glocks and the right-wing hysteria machine

            The sadness of this weekend’s shooting spree in Arizona is overwhelming: a moderate Democratic congresswoman doing an open air town hall with her constituents; a federal judge just stopping by to say hello; a nine year old girl in attendance because she loved politics; as many as 20 other people—all either dead or seriously injured by an apparently unhinged thug who had just legally purchased a Glock 9 millimeter semi-automatic weapon.

            I’ll come back to that purchase in a moment, but what strikes me as almost equally as sad is how quickly Republicans and Tea Party leaders leapt to whatever podium they could find to insist the vitriolic, often violent rhetoric they and their compatriots have engaged in since Obama’s election had nothing to do with the incident.

            Indeed, if you watched the Sunday morning talk shows,  it seemed apparent that the conservatives appearing on them had been issued two talking points.  First, the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords was the deranged act of an unstable young man and should in no way be associated with the myriad calls to violence the spokespeople knew their friends on the right had engaged in.  Second, and this almost seemed more important to some of them, the shooting should not be used as an excuse to launch another attack on gun rights.

             Let’s assume for the moment that Jared Loughner is a nut case.  If so, he can take his place along side Richard Paplowski, Dannie Baker, Michael McLendon, James Cartwright Jim David Adkisson and perhaps most famously, Scott Roeder—all of whom raised their ugly heads since 2008, and all of whom were responsible for senseless killings.  Paplowkski shot 2 Philadelphia policemen to death and seriously wounded several others.  Baker killed 2 Chilean exchange students and wounded 3 others.  McLendon simply opened fire with an automatic weapon in the middle of a small Alabama town and killed 10 people.  Cartwright killed two Sherriff’s deputies. Adkisson interrupted a performance of Annie at a Universal Unitarian church and killed 2 people.And Roeder of course murdered Dr. George Tiller.

            Paplowski was convinced that the government was going to take away his guns, Baker was certain that Obama was trying to do away with America and put this country under some vaguely imagined New World Order.  McLendon appears to simply have been angry that we had a black president, Cartwright was ex-military and also sure that his guns were going to be confiscated.  Adkisson hated all liberals.  Roeder killed Dr. Tiller because he performed abortions.

            The common thread among all these maniacs was a close tie to right wing ideology, or perhaps more accurately, right wing hysteria-mongering.  Why were Paplowski and Cartwright worried about their guns? Maybe Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly constantly trumpeting the notion that the Obama administration had a secret agenda to do just that had something to do with it.  Beck, you may recall, did a number of rants on his program about secret FEMA camps the administration was setting up to essentially imprison gun owners.  Why did Roeder target and murder Dr. Tiller?  Maybe O’Reilly endlessly referring to him as “Tiller the baby killer” had something to do with it.  Why did Adkisson shoot up a church?  Perhaps because UU is a well-known liberal gathering spot (the church in Knoxville had a Gay’s Welcome sign), and Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Bill O’Reilly and Bernard Goldberg had all written books explaining how liberals were akin to the anti-Christ.

            The point here is  that words do matter.  And while it could very well be true that each of the people mentioned above would have done what they did if Fox didn’t exist, it’s also true, as CBS’ Bob Schieffer said Sunday on his web site, “Those with sick and twisted minds hear us too.”

            In Washington state, federal officials recently put away a 64 year old man who threatened, in unbelievably vile language, to kill Senator Patty Murray because she voted for health care reform.  Was this the action of a rational man?  Clearly not.  What’s concerning is that obscenity’s aside, the language the man used in making his threats was taken almost word for word from rants about health care Beck had made on the air repeatedly.  Among the words taken from Beck—“the war is just beginning.”  It was also Beck who resurrected the incredibly vile rants of Cleon Skousen—the ‘50’s era John Birch supporter—who said a cabal existed that would put a one-world government in power.  See Dannie Baker above.

            Nor is Fox punditry the only problem.  Tea Party darling Sharron Angle's (in)famous suggestion that “second amendments remedies” may be coming, Sarah Palin putting crosshairs on Giffords’ congressional district, John Boehner saying of fellow congressman Steve Driehaus, “he may be a dead man,” Rep. Michelle Bachman calling on the people of Minnesota to become “armed and dangerous,” Texas GOP congressional candidate Stephen Broden remarking on television that violent overthrow of the government is “on the table,” or Alan West (at the time a Republican candidate) letting this morsel go, “You better be ready to fight for this country. . . You need to leave here understanding one, simple word.  That word is: bayonets . . . You leave here today—charge,” that kind of rhetoric has no place in political discourse, or any other kind of discourse.

            George Will, normally a conservative mind I fully respect, argues in his most recent Washington Post column that because there is no direct connection between right wing rhetoric and crazy actions by crazy people, we should impugn no connection whatsoever.  With all due respect to Mr. Will, that is intellectual sophistry of the worst kind.  What is evident, at least to me, is that when unhinged people hear their delusions, paranoid fears or twisted fantasies appearing to be validated by public figures, they become more likely to feel that acting on those delusions is in fact a public service.  If anyone remembers the Oklahoma City bombing, its perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, was explicit about his sense that he had done the country a favor by attacking its government.  The possibility that any of these people may have done their heinous acts had they spent the preceding 10 years in a cave is irrelevant.  They didn’t spend a decade in a cave and they did hear Sarah Palin say, “Don’t retreat, instead—RELOAD!”

            To be fair, the kind of overheated rhetoric the right is engaging in now is not all that different than the overheated rhetoric that came from the left during the Vietnam era.  It was destructive then, and it still is.

            Now, about that Glock.  Loughner walked into a gun store in Tuscon on Nov. 30 and asked for a semi-automatic pistol.  He could prove he was 21 and nothing showed up on the “instant” background check, so he was sold a weapon that has a very high rate of repeat fire and carries a 30 bullet clip. He was able to do so because the law banning semi-automatic weapons expired in 2004, and neither the then Republican congress or the since Democratic congresses have had the nerve to stand up to the National Rifle Association and reinstate it.

            The rationale behind banning semi-automatic weapons, which occurred as a result of President Reagan being shot, was that the only reason for such weapons to exist is to kill as many people as possible in as short a time as possible.  Hunters don’t need to be able to fire 30 rounds a minute.  

            The NRA worked for years to repeal that ban, and finally got their way when it expired.  Their argument for repealing, or not renewing the law, was threefold: criminals can get semi-automatic weapons, so law abiding citizens need to have them to protect themselves; banning semi-automatic weapons is the first step on to the slippery slope leading to a ban of all guns; and of course, the second amendment.

            The first is a “catch me if you can” argument.  Criminals can get semi-automatic weapons because the NRA was successful in blocking a provision in the law that would have criminalized the manufacture of such weapons except for police or military use.  Granted that wouldn’t have gotten rid of the Glocks already in circulation, but by now most of those wouldn’t work any more.

            The second is the favorite argument of every demagogic movement.  Universal health care is the first step toward socialized medicine; the takeove of General Motors is the first step toward nationalized industry.  It’s an effective argument because you can’t prove it’s wrong.  If universal health care is defeated because of the slippery slope argument, you can’t prove that the slope wouldn’t have been slippery.  It’s essentially a “fear of the unknown” argument, but its no less specious for being effective.

            The second amendment concern is what gun rights advocates have been hiding behind for years.  Until the Roberts court inexplicably threw out 200 years of Supreme Court jurisprudence, they were only able to do so by intimidating state legislatures into not putting gun restrictions in place.  If you haven’t read the Bill of Rights recently, the entire second amendment reads as follows: A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

            The framers, who were very clear and very specific in all their writing, constructed that sentence so the second clause, “the right of the people . . .” was clearly contingent upon the first clause, “A well regulated militia . . .”  The war for independence had been fought almost entirely with state militias, and every state in 1791 continued to maintain a militia.  There being no federal repository for weapons at the time, nor any federal army to amount to anything  it not only made sense that individuals—who might be called to service on very short notice—should not only be allowed to own a weapon, but should be encouraged to do so.

            The last state militia passed into history in 1903 when the Militia Act organized the various state militias into the National Guard of the United States.  Under the provisions of that law, each state maintains a National Guard unit that is subsidized by the federal government and constituted as a reserve component of the United States Army or the United States Air Force.  In each state, the National Guard unit is under the direct command of the state governor and can be called to active duty in response to emergencies, disasters, civil disorders, etc. Each state’s National Guard unit can also be called to active federal duty by the president.

            Since 1903, the federal government has taken on itself the responsibility of arming and otherwise equipping Guard units.  It has also placed responsibility for the “security of a free state” on the active duty United States Army, Navy, Air Force and Merchant Marine.  It would follow logically—and in fact does follow logically—that the fact a “well regulated militia” is no longer necessary means that it is also no longer necessary for private citizens to bear arms.           

            The right to own a Glock, in other words, is not one of those “unalienable rights” Jefferson wrote about.  Gun ownership, in a word, is not within the purview of the federal government, and hence—according to the Constitution—is something that can be dealt with by any state as it sees fit.  Until Robert, Scalito, Thomas and the boys took over.  They somehow reimagined the words of the second amendment so that they guarantee any citizen who wants one the federal right to own a gun—a right no state can override.

            Whether the Roberts’ court ruling is in itsefl unconstitutional is subject for another blog.  The point here is that two things about Arizona’s gun laws contributed to Saturday’s disaster.  Responsibility for one of them can be placed in the halls of Congress; responsibility for the other is directly on Arizona.  The Congressional responsibility lies in not outlawing private ownership of semi-automatic weapons; Arizona’s culpability lies in its allowing concealed weapons to be brought into public places (a feature of its law unfortunately shared by a number of other—mostly southern—states).  Had Jared Loughner approached the Safeway on Saturday with his Glock in plain view, someone would probably have noticed and sounded an alarm. 

Had he not been allowed to own a Glock—if he had only been able to purchase, say, a .38 revolver—Congresswoman Giffords might still have been shot, but Loughner would not have been able to rip off 30 rounds and most, maybe all, of the other people who were killed or wounded would have been just fine.  

Needless to say, if he hadn’t been able to purchase a weapon at all . . .  Ah, well, we can dream.