Douglas Anthony Cooper2013-05-23T21:10:20-04:00Douglas Anthony Cooperhttp://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=douglas-anthony-cooperCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Douglas Anthony CooperGood old fashioned elbow grease.Confessions of a Twisted Gun Grabbertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30598522013-04-18T09:03:26-04:002013-04-18T09:07:09-04:00Douglas Anthony Cooperhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-anthony-cooper/
This was a suggestion offered with complete sincerity in the comments beneath an article entitled "Inside the Twisted Mind of a Gun Grabber Pt. 2." Full disclosure: I am the gun grabber in question, and the twisted mind is my own. Which all goes to show that being screwed is very much a matter of perspective.
Now, let's argue for the hell of it that home carry makes you safer -- as opposed to more likely to be shot by your four-year-old. What's interesting is that these people like the idea of living in a nation where packing at the dinner table is the sensible thing to do. They sneer at those nations in which this proposition is considered loopy and loathsome (which is to say, most of the civilized world).
I have tried to squeeze myself into the untwisted mind of the enemy: what kind of person genuinely wants to impose that kind of hellish life on his fellow citizen?
It's certainly someone who considers his hobby more important than other people's children. Toting a gun is one of those thrilling activities that he is just not willing to give up, and -- luckily for him -- the Constitution was amended to defend his hobby.
He is also someone, however, who refuses to recognize that this is anything more than a hobby. He wants to believe that he does in fact live in a Die Hard sequel: that this hobby is necessary to his safety. To the safety of his family. Because God knows, Bruce Willis has to be prepared for armed bad guys emerging from the bathroom. Bruce Willis, bladder full to bursting, is wise to be packing when he approaches that bathroom door. If you live in a Die Hard sequel, home carry is more than just sane: it's responsible.
Let's say, however -- just for the sake of argument -- that you don't live in a Die Hard sequel. You don't live anywhere in the franchise: you're not even starring in that inspired first installment, with Alan Rickman as the dry Eurovillain. You live in the United States of America, a place where a man's home is supposed to be his castle, as opposed to his rifle range.
Real life isn't Die Harder, or Die Hardly Dead, or Die Hard Trying Hard Not to Die. Real life isn't even paintball. There is an entire mode of civilian existence -- experienced by all sorts of people in the free world -- in which the prospect of armed ambush doesn't play any role whatsoever.
This is what upsets the hobbyist. What kind of place is that? Where a guy doesn't require guns to defend his freedom? Surely that kind of place is fertile ground for an ambitious tyrant (usually Hitler). And even if it isn't -- even if people are in fact free and safe in such a place -- who the hell wants to live in that film?
A movie in which home carry is an idiotic and repulsive concept isn't the kind of movie in which Bruce Willis feels properly at home. Bruce doesn't do rom-coms. (Okay, perhaps he does, but they're a brief lapse in judgment, and nobody remembers them.) He doesn't do moist upbeat love stories or six-hanky weepers. Bruce -- and the sequel to Bruce, and the home carriers who hope to be cast as cameos in the fifteenth or sixteenth Bruce (Die Harderest) -- never enters an en-suite bathroom without his Bushmaster locked and loaded.
Ambush is the central concept here. That's something you can't really guard against, according to "Inside the Twisted Mind of a Gun Grabber." Ambush is what happened to District Attorney Mike McLelland, when he and his wife were shot to death in their own home. That's what I got wrong, when I noted that here a good guy with a gun -- in the safety of his own house -- was easily murdered by a bad guy with a gun. Only a silly non-sequel-dweller thinks that packing is going to help you survive an ambush.
What home carry does allow is for the good guy to prevail in an O.K.-Coral-style firefight in the living room. Bad guy twirling mustache at the mantelpiece. Bruce aware and smiling wryly in the La-Z-Boy. Wife and kids cowering behind the couch.
That's a scenario, friends, in which you're gonna wish you had that gun.
It's not entirely clear that home carry is necessary unless you're being hunted down by the guy who killed your deputy. On the other hand, you get a strong sense that it would a be a lot of fun even for the unthreatened hobbyist. Quoth one commenter beneath "Twisted Mind":
It was reported on the news that McLelland was trying to get to his gun when he was shot. The real lesson is home carry. When my wife read the story in the paper her first word "Given the threat to his life why didn't he have his gun with him."
To which another responded, "Yes, that is critical."
Speaking of critical, if you write a series of articles about the NRA and its victims, you receive a lot of feedback (to put it politely). Not all of that feedback, however, is predictable: I hear from quite a few impressive non-hobbyists.
A surprising number of professional soldiers support rigorous gun control. It's easy to see why: they have lived a life in which a gun is something you have to wear, every day, like shoes. They look at these hobbyists, and they see... well, hobbyists:
"Only 7 percent of American veterans say they are very confident that those who have not served in the military take seriously the responsibilities that come with gun ownership."
Oh, and quite a few veterans are in favor of background checks: 91 percent, in fact.
Professional soldiers don't uniformly love Wayne LaPierre, the muscular millionaire mouthpiece of the NRA. Oddly enough, 27 percent of veterans have an "unfavorable" view of this non-veteran, as opposed to only 15 percent who admire the man.
The guy who wrote that canonical piece, "Inside the Twisted Mind of a Gun Grabber Pt. 2," is not a veteran. His site, The Truth About Guns, doesn't have a whole lot of veterans on staff. One writer studied at the Citadel; another rejected an academic deferment to enlist in the Vietnam War (admirable); but most seem to have seen no more active combat than I have. Yet somehow -- despite our shared martial inexperience -- they have become straight shooters, and I have become a twisted gun grabber.
I'll grant that many of these guys are amusing writers. The article and the comments are meant to be devastating, but I'm an old-school debater, so I got a kick out of them. (With the exception of the cowards who insulted my dog. Frederick the Great rode to war with his Italian Greyhounds, and towards the end of his life preferred them to humans. But then, Fritz was an actual soldier.)
Relative to my other sworn enemies these days -- supporters of PETA and the HSUS -- these guys seem almost human. I'd prefer to go drinking with any of them than I would the average PETA apologist. Most of these gun fetishists strike me as irreverent, humorous, assholes, and surprisingly bright. But not soldiers.
And, oddly enough, veterans -- people who have in fact used their guns in a non-fictional way to stop bad guys -- don't want to see these stateside, self-identified good guys armed to the molars. Some 60 percent of veterans support bans on high capacity magazines and assault weapons.
Note that such bans would prevent them -- responsible veterans -- from owning these weapons as well. There's an odd absence of selfishness here. This is a broad generalization, but it would appear that actual soldiers care more about other people's children than they do about their own God-given right to sport an arsenal.
Compare and contrast with these Truthers About Guns.
Now, I'm not suggesting that your average veteran has anything much in common with me. What I am suggesting -- demonstrating, in fact -- is that these guys don't live in Die Hard: The Sequel.
Many veterans own legal guns, yes, but they have some idea of what home carry truly entails, and they don't much like the concept. They live in Afghanistan: The Sequel -- that episode in which the professional returns to America, and is dismayed to discover that he and his family are endangered by big swinging hobbyists with semiautomatics.]]>Boycott Celebs Who Strip for PETA's Death Machinetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30410412013-04-09T09:27:11-04:002013-04-09T18:01:23-04:00Douglas Anthony Cooperhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-anthony-cooper/Warning: the following graphic photo may distress the reader.
PETA's mass extermination of pets has finally worked its way into the public consciousness. Nathan Winograd's recent article -- "Shocking Photos: PETA's Secret Slaughter of Kittens, Puppies" -- has gone viral in a way rarely witnessed. There can be very few people who are still unaware that PETA has killed well over 29,000 animals in and around Norfolk, Virginia.
The evidence of PETA's carnage may be unfathomable, but it is impossible to deny. If you are a decent animal lover -- especially if you are a devoted PETA supporter -- I'm afraid you are going to be sickened. I'm including only one photograph here, as I have issues with the relentless barrage of these images. This is an Associated Press photo of a puppy killed by Ingrid Newkirk's employees in the back of PETA's mobile death unit:
Other corpses were secretly deposited in dumpsters: a grotesque act resulting in criminal charges. Many of these pets were completely healthy when killed. PETA had promised to adopt them out to proper homes.
Our charming "animal rights" workers were spared serious sentences in the end, because it turns out not to be illegal to kill animals under false pretenses. They were found guilty of "littering."
To make a long story short, the court ruled that North Carolina has a keen interest in keeping private trash receptacles free from the stench of rotting animal carcasses but absolutely none whatsoever in protecting the fragile lives of defenseless cats and dogs.
These employees were not fired.
And this was simply one incident, in over a decade of so-called "euthanasia" -- with a documented toll of 29,426 animals. Dead pets are no longer deposited in dumpsters: PETA's donors have unwittingly subsidized a massive walk-in freezer.
If you need more in the way of concrete proof and have a strong stomach, I urge you to visit Winograd's article on The Huffington Post or to read Friendly Fire, a book by Nathan Winograd and his wife Jennifer, which documents these abuses in detail -- a book that excoriates not simply PETA, but also the HSUS (Humane Society of the United States) and the ASPCA.
The question now becomes: What are we going to do about it?
Well, if you search the term "@peta" today on Twitter, you will encounter livid supporters -- sometimes every few seconds -- denouncing the organization, often in words NSFW. Many are making it clear that they will never donate to PETA again (including committed donors who had arranged to donate automatically from their bank accounts).
This is a start. If we're going to kick these hypocrites to the curb, yes, we have to kick them where it hurts: in the pocketbook.
We can however go much further. A great part of their $30 million annual budget is generated through shock publicity stunts: animal torture porn, for instance. The most notorious of these stunts is their ubiquitous softcore campaign: celebrities and porn stars stripping for PETA advertisements.
Celebrities feel immense pressure to shill for PETA. They are bullied relentlessly if they do not toe the party line. The answer is to apply even greater pressure from the other direction.
It's not as if a career can't survive opposition to these ghouls. A year ago, Jennifer Lawrence famously said, "Screw PETA." And she's done reasonably well since.
If a celebrity strips for PETA, refuse to buy their products. Refuse to see their films or listen to their music. Express your outrage on Twitter: Send tweets to their official accounts and to their fan clubs. Call for this boycott on Facebook and Tumblr and celebrity fan sites.
Make it impossible to ignore.
If PETA is going to kill pets, then it is the duty of every animal lover to ensure that this organization is properly and humanely euthanized.
NOTE: A list of celebrities who have offered support to PETA is here: http://www.looktothestars.org/charity/peta]]>A Good Guy With a Gun. R.I.P.tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30108622013-04-04T09:00:55-04:002013-04-04T09:06:10-04:00Douglas Anthony Cooperhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-anthony-cooper/
Meanwhile, let me tell you a true story. About a good guy with a gun. A guy who was more than simply good in the sense of morally admirable: he was good with a gun. He'd fought in the Gulf War. He knew what he was doing -- he had been tested in battle, and was demonstrably courageous.
You won't find a more useful best-case scenario to demonstrate the efficacy of civilian weaponry.
District Attorney Mike McLelland from Kaufman County, Texas -- unlike most Americans -- had an impeccable reason for carrying a sidearm. His deputy had been shot two months before, and it made sense for McLelland to assume that he was very much a target himself. This was hardly paranoia. I expect that most people, on either side of the gun debate, would respect his decision to arm himself.
McLelland -- unlike, say, Ted Nugent -- was no chicken hawk. He was the opposite of a draft dodger -- he had enlisted. More than that: he had voluntarily put in 23 years in the service of his country. He refused to be intimidated, vowing "to put away the 'scum' who killed his deputy." And he issued a powerful public statement:
I hope that the people that did this are watching, because we're very confident that we're going to find you.... We're going to pull you out of whatever hole you're in, we're going to bring you back and let the people of Kaufman County prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law.
This wasn't empty posturing. Most civilians who boast about their tactical prowess are macho blowhards, but McLelland was not the product of a brief NRA training course. We're talking about "a big bear of a guy" who had seen active combat.
When he discussed the threat that he faced, McLelland could legitimately say, "I'm ahead of everybody else because, basically, I'm a soldier." He did what you'd expect a trained soldier to do: after his deputy was assassinated, "he carried a gun everywhere he went and took extra care when answering the door at his home."
Last Saturday, in that very same home, this courageous man -- along with his wife -- were found shot to death.
After the slaughter of twenty children in Newtown, Wayne LaPierre, the vice president of the NRA, infamously reiterated this talking point: "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." This is, in a nutshell, the NRA's argument for arming kindergarten teachers.
Well, America doesn't offer us that many examples of a man with a gun who was this unambiguously good. Here is testimony from a guy who had been McLelland's classmate and law partner:
They were the consummate good people.... We kidded Mike because he had no identifiable vices, and we all had vices. We either drank too much or smoked too much or chased women. But Mike had no identifiable vices...
Whatever you may think of Wayne LaPierre, McLelland was a good, good man. Also -- unlike your average kindergarten teacher (and Wayne LaPierre) -- he was an actual soldier, deeply familiar with weaponry.
And none of this was of any use when it came to thwarting a bad guy with a gun. Not even when McLelland was in his own house, armed, and hyperalert to a very real threat.
Now, you're welcome to argue that this was a unique situation. The shooting of Mike McLelland was an anomaly, when it comes to this archetypal scenario: decent citizens, well-armed. I would agree.
What was unusual was this: in general, good guys with guns are not aware of an impending threat. A more typical situation would be that of Chris Kyle, who was shot and killed at a shooting range, without any warning.
Okay, even this situation is not typical. Because Chris Kyle was a Navy SEAL. Most of us aren't. Moreover, he was a sniper. Moreover, he was the SEAL who had achieved the record number of sniper killings in Iraq. Finally, what makes Chris Kyle atypical is that he wrote a bestseller called American Sniper.
In short, Chris Kyle was one of the best shooters in the country. Perhaps the best shooter in the country. And he had lots of weapons at hand: this was a shooting range. And he did not manage to stop the bad guy.
Sorry, but despite the sincere bleating of the NRA's vice president, making guns effortlessly available to good guys is just not a very good idea. It does not make good guys any safer. It is of no benefit to America. What it does -- and this doesn't matter to Wayne Lapierre -- is make guns effortlessly available to bad guys.
What it also does -- and this matters profoundly to Wayne LaPierre -- is ensure that the people who make guns and ammunition remain fat and healthy, so that they can continue to pour millions into his obscene organization.
The nation will deeply miss the likes of Mike McLelland and Chris Kyle. Real heroes are thin on the ground. And when they are gone we tend to be left with the likes of Wayne LaPierre.]]>Somewhere Over the Rainbow Lies a Less Rancid Prequeltag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28459132013-03-11T08:10:40-04:002013-05-11T05:12:01-04:00Douglas Anthony Cooperhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-anthony-cooper/Oz the Great and Powerful that fails to use some variant of the word "wretched" is not to be trusted. A critic who avoids "queasy," "soul-chafing" and "aspartame" has almost certainly been paid off by Disney. It's conceivable that someone somewhere has taste just rotten enough that they can dodge these terms without being slipped a few bucks. But unlikely.
When your child is old enough to be taught the word "execrable," Oz the Oily and Insincere will have provided a useful object lesson. "Well, Virginia, remember that foul prequel nominally based on the work of the fine L. Frank Baum? You do? I apologize. But 'execrable' is how honest critics describe such a film."
"Daddy, what does it mean when a plot 'creaks'?"
"Ah, Virginia. Good question. Do you recall that fetid, barely coherent attempt to provide a backstory to The Wizard of Oz? How three tedious sisters were set against each other in a way that didn't make a lot of sense, but seemed to suggest that Absolute Evil was the product of being jilted by a slimeball you've known for less than 24 hours? You don't? That's okay. Let's just say that 'creaking' is what you get in the absence of 'screenwriting'."
Oz the Inept and Unwatchable may prove useful as a sort of low watermark -- a touchstone that you really don't want to touch, like Shanghai Surprise or Howard the Duck or Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever. It's a gruesome exercise, but entertainment can be defined by what it isn't. Mavens will ponder Oz the Expensive for many years, in an effort to determine just which slot it deserves in the 100 Worst Movies of All Time.
"Father dearest? That irritating, completely unlikable winged monkey: was I supposed to be deeply moved when it became cloying and maudlin?"
"No, Virginia: the fact that you continued to respond with crippling irritation indicates that you are a human child, as opposed to a once-human critic, and that you are properly made ill by that which is saccharine and face-grabbingly horrible."
It's hard to remember the last time that a cheerful film inspired this kind of existential dread. I walked out of the theater with a shrunken regard for my fellow man (and was tempted to walk out much earlier, many many times.)
"Dad, I was under the impression that James Franco was not grating, and that Sam Raimi had talent. Also that someone like Mila Kunis, when projected into a world like Oz, would be wearing something other than tight leather trousers."
"Well, Virginia, life can be disappointing that way. On the other hand, these people may survive their inevitable Razzies to win a Satellite Award down the line, or perhaps even a BAFTA. This is improbable, but there is a small chance that their careers will not be sanded into dust by this abrasive travesty."
"Pater mine, is this flick likely to recoup at the box office?"
"That too is one of life's terrible ironies, Virginia. In the threatened sequel, Disney may well have the option of repaving their mangy yellow road with actual gold bricks. All because irresponsible film critics have failed to warn the nation's innocent families.
"Father, whatever happened to that charming Judy Garland person?"
"She's dead."]]>Anne Hathaway: The Most Horrible Person Who's Ever Livedtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.27696682013-02-27T08:44:30-05:002013-04-29T05:12:01-04:00Douglas Anthony Cooperhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-anthony-cooper/
Oh, you have talent? I bet you think you're just the bee's ass.
Okay, I didn't really know that I was supposed to hate Anne Hathaway until I woke up to a thousand or so articles telling me just that. Right. I figure all these people must know something that I don't: that she's a raging harridan backstage, or a preening snob, or something grisly that she skillfully suppresses in public.
But no, it seems that she's actually winning and eager and peppy in real life. So what we're expected to hate is this -- that the woman's charming.
Full disclosure: I didn't like her much in Les Mis. There she was trying too hard. The merciless close-ups didn't help: you don't want melodramatic facial contortions twenty feet tall. But that wasn't her issue alone: the entire film featured way too many close-ups of veins throbbing in foreheads like epileptic pythons. It should have been called Les Aneurysms. But that has no bearing on Hathaway the woman.
I'm genuinely trying to figure this out. We're supposed to hate Anne Hathaway, but love Jennifer Lawrence. I guess peppy is out, and awk is in. I happen to think they're both pretty great -- and this doesn't strike me as any kind of deep personal paradox -- but I don't have my finger on the nation's pulsing forehead.
Perhaps it's an absence of proletarian cool. America's going through a phase that defined Britain in the sixties: a working class hero is something to be. Fine. I have no problem with that -- it's a nice antidote to sphincter-clenched elitism. I've always been a cheerleader for hillbilly culture: I'd much rather hear a voice from Appalachia than Harvard.
The truth, however, is that Jennifer Lawrence isn't an echt hillbilly. She's not a coal miner's daughter. She's not Katniss. She wasn't raised gnawing on winter's bone.
Her father was in construction? In Louisville Kentucky? Cool. But he owned a construction business, which is not quite the same thing as standing knee-deep in Southern cement. Sure, Anne Hathaway's the daughter of a lawyer and an actress, which is a bit more glamorous. She's all Montessori and Vassar and NYU. But does this make her unlovable?
I've encountered one damning anecdote. One. It seems that Joseph Gordon-Levitt called her "an insufferable snob". I stress the word "seems". I googled the origins of this widely-quoted single slur, and came up with celebdirtylaundry.com, perezhilton.com, gossiprocks.com -- all impeccable sources really -- until finally celebitchy.com referred me to the sterling print publication that first offered this observation to the world: Star magazine.
A close reading of the passage in Star cannot help but reveal the dependable words: "sources say." Not just one anonymous source, note, but plural: anonymous sources. They're the ones that say. And they say that Joseph said. And celebitchy.com says this, based on what Star says that "sources say" that Joseph said: Anne's a snotty diva.
Color me unconvinced. Given the evidence, sorry: she's probably not a raging bitch on skis. Let's fish elsewhere, then, shall we? Goody two-shoes, right? (Both Prada.) Here we're standing on firm ground: the girl wanted to be a nun. Except that she gave up on that ambition when she found out that her brother was gay. Which is the kind of genuine moral decision that I find admirable -- dunno about you. It doesn't represent ditzy acquiescence to the status quo: it is, in its quiet personal way, a revolutionary act.
Maybe I just don't get it.
Perhaps it really is just a matter of cool. Anne Hathaway isn't. She's about as world-weary as a Labrador retriever. Approximately as cynical as Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz.
And that's perhaps it. Anne Hathaway is the young Judy Garland. Or rather: she's what Judy Garland presented to the public: "Let's put on a show!" The problem with Hathaway is that she's that same persona backstage: she's not a pill-popping train-wreck. If you're going to be cheerful, these days, you better be sitting on tragic. Unfortunately, the closest to tragic that Hathaway gets is to find herself accidentally falling in love with a grifter. And that's genuinely sad, except that she bounced back with determined peppiness.
When she found herself hosting the Oscars with a snoring James Franco, she battled the situation (unsuccessfully) with determined peppiness. She brought a bit too much determined peppiness to the role of Catwoman, but are we required to hate an actress for being miscast?
Eh. I suppose this is just the Age of Unpolished. Don't get me wrong -- I really do admire Jennifer Lawrence -- but not everybody has to faceplant on the way to the microphone.
The latest Hatha-slur? The woman had the temerity to rehearse her acceptance speech at the Oscars. Damn. That's criminal.
Give me a break. Every boy and girl in America has been rehearsing their acceptance speech since the age of nine. That's what they do in front of the mirror before brushing their teeth. (Not me. But I know what I'm going to say when I win the Pritzker and the Nobel.)
Okay, I give in. I'm going to start hating Anne. It's clearly what all the cool kids are doing. But guide me here: who am I supposed to worship? The anti-Anne, I guess. Sure, I can do that. Let's see now...
You know who's the apotheosis of happening, classy American womanhood? Jodi Arias.]]>The Grouches Reviewing the Oscarstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.27620272013-02-25T19:50:28-05:002013-04-27T05:12:01-04:00Douglas Anthony Cooperhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-anthony-cooper/
Seth MacFarlane, nicely classless, was a class act. Every rude comment drew attention to its own outrageous nature: You knew that MacFarlane was very much aware of which buttons he was pushing -- he was pointing out that the very existence of these buttons says something about our own bigotry.
The most outrageous comment was Ted the bear's: the suggestion that Hollywood is run by a cabal of Jews meeting in secret synagogues. Ted, of course, is Seth MacFarlane himself in bear drag, and the joke was a nice jab at both the anti-Semites who foam about the Jewish influence in Hollywood, and the undeniable fact of the Jewish influence in Hollywood. (I'm Jewish, by the way. Relax.)
The song "We Saw Your Boobs" was framed in the context of Captain Kirk spanking the host for insensitivity. The John Wilkes Booth comment (priceless) wasn't meant to insult Abe; it was directed at the piety of Americans. We're all the Party of Lincoln, right? Way too soon to call attention to our self-important reverence for a guy few of us will ever live up to. (I'm Canadian, by the way. Be annoyed.)
The proper response to Seth MacFarlane -- and this may be the professional response we in fact encountered -- is envy. Here's an entertainer who can simultaneously deliver the irreverence that Generation Z requires to stay focused, as well as the suave soft shoe that we associate with the golden age that probably never was. He's a cross between what James Franco, like, totally failed to pull off, dude, and our gilded memories of gentlemen like David Niven.
Oh, and by the way, the all-mighty Nielsen agrees:
The show drew an average audience of 40.3 million viewers, up about 3 percent from 39.3 million viewers last year, according to the Nielsen ratings service. The audience among those between the ages of 18 and 34 grew 20 percent, to post an 11.3 rating, compared to 9.4 last year, when Billy Crystal was the host.
Sorry, cynics, but Seth MacFarlane was a kick-ass, all-purpose host. May he reign for many seasons.]]>Them the People: Ted Nugent's Constituencytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.26807992013-02-14T08:58:25-05:002013-04-16T05:12:01-04:00Douglas Anthony Cooperhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-anthony-cooper/
Let's see now. The following are legitimate petitions, according to "We the People." You can petition the White House to have Piers Morgan deported for being insufficiently gun-besotted. You can petition the White House to have your disgruntled, gun-besotted states secede from the Union. Not only can you use the site to present these petitions, but the President will respond to your bonewitted requests.
So, that's legit.
Now, let's say that you (okay, I) launch a petition to have Ted Nugent drafted to serve on the front lines in Afganistan. That would seem to fulfill all of the requirements: frivolous, kind of dumb, utterly without hope of success. The only difference, as far as I can tell, is that my wacky petition was not sufficiently pro-gun. Worse: it was a bit anti-gun. It suggested that Some Guns Might Be Bad.
My petition was pulled from the White House site in a matter of hours. You can see the sorry remnants of my jape here.
What. Am I not the People? We Not the People? Non-People "R" Us?
As I say, I am only middish, wingwise. I'm a centrist dipstick. I can only imagine how severely discriminated against are the addled leftwing needlebrains of this world.
Was it because I made it clear that I recognized the idiotic nature of my petition, unlike the idiots who presented their petition with the deep sincerity befitting actual idiots?
I was forced to relocate my dull-yet-pointed petition to change.org: here. (Sign it, if you share my silly prejudice against draft-dodgers who shill for the NRA.)
Is this a First Amendment issue? Hell yes! Okay, hell maybe! Okay, probably not!
But it's an object lesson. If you're going to be a jackass and launch a chowderskulled stunt on an official White House site, make sure that you're a sincere, deeply committed enemy of the administration.]]>Petition: Draft Ted Nugent to Serve in Afghanistantag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.26654642013-02-12T09:51:48-05:002013-04-14T05:12:01-04:00Douglas Anthony Cooperhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-anthony-cooper/petition to draft Ted Nugent to serve on the front lines in Afghanistan.
You may well wonder why Mr. Nugent has not already made this decision on his own. This is a complex medical affair: while courageous in a way rarely encountered this side of Chuck Norris, Mr. Nugent has long been plagued by an allergy to active duty. I stress that this is an allergy, not a personal disposition. There is a vast difference, yo.
Ted Nugent wants to fight. He just can't bring himself to do so, because of this unfortunate and rare ailment. We can help.
When called up to serve in Vietnam, Ted Nugent allegedly contracted a serious bowel condition. We have this allegation from an impeccable source: Ted Nugent. In an article in High Times magazine in 1977, Mr. Nugent described this rare and unpleasant intestinal failure in gruesome detail. When he finally presented himself for duty, he was a walking disease of a human being, and the army wouldn't touch him: "They'd call dead people before they'd call my ass."
Note that this in no way reflects upon Mr. Nugent's courage or capabilities. It is also, as "The Nuge" himself points out, something of an irony:
But you know the funny thing about it? I'd make an incredible army man. I'd be a colonel before you knew what hit you, and I'd have the baddest bunch of motherf*uckin' killers you'd ever seen in my platoon. But I just wasn't into it. I was too busy doin' my own thing, you know?
We do know. And now that your own thing involves rocking heavily on behalf of guns and the constitutional right to high-capacity magazines, you should have the opportunity to do it, right? Your own thing.
We can help.
Now, Mr. Nugent later denied the words above -- and, let's face it, they don't really sound like the decorous rhetoric we associate with the real Ted Nugent -- so we'll have to lean here on snopes.com: his deferment was of an educational sort (twice), before he was rejected "as a result of a physical examination." And that physical might have determined, for all we know, that The Nuge had a debilitating hangnail.
Still, the lingering suspicion dogs Mr. Nugent, and it's our collective duty to make this clear: that dog won't hunt. Hence, the "Draft Ted Nugent" campaign.
Historically, the draft has been a complex issue, to put it mildly. In 1918, the Supreme Court deemed it constitutional for Congress to mandate conscription: Congress gets to declare the war, so it gets to decide who's going to do the warring.
Twice, however, the president himself has shown personal muscle in this regard. The draft was altered by executive order in 1942, and again in 1953. Ladies and gentleman, we have a precedent. What decent, reasonable SCOTUS would sniff at an executive order this selective, exceptional, and patriotic? Hence, to bypass deadlock in Congress, we are presenting our petition directly to the White House.
Mr. President, draft the Nuge. Let them know what the Great American Satan looks like turned up to eleven.
Imagine you're a shy, cave-dwelling Talibanista, and you're confronted by a yowling Motor City staple of classic rock radio stations, shouldering a bazooka and clutching the Second Amendment and making that face that you see on the cover of Cat Scratch Fever.
(How do you say "gosh, that's quite something" in Pashto?)
President Obama, you owe it to the United States of America to draft this hunk o' has-been rockstar. Let the Nuge serve proudly and loudly on the front lines, before the war ends and he is forever denied this headlining gig.
Moreover, it is time to clear the Nugent name. As the Ted Nugent Draft is shouted from the mountaintops, let there also be proclaimed a bitchin' presidential pardon, forgiving Mr. Nugent for whatever caused him regretfully to decline active duty during the Vietnam War.
You're good to go, Ted. No cowardice in your past, and none in your future.
And when the last of the troops comes home, Colonel, we'll leave you to Wango Tango in Tora Bora, armed to the canines, and you can personally scour the caves for left-over bad guys: solo like Rambo. You'll have all the big-bored gun tech you could possibly dream of. There ain't no ban in the 'Stan -- you won't be prosthetically neutered by chickenshit small-capacity liberals. This will be the unfettered Nuge, a one-man death-dealin', cat-scratchin' war machine: the guy immortalized by Guitar World magazine for playing #7 in the "100 Worst Guitar Solos" of all time. Surely it's time to add to that honor a posthumous purple heart.
NOTE: The original petition on the US government site has been removed. We can argue about whether or not this constitutes censorship, but more important is to sign the new version of the petition, which I have launched on change.org:
The petition reads: "Ted Nugent, draft dodger, should have the opportunity to redeem his sullied reputation, so that he can drown us in a cesspool of guns. In fact, we should make him do this. An executive order is appropriate: Mr. President, conscript the Nuge."]]>PETA's Actual Death Tolltag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.26270492013-02-06T01:50:10-05:002013-04-07T05:12:01-04:00Douglas Anthony Cooperhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-anthony-cooper/This is a follow-up to yesterday's article, "How Many Pets Did PETA Kill in 2012?"
I was generous yesterday when I suggested that PETA's monstrous kill rate in 2012 was in fact, for them, an improvement. The official documents, yes, demonstrate that PETA killed only 89.2 per cent of pets taken in -- as opposed to the 95 to 97 per cent in prior years -- but these documents do not tell the whole truth.
Since we don't have precise data, I chose to ignore an important category in the report that PETA submitted to the Virginia Department of Agriculture: animals that were "Transferred to Another Virginia Releasing Agency."
The term "releasing" here should make you shudder. We know just who PETA "releases" pets to: that looming presence many cultures refuse to name, for fear that he'll visit at midnight. And we know that this is also true of the operations that they approve of: PETA refuses to transfer animals to No Kill facilities, for ideological reasons that I've analyzed here: "Why is PETA Opposing No-Kill Animal Shelters?"
This means that many if not most of the 108 dogs and 22 cats transferred to other "releasing agencies" are no longer with us.
Nathan Winograd, who heads up the No Kill Advocacy Center, has performed the calculations:
If the animals transferred to kill shelters were themselves killed, or displaced other animals who were then killed to take in the ones from PETA, the death toll could be as high as 96%. If those disposed of under "Miscellaneous" ("The number of animals that were disposed in a manner which is not consistent with the other designated categories") also died, the death toll is as high as 98%.
These grotesque numbers would not, as I say, be anomalous: they are in fact what we expected. For Ingrid Newkirk, they are the norm.
It is interesting to put this in the context of a favorite PETA lie: one that I've encountered increasingly in recent months. For those unfamiliar with the No Kill program, I've gone into detail here, in "The Humane Alternative to PETA's Pet Slaughter." The essence is this: a No Kill shelter is an open-admission shelter that has achieved a live release rate of at least 90 per cent -- the inverse of PETA's gruesome accomplishment. The No Kill network is nationwide, and growing: at last count, 89 communities had achieved this. They are documented at No Kill News.
You will encounter a focused campaign of propaganda aimed at discrediting No Kill, but the fiction I encounter most frequently these days is especially ironic: we are told that No Kill shelters achieve a 90-per-cent success rate only by surreptitiously shipping animals off to high-kill facilities. I'll allow Nathan Winograd himself to answer that:
When I ran the shelter in Tompkins County, NY, we worked with rescue groups only under an agreement that if they could not place the animal, they would have to return the animal to us. They were not permitted to kill the animal. We once sent a cat to a rescue group on Long Island, a five hour drive. The cat was adopted and returned two times because she was incontinent (she peed with no control). They called us and told us they could not place her. I sent a volunteer to pick her up. We ultimately placed her.
Our save rate was 93%. In fact, only a small percentage went through rescue. We adopted the majority ourselves. In Washoe County, the Nevada Humane Society sends very few animals through rescue. They adopt almost all of them out themselves. I can't speak to every community with a 90% save rate, but I can say that the notion that someone else has to do the killing to achieve a communitywide save rate of 90% or better is a lie.
PETA's advocates, however, desperately want this to be true. Why? Because it would mean that their critics shared the ethical burden of what PETA has proven guilty of, again and again: sending healthy creatures off to be killed elsewhere.
We do not have this year's precise statistics regarding the deaths attributable to this policy (should we call it a "program"?) -- all we know is that the number cannot be negligible. If you refuse to send animals to No Kill shelters, then a great many will be killed. It is a fact.
Hence, yesterday's report has to be modified with this in mind: PETA's official 89.2-per-cent kill rate represents only the bodies that the government has forced them to count -- the pets dispatched personally by PETA employees, either at headquarters or in one of their mobile units. The actual kill rate is certainly well into 90 per cent, and perhaps at the upper reaches of that. We know that only 1 per cent of pets were adopted out (a disgrace by any measure). The true cost of PETA's viciousness in 2012 -- the toll taken upon innocent creatures -- will never be fully known.]]>How Many Pets Did PETA Kill in 2012?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.26206602013-02-05T12:46:21-05:002013-04-07T05:12:01-04:00Douglas Anthony Cooperhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-anthony-cooper/desperate efforts to rein in this ghoul, dogs and cats simply do not have much chance of emerging alive from the headquarters of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
The law requires PETA to submit documents annually to the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (VDACS), and this year's have just been released online: you can examine them here. A quick summary? In 2012 only 10.8 percent of the pets taken in by PETA at their headquarters in Norfolk Virginia escaped the hypodermic; 94.1 percent of the cats and 82.1 percent of the dogs ended up in Ingrid's walk-in freezer.
A total of 1,675 cats, dogs, and "other companion animals" are listed in the column headed "Euthanized." Plus 72 unlucky wild animals.
Taking wildlife into account, Newkirk's outfit killed 89.2 percent of animals taken in.
I have been expecting the statistics to be released for some time. On February 1st I received an ominous tweet from an anonymous account: @WhyPeTAEuths.
"Euth" is cute code for "euthanasia," which is itself -- in this case -- a euphemism for killing. PETA's interns and fellow travelers commonly talk about "performing a euth." This tweet referred me to a website: Why PeTA Euthanizes.
I responded: "Hm. Suspicious. Why this Twitter account NOW? PETA's kill stats are about to be released: Are they particularly ugly this year?"
And lo: Here they are. In Newkirk's favor, these numbers are not especially ugly, relative to the last few years. PETA's kill rate has hovered in the range of 95 to 97 percent. So this year's 89.2 percent is, yes, an improvement. The Grim Reaper is now merely -- what? -- the Angel of Death?
PETA is not required to identify how many of the pets killed were perfectly healthy and adoptable. We can assume only one thing: we're not going to find out. Newkirk has never been forthcoming in the past, apart from vague tearful remarks about the dreadful shape of the animals left on her doorstep. We know from various reports, however -- including legal testimony from local veterinarians and shelter workers -- that many of the pets killed at PETA headquarters were impeccably healthy, some of them puppies and kittens.
I'll be weighing in further as more information arrives, but for now you can decide for yourself how to interpret these documents. I urge you to visit Why PeTA Euthanizes -- you may find the arguments there persuasive. Many of PETA's critics are identified, correctly, as a front group for the meat industry. Other sources will tell you outright that all of PETA's critics are compromised in this way, including me. Perhaps you'll find that convincing.
I also urge you to visit Nathan Winograd's site: he is the most prominent spokesman for the No Kill movement, and he has written about Newkirk at great length. Start here, with "The Butcher of Norfolk." If you want more detailed information -- and have a strong stomach -- you can turn to Friendly Fire, a book by Nathan and his wife, Jennifer Winograd. This was just published, and deals with a number of sorry outfits, including PETA and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS).
My own series of articles about this vile business begins here: "PETA's Celebs: Naked in the Name of Mass Pet Slaughter."
So, examine the documents, and read the divergent commentary. And then -- unless you simply don't give a damn about the innocent creatures that require our protection -- I suggest that it is your ethical duty to make a decision. That old union anthem does not permit neutrality, and neither does this. You're going to have to take a stand here: Which Side Are You On.
CLARIFICATION: We have plenty of testimony regarding healthy animals killed on the premises in Norfolk -- see David Shishkoff's testimony here, for instance. Some of the testimony at the link I provided above is of this nature: "One former intern (reported) that he quit in disgust after witnessing perfectly healthy puppies and kittens in the kill room."
PETA also operate a mobile death service, however. One of the veterinarians I refer to delivered testimony -- much of it under oath -- about healthy kittens and a six-month-old puppy killed not on the premises, but by PETA employees in the back of a PETA van. The corpses were then surreptitiously deposited in a trash bin at a supermarket.
The former director of Norfolk's SPCA, Dana Cheek, has said: "I often receive phone calls from frantic people who have surrendered their pets to PETA with the understanding that PETA will 'find them a good home.'... Little do they know that the pets are killed in the PETA van before they even pull away from the pet owner's home."]]>What I Did Not Say to the Senate About Gunstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.26134992013-02-04T03:52:48-05:002013-04-05T05:12:01-04:00Douglas Anthony Cooperhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-anthony-cooper/cited in testimony to a Senate Judiciary Committee. It is less flattering to be cited in an argument against gun control, by a libertarian sympathetic to the NRA. It is not flattering in the least to have my utterly transparent agenda presented as somehow sneaky and hidden.
Nevertheless, this is an object lesson in first-class innuendo: let's examine how a gun proponent takes a perfectly sensible proposal and turns it into dark mutterings by a shadowy gun grabber.
The committee is addressing the question: "What Should America Do About Gun Violence?" I get my very own paragraph. Here it is, in the written testimony by David B. Kopel, whose credentials are impressive: he teaches constitutional law, and analyzes policy for the Cato Institute.
The only true utility of a ban on "assault weapons" is to condition the public to bans on more guns. For example, Douglas Anthony Cooper advocates a ban on "assault" semi-automatics and "high-capacity" magazines, though he grants such legislation makes little or no difference. His solution is to ban all semi-automatic rifles and all pump-action shotguns, writing that pump-action shotguns "are in some ways more useful than many often-banned weapons, if you intend to shoot a huge number of people, quickly."
That first sentence sure is ominous. Anyone arguing for an assault weapons ban (as I do) is complicit in the sneaky subversion of civic mores. We're proposing to "condition" the public: to soften them up for the brutal gun grab to follow.
Now, I'll give Professor Kopel credit: after suggesting that I'm a citizen-softener, he does point out that I'm more honest than most in aiding and abetting this sneakiness. I do announce the impending brutal gun grab. My announcement is distorted only slightly in his testimony.
Here is what I in fact wrote in the Huffington Post:
I do not intend to propose that because banning the ugliest guns does not work, we should therefore ban none of them. This line of thinking is embraced by only two groups, who have little else in common: defeatists and thugs. Chief spokesman for the latter, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA, stressed this week that his organization retains complete faith in this non-approach to the issue.
Of course you ban assault weapons. Of course you'd be foolish to permit high-capacity magazines on the streets. I simply intend to demonstrate that you'd be foolish to stop there. It's a first step, but it's a specific kind of first step: the sort that's thoroughly useless if you don't take the second and third.
So, it's not that this legislation would make "little or no difference." It would make a huge difference, if properly augmented.
I do not suggest that we "condition" anybody: there is nothing gradual about the "steps" mentioned here; I transparently advocate a sensible ban, all at once, rather than limp and ineffective legislation.
The remarks concerning pump-action shotguns insinuate something more subtle. Professor Kopel implies that I was inflating the dangers of this category of weapon, by suggesting that they were as lethal as semi-automatic rifles. What I was in fact saying was that they are more useful in a mass shooting than semi-automatic shotguns. This happens to be correct: semi-automatic shotguns have a tendency to jam.
Now, Professor Kopel is not really accusing me of making a factual error. He is slyly accusing me of being sly. He wants you to believe that I was carefully placing all of these weapons in the same category: that I wished to equate pump-action shotguns with "assault weapons" -- here meaning semi-automatic rifles with high-capacity magazines.
In short, he wants you to believe that I am in favor of grabbing all guns, indiscriminately, because I refuse to discriminate.
This is, I'm afraid, inaccurate. I am in favor of grabbing some guns -- okay, many guns -- but I do discriminate. Let me be clear: pump-action shotguns are generally less useful to mass shooters than semi-automatic rifles with high-capacity magazines.
Note that I don't feel the need for quotation marks when designating a rifle magazine as high-capacity. Any gun capable of firing over ten rounds effortlessly is not a low-capacity weapon. It is not a mid-capacity weapon. It is the kind of weapon you simply do not require, unless you're in the mood for mass murder.
Now, many pump-action shotguns are capable of holding eight shells, which are loaded more slowly than rounds in a semi-automatic shotgun, but quickly enough, and dependably. You really don't need one of those either.
Australian legislation -- which I am advocating -- discriminates carefully between various kinds of weapons. "Category C" includes pump-action shotguns capable of firing five rounds or less, as well as semi-automatic rifles limited to ten rounds. These are highly restricted. They are not banned outright; whereas higher-capacity weapons -- the ones useful only to murderers -- are.
Hence, I advocate a law that very much discriminates, albeit somewhat severely: you probably won't be able to get your hands on a Category C weapon unless you use it professionally.
Eh. You'll live. As will many thousands of Americans every year who otherwise would not.
No question that this is a serious ban. That's why it works. The Australian model allows hunters and target shooters to keep the weapons that they require, but denies them the weapons that they don't. The legislation includes all of those pesky background checks that the NRA tells you are, well, pesky. You have to endure a bit of paperwork to own weapons, just as you do to own a car.
I advocate this legislation in a way that is not even slightly underhanded. I do not propose to "condition" anyone. The laws I am promoting are not the first steps on a slippery slope towards the complete abolition of civilian weaponry -- I am proposing that we take all the necessary steps at once. These are the first and last steps: the only steps that need to be taken. I'm announcing -- without softening the blow in any way whatsoever -- that I favor the Australian legislation. As should you.
If you float around the web, you will find all sorts of gun-lovers trying to distort the Australian statistics. My favorite is a site that refers to me, in quotation marks, as "novelist and expert" Douglas Anthony Cooper. That should of course be novelist and "expert." You don't get to turn me into a non-novelist, just because you don't consider me an expert in gun control. I am in fact not an expert: just a guy who does his homework. As should you.
I won't go into the statistical debate now. The site that has determined that I am not really a novelist because I grab guns is here. One of the many experts who explain how the American gun lobby likes to twist the Australian statistics is here.
Meanwhile, the lesson to draw from the Australian model is right here, below, in this very article. Should the Senate Judiciary Committee invite me to testify personally -- not all that likely -- I will yield the chair to Gun-Grabber-in-Chief John Howard, who was Prime Minister of Australia in 1996. That was the year of the Port Arthur massacre, when Martin Bryant murdered thirty-five people in south-eastern Tasmania: the worst mass shooting in Australian history. One of the weapons employed was a semi-automatic AR-15, similar to the Bushmaster used by Adam Lanza to murder twenty children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
It was Prime Minister Howard who courageously implemented the gun control legislation that I am advocating. These are his words:
The Australian Institute of Criminology found that gun-related murders and suicides fell sharply after 1996. The American Law and Economics Review found that our gun buyback scheme cut firearm suicides by 74 percent. In the 18 years before the 1996 reforms, Australia suffered 13 gun massacres -- each with more than four victims -- causing a total of 102 deaths. There has not been a single massacre in that category since 1996.
This is the tenth installment of "NRA vs. USA", a series by Douglas Anthony Cooper dealing with gun control and the Newtown Massacre. Part One, "This is What You Take to a Gun Fight" is here. Part Two, "Walking in the Shoes of Our Slain Children" is here. Part Three, "A Proven Way to End the Gun Slaughter: Will We Fight For it?" is here. Part Four, "Guns? Mental Health? Really? Let's Talk About Psychopaths" is here. Part Five, "So You're Bored of the Newtown Massacre" is here. Part Six, "Now We Know Who's Going to Take Down the NRA" is here. Part Seven, "The NRA is My Hall Monitor" is here. Part Eight, "The NRA's 'Slippery Slope' Lie" is here. Part Nine, "Gun Ranting: Good Fun, or Treason?" is here.]]>Gun Ranting: Good Fun, or Treason?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.25231892013-01-22T12:06:05-05:002013-03-24T05:12:02-04:00Douglas Anthony Cooperhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-anthony-cooper/
Yes, I know -- it's a matter of arming civilians against tyranny. That in itself is not a monstrous concept, and you find something of that in the Founders' fear of a standing army, and hence in the Second Amendment itself.
Note, however: you don't get to define "tyrant" any which way you'd like. John Wilkes Booth, for example, clearly thought that Abraham Lincoln fit the description. After shooting the president, he famously announced: "sic semper tyrannis" ("thus always to tyrants"). Hence, he was simply exercising his constitutional rights, right?
Sadly for Booth, Americans did not much agree with his assessment of Lincoln. Booth saw himself as ridding the nation of a tyrant, but the nation mostly saw him as the treasonous assassin of their elected leader. See how this works? It's all a matter of perspective, isn't it.
Booth was surprised to discover that his opinion was not so popular. Then he was shot in a burning barn. Sic semper to guys like John Wilkes Booth.
You regard Obama as a tyrant? (Many gun hoarders do, including ex-rock-star Ted Nugent, who is, among other things, a lot less handsome than Booth.) As long as you do not act upon this demented interpretation of current events, then you're safely this side of Booth territory. Even if you resemble him notionally.
I think we can say, however, that history will not side with you should you loudly proclaim your desire to assassinate your elected commander-in-chief. Decent people will not remember you, fondly, as a patriot doing calisthenics with the Second Amendment. They will regard you as an enemy of the state, contemplating treason. And, unfortunately for you, they will be correct.
You do not have to succeed to be remembered in this way. Guy Fawkes did not, when you think about it, go all that much further than today's most malignant gun hoarders: he collected lethal materials (in his case gunpowder, not Glocks), and he plotted.
The difference, of course, is that very few of today's macho schemers intend to follow through with their expressed plans. Fawkes would undoubtedly have lit the match, given the opportunity. Moreover, most Second Amendment blowhards are careful to express their plans contingently: it's only if the administration does something terrible -- say, grabs their guns -- that they will topple it by force. This eventuality requires, they insist, that the nation always swim in a vast cesspool of ordnance. But there's a possibility that they will in fact refrain from armed insurrection.
Most of these guys are more in the line of James Yeager. Mr. Yeager, if you have not yet had the pleasure, is the man who went viral (and I use that term in its proper medical sense), with a YouTube rant about his intention to commit mass murder should his guns be grabbed. He announced that he was going to "start killing people" should his fantasy version of the Second Amendment be circumcised.
Now, what's interesting about James Yeager is that his guns were in fact grabbed.
Yes, Yeager's handgun carry permit was suspended, after this virulent rant, by the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security. This wasn't the federal government, but it was an entity acting in accordance with the current administration in Washington, and these officials did indeed make a point of infringing upon Yeager's right to bear arms.
And here's the thing: James Yeager did not start shooting people.
This man, who gives baldness a bad name, just isn't all that putsch-happy when he's not on YouTube. He does happen to be the CEO of a company called "Tactical Response," but despite the attitudinal goatee and the righteous tattoos, he's probably no more of a threat to the nation than the Star Wars Kid.
I expect that Yeager is the norm, among today's plotters: very few of them constitute a genuine political menace. All that they have in common with Guy Fawkes, or John Wilkes Booth, or Timothy McVeigh, are scary words and scary weapons.
I don't mean to say that the Homeland Security people did wrong here. It would in fact be nice to see the federal Department of Homeland Security take their cue from the boys in Tennessee. The best way to ensure the safety of Americans is not to remove their shoes at the airport, but to remove their guns at the threat to kill people.
I'd rather see the nation's grandmothers permitted their shoes, and the nation's Yeagers deprived of their Colts. It's a subtle distinction: the footwear of a little old lady who is not the CEO of Tactical Response vs. the hardware of a buff ranting guy who is the CEO of Tactical Response. Even if the buff guy turns out to be all bluster, it's reasonable to worry about his capacity to kill.
The threat to employ lethal weapons against the elected government, by the way, is not a protected right. It would seem to be covered by both the First and Second Amendments, but most jurists consider the Constitution unfriendly to traitors.
Only one circumstance would render this threat constitutional: the rise of a genuine tyranny. Again, however, the crucial distinction here is genuine. You do not get to decide that -- because you don't like the man elected by your fellow citizens -- you are therefore enslaved to a tyrant, and have the constitutional right to storm Washington with semiautomatics.
Even if this duly-elected president enacts rigorous gun controls, you still don't get to decide that he's fair game for a coup d'état.
Your conviction is admirably dim in the first place: that you can go up against this imagined tyranny with your personal stash of Bushmasters. You may believe this, but I expect most of your gun dealers (and I use that term in its proper criminal sense) don't. To them, your delusions are a means to an end: your courageous fear of slavery ensures that you remain enslaved to their product.
But this brave medieval stupidity has to be made simply irrelevant. Should you loudly announce that you're arming yourselves with the intent to "start killing people" when aggrieved, then your fellow citizens -- the sane ones -- should pledge to make your life appropriately hellish.
Ted Nugent's bombast -- despite the militia-speak and the nod to patriotic history -- is the opposite of patriotic: "If you want another Concord Bridge, I got some buddies.... When a man can dictate to another man an unarmed helplessness, such a dictator is dangerous." Ted made it very clear that the word "dictator" here referred to President Obama: "He is an evil dangerous man who hates America and hates freedom and we need to fix this as soon as possible."
Sane gun enthusiasts recognize that Ted is as much of a hazard to them as to the rest of us. His buddies are as dangerous to the children of hunters as they are to the children of holistic massage therapists. Moreover, Nugent-like ranting is a menace to sane people's Second-Amendment rights: it is because of these Yeageresque extremists that we see a radical abolitionist approach to all civilian weaponry.
Personally, I have no problem with guns used, for instance, to keep predators from livestock. I have absolutely no problem with competitive marksmen: may you win a gold medal. Okay, I have a bit of a problem with hunters, but that has nothing to do with guns -- it's predicated on a softness for innocent creatures. In short: I have no problem with guns per se. I expect that most Americans agree with me.
I do however take issue with the NRA's inane, disingenuous slogan: "Guns don't kill people; people kill people." Properly stated, this should be: "Guns don't kill people; bald tattooed survivalists with the treasonous intent to commit mass murder because they fear and loathe the democratically elected administration -- when combined with unfettered access to semiautomatics -- kill people."
It's not any one ingredient, you see. It's a sort of brutal cake mix. This threat of a soufflé.
And the NRA, to pursue this lousy metaphor, is the baker from hell.
Note, however, that silly language -- although all the rage -- is not always so benign. Even though musing about sedition is the new black, we should stress that the law does have a way of dealing with this, when musing crosses that subtle line into threatening. Revoking James Yeager's gun carry permit is pretty mild, relative to the punitive measures that the nation has at its disposal when faced with a credible threat of treason.
Clowns like Alex Jones should probably be permitted to wax seditious the way that he did on Piers Morgan's show. A certain kind of rhetorical lunacy is a grand American tradition, and parody -- even self-parody -- is protected by the First Amendment.
Whether Ted Nugent is a clown or a dangerous clown is for the Secret Service to determine (and they seem unsure). It's not always clear when entertainment becomes intent. It is, however, a crucial distinction. James Yeager appears, for instance, to have put one muscular toe over the line. And we should not weep that his Second Amendment rights are now a bit less absolute.
In fact, we the sane should insist upon this: treasonous posturing is not something to be treated casually. Yes, you have the right to own guns. You have the right to announce that you own these guns for reasons of self-defense. The Constitution even permits you, apparently, to announce that you've amassed weapons in order to do battle with tyranny.
When, however, you announce that the current duly-elected president and his administration are precisely the tyranny against which you are amassing weapons, this -- while risible in some respects -- should not be shrugged off as a healthy exercise of constitutional rights. It should be seen for what it is, and dealt with appropriately.
You truly intend to take up arms against a sea of imagined troubles? You're in for a world of pain.
This is the ninth installment of "NRA vs. USA", a series by Douglas Anthony Cooper dealing with gun control and the Newtown Massacre. Part One, "This is What You Take to a Gun Fight" is here. Part Two, "Walking in the Shoes of Our Slain Children" is here. Part Three, "A Proven Way to End the Gun Slaughter: Will We Fight For it?" is here. Part Four, "Guns? Mental Health? Really? Let's Talk About Psychopaths" is here. Part Five, "So You're Bored of the Newtown Massacre" is here. Part Six, "Now We Know Who's Going to Take Down the NRA" is here. Part Seven, "The NRA is My Hall Monitor" is here. Part Eight, "The NRA's 'Slippery Slope' Lie" is here.]]>The NRA's "Slippery Slope" Lietag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.24699822013-01-14T15:00:29-05:002013-03-16T05:12:02-04:00Douglas Anthony Cooperhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-anthony-cooper/
The slippery slope has in fact never been tipped in the direction that the gun lobby would like you to believe. When gun fanatics lose the tiniest bit of ground in the argument over Second Amendment rights, they never find themselves sliding any further. Ever. No weapons ban has ever snowballed into anything remotely like the "gun grabbing" that the NRA predicts with calculated dread. Quite the opposite.
It is worth looking at the most rigorous attempt to implement a series of gun reforms in the United States. That would be the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994. If anything should have set gun laws into that catastrophic slide towards mass prohibition, it would have been this.
The NRA of course announced to its members with great lamentation that this was now guaranteed to happen. When Bill Clinton proposed the ban, he met with full-on war, and when he succeeded in passing the ban, he met with full-on vengeance.
The fight to achieve the assault weapons ban was clever, even if it provided the country with poorly-crafted legislation:
Rahm Emanuel, the hard-charging White House senior adviser, engineered the main strategy: shove provisions favored by conservatives (more death penalty and prisons) and those fancied by liberals (gun control and rehabilitation programs) into a single package, and the $25 billion-plus bill would have a shot of success. Meanwhile, Clinton draped himself in cops. "At every event he had touting the bill and the assault weapons ban, he had at least 40 cops," a former Clinton Justice Department official recalls. "And he was pro-death penalty."
The ban itself was largely impotent, because it was riddled with loopholes. Gun zealots now use this to argue that weapons bans simply do not work, but that is not the lesson at all, as Australia discovered: bans work only if they are comprehensive and intelligent.
Clinton spent much of his political capital on this flawed legislation -- a law that had no appreciable effect upon the average gun owner -- and still the National Rifle Association howled. They'd hardly lost their vise-grip on the nation: the Federal Assault Weapons Ban "passed by a two-vote margin in the Democrat-controlled House." Still, the NRA behaved as if America had turned its back on the Second Amendment and shoved patriots onto a polished and greased slide. Soon guns would be confiscated by jackbooted feds with soul-stealing warrants.
Passing the ban gave the NRA what they needed to create mass hysteria among their members and unprecedented pressure upon legislators. The gun lobby ginned up Republicans with just this sort of rhetoric, leading to a monumental GOP victory in the midterms: Republicans "gained 54 seats and control of the House for the first time in 40 years."
Clinton blamed the midterm debacle on this hard-won but ultimately weak ban. The Democrats have been gun-shy ever since. And we should not sugarcoat this: they do have much to fear. If Congress has the backbone to pass meaningful legislation after Sandy Hook, then the next federal election is going to be a precarious business.
In fact, the only way to stave off a similar debacle will be a strategy along the lines of the one that I have proposed here, or the very similar one that Gabby Giffords is promoting: an equal and opposite counter-lobby, funded to the same obscene degree as the NRA, and prepared to support the campaign of any candidate with the courage to stand up to the gun lobby.
The most remarkable result of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, however, was not Democratic apprehension: it was the terror that seized gun zealots, and that holds them captive even now.
These people are spooked by any mention of a ban. Ever since I began writing this series, I've been transformed into a looming sasquatch: the worst kind of hunched and hairy bogeyman. Consider my favorite tweet from a gun lover to his brethren: "Agree that assault weapons ban does nothing, disagree with policy solution. Fear him."
Fear me? These people have semiautomatics, and I don't own so much as a Super Soaker.
I know: the pen is mightier than the sword. Still, I doubt that even my manly, rugged iPad could stop a determined bullet.
I'm not even a very credible gun grabber. I have championed the Australian Model, which has allowed responsible gun owners in Oz to keep their weapons, and has not -- sorry -- caused anyone's gun rights to slide anywhere. It is well-written legislation that does precisely what it was designed to do; it has not grown into anything more than this, and it does not show any signs of doing so.
I'm just not a very scary guy, but because I've proposed sensible laws, I inspire this quasi-biblical tweet: an exhortation to fear me. It really is worse than irrational. Physician, fear thyself -- and stop projecting. You might as well fear the first-graders slaughtered at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Ah, but these people do fear those six- and seven-year-olds. Gun partisans do not mourn these children: they worry that the massacre might bring back the terrifying, tyrannical days of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban.
The 1994 ban has indeed generated chronic and truly useful neurosis, which has been exploited with characteristic skill by the NRA. All of this despite the comical shoddiness of the legislation.
While the term "assault weapons" dates back at least to 1943, the Clinton-era ban refined this term to produce an almost useless definition: the law determined that scary-looking guns were assault weapons. "Anti-gun people and organizations used the term to describe anything that even remotely looked like a military-style weapon. Senator Howard Metzenbaum even described them as 'ominous.'"
Ponder this. You're a gun manufacturer, and you've been told by legislators that your uglier weapons -- literally, ugly to look at -- are now illegal. What do you do? The answer is obvious: make the same weapons, but give them a makeover.
After the ban, and this badly-written definition, guns could in fact be given a nice face-lift in a way that rendered them legal, but hardly affected them functionally. A gun was permitted to have only one of the following features, for instance: "an adjustable stock, pistol grip, bayonet mount, grenade launcher, or a flash suppressor." Criminals, believe me, were perfectly happy to have semiautomatics without grenade launchers. They did not even use bayonets all that often.
Flash suppressors are the visual equivalent of a silencer, however, and are indeed useful if you are involved in a midnight murder that requires a degree of cover: sparks might tip off the neighbors. So you would have to do without an adjustable stock or a pistol grip if you required one of those. Hey, you'd live. (Your victim, not so much.)
Hence the ban resulted in all sorts of guns that were cosmetically a bit less ominous, and in essence pretty much the same. Many of these were named for the ban, to remind gun owners just how much they were suffering.
The NRA wept and wailed. Take away our bayonet mounts, and the next thing you'll want are shotguns, handguns, slingshots.
None of this happened. The ban was not extended to cover any further weapons.
The legislation did limit the size of magazines to 10 rounds, a reasonable provision, but finally not that helpful.
In fact, the Federal Assault Weapons Ban was of such minimal use -- and caused so much grief to legislators involved -- that politicians a few years later did not want to go anywhere near it.
The 1994 law had a "sunset clause," meaning that it had to be renewed in 2004 or it would evaporate, and 2004 just happened to be four years into the trigger-happy Bush administration, and three years after 9/11. Every citizen was nervous about perceived national weakness, and every politician was nervous about the massive political hit taken by the Democrats after the ban was passed. Hence there was no impetus on either side of the aisle to extend the legislation, and the 1994 law died a quiet and ignominious death.
So much for the slippery slope.
There is no other way to interpret this: our inclined plane is tilted in precisely the opposite direction from the one the NRA would have you believe. The almost impossible business is climbing up the slope towards gun control.
This remains, however, an extremely good metaphor. Ever tried to ascend an iced hill? You get one or two steps up, and then you have to hold your breath and balance -- absolutely still -- in order to maintain the little bit of ground you've achieved. There is no question of going any further. Simply staying where you are requires immense concentration.
It is natural at this point to give up. You sure ain't going anywhere, so what's the purpose of clinging to your sorry accomplishment? And so it goes: we slide back down the slope into a silly, maximalist reading of the Second Amendment.
The Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 is captured almost perfectly by this simile. No doubt the NRA took note of this and studied it, before flipping it to produce their perfect lie: oh, those slopes are horribly slippery, and they tilt disastrously towards gun grabbing and tyranny.
Don't fool yourself: the gun lobby is willing to give up precisely nothing. They do not negotiate. This disingenuous conceit -- this slippery fiction -- allows them to justify the most extreme form of intransigence. Note how it works: "If we give up even a nanometer of gun rights, that's it: we're on an infernal toboggan, sliding into that hell where all guns are banned. Hence? We give them nada."
It is an apparently reasonable argument, and it serves to crank up the jittery will of paranoid extremists.
The NRA feeds its members on a steady diet of fear. Responsible gun owners don't swallow this: most of them have long favored practical gun control; they are important allies in this battle. Yes, many belong to the NRA, but they do not buy into the gun-grabber paranoia. The NRA plays, therefore, to the members that do: the armed and timid. If you can manipulate these people so that they always feel cornered, then they will always behave like cornered rats. That is how you make the terrified truly dangerous.
Hence, the NRA has good reason to favor this slippery metaphor. It is elegant propaganda: simple, scary and targeted: nobody wants to occupy dangerously tilted terrain, especially if they're already off-kilter. Never mind that it is sane, decent citizens who stand on this carefully snake-oiled slope, and who slide -- every single time -- into the hell that is Columbine, and Virginia Tech, and Aurora, and Sandy Hook.
This is the eighth installment of "NRA vs. USA", a series by Douglas Anthony Cooper dealing with gun control and the Newtown Massacre. Part One, "This is What You Take to a Gun Fight" is here. Part Two, "Walking in the Shoes of Our Slain Children" is here. Part Three, "A Proven Way to End the Gun Slaughter: Will We Fight For it?" is here. Part Four, "Guns? Mental Health? Really? Let's Talk About Psychopaths" is here. Part Five, "So You're Bored of the Newtown Massacre" is here. Part Six, "Now We Know Who's Going to Take Down the NRA" is here. Part Seven, "The NRA is My Hall Monitor" is here.]]>The NRA Is My Hall Monitortag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.24535052013-01-11T08:50:12-05:002013-03-13T05:12:01-04:00Douglas Anthony Cooperhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-anthony-cooper/This is the seventh installment of "NRA vs. USA", a series by Douglas Anthony Cooper dealing with gun control and the Newtown Massacre. Part One, "This is What You Take to a Gun Fight" is here. Part Two, "Walking in the Shoes of Our Slain Children" is here. Part Three, "A Proven Way to End the Gun Slaughter: Will We Fight For it?" is here. Part Four, "Guns? Mental Health? Really? Let's Talk About Psychopaths" is here. Part Five, "So You're Bored of the Newtown Massacre" is here. Part Six, "Now We Know Who's Going to Take Down the NRA" is here.
By all means let's put armed guards in public schools. I remember in kindergarten really wishing we had cops stalking the hallways: the kind armed and trained to take down determined shooters in bulletproof vests. The problem is that I was raised in Canada, where people aren't free, so there was no reason for hall monitors to be grownups with assault rifles.
Freedom means that children are imprisoned so that gun-lovers can exercise their constitutional rights? Oh, but this isn't a prison. Here, the jailers are allied with the kids. You want hard men carrying semiautomatics to keep out the bad guys. Well, let's go all the way, shall we, as we design these not-prisons.
Looks as if this exercise in happy-go-lucky childhood -- suggested by those adults at the National Rifle Association -- may well be attracting some serious funds: there's talk of putting aside $50 million. Still, this will be tax-payers' money, so let's be fiscally responsible. How about barbed wire? Barbed wire is cheap, and bad guys have a notoriously difficult time climbing over barbed wire.
What about guard towers? I ask you, which is safer: having armed goons wandering the halls, or trained snipers in towers? The thing about guard towers is that you can take out the bad guys before they get anywhere near the school. And let's keep an eye on the budget here: if you put a tower at each corner of the school, and have a swath of no man's land surrounding the structure -- a sort of dry moat -- then you can minimize the manpower required to keep children free and happy.
Searchlights! Searchlights are affordable, and night classes can be dangerous.
And what you really want is the very finest high-tech surveillance equipment. Ah, childhood. Tom and Huck. Kick the can. Infrared.
You see, the best way to prove the totalitarian stupidity of the NRA's proposal is to take it seriously. This is an old and venerable technique: the reductio ad absurdum. You simply accept the premises of an argument, at face value, and see where they take you. Once you've demonstrated that this trail of reasoning leads -- by necessity -- to an unacceptable (generally idiotic) conclusion, then you know that at least one of those premises is rotten.
Here's the problem, however. Once you arrive at the unacceptable (generally idiotic) conclusion, you have to recognize that this is where you're standing: somewhere unacceptable. You have to acknowledge that -- simply by standing there, stroking your chin seriously -- you're an idiot.
Otherwise the reductio doesn't work. You come up with a situation like this: well-meaning, generally thoughtful politicians actually proposing -- with straight faces -- that we put $50 million towards transforming schools into gulags.
And why? So that the grownups can be free to stockpile weapons against tyranny. I mean, good lord, you don't want tyrants. So let's have our children spend their best, most carefree years under the watchful eyes of crack mercenaries.
We were in the process of some kind of argument, I seem to remember. Something about arriving at an absurdity, and deciding that -- as a result of this -- there's something desperately wrong with the reasoning that brought us there?
Now, explain to me how this is not just a little bit absurd. To preserve freedom in America, we'll place children in a learning environment that would have been considered oppressive under Stalin. We'll lock them in buildings that are -- I guarantee it -- more heavily guarded then any kindergarten in North Korea.
Are we out of our collective mind?
Fifty. Million. Dollars. Towards ensuring that, between the ages of six and sixteen, American citizens live in a dystopian hell. All in the name of freedom.
The NRA would have this so that, once you emerge from that hell, you're free. And let's face it: you are. You can own as many guns as you want. Can't say that about anywhere else in the free world, can you? You can buy all of these guns without being hassled: no intrusive background checks; no edgy waiting period. Anywhere else have this kind of freedom? I don't think so.
Hence, when you escort your children from the house to the school, you can guarantee them genuine safety. An armed escort. Home is safe (because there are guns); school is safe (because there are guns); and should anything bad happen between these two armed camps, you have mil-spec ordnance to annihilate this threat to your children's freedom.
Nowhere else in the world will children be so rigorously protected from tyranny.
The Obama administration is, of course, famed for going the distance when it comes to compromise. (The distance being precisely the thing you don't want to go.) And so we read this paragraph, in an actual news story:
The school safety initiative would make federal dollars available to schools that want to hire police officers and install surveillance equipment, although it is not nearly as far-ranging as the National Rifle Association's proposal for armed guards in every U.S. school.
The idea is gaining currency among some Democratic lawmakers, who see it as a potential area of common ground with Republicans who otherwise oppose stricter restrictions on firearms. Liberal Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said she presented the plan to Vice President Joe Biden, and that he was "very, very interested" and may include it in the policy recommendations he makes to President Barack Obama.
Let's do a close reading. This idea is "gaining currency." With sane people.
Why? Because it's a "potential area of common ground." Ah! A compromise! Senator Barbara Boxer (a sober, liberal woman) presented this lunacy to Joe Biden (not generally considered a drooling whackjob) and the Vice President is "very, very interested."
Interested in what?
Am I missing something? Is there an idea here? The NRA has suggested something cynical, tyrannical, utterly worthless and unparalleled in stupidity -- and this fascinates you? Perhaps the interesting part is that you're only going to put $50 million towards this thuggery, when it could be $100 million. "It is not nearly as far-ranging as the National Rifle Association's proposal for armed guards in every U.S. school." We'll, that's win-win, isn't it.
In return for this, the NRA is willing to not consider gun controls of any sort. Seems fair to me.
At least we're not talking about barbed wire, right? Or guard towers. Or surveillance equipment. Or... hang on. Sometimes you really do have to read things closely, to be sure that you're not hallucinating.
"The school safety initiative would make federal dollars available to schools that want to hire police officers and install surveillance equipment."
When Joe Biden eagerly presents these "policy recommendations" to President Obama, all I ask -- all I beg for -- is one thing. It doesn't have to be the president himself. It can be a senator, a congressman, some minor functionary, a powerless aide -- I don't care. But will somebody please have the common decency to laugh convulsively until tears ruin his tie and he has to be carried helpless from the room?]]>Now We Know Who's Going to Take Down the NRAtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.24365022013-01-09T09:01:56-05:002013-03-11T05:12:01-04:00Douglas Anthony Cooperhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-anthony-cooper/This is the sixth installment of "NRA vs. USA", a series by Douglas Anthony Cooper dealing with gun control and the Newtown Massacre. Part One, "This is What You Take to a Gun Fight" is here. Part Two, "Walking in the Shoes of Our Slain Children" is here. Part Three, "A Proven Way to End the Gun Slaughter: Will We Fight For it?" is here. Part Four, "Guns? Mental Health? Really? Let's Talk About Psychopaths" is here. Part Five, "So You're Bored of the Newtown Massacre" is here.
People would love to donate money towards fighting the NRA. They keep telling me this. I've been desperately promoting an obvious solution since the Newtown massacre: a counter-lobby to take on the National Rifle Association, dollar for dollar, using their own grotesquely successful tactics to bring them down. Every time I suggest this project, the response is immediate and enthusiastic: "Where do I send a check?" To which I've had to respond: I don't know.
And now I do.
Equally obvious to me was the right person to head up such an endeavor: Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City, who has been one of the rare voices here both courageous and persistent. I've been trying to get my proposal onto his desk for weeks, with spectacular unsuccess.
Of course, there is an even more obvious candidate. She has in fact just proposed precisely the same idea, and I didn't even have to harass her personal assistant.
Her name is Gabrielle Giffords.
It gets better. Hizzoner may not return my calls, but I assure you he picks up the phone when the former congresswoman from Arizona calls. And Gabby Giffords called.
If I sound a touch giddy, it's because this is just fabulous news: frankly, the only good news we've had here since the massacre. I'm sick of writing bitter essays that seem to be read -- judging from the comments -- mostly by suspicious gun zealots.
I can't imagine a better team. Giffords will be heading up the organization with her husband, Mark E. Kelly, a formidable figure in his own right. The part that Mayor Bloomberg will play has yet to be detailed. It's sufficient to know that he's on board.
The proposal is a political action committee called Americans for Responsible Solutions. The plan is to "raise funds necessary to balance the influence of the gun lobby." That influence is direct, and ugly: If a candidate displays a tendency towards voting responsibly on gun control, the NRA will put a huge chunk of cash into a hand-picked opponent. Only by matching those cynical dollars will decent candidates stand a proper chance. If the following sounds familiar, it's because Gabrielle Giffords has been reading my mind:
Until now, the gun lobby's political contributions, advertising and lobbying have dwarfed spending from anti-gun violence groups. No longer. With Americans for Responsible Solutions engaging millions of people about ways to reduce gun violence and funding political activity nationwide, legislators will no longer have reason to fear the gun lobby.
I intend to take full and fulsome credit for all of this, needless to say. (Feel free to respond with snorting derision. My girlfriend already has.)
On a more serious celebratory note: This is strategically miraculous. Let's examine the collective bona fides here.
Gabrielle Giffords is, of course, the former representative from Arizona who survived an assassination attempt, on January 8 2011, that left six people dead. She can hardly be dismissed as a "gun grabber" -- the pejorative term du jour for people opposed to the NRA. This is a slur to be borne with pride (I've taken to signing my name "DAC, GG") but it does not describe Giffords. She's not even opposed to the NRA itself -- simply to "special interests purporting to represent gun owners but really advancing the interests of an ideological fringe."
Tell me that a sane gun owner can truly find this statement scary:
Forget the boogeyman of big, bad government coming to dispossess you of your firearms. As a Western woman and a Persian Gulf War combat veteran who have exercised our Second Amendment rights, we don't want to take away your guns any more than we want to give up the two guns we have locked in a safe at home. What we do want is what the majority of NRA members and other Americans want: responsible changes in our laws to require responsible gun ownership and reduce gun violence.
Yes, efforts to paint Gabby Giffords as a rabid leftwing enemy of the Constitution won't get far. She was a member of the Blue Dog coalition, the fiscally conservative bloc in the Democratic Party. Before that, she considered herself a Republican. While she opposed the draconian immigration law that recently disgraced Arizona -- the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act" -- her former district in southeast Arizona shares a border with Mexico, and she is famously tough with regard to border security.
On social issues Giffords has tended towards centrism, but even here she will be difficult to dismiss, as she was particularly distinguished in an area disingenuously endorsed by the NRA: They've called for reforms in mental health care, and Gabby Giffords "was named the Legislator of the Year in 2004 by the Mental Health Association of Arizona."
Her partner in this political action committee is her husband, Mark Kelly, who is even more difficult to shrug off as a foaming leftwing enemy of the state. I mean, good luck with that: Kelly "made two deployments to the Persian Gulf on the aircraft carrier USS Midway, flying 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm."
Compare and contrast with the martial record of Wayne LaPierre, the butcher-than-thou CEO of the NRA, who -- when it came time to serve in Vietnam -- "apparently pulled lottery #97 in 1969 as a campus radical at SUNY-Albany, but weaseled out by getting a family doctor to claim he had a nervous disorder."
Unlike the not-so-well-regulated militia who hoard semiautomatics in the attic, Mark Kelly was issued his weaponry by a more credible outfit than Walmart: He is on active duty in the US Navy, with the rank of Captain.
Just for the hell of it, let's list his awards, all of which tend to disqualify him as a Gun Grabber:
Defense Superior Service Medal (with one bronze oak leaf cluster); Distinguished Flying Cross; Air Medal (with valor device and three bronze service stars); Navy Commendation Medal (with valor device and one bronze service star); Navy Achievement Medal; Southwest Asia Service Medal (with one bronze service star); Navy Expeditionary Medal; National Defense Service Medal (with one bronze service star); Navy Unit Commendation (with one bronze service star); Sea Service Deployment Ribbon (with one bronze service star); Overseas Service Ribbon; Kuwait Liberation Medal (Saudi Arabia); Kuwait Liberation Medal (Kuwait); NASA Exceptional Service Medal; NASA Space Flight Medal (with three bronze service stars).
Did I mention that he's an astronaut? "Kelly traveled over 4.8 million miles and orbited the earth 186 times over 11 days and 19+ hours." Slightly more impressive than sitting wild-eyed in a personal suburban bunker, terrified that the New World Order will descend in black helicopters to snatch your polished collection of AR-15s.
Filling out the team, in a capacity to be determined, is Mayor Michael Bloomberg. This man has also put in quality time as a Republican: Before becoming an independent in 2007, Bloomberg was twice elected mayor of New York City under the banner of the Party of Lincoln and Giuliani.
Mayor Bloomberg also doesn't really cut it as a welfare-sucking commie: he's the 11th-wealthiest man in the United States, and 20th in the world.
That's why the gun lovers won't be able to dismiss Gotham's mayor. Whereas this is why the gun grabbers (that would be me, GG), love the guy: immediately after the Newtown massacre, Bloomberg held a press conference, where he stated, "If this moment passes into memory without action from Washington, it will be a stain upon our nation's commitment to protecting the innocent, including our children."
How many people didn't say that.
Moreover, he has singlehandedly demonstrated that the NRA can indeed be conquered in the manner proposed: by doing precisely what LaPierre's militia does, with comparable funding, and -- here's the crucial difference -- principles.
As I've already reported, Bloomberg's personal super PAC, Independence America, contributed $2.7 million to the campaign of Gloria Negrete McLeod in California's 35th district -- as a result of which she surged from a nearly hopeless position to crush Rep. Joe Baca, a Democrat blessed by the NRA with a despicable A rating.
Let's calculate the appropriate amount for an ordinary American citizen to pledge to an Anti-NRA. I took a stab at it once before, but let's make a more rigorous effort. We'll call this the Walmart Equation.
A Bushmaster Patrolman's Carbine M4A3 Rifle, 5.56 NATO -- a variant of the AR-15 assault rifle, and perhaps the precise weapon used by Adam Lanza to slaughter 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School -- is $850 at Walmart. Okay, it was that amount, before Walmart pulled it from the shelves after the massacre. Walmart shoppers recommend this weapon highly: it garners a 4.9 out of 5 rating from satisfied customers. In fact, Walmart has succeeded in making the AR-15 the "most popular assault weapon in America."
So, that's perhaps what you'd like to send to Gabby Giffords' new organization: $850. Seems fair to spend as much on the safety of your children as a patriot spends on his gun.
Some killers buy cheaper weapons, it's true. If you visit stormfront.com, you'll find the following comment: "Ya, I don't like WalMart either but if you are in need of a quality AR for less than $600....that would be the only place of which I am aware."
So that's perhaps an appropriate amount: $600. (Stormfront is the White Pride website. Referring to them here is a cheap shot. Then again, maybe not.)
I consider this the deluxe package for your average citizen. If your personal wealth is in the Bloomberg stratum, multiply by one thousand. If you're an ordinary millionaire, multiply by ten.
Some of us don't have that kind of discretionary cash, which is fine. The Walmart Equation can help you make an appropriate decision here as well.
Along with assault rifles, a variety of baby cribs are available at Walmart. The "DaVinci Reagan Three Piece Convertible Crib Nursery Set with Toddler Rail in Cherry" is, unfortunately, about the same price as a cheap semiautomatic. That's okay, however. You have options.
The "Room Magic Boys Like Trucks Crib / Toddler Bed in Chocolate" is $465. If you're feeling flush, and that's the amount of money you can imagine spending on your toddler's bed, then that's a judicious amount to send to Gabrielle Giffords' new gun-control lobby. Cribs too are designed specifically to protect children.
Again, that's a hefty sum, and not everyone spends that sort of money on a crib. It seems that the least expensive is the "Dream On Me - Classic 2-in-1 Convertible Crib." Ninety-nine dollars, which is something even a novelist can afford: I'll be sending that much. And I don't even have kids.
What's the bare minimum? What's the least amount that a responsible parent should donate to fund a plan to stand up to an organization determined to make the nation less safe for your children?
Here we'll deviate from the Walmart Equation.
Consider that an annual membership in the NRA is $35. Lots of people with very little cash in the cookie jar see fit to put that amount towards their favorite vicious organization: a gun lobby opposed to even the most elementary background checks. (The voices in your head tell you that Honey Boo Boo is a Manchurian Candidate? How interesting. Have an assault rifle.)
Unless you're truly broke -- and if you are, I sympathize -- I would say that this is a sensible amount. If every responsible citizen in America were to send in $35, then perhaps -- just maybe -- we could match the amount that the NRA spends on getting their faithful lackeys elected. The New York Timesreminds us that the NRA has "millions of members around the country and virtually unmatched ferocity in advancing its political and legislative interests."
