Monthly Archives: December 2012

Meaningless Contributions 12

Twelve years ago, the Oscar-winning actor Charlton Heston lumbered onto a stage in Charlotte, North Carolina and delivered one of the most memorable lines of his acting career. Only a week before, hundreds of thousands of mothers had gathered in the nation’s capitol, protesting for increased gun control, and Heston, as President of the National Rifle Association, realized that his organization needed to respond. At the time, we were in the thick of a Presidential election, and Al Gore, the presumptive Democratic nominee, was an outspoken advocate for sensible gun control laws.

The NRA, already reeling from the 1994 assault weapons ban and the public backlash in the aftermath of a series of deadly school shootings, was in full damage control mode; the possibility of Al Gore becoming the next President sent them into a full-scale panic. At best, the NRA’s outrage was contrived, and at worst, it was nothing short of total hysteria. They launched a media campaign that heralded the Second Amendment as the country’s “most important amendment.” They gleefully endorsed and embraced a whole roster of paranoid conspiracies, including, most destructively, the notion that the Second Amendment was actually intended to provide citizens with unfettered access to weapons that could be used for an armed rebellion against the government. It’s an incomprehensibly stupid position that requires us to believe that our Founding Fathers thought that our democracy could be legally overthrown by any random, ragtag group calling themselves a “well-regulated militia.” Even Antonin Scalia knows better.

With all due respect to the late, great Charlton Heston, he didn’t become the President of the National Rifle Association because he was a great policy mind with an extensive background in Constitutional law. He was a gimmick, an aging American icon who could put a familiar and beloved face on an imperiled organization, and even though he may have not been able to debate the nuances, he could always pretend.

And that day in Charlotte, Heston stood in front of 2,000 faithful NRA members and, after denouncing Al Gore’s candidacy, hoisted up a replica of an antebellum-era rifle and said, famously, “I’ll give up my gun when you take it from my cold, dead hands.” It wasn’t an original line; it was an old slogan the NRA had used decades before. Heston, after all, was an actor playing a role and reading from a script.

Screen Shot 2012-12-23 at 10.36.06 PM

And before the age of viral videos or hashtags, Heston’s performance became instantly memorable. Ironically, although Heston’s speech was delivered in front of an audience of only 2,000 people, it somehow became much more iconic and culturally significant than the Million Mom March, the pro-gun control demonstration that had been held only a week before and had attracted upwards of 750,000 people in Washington, D.C. and nearly 200,000 more in coordinated events across the country.

There’s another irony here: The gun that Charlton Heston hoisted up was a replica of a Sharps rifle, a 150-year-old weapon that no one has ever tried to “take away” from anyone here in America. Heston’s gun fires, at most, ten bullets a minute.

This speaks to the greatest lie promoted by the National Rifle Association: That gun control advocates want to take away your guns, even your antique rifles. Nearly a million people show up to personally demonstrate against assault weapons and the availability of illegal guns in our inner-cities, and a week later, an aging actor reading from a script can lift a replica of an antique rifle over his head and recast the entire debate.

To be sure, there are people who aspire to eliminate all guns, but for anyone who seriously recognizes the issues and understands the fundamental protections provided by the Constitution and over two hundred years of case law, these folks, however well-intentioned, are just as credible as a beauty pageant contestent who declares that, if crowned, she would help usher in an era of world peace. It’s silly and naive, but if you believe the NRA, then you may have the impression that “gun control” is just coded language for a wholesale repeal of the Second Amendment. It’s a toxic lie, and for decades now, this lie has prevented us from having an honest conversation about what we should do, as a country, to stop gun massacres, gang violence, and the proliferation of illegal weapon sales.

Like the overwhelming and vast majority of people who believe in sensible gun control, I also respect and believe that the Second Amendment provides responsible, law-abiding citizens with the right to own and possess “arms.” I grew up in an area of the country where almost every family owned at least one gun, most typically a hunting rifle. I learned how to shoot a gun before I learned how to drive a car. And no, shooting has never something I particularly enjoyed or was even remotely interested in pursuing as a hobby, but I get it. It can be a sport, and for many, it’s exhilarating.

As I said in a previous post, all rights come with responsibilities, and if you’re law-abiding and well-intentioned, then those responsibilities impose no additional burdens. In fact, you never even encounter them.

We are wise, as a country, to seriously discuss the epidemic of gun massacres, and just as importantly, we must also, once and for all, decide what the Second Amendment really means. A week after a mentally-disturbed 20-year-old man used the weapons his mother had been stockpiling in their home, first murdering her in cold blood and then slaughtering twenty small children and six adults, the National Rifle Association decided to finally state its position: It could have all been prevented if there’d only been more guns. Never mind that there were two armed police officers stationed at Columbine who actually returned fire when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, armed to the teeth, massacred 12 students and a teacher and wounded 24 others. Never mind that Virginia Tech had its own SWAT Team in place when Seung-Hui Cho murdered 32 of his peers and wounded another 17.

Wayne LaPierre and the National Rifle Association promised to provide “meaningful contributions” to help curb the insanity of gun massacres in America. Instead, Mr. LaPierre proved himself to be dangerously out-of-touch, a man who presents his sickening and perverted love for guns as a type of patriotism, a man who would rather the government compile a list of Americans diagnosed with psychological disorders than have them enforce background checks for the 40% of guns and ammunition purchased in gun shows or online.

Wayne LaPierre blames movies and video games for promoting a culture of violence, and then, in the same breath, declares that the solution is to further militarize our civic institutions. The dystopian vision of America presented by Mr. LaPierre is far more terrifying, more stifling, and more oppressive than anything ever previously imagined. Even Charlton Heston’s rigor mortis would relax.

Put simply, the people who believe that we should all enjoy unfettered access to semi-automatic weapons and high-capacity magazines are, by definition, unqualified to lecture the rest of us about mental health, American culture, or the best ways to eliminate gun massacres. This has nothing to do with putting more armed guards in more schools; it’s a red herring. Nearly a third of American schools already have armed security. Remember, these gun massacres aren’t just occurring in our schools; they’re taking place in our shopping malls and movie theaters and office parks and public streets.

Newtown refocused the country’s discussion on these issues, as well it should have, but we would be foolish to let someone let Wayne LaPierre narrowly define the epidemic of gun massacres as something confined to our public schools. It is a shameless and naked exploitation, a willful distortion of the true scope and scale of the paralyzing terror brought onto this country by civilians who, more often than not, legally possess weapons designed to murder as many human beings as possible as quickly as possible.

In America, we’ve always aspired to be “a more perfect union,” a country kept in tact by a government that selflessly serves and protects the common good.

This isn’t about your handgun or your hunting rifle. Let’s get real.

Wayne LaPierre and the National Rifle Association should be called out for what they actually are: Negligent enablers and lobbyists who are paid by gun manufacturers to distort the facts, terrorize our public discourse with hackneyed pro-gun propaganda, and promote a future that cares absolutely nothing about decreasing violence and everything about selling more guns to more people in more places.

I earnestly hope that, in light of the unhinged commentary promoted by the NRA, responsible American gun owners will follow the lead of Republican President George H.W. Bush and countless others and tear up their membership cards; we, as a country, deserve better than Wayne LaPierre’s extremism, negligence, and hypocrisy.

 

We Are Being Terrorized 31

I was born and raised in a part of the country that refers to itself as “Sportsman’s Paradise.” In South Louisiana, people like to say that there are four seasons- football, Carnival, festival, and crawfish- but if you drive a few miles north, many folks would argue that the four seasons are actually deer, duck, dove, and Christmas. When I was in elementary school, during show and tell, kids would sometimes bring pictures of themselves sitting atop deer carcasses. Sometimes, the local newspaper would even print these photos. I’ll never forget when, in the fourth grade, one of my classmates, a boy who had been picked on for being scrawny and short, was sent home after he showed up with a dead squirrel in his backpack. He’d just wanted us to know that he’d shot that stupid squirrel, that he wasn’t a wimp; he was a hunter.

As a kid, I understood that people sometimes used guns to hurt and kill other people, but the people who I knew who owned guns, they were just hunters. They didn’t own the scary, shiny, metallic guns that I saw in the movies; they owned oak-paneled rifles that required deliberation, patience, and skill. And that was part of the allure of hunting: You couldn’t just indiscriminately fire out a hundred bullets a minute; to be good, you had to be patient and precise, a marksman. It was, after all, a sport.

But during the last twenty years, America’s gun culture has dramatically changed. Our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms somehow became a sacrosanct right to murder anyone perceived to be threatening; it became a right to possess and stockpile massive arsenals of weaponry designed, exclusively, to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible. Why would you use your dad’s old hunting rifle to scare someone away from your property when you could buy a high-powered semi-automatic rifle from the nearby WalMart?

I have some theories about why this change occurred, but I don’t think they entirely suffice. Part of the shift, I think, is because rural and suburban Americans became increasingly fearful of the epidemic of urban, inner-city violence that percolated in the late 1980s and early 1990s. When President Clinton, in response to this violence, signed a ban on semi-automatic weapons, many law-abiding gun owners felt unfairly singled out. Part of it, also, is that the gun lobby in America has successfully convinced people that guns aren’t just a part of our history and our culture; guns are our culture. Guns are just as American as baseball and apple pie, and anyone who seeks any restrictions on the manufacture and sale of any guns is somehow un-American. And part of it, I think, is that we’ve lived in a state of perpetual war for more than a decade; it’s no surprise to me that the perpetrators of the most recent spat of gun massacres have all been in their early twenties. Before we blame fictional video games and movies for promoting a “culture of violence,” we should first look at reality.

We are deluding ourselves. We are caving into the hysteria of a small group of angry people who promote their naive and dangerous beliefs about the need for and the constitutionality of unfettered gun ownership, while wrapping themselves around the flag and pretending as if they’re promoting Christianity– or, even worse, pretending as if any honest discussion about how we, as a country, can stop gun massacres is an assault on Christianity.

No one wants to take away your right to keep and bear arms. But here’s the thing: The Second Amendment has never been about protecting your individual right to use high-powered weaponry to murder your fellow Americans; it is, in very plain English, a way to ensure that Americans can form “well-regulated militias” to protect themselves against institutionalized invasions. And during the last few decades, this right has been perverted and desecrated by the profiteers of death, mayhem, paranoia, and destruction.

Rights carry responsibilities. If you want to hunt deer in Louisiana, you need a license. You can’t kill more than a certain number of deer in any given season. And this is a contract that all deer hunters must agree. The idea is: If you want to hunt, you must play by the rules and the regulations. Somehow, though, when it comes to owning weapons that are designed to murder human beings, we’re told that there shouldn’t be any rules.

Spare us all the self-righteous indignation, the equivocations about guns being no worse than cigarettes or drunk driving, the bizarre paranoiac fantasies about how you’re going to protect the country from a violent coup, the moralizing on Scripture, and the excuses about how this latest massacre was unpreventable because evil is unpreventable.

In my lifetime, we went from a country that understood gun ownership as a right to hunt and, secondarily, as a last resort for self-defense into a country dominated by an intransigent gun lobby that seeks to arm every man, woman, and child with an instrument of death. We are less safe, less free, and more fearful, as a country, because of those who refuse to acknowledge the need for sensible gun control. We are being terrorized, over and over and over again.

And our actual enemies are well-aware. If you don’t believe me, do yourself a favor and watch this video of Adam Gadahn, a member of al-Qaeda and the very first American charged with treason since the 1950s.

The sad reality is– particularly after the shootings in Newtown yesterday, it’s hard to imagine that al-Qaeda could use our gun loopholes to terrorize Americans any more than we terrorize ourselves.

Jindal is Lying: Louisiana Never Voted on School Voucher Program 1

In response to Judge Tim Kelley’s ruling striking down, as unconstitutional, the funding mechanism for Louisiana’s so-called “voucher program,” Governor Jindal writes (bold mine):

“The opinion sadly ignores the rights of families who do not have the means necessary to escape failing schools. On behalf of the citizens that cast their votes for reform, the parents who want more choices, and the kids who deserve a chance, we will appeal today’s decision, and I’m confident we will prevail. This ruling changes nothing for the students currently in the program. All along, we expected this to be decided by the Louisiana Supreme Court,” the statement added.

Despite what Governor Jindal is suggesting, Louisiana citizens never voted to support Jindal’s vision for education reform; voucher expansion was not a plank of Jindal’s re-election platform, and it has never been subjected to a statewide referendum. Indeed, according to the most recent scientific polling on Jindal’s voucher program, the majority of Louisianans are in opposition.

Jindal, in full-on defense mode, seems to be relying on an ancient political tactic: Bald-faced lying.

Jindal’s Scheme to Defund Public Schools In Order to Enrich Religious Schools Ruled Unconstitutional Reply

In what can only be described as a major victory for those in Louisiana who champion and value the fundamental right to public education, today, Judge Tim Kelley ruled that Governor Bobby Jindal’s attempt to divert taxpayer dollars to prop up private religious schools, under the pretense of “school choice,” violates the Louisiana State Constitution. Although Judge Kelley did not issue an injunction against the program and although an appeal to the Louisiana State Supreme Court had already been a foregone conclusion, Judge Kelley’s 39-page decision represents the most significant ruling to date on the constitutionality of diverting Minimum Foundation Program (MFP) dollars to fund Jindal’s experimental and controversial “school voucher program.” While Governor Jindal and his allies decried and denounced the decision, vowing to appeal, they have also, more quietly, attempted to consider alternate funding solutions, the most obvious of which would require a direct appropriation from the State’s General Fund.

Essentially, in order to fund what some have described as the largest school voucher program in the nation’s history, Governor Jindal had attempted to reallocate money collected under the Minimum Foundation Program, a program that is Constitutionally defined specifically for public schools. The MFP employs a complex formula to determine the proper and fair way to equitably distribute revenue and resources generated on the district and state-level to public schools across the State.

Even if you are a staunch supporter of so-called “school choice” and a defender of Jindal’s plans, you’d be hard-pressed to find a legal and constitutional way to walk around the plain language meaning of the Minimum Foundation Program: It was conceived and has been employed as a way of better ensuring basic equality among our public schools. It was never intended or anticipated to become a vehicle by which taxpayer dollars could be reassigned from public institutions and given, instead, to over 100 voucher schools, many of whom lack credentialed teachers and some of whom have already attracted national media coverage for their adoptions of a radically religious right education: Evolution is fake; fossils are God (or Satan?) tempting our faith; the Loch Ness monster is training right now with Michael Phelps; when Noah built the ark, he rounded up a series of 10 ton dinosaurs.

Before I say anything else, I should first admit: Wow. I am pleasantly surprised by Judge Kelley. He’d given every indication that he had been leaning toward Jindal’s arguments, and, as I recently pointed out, it was impossible, at least for any thinking person, to read Judge Kelley’s statements on Monday, then discover that Jindal’s own lawyer in this case had donated $1,000 to his election only a month prior, and think that the Judge hadn’t already made up his mind. It seemed like a foregone conclusion. But guess what? The next day, Judge Kelley immediately corrected his previous statements, dialing them back substantially and now saying, instead, that he could not be sure when he’d release his opinion.

Less than 24 hours later, Kelley ruled that Jindal’s voucher program is unconstitutional. Period. I’ve read some commentary that suggests vouchers weren’t “unconstitutional,” only the way vouchers were funded. Sorry guys, same difference. This program was ruled unconstitutional, and no amount of rhetorical nitpicking works.

I was completely wrong about Judge Tim Kelley. His opinion was cogent, on-point, and objective. “It’s an incredible first step,” writes education activist Zack Kopplin, “Judge Kelley deserves praise and I hope the Supreme Court makes the right decision.”

That is true, but remember, this was just Round One.