Two Years Since Newtown

Memorial in Newtown /Credit: AP (appeared on ABC News website)

Two years ago on December 14, 2012, a disturbed 20 year-old shot and killed his mother, then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed 20 children and 6 adults before turning the Bushmaster rifle on himself.  This shooting was supposed to be the one that finally changed everything about the availability of guns in the United States and our national epidemic of gun violence.   It has not.  Thanks to a powerful gun lobby and fanatic "gun rights" advocates, very little has changed at the national level.  It is a disgraceful reminder of the power of special interest group money to prevent legislation for the common good from being enacted.

In the two years since Sandy Hook, there have been 21 deadly school shootings in the United States resulting in 37 deaths, including 5 of the shooters.  Mark Follman at Mother Jones analyzes the past two years of these attacks in a December 9 post and adds that "During the same period, there have been dozens of other gun incidents on school grounds that caused injuries, as well as seven additional cases where someone committed suicide with a firearm, but no one else died."

While action has been minimal to non-existent at the national level, there has been some good legislation passed at the state level - most recently, in the state of Washington voters approved a ballot initiative requiring universal background checks in November.  The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence summarizes the progress: "In the past two years, states have seen historic and unprecedented progress in adopting gun laws to help keep communities safe from gun violence. A total of 99 new laws strengthening gun regulations have passed in 37 states nationwide since December 12, 2012, and 10 states have made major overhauls to their gun laws. 2014 was a remarkable year for smart gun laws, with California’s Gun Violence Restraining Order law, Washington State’s successful ballot initiative for universal background checks, and seven states adopting legislation to keep guns out of the hands of domestic violence abusers."  You can check out its 2014 Annual Gun Laws State Scorecard at http://gunlawscorecard.org/.

In addition to the successful ballot initiative in Washington, gun-control advocates saw a few other victories on Election Day. In Colorado, the two state senators who were recalled in 2013 by a gun lobby funded recall vote won back their seats.  As the LA Times reported: "...in a little-noticed footnote to Colorado’s closely watched gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races, the Democrats won back both of those seats, and it wasn’t at all close in either Pueblo or Colorado Springs."  And, in the midst of what was a Republican rout, the Democratic governors of Connecticut and Colorado won re-election in November despite gun lobby efforts to unseat them.  Connecticut and Colorado passed some of the toughest gun legislation in the country after the tragedies at Sandy Hook and Aurora.

In recent news, the gun lobby suffered a defeat Monday when, in what CNN analysts called "a small political miracle", the Senate approved Vivek Murthy as Surgeon General.  The gun lobby and their allies on the right had delayed his appointment for more than a year because he dared to say that gun violence is a public health issue.

Also on Monday, the families of nine people killed at Newtown filed suit against the maker and sellers of the Bushmaster AR-15 rifle.  The suit alleges "wrongful death and negligence" and seeks unspecified monetary damages.  "The complaint says the gun allows shooters to inflict unparalleled civilian carnage.  'In order to continue profiting from the sale of AR-15s, defendants chose to disregard the unreasonable risks the rifle posed outside of specialized, highly regulated institutions like the armed forces and law enforcement," the plaintiffs wrote in the complaint...A 2005 law shields gun manufacturers from most lawsuits over criminal use of their products, but it does include an exception for cases where companies should know a weapon is likely to be used in a way that risks injury to others. A lawyer for the Newtown families, Katie Mesner-Hage, said the lawsuit appears to be the first of its kind against a manufacturer to claim that exception." [AP/Huffington Post, Dec. 15]

The public is way ahead of the politicians on this issue with overwhelming majorities favoring common sense gun regulations.  Referring to the re-election of Governors Malloy (CT) and Hickenlooper (CO), the Americans for Principled Leadership website notes: "The public polls on gun safety reforms have been proven out in these two gubernatorial elections. By lopsided majorities the voting public strongly favored the gun safety legislation put in place after the Aurora movie theatre and Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. It’s only a question of time before other states catch on."

Photo Credit: smartgunlaws.org (Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence)

Once the laws are on the books, we can expect attacks from the gun lobby in the courts - usually on the basis of the Second Amendment.  On the district court level, 2014 saw a number of victories for common sense gun laws,  In September. "U.S. District Court Judge John Darrah handed the gun sense movement yet another legal victory by upholding a local ordinance that prohibits military-style assault weapons and large capacity ammunition magazines (“LCMs”) in the city of Highland Park, Illinois. The decision is the most recent in a growing string of cases unanimously finding that prohibitions on assault weapons and LCMs do not infringe on the Second Amendment...This outcome marks the tenth major court victory for common sense gun laws in 2014. Despite a concerted effort by the gun lobby to challenge a host of reasonable firearm regulations, courts have rejected Second Amendment challenges to laws ranging from universal background checks and firearm registration to safe storage and restrictions on assault weapons and LCMs. The message from the courts is clear: the vast majority of sensible gun laws are fully compatible with the Second Amendment."  [Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Sep. 29]

The positive state and local actions on gun regulation make these communities safer.  But other states have passed laws making guns more readily available and present.  Guns can be transported across state lines as easily as people, and action at a national level is also necessary. Unfortunately, after the midterm elections, action at the national level is now more unlikely than ever.

Then there is the question of the Supreme Court.  What will happen when these lower court cases make their inevitable way to the conservative-majority Supreme Court is anybody's guess.  SCOTUS' infamous District of Columbia vs. Heller 5-4 ruling in 2008 upheld a district court ruling that a Washington D.C. law banning handguns and requiring other firearms to be stored unloaded or locked was unconstitutional.  In so doing, they essentially declared that an individual unconnected to service in a militia had the right to "bear arms" - a first ever and unprecedented interpretation.

But the news at SCOTUS is not all bad.  In the court's last term (2013-4), "despite numerous invitations and opportunities, the justices went out of their way to avoid the right to bear arms.  Signs of this were clear...when the court in a 5–4 ruling upheld a major gun control law, the federal ban on 'straw' purchasing without so much as mentioning the Second Amendment." Justice Kennedy is apparently the swing vote on these issues and neither the conservative or liberal justices appeared willing to bet on which side he would vote if the Second Amendment were brought into the case.  "Kennedy seems increasingly less likely to be a solid vote for expansive Second Amendment rights. Indeed, twice [in the 2013-4] term he voted for expansive readings of gun control laws instead. For the NRA, so used to winning in statehouses around the country, this can't be good news." [Slate, June 19]

Related
Let's Repeal the Second Amendment [March 18, 2014]

Let's Repeal the Second Amendment

One of the many pieces of legislation bottled up by the do-nothing-Republican-controlled-and-Republican-filibustered Congress is gun control regulation.  Even after Sandy Hook, Republicans managed to prevent meaningful Federal gun legislation from being enacted - not even the requirement for universal background checks or a ban on assault rifles.  Recourse to the courts for a common sense interpretation of the Second Amendment for the common good is useless.  The Republican majority on the Supreme Court refuses to recognize "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State" as the clearly dependent introductory clause that it is.

While some states have advanced tougher gun laws, others are moving into the deep end of the bizarre.  Georgia's State House of Representatives has drafted what's been called the "most extreme gun bill in America" by Americans for Responsible Solutions.  "Georgia lawmakers could soon make broad changes to the state’s gun laws to allow firearms in bars, churches, airports, and certain government buildings." [MSNBC/March 14]  What in hell could these fools be thinking?  In Georgia, no permit is needed to purchase a handgun and the state has the 9th highest firearm homicide rate in the country. 

NRA money continues to flow into Colorado to upend the stronger gun laws passed there last year.  The NRA has been able to defeat two state senators instrumental to the passage of the gun legislation in recall elections.  But so far they have had little success in overturning the laws as Democrats are holding on to a majority in the state legislature.  Seven of the eight bills introduced by the pro-gun industry  have been defeated - Concealed Handgun Carry without a Permit, Ammunition Magazine Prohibition. Concealed-Carry in Public Schools, Governor Cannot Restrict Firearms During Emergencies, No Background Check for Step-Relations, Concerning Background Checks and Fees for Gun Transfers, Repeal Large-Capacity Ammunition Magazine Ban.  One (Repeal Regulations on Firearms Purchases in Contiguous States) passed the State Senate and is pending in the House. This last bill, according to John Morse of Americans for Principled Leadership. "actually addresses an outmoded 1969 state statute that has subsequently been eclipsed by the Brady Bill and other federal legislation passed more recently....No harm is being done with this clean up measure."

According Slate.com's gun death tally, more than 12,000 people were killed by guns in the US between the time of the Sandy Hook shooting and Dec. 31, 2013.  Add to this the 20,000 suicides per year and the need for common sense regulation of guns becomes clear.  Mental illness, socio-economic factors, gang violence, guns in the hands of felons - these all contribute to the totals. But taking guns out of the hands of those prone to use them against others or themselves and taking assault rifles out of everybody's hands would make the totals significantly lower.

Every study and every statistic point to the connection between the availability of guns and gun-related deaths.  The gun homicide rate in the US with its relatively lax gun laws is vastly higher than that in other developed countries - 10 times that of Italy and 90 times that of the United Kingdom, for example.  [Wikipedia]  The largest study of gun violence in the United States, released in September 2013, "confirms a point that should be obvious: widespread American gun ownership is fueling America’s gun violence epidemic...[The authors found] “for each 1 percentage point increase in proportion of household gun ownership,...firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9 percent." [Think Progress website]  A Harvard study found that states with the strongest/most gun laws had a firearms death rate 42% lower than the states with fewest controls on guns.  The authors take pains to note that "You can’t necessarily say one absolutely led to the other … but you can say those things are related.”   I found one of the reasons for their hesitation absolutely incredible.  “One of the major challenges that has existed over the past 15 years is that basically all avenues of federal funding – either the CDC or the NIH – have been cut off from studying firearm fatalities,” [the author Dr. Eric] Fleegler said. ”I’m a pediatric emergency medicine doctor. If there are ten children who die from a toy or some sort of injury, there is an incredible human cry that we make sure that we stop those types of deaths. Here on the other side you have 31,000 people who die every single year from firearms. That is a number of deaths on virtually an unprecedented level, and nothing is being done to understand this or reduce it.” [Here & Now webpage, Boston Public Radio website]

I cannot get the objection of those who oppose universal background checks.  If you personally have nothing to hide, why are you reluctant?  I cannot get the point of those who would make possession of high capacity magazines and assault rifles the right of every mentally unstable American.  Under what circumstances other than mass murder or civil insurrection would you ever need these?  Please don't say hunting.  And I really can't get why Federal funding has been cutoff from studies of gun violence. What are they afraid we'll find out?

Maybe it's time to repeal the outmoded second amendment or at least interpret it in a manner consistent with the amendment authors' intent.  It was written at a time when muskets had to be powdered and reloaded after every shot, when America was a rural nation, when some were worried that the country would be reclaimed by Great Britain and, probably most importantly, when the militia were the only means of defense.  As Dan Heaton writes at Yahoo Voices: "After the Revolutionary War, the standing army of the new country essentially ceased to exist and the various state militias were again the primary means of national defense." .In other words, the militia granted the right to bear arms was the equivalent to today's armed forces.  No other Western democracy has anything like this enduring anachronism from the eighteenth century and they are surviving just fine, thank you.

In Brief - Updates on Issues We've Been Following
U.S. Accidental Shootings mid-February to early March

Oregon and Montana became the fourth and fifth states to restore Congressional food stamp cuts. They joined New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania.  Of the 14 states and the District of Columbia affected by the cuts, at least seven states (Connecticut, Montana, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont) plus D.C. are moving or have already moved to block them, according to a Stateline survey. The remaining "heat and eat" states  — California, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin — are considering doing the same.

Senate negotiators struck a bipartisan deal on March 13 that would renew federal unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless.  The bill could come up for a vote in the Senate by the end of March but its fate in the Republican-controlled House is up in the air.

President Obama rolled out his plan to "force American businesses to pay more overtime to millions of workers, the latest move by his administration to confront corporations that have had soaring profits even as wages have stagnated."

The people of Crimea voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Russia on Sunday.  On Monday the US and EU announced announced personal sanctions against Russian and Crimean officials.

Louisiana's lawsuit against MoveOn's billboards advocating Medicaid expansion