Gun reform, going nowhere fast: After Oxford High, there’s no appetite for legislative change

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The response to Michigan’s Oxford High School shooting proves what I’ve long suspected: Gun reform has hit a wall. Within hours, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy asked for unanimous consent to reintroduce a universal background check bill. It was blocked by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, and this time there was not even much of an uproar.

Reformers face a deeper reckoning in a pending Supreme Court decision on a New York State law limiting the concealed carrying of guns mainly to those who can demonstrate their specific self-defense need to do so. Its decision could expand the legality of civilians carrying hidden guns in not just New York but nationwide.

For decades, different right-leaning groups have organized to restrict abortion access and to expand access to guns, and their efforts are now showing results. Left-leaning groups have been more reactive, organizing when they feel threatened but without any long-term strategy.

Gun reformers need a new approach, one which considers how we got we got here as a nation so we can find a way out. Instead of ignoring the gun lobby and its messaging, reformers need to step up to challenge the myths and lies promoted by the gun industry and the National Rifle Association that are blocking gun reform. Instead of deferring to politicians who rarely focus more than a few years ahead, reformers need to reach out themselves to gun owners to find common ground.

Those who want a change in American gun laws should dig in and build a gun reform movement to match what the NRA and the gun industry built up together for more than four decades, beginning after new hardline leaders took over the NRA in 1977.

Today, the modern NRA faces its first existential crisis since 1977. Lately gun reformers have gloated over the NRA’s self-inflicted embezzlement scandal that could yet bring it down. But they miss that the pro-gun movement is stronger today than it’s ever been, certain to endure now as a central plank of the GOP even if the NRA that helped nail it in place collapses.

Gun reformers must rethink what they want and learn how to talk to gun owners. Unless they can start the conversation by credibly saying no one is ever going to come for your guns, they will likely continue to fail. The gun lobby’s most successful myth has been to convince many Americans and nearly all of today’s GOP leaders that gun ownership and gun control simply cannot co-exist. They can. This claim ignores how they do co-exist in other advanced nations as well as in six states plus the District of Columbia, in which residents are required to register many or most newly purchased weapons.

Most reformers don’t realize that the measures they advocate for — like stronger background checks, red flag laws, anti-trafficking measures, anti-violence measures and more — would still only make a slight dip in bringing our gun violence down to that of other wealthy nations even if they all one day were to pass. President Biden, when under pressure, has intermittently said he would try to reimpose a new assault weapons ban. But this is something that has backfired in the past, and that today’s Supreme Court, as the legal scholars have pointed out, would likely overturn.

Few reformers seem to know that the one thing that separates our nation from every other wealthy nation, besides us having 25 times, on average, more gun violence, is that these nations all have a national system of licensing gun owners and registering their weapons, while we alone leave it up to our states. Democrats seem to have concluded that trying to implement national licensing and registration might encounter even more resistance. Yet easy access to guns is the common denominator in our gun violence, and, unless we find some way to check it, the carnage will continue.

Reformers need to talk with gun owners about regulations that would respect gun ownership but that also raise the threshold to purchase new guns, especially, to match the responsibility that comes with keeping them. New guns sold in states with weak gun laws is what fuels our ongoing gun tragedies, as up to more than half of guns seized from criminals have traveled across state lines.

Biden needs to appoint a commission to ask how we got here and options for moving forward. It should finally examine our own history of gun control, showing the passage of federal gun laws from the 1930s through the 1960s in response to gun violence from organized crime to political assassinations. And ask why that progress not only stopped, but, if anything, has only since been rolled back, and why we barely talk about any of this anymore.

Given the state of affairs today, meaningful fixes to our gun laws could take years, if not a generation. And they’ll never happen unless advocates rethink their approach.

Smyth is the author of “The NRA: The Unauthorized History.”

MLB vs. NRA: Compare and contrast

MLB vs. NRA: Compare and contrast

A police vehicle is seen across from Nationals Park, Sunday, July 18, 2021, in Washington. A baseball game between the San Diego Padres and Washington was suspended in the sixth inning Saturday night after a shooting outside Nationals Park.
A police vehicle is seen across from Nationals Park, Sunday, July 18, 2021, in Washington. A baseball game between the San Diego Padres and Washington was suspended in the sixth inning Saturday night after a shooting outside Nationals Park. (Nick Wass/AP)

The gunfire that suspended a game between the San Diego Padres and the hometown Washington Nationals was a first for Major League Baseball. Unfortunately, it’s hardly surprising in 2021 America.

This year the nation has endured a mass shooting, or the wounding or killing of at least four people, more than once a day. We have about 25 times more on average than in other advanced nations. Every day a new gun tragedy, each with its own loss of life and lifelong toll, seems to replace a prior heartbreak.

Major League Baseball and the National Rifle Association are each a century and a half old. But while MLB celebrates its history, the NRA buries and rewrites its own, likely because an exhumation could illuminate our nation’s pickle over gun violence.

Baseball’s roots are long. Amateur clubs emerged in many states after the Civil War. The first “professional” game where all players were paid occurred in Mansfield, Ohio in 1869, and the first “major league” game was played nearly two years later in Indiana. The hometown Fort Wayne Kekiongas, named for the capital of a local Native American tribe, beat the Cleveland Forest Citys, in an association that in 1903 became the Major League Baseball we know today.

Six months after the Fort Wayne game, the NRA was founded in New York City. Two Union Army veteran officers founded the group to improve marksmanship in anticipation of future wars. They copied its name, the layout of its gun range and even the design of tons of iron targets, shipped by steamer across the Atlantic, from the National Rifle Association of the United Kingdom.

The MLB celebrates its history. From retiring numbers of baseball legends, to players donning uniforms to celebrate the Negro Leagues, to honoring surviving legends by bringing or assisting them into stadiums to be cheered by fans, to archiving scores and statistics in publicly accessible databases dating back to 1903 — the year of the first World Series.

The NRA at least appreciates its history, having built a climate-controlled room to preserve documents, blueprints, trophies, ephemera and movie reels of shooting competitions dating back to the 1930s, in the basement of the National Firearms Museum at NRA headquarters in Fairfax, Va. But it is closed to both rank-and-file NRA members and the public. Why? The NRA underwent a change in 1977, more than a century after it was founded, and its new leaders wanted a reboot. The “Cincinnati Revolt,” as it is known, shifted the group from a gun club to the unyielding gun lobby we know today.

Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s longtime and now embattled CEO, joined NRA a year later. He and other modern leaders don’t want anyone to know about the NRA’s British Royal roots, lest the disinterment belie their claims that the NRA was founded to support gun rights and the Second Amendment.

The NRA’s museum illustrates much about firearms but nothing about NRA history, apart from a large bronze bust of Harlon B. Carter, the leader of the Cincinnati Revolt whom LaPierre recently called a “great leader.” Carter had changed his first name from Harlan to conceal for 50 years that he was once convicted and jailed of murdering a fellow juvenile, Ramón Casiano, with a shotgun before his conviction was overturned upon appeal.

Today’s NRA leaders have more to hide. Like how the NRA took no position on gun control over its first 50 years, then supported national gun control legislation from the 1930s until the 1977 revolt. Or how the NRA ended a 50-year practice of financial transparency, also in 1977.

Recently NRA leaders have told new lies. In Indianapolis, in 2019, an NRA board member named Allen West claimed that the early organization had “stood with freed slaves.” West is a former Florida congressman and chair of the Texas Republican Party, who is now running against Greg Abbott in the Texas gubernatorial primary.

“When faced with the threats, coercion, intimidation, and yes, violence of an organization called the Ku Klux Klan, it was the NRA that stood with and defended the rights of Blacks to the Second Amendment,” West previously wrote.

Not one word of this is true. Five years before, a book whose research was partly financed by the NRA claimed that gun control helped enable the Holocaust. That’s also false. But it shows how far the modern NRA will go to keep making it easy for Americans to buy guns, sustaining earnings for gun industry and NRA executives alike.

The MLB has seen its share of scandals from accusations of throwing the World Series in 1919, to widespread steroid use, to pitchers today allegedly doctoring the ball. But the MLB has survived each one by using transparency, even if commissioners were slow at first, to regain trust. One American pastime, gun-toting, could learn a lot from the other.

Smyth is the author of “The NRA: The Unauthorized History.”

 

 

 

Holocaust, guns and the truth

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Holocaust, guns and the truth

Prisoners posing with guards outside the prison building in the Warsaw Jewish ghetto during World War II in 1943.
Prisoners posing with guards outside the prison building in the Warsaw Jewish ghetto during World War II in 1943. (AFP/AFP via Getty Images)

Republican Party leaders finally called out Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — a supporter of QAnon and the big lie about the 2020 election — after she compared health measures requiring facemasks, to Jews in the Holocaust forced to wear Stars of David. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called the parallel “appalling,” while Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called it “absolutely outrageous and reprehensible.” They and other GOP leaders have given no indication, however, that they will sanction Greene.

But the freshman congresswoman is hardly the only figure in the nation to have manipulated the Holocaust. The National Rifle Association, or at least its modern leaders led by its now embattled CEO, Wayne LaPierre, have long searched for “proof” that gun control is nothing more than a slippery slope to genocide. And in recent years, the NRA has manipulated the Holocaust to claim they finally found it, funding research that has allegedly discovered a new link between gun control and the Holocaust that generations of scholars have yet to find.

In 2013, the Anti-Defamation League said “Nazi Analogies Have No Place In Gun Control Debate” after a half dozen commentators including Sean Hannity and Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News out of the blue all raised the matter of gun control and the Holocaust.

“If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had had the firepower and the ammunition that the Nazis did, some of Poland might have stayed free and more persons would have survived the Holocaust,” claimed Napolitano.

It’s as if they were all laying the groundwork for the book, “Gun Control in The Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and ‘Enemies of the State,’” published later that year by the Independent Institute, a small think-tank in Oakland. Research for this book was partly funded by the NRA. Its author, Stephen P. Halbrook, is the nation’s best-known pro-gun lawyer. Several years before, during the watershed gun rights case Heller vs. District of Columbia that established that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep arms, Halbrook filed a successful amicus brief on behalf of 250 members of the House of Representatives, 55 senators, and the president of the Senate, then-Vice President Dick Cheney.

Halbrook’s thesis about gun control and the Holocaust is novel at best. Most Holocaust scholars, like Alan E. Steinweis, director of Holocaust studies at the University of Vermont, say that the idea that gun control was a factor in the Holocaust is “simply a nonissue.” But Halbrook claims that prior gun control laws during the Weimer Republic, or Germany’s democratic years before Hitler took power, were used to seize firearms from Jews, enough to have helped enable the Holocaust.

Never mind the weak evidence, the NRA’s house organ crowed about the book’s supposed breakthrough.

“Based on newly discovered secret documents from German archives, diaries and newspapers of the time,” the book “presents the definitive, yet hidden history of how the Nazi regime made use of gun control to disarm and repress its enemies and consolidate power,” read the NRA’s American Rifleman in the most glowing review. “While voluminous scholarship has documented the Third Reich and the Holocaust, this is the first thorough examination of the laws restricting firearm ownership that rendered Hitler’s political opponents, as well as the Jews, defenseless.”

The very same language is repeated by the Independent Institute in its website’s blurb for the book. The Washington Times also reviewed it, but notably hedged the book’s claim that gun control was a significant factor in the Holocaust. “There is no way to prove it,” Robert VerBruggen wrote of the book’s thesis, sidestepping whether the book’s evidence is sound, only noting that it provided an “extensive history” of the matter.

Halbrook even buried near the back of his book that he never found the evidence to prove his case. “Police reports listing weapons seized from Jews have been difficult to locate,” he wrote. He added that “such records may have been destroyed during the war,” which is hard to believe, as records of nearly every aspect of the Holocaust survived.

This thesis resonates more loudly today than many may realize. Taken at face value, it suggests that gun control laws like those the Democrats are trying to pass now could one day be used to confiscate arms, just like the Nazis allegedly did. If this same thesis fails to hold up, however, the best evidence gun rights advocates would have left to stop gun control would be the 1984 Hollywood movie “Red Dawn,” where Communist invaders use prior gun control lists to seize guns as they take over. But that, of course, is fiction.

Leaders of both parties have rightly spoken out against Rep. Greene’s disturbing comparison. But no one should get a pass for spinning the Holocaust to advance gun rights, either.

Smyth is the author of “The NRA: The Unauthorized History,”

The slope is not so slippery, actually: Dems must tackle disinformation about gun control head-on

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President Biden’s gun plan includes mandatory registration of “assault weapons” for anyone wishing to keep those they already own. He is the first president to raise the issue of gun registration in more than 50 years since President Lyndon Baines Johnson. He’s the first ever, too, to propose banning new sales of “assault” or tactical, semiautomatic weapons.

The Biden administration is responding to pressure for gun reform led today by survivors of the Valentine’s Day 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. The plan has finally put on the table what gun reform advocates including surviving parents and others have long demanded, seemingly in vain until now. The House just passed major gun control bills on Thursday.

Gun rights advocates, however, a group that seems to include nearly every leader of the Republican Party, are readying for a fight. If there is one issue that could reunite the GOP, from Sen. Mitch McConnell to former President Trump, not to mention every group from Three Percenters to neo-Nazis who joined in the Jan. 6 Capitol takeover, it is gun registration. Against it, that is.

It is impossible to imagine how Biden could succeed in healing the nation, as he has promised, and still enact all of his gun plan. Many if not most of the 74 million people who voted for Trump’s reelection would also oppose this plan. Not to mention many elected officials, from governors to constitutional sheriffs, who might refuse to comply. Or the new Roberts Supreme Court, which will one day no doubt rule on gun laws.

Millions of people, today, see gun control itself as an existential threat.

“They call it the slippery slope, and all of a sudden everything gets taken away,” as President Trump said in 2018 when he reversed himself on background checks after the back-to-back weekend shootings in El Paso and Dayton. He did so after speaking with the National Rifle Association leader Wayne LaPierre, who, like the NRA, has long promoted this theory.

Biden has yet to address the details of his own gun plan. Throughout his 48-year career, moreover, he is not known to have ever addressed the issue of gun registration. Gun groups have been circulating for months what they call the “Biden plan to destroy the Second Amendment,” filling the vacuum left by his silence with fear. They claim that this is the fateful step, after background checks, that could start the slide to disarmament, and then genocide.

This kind of cowardice has long led reformers astray. The nation has not passed any comprehensive and lasting national gun laws in more than a half-century. In 1994, during the Clinton years, Congress passed the “Assault Weapons Ban,” which outlawed, for just 10 years, select semiautomatic firearms based on their cosmetic features, like both a pistol grip and a flash suppressor. But this only led gun manufacturers to design weapons to bypass the ban, which, since it expired, has resulted in more sales of more AR-15 rifles and other tactical, semiautomatic weapons than ever before.

The Biden plan would give existing owners of semiautomatic weapons (like me) the choice of either selling their weapons back to the federal government, or registering them under a prior gun law, backed in 1934 by the NRA, along with paying a tax of up to $200 for each weapon. This would put hardship on working-class gun owners, noted the former NRA commentator and independent merchandiser Colion Noir.

The plan would limit, too, although no one has yet suggested the cap, the number of weapons one may own, along with banning high-capacity magazines. All these steps are opposed by the NRA and others who share the belief that firearms in civilian hands are a necessary check on the power of federal as well as state governments, and that they are also necessary for self-defense against not just lone criminals but also armed mobs. Firearms sales spiked last year after the death in police custody of George Floyd as the uprising began of Black Lives Matter protests.

Biden said he would also reverse the immunity granted under President George W. Bush to hold gunmakers civilly liable, again, for the potential misuse of their weapons to commit harm. He would eliminate the “gun show loophole” to require background checks on private sales. It remains to be seen whether this proposal might include an exception for, say, the passing down of a firearm heirloom to the next generation.

The president left out one measure in his recent remarks, on the third anniversary of the Parkland shooting, still posted online: to ban online sales of ammunition. The nation has experienced an unprecedented, ongoing shortage of ammunition from both over-the-counter and online retailers, according to both the trade press and the NRA. It’s been fueled by ever-rising demand, as manufacturers have been producing ammo at “above-normal capacities” throughout the pandemic. Demand spiked again to worsen the shortage after first CNN, and then Fox News, announced that Biden had won the presidency.

No doubt any attempt to end commerce in the firearms industry’s fastest-growing sector would meet opposition. Most of the outrage already smoldering in resistance to the gun plan, however, is based on speculation, not facts. This shows how much the NRA, in particular, has shaped how we as a nation look at guns and their regulations. The NRA wasn’t always like this. The NRA backed gun control from the 1930s into the 1970s, as its leaders long sought to balance the needs of gun owners against public safety.

Despite what today’s NRA may suggest, gun registration is the norm in every other advanced nation, and not one of them has deteriorated into either a totalitarian or genocidal state. Canada, the nations of Western Europe and Japan all control guns by strictly licensing owners and registering each weapon, to the degree that they permit civilian ownership at all.

A few more, like Australia and New Zealand each confiscated semiautomatic weapons after a mass shooting. Yet, rather than falling into tyranny, each of these two nations still gets the very highest rankings for their political and civil rights on the Freedom Index compiled by the watchdog Freedom House.

Six blue states, too, including New York and New Jersey, require mandatory registration of some or all semiautomatic guns. New York also requires registration of all handguns, which must be kept in the home. Most states, today, also issue permits for the concealed carry of handguns. This generates registries of gun permit holders that the NRA and others also conveniently ignore.

Resistance to gun registration runs deep. During the Reagan years, LaPierre was dubbed the “Captain” by Sen. Orrin Hatch after he guided, on behalf of the NRA, passage of a 1986 law that weakened two prior national gun control laws. The same law also prohibited “any system registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions.”

Fear of gun registration remains strong. In 2013, when a bipartisan pair of senators, Joe Manchin from West Virginia and Pat Toomey from Pennsylvania, wrote a bill for “universal” background checks after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in two first-grade classrooms, they included language adding criminal penalties to any government official found to have compiled gun registration lists, saying it would make the bill more palatable.

Yet, even with this redundant language, the bill still fell short of garnering the 60 votes needed to overcome a threatened filibuster. Today, even though the Democrats now have a slim majority in the Senate, the threat of a filibuster to block gun reform remains. Majority leaders have discussed the possibility of taking the “nuclear option” to eliminate it. But they are hesitant, as it could lead to other ways for the Republican minority to block legislation.

To support their theory of the slippery slope, the NRA helped fund research for a book called “Gun Control in the Third Reich” by the gun rights litigator and scholar, Stephen P. Halbrook, published by a small think tank in 2013. This book “presents the definitive, yet hidden history of how the Nazi regime made use of gun control to disarm and repress its enemies and consolidate power,” read its own publisher’s blurb parroted verbatim in a review in the NRA’s flagship American Rifleman magazine, which omitted mention of Halbrook having received NRA funds.

Few if any Holocaust scholars support this claim. It ignores that European Jews had no tradition of either gun ownership or resistance, as the scholar Raul Hilberg, author of “The Destruction of the European Jews,” documented. The director of Holocaust studies at the University of Vermont, Alan E. Steinweis, wrote that the idea that gun control played a role “is a simply a nonissue.”

Halbrook in his book also cited evidence that seems to disprove his own thesis, burying it near his conclusion: “Police reports listing weapons seized from Jews have been difficult to locate. Many such records may have been destroyed during the war, either by the Nazis themselves or due to Allied bombings.” The Nazis went door-to-door searching for Jews and confiscating their property. But, when it came to firearms, they found little more than hunting rifles and antique guns, as the surviving records Halbrook did manage to find show.

These are the kinds of myths and disinformation that is filling the gap left behind by Biden and his advisers’ silence over their own gun plan. If they and others want to pass meaningful reforms, they need to finally address these tough issues head-on. They might want to pace themselves, though, as anything more than expanded background checks will probably take years, and nothing less than changing the nation’s conversation about guns.

Smyth is the author of “The NRA: The Unauthorized History.”

The NRA’s 40-year problem: It chose its leadership and gun-rights zealotry over integrity and a simpler mission

The original article is here.

The financial improprieties alleged by New York’s attorney general in her lawsuit against the National Rifle Association remind me of a scandal nearly a century ago. NRA leaders back then, however, handled it differently from the way leaders do today.

Back in 1925, the NRA secretary, who had accumulated unchecked power, was dismissed over evidence of embezzlement. The NRA reorganized its board and created the office of the executive vice president, choosing the title out of respect for the traditions of the Reconstruction-era-founded association.

In other words, the group cleaned its own house and implemented controls so no one could easily either accumulate power or divert funds again.

The first EVP was a highly decorated Maryland national guardsman named Milton A. Reckord. Reckord served in the Mexican Expedition against Pancho Villa and in World War I. The Military Police commander for Europe in World War II, he was responsible for all prisoners of war.

In 1974, Brig. Gen. Reckord, at 94, was interviewed by NRA officials in his home for an NRA oral history. In it, he described how a 1934 law supported by him and the NRA and inspired by the Tommy Gun days of Prohibition that outlawed automatic firearms (still on the books) was “sane, reasonable and effective.”

But the NRA oral history was never published, and his legacy, too, seems forgotten.

The NRA didn’t used to take sides then like it does today. “Take an active interest in politics, Mr. Shooter,” read an editorial in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine before the 1936 elections. “But keep your political interest and activity on a high plane of honest, frank discussion; and remember that there is neither rhyme nor reason in splitting open a good rifle club over a bum political argument.”

But splitting open a good rifle club is exactly what the men who later took over the NRA did. Today EVP Wayne LaPierre and other NRA leaders claim the NRA is the nation’s oldest civil rights organization. But the NRA did not raise gun rights until 1922, in an editorial warning about the possible spread of a New York State gun law passed in 1911, and the outlawing of civilian ownership of guns in Russia after its 1917 Bolshevik-led Communist revolution. The NRA did not raise “the Second Article of the Bill of Rights” until 1952, and it did not describe itself as an organization defending “civil liberties” until 1968.

The split in the NRA resulted in an internal revolution rarely mentioned out loud anymore but still known within the lore as the “Cincinnati Revolt.” That’s when, in 1977, the NRA under Harlon Carter transformed literally overnight from America’s largest firearms sporting organization into the nation’s largest gun-rights vanguard.

It was Carter who ended the policy of publishing the NRA’s annual financial reports in NRA member magazines, and who centralized control, hand-picking three men under him to run the organization; everyone, including magazine editors had to report up the new chain of command.

In 1981, the New York Times reported that Carter had changed a vowel in his first name, according to his birth certificate, to help conceal that, as a juvenile, he had been once convicted of murder and later had his conviction overturned on appeal. After the news broke, NRA members changed the by-laws to elect him to an unprecedented five-year term.

The leadership soon led another change of the by-laws to transfer power away from the membership and back to the board. NRA leaders themselves have since compared their own board to a Communist politburo.

LaPierre, who calls Carter a “great leader,” was made EVP in 1991, and he fended off one rebellion in the late 1990s. A bigger insurgency arose against him last year through leaked accusations of his alleged financial malfeasance by dissident board directors led by Oliver North.

But we’re missing the bigger picture if we think the NRA has suddenly gone off the rails. Its current troubles began more than 40 years ago.

Smyth is the author of “The NRA: The Unauthorized History.”

Dana Loesch follows NRA playbook in Town Hall meeting by deflecting questions, avoiding fundamental conversation about gun access

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/nra-dana-loesch-deflects-questions-town-hall-meeting-article-1.3835143

CNN’s Town Hall meeting in Sunrise, Florida began like the most honest conversation America has had about gun violence in decades. Surviving students and parents of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting peppered politicians like GOP Sen. Marco Rubio with questions about his NRA funding and positions on guns, specifically the AR-15 rifle.

But the conversation shifted when NRA spokesman Dana Loesch took a seat and began fielding questions.

A Generation-X gun rights advocate, Loesch learned how to hunt and shoot from her grandfather in the Ozark Mountains. She is a God-fearing Christian who still goes to church regularly, she claims. She made her name for years as a conservative commentator before becoming the face of the National Rifle Association last year.

The anticipation peaked when CNN let the compelling, surviving high school senior Emma Gonzalez ask the NRA representative, “Do you believe that it should be harder to obtain the semi-automatic weapons and modifications for these weapons to make them fully automatic, like bump stocks?”

The question was on point, but the NRA spokesperson never answered it.

Instead, Loesch validated the young, grieving woman’s emotions, saying she was a teenage activist herself. The NRA representative then deflected the conversation to the shooter whom she described as a “monster” who was “nuts,” adding that “crazy” people like him should not have access to firearms.

Loesch then changed the conversation to states who don’t fully report incidences of mental illness to the national background check system. Gonzalez ended up silencing the crowd herself when people starting shouting and accusing the NRA official of dodging the question.

The high school senior, it seems, was played along with CNN and the rest of the nation.

The national outrage over the Parkland, Florida high school shooting has all the markings of a tipping point in the national debate over gun violence. Five years ago, however, the pro-gun movement managed to survive another alleged tipping point after the Newtown, Connecticut Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

No one should count the NRA out yet.

The same day as the CNN Town Hall meeting, President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence held a meeting together in the White House with survivors and educators who have endured shootings in Parkland, Newtown and Washington, D.C. One young man, a Parkland high school shooting survivor, managed to drill down on the issue of access to semi-automatic weapons. The rest, who seemed to be carefully vetted, expressed emotions demanding actions without saying exactly what they wanted.

The NRA is smarter than you think. For decades its representatives and pundits followed a playbook. Avoid the fundamental conversation about gun access. Deflect the dialogue by saying things like, “Before we pass new laws, enforce the laws already on the books,” without mentioning that NRA lobbying has ensured most of the same laws remain unenforceable.

Or change the conversation to focus on the mentally ill. If that fails, entangle opponents in the minutiae of firearms. As a last resort, wrap yourself in the Second Amendment. Meaning: posit a false choice between doing nothing about guns or trying to confiscate and outlaw them all.

Rubio seemed to be feeling the pressure. He suggested such a false choice, before unexpectedly breaking with the NRA on two points: setting an age limit to purchase firearms and limiting the ammunition capacity of magazines.

His A+ NRA rating may decline.

But Loesch made no concessions, while attempting to strike a sympathetic tone with the audience in the hall and homes across America.

Her recruitment by the NRA is part of an ongoing tactical shift for the organization.

For decades the NRA has sheltered in place, remaining leery of fellow conservative politicians and groups. No less than Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush each ended up betraying the gun lobby by denouncing high-capacity rifles and NRA anti-government rhetoric, respectively. Even with the rise of the Tea Party, which drew in activists like Loesch, the NRA kept its distance from what it saw as a largely leaderless, unpredictable movement.

Today many pro-gun activists still don’t trust President Trump. But the NRA has thrown its lot in with Trump and his supporters, betting that gun activists and his backers have plenty in common.

Loesch leads the NRA today on the culture war’s frontline. She has narrated videos lashing out at Hollywood along with the liberal media, saying the NRA will meet their purported lies with “the clenched fist of truth.”

But she showed another side at CNN’s Town Hall meeting that validated her opponents’ emotions instead of attacking them, just like President Trump did the same day inside the Oval Office.

Parkland school shooting survivors like Gonzalez have the potential to change the nation. But only if they and other gun reform advocates figure out a way to compel the NRA to answer the question.

Smyth (www.franksmyth.com) is a freelance journalist who has covered the NRA for Mother Jones, The Progressive and MSNBC.

What’s behind the AR-15’s allure, and why we must restrict its sale if we want to limit future mass shootings

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/behind-ar-15-allure-article-1.3823134

The AR-15 is America’s best-selling rifle, helping gun sales more than double over the past 20 years. An estimated 8 million AR-style rifles are in circulation, with more being sold every day.

The weapon is a modification of the M-16 rifle issued to U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War. Firing a small caliber bullet propelled by much gunpowder, its round is designed to maximize damage to tissue and bone.

Like the M-16, AR-style rifle magazines hold up to 30 rounds. But the AR-15 fires semi-automatically, so, instead of “spraying” bullets, it reloads to fire as quickly as one can squeeze the trigger. AR-style rifles rarely jam.

The shooter who killed 17 students at a Parkland, Florida high school and injured 14 others can be heard on a cellphone video firing rounds at will amid screams by students.

The United States is the only country in the world where high-powered, semi-automatic rifles can be so easily purchased. Once marketed as assault weapons to advance sales, they now have different names within the gun community.

The gun industry labels them tactical rifles. AR enthusiasts on forums like AR15.com call them “EBRs” or “Enhanced Battle Rifles.” One “Gen-X” National Rifle Association columnist calls them “modern sporting weapons.”

From 1994 to 2004, the federal assault weapons ban outlawed sales of some new semi-automatic weapons, limited magazine capacity to 10 rounds and banned add-on features like a flash suppressor. Since it expired, the gun industry and the NRA have together incorporated AR-style rifles into High Power Rifle Competitions, making them a new sporting weapon while further expanding their circulation.

Over just the past six years, shooters have used AR-style rifles to injure or kill dozens of people in each incident in Parkland, Sutherland Springs, Las Vegas, Orlando, San Bernardino, Newtown and Aurora. Whether motivated by mental illness, terrorism or revenge, the shooters rarely broke any laws in obtaining their guns.

What’s behind the AR-15’s allure

NRA leaders tend to go dark after each mass shooting, while sympathetic politicians and pundits claim no one should politicize the (latest) tragedy. Yet like a never-ending horror movie, America’s toll of gun violence continues to rise including far more, but less publicized gun violence among urban minority youth.

It was a former Fox News host who recently said out loud what many others think. Mass shootings, wrote Bill O’Reilly, are “the price of freedom.”

Americans have not seriously discussed gun reform in decades. The loss of 20 young children and six educators at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown gave rise to a debate in Congress that faded within four months. After America’s largest shooting, in Las Vegas, Congress debated not restricting guns but only possibly an after-market accessory-bump stocks. Today Republican leaders are offering prayers instead of action. Or talking about anything — from better reporting of military domestic abusers, to improved monitoring of disturbed children along with potential terrorists — but gun reform.

Democratic leaders are again talking about attempting to pass a new assault weapons ban. But like other modest measures passed by Congress in past years, as well as measures adopted in a number of liberal states, the ban focuses more on the features of weapons than on who can access them.

Today in most states, one has to be a convicted felon or have been deemed mentally unfit by a court authority to be ineligible to buy a firearm. Even individuals charged with domestic abuse may still keep their guns in most states.

Real reform would mean asking, Who needs tactical weapons?

This is heresy to the NRA. But without addressing gun access, any attempt to curb gun violence will fail.

Take New Jersey. Before buying any gun, an individual must apply for a firearms ID card requiring a background check and fingerprints. One must apply for a separate handgun permit involving repeated checks to buy a single revolver or pistol.

Fla. school gunman Nikolas Cruz faces premeditated murder charges
That may sound like a lot of bureaucracy, but state and federal courts have so far upheld that such regulations are constitutional.

Individuals buy AR-style rifles for many reasons, including not to be outgunned by any potential (or imaginary) attackers. They include criminals and home burglars, and marauding rioters like after the 1992 acquittal of L.A. police officers for beating Rodney King, and government forces seeking — in the minds of many gun activists — to impose some kind of dictatorial state.

During the Obama administration there was talk of overthrowing the government. Under President Trump the talk is of defending his continuance in power.

America could curb gun violence by legally regulating access to guns including tactical rifles. But doing so would require changing the conversation.

Smyth (www.franksmyth.com) is a freelance journalist who has covered the NRA for Mother Jones, The Progressive and MSNBC.