The Sheer Number of Guns in America Will Kill Us With or Without Terrorists
WASHINGTON, D.C.-It was Tuesday, so the U.S. senators from both parties were having their weekly policy lunches. This was in the wake of that body's shameless capitulation on the issue of guns on Monday evening. The reaction around the country to that ungainly dive has not been a friendly one. So, on Tuesday, the halls of the world's greatest deliberative body were redolent with the smell of fried fish and compromise.
Susan Collins and Heidi Heitkamp, Republican and Democratic senators respectively, and two women of virtually no influence within their respective caucuses, cobbled together a bill that they announced at a press conference in the early afternoon. The press conference was attended by an odd-lot of co-sponsors whom Collins and Heitkamp also cobbled together. These included Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, who probably just wants to get anything passed at this point, and Kelly Ayotte, Republican of New Hampshire, who is facing a tough re-election campaign back home and is using this issue to cast herself in a series of reaching-across-the-aisle/I'm-No-Politician campaign commercials down the road.
Cynical? Moi?
You have to see these people in action to develop a deep dislike for the words "bipartisan" and "compromise" and a true loathing for the phrase "bipartisan compromise." To be fair, here are the elements of the Collins-Heitkamp compromise: a.) It would ban gun sales to anyone on the no-fly or selectee list, which comes to about 2,700 people in this country and a little over 100,000 worldwide; b.) Anyone denied a gun under the first provision could take their case to the U.S. Court of Appeals; and c.) That there would be a "look back" system in place with which law-enforcement could check if someone had been on the lists at one point or another in the previous five years. This, theoretically, anyway, could have snared Omar Mateen, who was under investigation by the FBI twice prior to his shooting up Pulse in Orlando.
This is a jerry-rigged concoction made up of provisions from all the bills that failed on Monday, and those bills were fairly toothless in the first place. The NRA was lobbying against the new bill even before the press conference at which it was unveiled. Harry Reid ridiculed it at his weekly press conference. And there's no indication that Collins ever swung the kind of weight she will need to find 14 Republicans to join every one of the 46 Democrats to ensure that this new bill even gets to the floor. Nonetheless, if you listened to Heitkamp, you'd think she and Collins and their co-sponsors were riding up to Omaha Beach on an LST:
"Many times on issues that are as contentious as this one, stepping out is no easy thing. But it's absolutely essential if we're going to get something done, to actually come to the table and say, 'What can we do?' You know, we've gone through a series of votes, and the outcome hasn't been good. But if we want to get something done, it has to be bipartisan, it has to be simple, and it has to accomplish the purpose. No-fly-no-buy, we've accomplished that purpose. It's a great bipartisan bill, and I applaud my colleagues who have taken what can be described as a terrifying, in some ways, first step."
Good god, does this person walk around with movie-trailer music playing in her head?
"In a world…"
The philosophy behind this bill seems to be to keep proposing increasingly watered-down gun restrictions until the NRA and its many sublets in Congress look entirely ridiculous in opposing them. This strikes me as assuming both shame and embarrassment not in evidence, but let's play along. Politically, the strategy may make sense, but as a way of creating effective public policy, it looks like a Zeno's Paradox of legislative cowardice. I am not averse to compromise, nor am I entirely averse to bipartisan approaches to things, once the Republican Party stops being insane. But this hits a very unpleasant parlay–it will do very little toward addressing the problem, and it likely isn't going to pass anyway. If it even gets a vote, that would be a major victory for its sponsors. Of course, the bill would lose the vote, but that's how the sausage gets made, right?
"It's despicable that Congress won't do this. It's all about the political contributions of the gun manufacturers," said Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio. "I'm interested in doing the right things here and those [the Collins-Heitkamp provisions] are baby steps. It's clear we should have background checks. Somebody who's a terrorist, somebody with a history of domestic violence, shouldn't be able to go out and buy a gun and come back 45 minutes later and kill their wife. I don't know [about the new bill]. I'd have to see what it is."
(Brown shrewdly emphasizes that the dogs in the manger on this issue are the gun manufacturers, and not specifically the NRA, which is merely the industry's sales force. If someone could devise a bill that would split the gun industry from the rank-and-file membership of the NRA, then that would advance the cause considerably, but it also would be a very long haul.)
There is little question, however, that, in the wake of the Orlando shooting, the Senate has been completely wrong-footed, and the reason is that this particular outburst of savagery has been linked to the great 21st Century bogeyman of terrorism. It has turned Republicans into defenders of our endangered civil liberties and Democrats into terror warriors of the first water. I'm still not sure that this tactic won't hit its shelf-life quickly, or that it might not lead Democrats into places they don't want to go, but the politics now seem to demand that we stop Omar Mateen and hope that we stop Adam Lanza along the way. Already, the standard reply for Republicans to any Democratic who tries to pitch gun restrictions is to denounce the president for not using the magic words, "Radical Islamic terrorism," and on we go. Getting the push for sensible gun restrictions mixed up with our "war" on terror, much of which has been utterly misbegotten, seems like good politics that could lead to strange results.
The politics now seem to demand that we stop Omar Mateen and hope that we stop Adam Lanza along the way.
To that end, the most interesting moment of the day came earlier that morning when Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat from New York, rose and introduced three amendments to the Criminal Justice Science appropriations bill that, among other features, would crack down on interstate gun-trafficking.
"The first is a law enforcement bill. It is a bipartisan gun-trafficking bill which would finally make gun-trafficking a federal crime. We would assume that bringing deadly weapons up I-95 and selling them to a gang member in New York would be a federal crime. It's not. Right now, there is no federal law preventing someone from loading up a truck in Georgia, bringing them up I-95, and unloading them in a parking lot in Brooklyn to a gang member or other dangerous people who aren't eligible to buy a gun anywhere else."
This is common-sense gun legislation that probably has no more chance of becoming law than the bills on Monday night did. However, terrorism is subtext in Gillibrand's proposal, which is the way it should be. The number of guns in this country would be a political crisis and a public-health emergency even if the prophet Muhammad never had been born. That's a point that cannot get lost. That's a point that never should be compromised away, in a bipartisan fashion or not. It was made in its own mad way by a gun store owner in Kentucky who was interviewed on MSNBC on Tuesday morning.
"We are Americans and we love freedom," the guy said. "We'll have to take a few hits because we love our freedom.
A few hits.
Dear god in heaven.
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