on this issue or any issue.
I’m not convinced we will win the galvanization fight on this one.
If it were easy to be convinced, there wouldn’t be a fight.
We don’t need to advocate repeal. We need to shame the self-proclaimed originalists into actually being originalists with respect to the second amendment.
I think this is the way to do it. I highly recommend the More Perfect podcast episode on the 2nd amendment. Basically our interpretation, emphasizing the militia part, was viewed as correct even by conservatives right through the early 1990’s. Warren Berger’s oft cited quote on the subject is clear proof that when he went to law school, this was the straightforward interpretation.
After the assassinations in the 60’s and the first outcrop of massacres in the 70’s, the NRA met and actually decided to go ahead and rename themselves rather than be associated with gun nuts. Grassroots gun nuts then took over the NRA and working with the Federalist Society made their fringe interpretation the law of the land. Heller cannot be undone now. Like Roe, only an amendment or a differently composed court can affect a change in constitutional law.
Meaning even if we get 60 votes for gun control, D house, D Senate-whatever the pass will violate Heller and be overturned by Kavanaugh and Co. This is why the amendment fight is required. Whether successful or not, it forces a constitutional conversation and reframes the fringe interpretation of unlimited individual rights as the fringe interpretation.
By and large I agree with this (I up-voted it)
At the same time, I have a few quibbles as follows:
I fear this misses the point. The key pro-gun players in the gun-control argument are not “the very small percentage of the population obsessed with guns”. The key players are instead the very deep-pocketed gun manufacturers. Fortunately, their pockets are apparently not as deep as they used to be because some of them basically defrauded and embezzled the NRA. Golly gee, that’s terrible.
Oliver North was apparently double-dipping. I’m shocked! Who would have thought, based on his long and very public history, that Mr. North would DO such a thing?
The other perhaps more important point is that that anti-abortion lobby has NOT amended the Constitution to ban abortion. So when you push to repeal the Second Amendment, you go FAR beyond what the anti-abortion movement has achieved.
I like your first sentence as it stands:
I think that means that we need to pass law after law banning weapons the same way that conservatives have spent decades passing law after law banning abortion.
I think we force the Court to declare these unconstitutional over and over again, as each and every state chips away at every chink in the pro-gun position.
I think we force anti-gun judges onto the Supreme Court. I think we use every opportunity to flood the lower courts with anti-gun judicial appointees.
I think we force religious institutions — specifically the institutional Roman Catholic Church — to answer questions like “How do you reconcile manufacturing and selling AR15s with the commands of Christ?”
I think we find and encourage Roman Catholic bishops, arch-bishops, and cardinals who publicly announce that public officials who encourage the manufacture and sale of these weapons will be denied communion.
We need to turn people who own these weapons into pariahs. We to turn the manufacturers of these weapons into villains the way the radical right has turned Planned Parenthood into a villain.
It seems to me that the past few decades have shown us that half-baked measures like the Baker Bill don’t do squat.
I think it’s time to for us to do some demonizing.
I agree with most of what you’ve said here except I’d argue the gun manufacturers are paper tigers. Poll after poll shows an incredibly high percentage of people in favor of gun control. The people who are not are just the most vocal and well financed.
While cursory, I was in the White Mountains this week and many people would tell me how much they favor some form of gun control. One statement that seemed to resonate was that the only gun you ever really needed was a shotgun with 3-5 rounds. Our discussion was not in depth but I’d guess most were not liberals.
Finally, random FYI – America the Magazine had a whole issue dedicated to gun control being a pro life issue.
Welcome back Anthony and this was a well written and thoughtful response to this weekends barbarism.
Gun control as pro-life – you may have found the hook we need. Hardly the only issue where Dems appear to be truly the pro-life party.
Such a beautifully well-written and persuasive appeal to radically recalibrate our approach to this issue. I’m so thankful you wrote this.
I’d say do all of the above, but allow rifles with licenses (being stuck with the unprecedented Heller decision, which found – for the first time in 230 years – that the 2nd Amendment does recognize a personal right to bear arms, we likely have to include handgun licenses as well).
Few people realize that the Heller decision does not stop state jurisdictions from severely limiting gun ownership beyond rifles. In other words, it is extremely likely that a ban on semi-automatic weapons would be upheld as legal by even this supreme court.
Then again, if the groundswell really happened and your approach was pursued and the Second Amendment was actually repealed, all of my comments here would be moot.
I do think it’s important to recognize the very different cultures we have in other parts of the country and allow licenses for hunting rifles.
Nonetheless, I receive your refreshing post as a CLARiON call to stop tolerating or giving any credence whatsoever to the lectures we regularly receive from gun people that we know nothing about the difference for example between automatic weapons and semi-automatic weapons – as if that actually has any bearing whatsoever on the fact that it is these very sub-automatic weapons that are killing masses of people on a regular basis.
Enough with these red herring lectures. We need to take the reins and take our country back. You just started the process.
Counties that have hosted Trump’s fascist rallies have a 226% higher rate of violence than counties that didn’t host his rallies.
“He’s not tolerating racism, he’s promoting racism. He’s not tolerating violence, he’s inciting violence.” Beto O’Rourke
The needle just moved. Rupert Murdoch’s NY Post headline today : BAN ASSAULT WEAPONS.
That is too simple. I have lived for some years in rural Maine. There are people who get the largest majority of meat from deer hunting. I have a dear friend whose favorite hobby is target shooting. There are lots of things we can do that will not take away people’s guns altogether. We could start with limiting guns to two or three rounds. We could require new guns to have a mechanism that requires the owner’s fingerprint in order to fire. We could make people keep target shooting guns at a locked storage container at the gun club.
We need to be smart, not dogmatic.
I don’t think the OP is proposing to make guns used for hunting or target shooting illegal.
It’s easy to get data about domestic gun production.
From the above government data, three and a half MILLION pistols were manufactured in the US in 2015 and more than three quarters of a million revolvers. That’s more than FOUR MILLION pistols and revolvers manufactured in one frigging year. Domestic pistol and revolver production has more than TRIPLED in the last ten years of the above data.
Scroll to the bottom of the above data, and look at the number of weapons registered — then compare that to the number produced. We produce more than NINE MILLION weapons per year in the US, yet only five million are registered.
Guns do not wear out. Those guns all go somewhere. Those pistols and revolvers aren’t being used to hunt deer in Maine.
They are instead being used to kill people in cities.
I’m all for being smart. It is not dogmatic to observe that our annual gun production is absolutely out of control.
I’d like to see us consider things like limiting the total number guns allowed to be in circulation at any one time. Make it illegal or exorbitantly expensive to buy a gun without returning one at the same time. Make each ROUND, casing, and each gun individually identifiable with some sort of bar code, so that evidence found at a crime scene can be accurately traced through its legal chain of custody. Hold the last licensed owner of a round, casing, or weapon liable for any harm done by the weapon, unless those items are reported stolen to local authorities. Maintain a national registry so that rounds, casings, and weapons can be tracked. We do this with automobiles, it isn’t that hard to do it with weapons and ammunition.
What we are doing with weapons is absolute lunacy. How can any culture that claims to value life allow this unrestricted production of instruments of death?
You’re making a common mistake that amending the second amendment is the same as a national ban on all guns. It’s not.
What if we amended it to read as follows
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, shall not be infringed.
This restores the the originalist meaning of the right to bear arms to mean common people using small arms for self defense within a community. Hunting, fishing, etc. are well regulated by the states and won’t be affected.
This removes the problematic ambiguity behind the “the right to bear arms shall not be infringed” clause that fringe conservatives deliberately misinterpreted to mean unlimited individual rights to any firearms. This change clarifies Burger’s plain reading as the only reading.
Because US does NOT have domestic terror laws, 70% of domestic terrorists are arrested AFTER the attack whereas 70% of international terrorists are arrested BEFORE the attack.
’68, ’93, and ’94 were the only years gun reform passed into law because those were the only years Democrats held the White House and both houses of Congress.
No. I am not making that mistake. I am all for banning all military style weapons and restricting a variety of types of weapons. What I reacted to was: “It’s time to …. criminalize possession of nearly all guns except a very limited few”.
Heh — rifles used for hunting and target shooting meet my understanding of “a very limited few”.
I sincerely doubt that there are tens of millions of such guns.