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 Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
“Follow the money.”
-Jesse “the Governor” Ventura
I was going to say something of a more general nature about politics this week, but then of course a 19-year old shot up the school from which he was expelled, killing 17 and wounding 14 more. And of course this is setting off another round of disingenuous calls to have a “conversation” about “gun safety.” Or, “just do what Australia did.” What, tell the vast majority of American gun owners that they’re obliged to turn in their weapons when they didn’t do anything wrong? I don’t think so, Tim.
At the same time, the right-wing apologists for gun rights, rather than address the issue of gun access, want to say the issue is the mental illness of a given shooter, when the “mentally ill” tag is conflating an emotional state with a psychiatric diagnosis that most pundits are not in position to make.
But something else that was pointed out in the news was that the killer decided to commit his crime on Valentine’s Day. So oh no, from now on, Valentine’s Day is going to be forever more associated with mass gun violence.
Except for those who read history.
The St. Valentine’s Day massacre was a Chicago gang hit in 1929 in which only seven men were killed. And the shooters were using Tommy guns.
I bring this up to point out that this is hardly the only era of American history with mass gun violence. At the same time, things were different. The government and federal law enforcement were determined to take down organized crime, perhaps because the thugs in question were mainly Italian, Jewish and Irish. But the organization of the gangs made them easier to investigate and target. Whereas the problem now is that we don’t know when any given individual is going to buy a weapon and use it to kill people. According to a Politico article (published after the Las Vegas shooting), the number of shootings in America has not increased relative to previous decades, but the death toll at each incident has. “Research shows that the number of victims killed and wounded are the strongest predictors of the extent to which a mass killing gets reported by the news media. Recent growth in the number of catastrophic mass public shootings—combined with the extensive, wall-to-wall news coverage that accompanies these tragedies—likely accounts for the commonly held misconception that mass shootings are now more frequent. ” The article continues: “But the available evidence suggests that strengthening or weakening gun laws would not significantly affect the incidence or severity of mass public shootings. For example, studies examining bans on large-capacity magazines and right-to-carry concealed firearms laws have found they would have little or no effect on mass public shootings.”
The socialist-left approach of course is to make decisions for everyone and deny a right to private arms, Second Amendment be damned. I prefer the Adam Smith approach of acknowledging ulterior motives and channeling them into constructive directions.
In this case, studies on the private sales of guns before the 21st century are fairly lacking, but we can look at the history of the National Rifle Association (NRA) as a primary lobbyist for the gun industry, ostensibly for the sake of the Second Amendment but ultimately for the sake of the firearms industry and its continued business. That pro-industry stance is itself fairly recent. In the 19th century, the NRA was founded for the Second Amendment purpose of giving proper training to those who would serve in the militia. In 1934, NRA President Karl Frederick testified to Congress, “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I seldom carry one. I have when I felt it was desirable to do so for my own protection. I know that applies in most of the instances where guns are used effectively in self-defense or in places of business and in the home. I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” In fact, Frederick made this statement during the debate on passage of the National Firearms Act of 1934, which was inspired partly by the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and other acts of gangster violence. But later, after the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968 (which also had NRA support), a more right-wing group started mobilizing and took over the NRA leadership, after which the NRA’s membership more than tripled by 1985. Since then the NRA has developed one of the strongest political action committees in Washington.
Way back in 2012, the Washington Post reported that President Obama was “the best thing that ever happened to the firearm industry.” This was as measured by the number of federal background checks on gun purchases, which were about double the amount during George W. Bush’s first term. Prior to Bush, the gun industry was actually facing a decline because of a robust economy and declining fears of crime. In a related matter, the article noted that gun sales spike after a mass shooting. One gun store owner told the Christian Science Monitor: “Normally what happens—and I’ve been doing this for 30 years—is whenever they start talking about gun control on the news and they start pushing that, people have a tendency to think they’re going to take away their right to buy the gun, and that usually spurs sales”.
But if anything, since Obama left office and a Republican took over, the gun industry has the opposite problem. Several outlets have reported that while gun sales in the US are still strong, one gun manufacturer had a 48.5 percent drop in sales from one quarter to the next, with The Guardian reporting that overall sales fell by $100 million. Just this weekend, historic manufacturer Remington had to reach a deal for bankruptcy protection. According to UPI, “When a presidential candidate is perceived as pro-gun control, people tend to buy more guns in case laws take hold that prevent them from doing so in the near future. But when a politician appears to be against gun control, there’s not as much urgency to stock up on weapons.”
Like the rest of the conservative agenda, support for guns has become less mainstream as that position has associated with disreputable characters like mass shooters and Trump Administration officials. So the industry, like the Republican Party, has had to substitute loyalty for numbers and focus on the people who are convinced that government is the enemy. But what happens to that posture when government is no longer the enemy? For that matter, what happens when it is?
Everybody was so hopping mad that Obama was going to take our guns. How many gun control laws did Congress pass after Sandy Hook? None. How many guns did the Obama Administration confiscate from gun stores? None.
The most consequential thing that Obama and his (brief) Democratic majority accomplished was to pass the Affordable Care Act, which was of course the most radical and socialist thing ever, except for the public option, single-payer or any of the other national health care schemes that you have in Leninist countries like Switzerland. In fact, the ACA resembles not only Romneycare in Massachusetts but a 2004 article by Ron Bailey in Reason magazine advocating that we “solve” the healthcare crisis by making private health insurance mandatory. And I remember this because at the time, when I brought this idea up to liberals on the Internet – before Democrats embraced it – they attacked it as a right-wing think tank giveaway to insurance companies and Big Pharma. And as it turned out, they were right! It’s just that that plan was the only thing that Democrats could get through their own centrist caucus.
It’s of a piece of why they don’t push “gun safety” legislation, or try and get rid of the Electoral College, or call for impeaching Trump, or even call for the government to make Trump release his tax returns. Democrats would of course argue that there’s no point in doing so when they aren’t the majority and don’t have the White House, but then won’t ask themselves why they lost the majority in the first place.
But then, Democrats are the sensible people. Unlike Republicans, they’re not going to keep pushing crazy, radical legislation if it’s likely to get shot down in Congress, which is to say, if there’s any likelihood of that at all. After all, they wouldn’t want the party that worships a pussy-grabbing race baiter who praised the Charlottesville Nazis to brand them as being extreme.
In his inaugural address, President Ronald Reagan said, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden.” In other words, in the context of Reagan’s time, in which government was built on the assumptions of Democrats and liberal Republicans, government was the problem. “Government is the problem” is not an a priori value. And if an individual is not capable of governing himself, then why should such a person be trusted with the government? The problem with conservatives is that they have disregarded the context of Reagan’s statement. Now, the government we are looking at is based on the assumptions of Big Government Republicans. And if one looks at the big picture and concludes that in almost all cases, the problem with government is the Republican Party, that conclusion may encourage Democrats to think that there is no longer anything to lose in being angry and radical and nothing to gain in continuing to play it safe and be marshmallows.
Gun owners and conservatives are not completely synonymous groups, but insofar as the gun lobby/NRA is synonymous with conservatism, they’ve put themselves in a box. Either continue on their present course and alienate the rest of the country (and incidentally lower gun sales) or let the Democrats win to rile up the customer base, and in the meantime hope that Democrats are just as useless as they were the last time they were in power.
Of course considering how fixated both major parties are on the symbolic and real powers of the president, it isn’t enough for the Republicans to lose one or both houses of Congress this year. For gun sellers to keep their customers angry and motivated, they have to work to make sure that Donald Trump is a one-term president.
It makes sense in that what passes for conservatism these days is simply a grievance industry unsuited to governance and oriented solely towards opposition. The longer that conservatives have to be the government, they not only have to keep defending the indefensible, their escalating bullshit reaches a level that not even some of their biggest partisans can keep swallowing it.
(Or, conservatives could do what Reagan did and present an economic and cultural agenda that appeals to a majority of voters. But I guess that’s just too hard.)
So you know what you have to do, gun lovers. Do it for capitalism. And America.