#nra history

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

May 6, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAY 6, 2023

For years now, after one massacre or another, I have written some version of the same article, explaining that the nation’s current gun free-for-all is not traditional but, rather, is a symptom of the takeover of our nation by a radical extremist minority. The idea that massacres are “the price of freedom,” as right-wing personality Bill O’Reilly said in 2017 after the Mandalay Bay massacre in Las Vegas, in which a gunman killed 60 people and wounded 411 others, is new, and it is about politics, not our history. The Second Amendment to the Constitution, on which modern-day arguments for widespread gun ownership rest, is one simple sentence: “A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” There’s not a lot to go on about what the Framers meant, although in their day, to “bear arms” meant to be part of an organized militia. As the Tennessee Supreme Court wrote in 1840, “A man in the pursuit of deer, elk, and buffaloes might carry his rifle every day for forty years, and yet it would never be said of him that he had borne arms; much less could it be said that a private citizen bears arms because he has a dirk or pistol concealed under his clothes, or a spear in a cane.” Today’s insistence that the Second Amendment gives individuals a broad right to own guns comes from two places. One is the establishment of the National Rifle Association in New York in 1871, in part to improve the marksmanship skills of American citizens who might be called on to fight in another war, and in part to promote in America the British sport of elite shooting, complete with hefty cash prizes in newly organized tournaments. Just a decade after the Civil War, veterans jumped at the chance to hone their former skills. Rifle clubs sprang up across the nation. By the 1920s, rifle shooting was a popular American sport. “Riflemen” competed in the Olympics, in colleges, and in local, state, and national tournaments organized by the NRA. Being a good marksman was a source of pride, mentioned in public biographies, like being a good golfer. In 1925, when the secretary of the NRA apparently took money from ammunition and arms manufacturers, the organization tossed him out and sued him. NRA officers insisted on the right of citizens to own rifles and handguns but worked hard to distinguish between law-abiding citizens who should have access to guns for hunting and target shooting and protection, and criminals and mentally ill people, who should not. In 1931, amid fears of bootlegger gangs, the NRA backed federal legislation to limit concealed weapons; prevent possession by criminals, the mentally ill and children; to require all dealers to be licensed; and to require background checks before delivery. It backed the 1934 National Firearms Act, and parts of the 1968 Gun Control Act, designed to stop what seemed to be America’s hurtle toward violence in that turbulent decade. But in the mid-1970s a faction in the NRA forced the organization away from sports and toward opposing “gun control.” It formed a political action committee (PAC) in 1975, and two years later it elected an organization president who abandoned sporting culture and focused instead on “gun rights.” This was the second thing that led us to where we are today: leaders of the NRA embraced the politics of Movement Conservatism, the political movement that rose to combat the business regulations and social welfare programs that both Democrats and Republicans embraced after World War II. Movement Conservatives embraced the myth of the American cowboy as a white man standing against the “socialism” of the federal government as it sought to level the economic playing field between Black Americans and their white neighbors. Leaders like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater personified the American cowboy, with his cowboy hat and opposition to government regulation, while television Westerns showed good guys putting down bad guys without the interference of the government. In 1972 the Republican platform had called for gun control to restrict the sale of “cheap handguns,” but in 1975, as he geared up to challenge President Gerald R. Ford for the 1976 presidential nomination, Movement Conservative hero Ronald Reagan took a stand against gun control. In 1980, the Republican platform opposed the federal registration of firearms, and the NRA endorsed a presidential candidate—Reagan—for the first time.

When President Reagan took office, a new American era, dominated by Movement Conservatives, began. And the power of the NRA over American politics grew. In 1981 a gunman trying to kill Reagan shot and paralyzed his press secretary, James Brady, and wounded Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy and police officer Thomas Delahanty. After the shooting, then-representative Charles Schumer (D-NY) introduced legislation that became known as the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, or the Brady Bill, to require background checks before gun purchases. Reagan, who was a member of the NRA, endorsed the bill, but the NRA spent millions of dollars to defeat it. After the Brady Bill passed in 1993, the NRA paid for lawsuits in nine states to strike it down. Until 1959, every single legal article on the Second Amendment concluded that it was not intended to guarantee individuals the right to own a gun. But in the 1970s, legal scholars funded by the NRA had begun to argue that the Second Amendment did exactly that. In 1997, when the Brady Bill cases came before the Supreme Court as Printz v. United States, the Supreme Court declared parts of the measure unconstitutional. Now a player in national politics, the NRA was awash in money from gun and ammunition manufacturers. By 2000 it was one of the three most powerful lobbies in Washington. It spent more than $40 million on the 2008 election. In that year, the landmark Supreme Court decision of District of Columbia v. Heller struck down gun regulations and declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms. Increasingly, NRA money backed Republican candidates. In 2012 the NRA spent $9 million in the presidential election, and in 2014 it spent $13 million. Then, in 2016, it spent over $50 million on Republican candidates, including more than $30 million on Trump’s effort to win the White House. This money was vital to Trump, since many other Republican super PACs refused to back him. The NRA spent more money on Trump than any other outside group, including the leading Trump super PAC, which spent $20.3 million. The unfettered right to own and carry weapons has come to symbolize the Republican Party’s ideology of individual liberty. Lawmakers and activists have not been able to overcome Republican insistence on gun rights despite the mass shootings that have risen since their new emphasis on guns. Tonight, I am, once again, posting yet another version of this article.

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[kateflicky]

Dm for hookup

[ellcrys]

The Secret History of Gun Rights: How Lawmakers Armed the N.R.A.

They served in Congress and on the N.R.A.’s board at the same time. Over decades, a small group of legislators led by a prominent Democrat pushed the gun lobby to help transform the law, the courts and views on the Second Amendment.

A Climate Warning from the Cradle of Civilization

Every schoolchild learns the name: Mesopotamia – the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of civilization. Today, much of that land is turning to dust.

[jmpphoto]

Grapevine Canyon Petroglyph I by James Marvin Phelps Via Flickr: Petroglyphs Grapevine Canyon Lake Mead NRA Nevada April 2024

[bread-and-roses-too]

shit is always happening in Pennsylvania. Get out of my state, politicians

[wilwheaton]

The GOP wonders why young people (and others) don't want to vote for them. Some wise scribe assembled this list.

1.) Your Reagan-era “trickle-down economics” strategy of tax breaks for billionaires that you continue to employ to this day has widened the gap between rich and poor so much that most of them will never be able to own a home, much less earn a living wage.

2.) You refuse to increase the federal minimum wage, which is still $7.25 an hour (since 2009). Even if it had just kept up with inflation, it would be $27 now. You’re forcing people of all ages but especially young people to work multiple jobs just to afford basic necessities.

3.) You fundamentally oppose and want to kill democracy; have done everything in your power to restrict access to the ballot box, particularly in areas with demographics that tend to vote Democratic (like young people and POC). You staged a fucking coup the last time you lost.

4.) You have abused your disproportionate senate control over the last three decades to pack the courts with religious extremists and idealogues, including SCOTUS—which has rolled back rights for women in ways that do nothing but kill more women and children and expand poverty.

5.) You refuse to enact common sense gun control laws to curb mass shootings like universal background checks and banning assault weapons; subjecting their entire generation to school shootings and drills that are traumatizing in and of themselves. You are owned by the NRA.

6.) You are unequivocally against combatting climate change to the extent that it’s as if you’ve made it your personal mission to ensure they inherit a planet that is beyond the point of no return in terms of remaining habitable for the human race beyond the next few generations.

7.) You oppose all programs that provide assistance to those who need it most. Your governors refused to expand Medicaid even during A PANDEMIC. You are against free school lunches, despite it being the only meal that millions of children can count on to actually receive each day

8.) You are banning books, defunding libraries, barring subject matter, and whitewashing history even more in a fascistic attempt to keep them ignorant of the systemic racism that this nation was literally founded upon and continues to this day in every action your party takes.

9.) You oppose universal healthcare and are still trying to repeal the ACA and rip healthcare from tens of millions of Americans and replace it with nothing. You are against lowering the cost of insulin and prescription drugs that millions need simply to LIVE/FUNCTION in society.

10.) You embrace white nationalists, Neo-Nazis, and other groups that are defined by their intractable racism, xenophobia, bigotry, and intolerance. You conspired with these groups on January 6th to try to overthrow the U.S. government via domestic terrorism that KILLED PEOPLE.

11.) You oppose every bill aimed at making life better for our nation’s youth; from education to extracurricular and financial/nutritional assistance programs. You say you want to “protect the children” while you elect/nominate pedophiles and attack trans youth and drag queens.

12.) You pretend to be offended by “anti-semitism” while literally supporting, electing, and speaking at events organized by Nazis. You pretend to hate “cancel culture” despite the fact that you invented it and it’s basically all you do.

13.) Every word you utter is a lie. You are the party of treason, hypocrisy, crime, and authoritarianism. You want to entrench rule by your aging minority because you know that you have nothing to offer young voters and they will never support you for all these reasons and more.

14.) You’re so hostile to even the notion of helping us overcome the mountain of debt that millions of us are forced to take on just to pay for our post K-12 education that you are suing to try to prevent a small fraction of us from getting even $10,000 in loan forgiveness.

15.) You opened the floodgates of money into politics via Citizens United; allowing our entire system of government to become a cesspool of corruption, crime, and greed. You are supposed to represent the American people whose taxes pay your salary but instead cater to rich donors.

16.) You respond to elected representatives standing in solidarity with their constituents to protest the ONGOING SLAUGHTER of children in schools via shootings by EXPELLING THEM FROM OFFICE & respond to your lack of popularity among young people by trying to raise the voting age.

17.) You impeach Democratic presidents over lying about a BJ but refuse to impeach (then vote twice to acquit) a guy whose entire “administration” was an international crime syndicate being run out of the WH who incited an insurrection to have you killed.

18.) You steal Supreme Court seats from democrats to prevent the only black POTUS we’ve ever had from appointing one and invent fake precedents that you later ignore all to take fundamental rights from Americans; and even your “legitimate” appointments consist of people like THIS (sub-thread refuting CJ Roberts criticisms of people attacking SCOTUS' legitimacy).

19.) You support mass incarceration even for innocuous offenses or execution by cop for POC while doing nothing but protect rich white criminals who engage in such things as tax fraud, money laundering, sex trafficking, rape/sexual assault, falsifying business records, etc.

20.) You are the reason we can’t pass:—Universal background checks—An assault weapons ban—The ‘For the People/Freedom to vote’ Act or John Lewis Voting Rights Act—The ERA & Equality Act—The Climate Action Now Act—The (Stopping) Violence Against Women Act—SCOTUS expansion.

21.) You do not seek office to govern, represent, or serve the American people. You seek power solely for its own sake so you can impose your narrow-minded puritanical will on others at the expense of their most fundamental rights and freedoms like voting and bodily autonomy.

22.) Ok, last one. You are trying to eliminate social security and Medicare that tens of millions of our parents rely on and paid into their entire lives. And you did everything to maximize preventable deaths from COVID leaving millions of us in mourning.

Source: https://imgur.com/gallery/e8DBZLH

[adorabledaylilly]

So angry at a white man on Twitter I want him crushed and ground up by a train

[odinsblog]

Can we please get something straight here??

Mitch McConnell has supported Donald Trump and will support him again if Trump wins the Republican nomination. I have never supported Trump and I never will.

Mitch McConnell has been a willing tool of the NRA and helped pass countless stand-your-ground laws, he has helped pave the way for laws like permitless carry, and he has helped make guns easier for anyone to get. I have not.

Mitch McConnell has helped pass laws that intentionally suppress the votes of millions and millions Black people. I have not.

Mitch McConnell has helped write or pass laws that deny millions of women access to reproductive health care. I have not.

Mitch McConnell has helped write or pass laws that deny basic healthcare and living wages to millions of poor people. I have not.

I AM NOW AND I WILL ALWAYS BE BETTER than Mitch McConnell and Republicans, because my wishes do not have any material impact on anyone, unlike the myriad of hateful draconian laws that Mitch McConnell has helped to pass.

I could continue, but hopefully I’ve made my point: people sending Mitch McConnell “ill wishes” IS NOT being “just the same” as Mitch McConnell and Republicans, and it doesn’t make anyone “as bad as” McConnell and the GOP.

Are you fucking kidding me??

Saying that my wishes = McConnell’s actions is a false equivalence. It’s false, it’s offensive and it’s gaslighting.

Mitch McConnell is an elected politician who has a very long history of using his political power to actively harm the poor, marginalized communities, women, LGBTQ people, and non-Christian, non-white people. If you cannot differentiate between the words and the unenforceable “wishes” of the oppressed vs. the actions of an oppressor, then you have some serious problems to unpack.

I could ~almost~ see it if there was some chance that a Republican would go, “Oh wow, those progressives are being nice to Mitch McConnell, maybe I’ll stop being a racist and vote for a Democrat now.” But that almost never ever happens, does it??

You are not going to win over a Republican by being kind. Their entire ideology is based on racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and cruelty.

Look, I’m not tryna write a dissertation here, but please believe me when I say that this neoliberal knee jerk Pollyanna reaction of, “turn the other cheek” and “be kinder to your oppressors” is very much rooted in Christofascism + white supremacy. It’s a weaponization of the “hate breeds hate” trope and the “forgiveness narrative” meant to tame slaves, and I refuse to fall for it.

I absolutely positively do not wish Mitch McConnell well, and HELL NO, I am not being a bad person for hoping that a racist, evil, old white man suffers a fraction of the pain he has inflicted on others for decades and decades.

I am a proud member of the #MitchMcConnellDieChallenge community.

That all said, at the very least, Mitch McConnell has unintentionally provided us with a teachable moment: please learn to spot the warning signs of someone having a stroke

[bithablu]

I'm having a difficult time with certain people I know IRL who say that both political parties are the same and it's not worth voting. The Palestinian genocide is usually their main talking point about how both parties suck and how they can't vote for anyone who wouldn't demand an immediate cease fire.

Ok. Cool. Name me one president who didn't have to deal with some kind of genocide. Now show me the one that dealt with it perfectly. No flaws. Quickly. Oh? None? Because politicians are deeply flawed people navigating an overly complicated system of checks and balances that are in place to prevent fascism and dictatorships? Huh.

Palestinians need humanitarian aid, support, political allies, and political pressure on Israel. Which candidate do you think would be more likely to provide ANY of that? The guy who moved the American embassy to Jerusalem, tacitly insinuating that Jerusalem was Israel's capital? Or the chick who called for a cease fire and has a history of supporting humanitarian aid programs?

Is she perfect? Fuck no. Is she good enough? Not on this topic. But which one of them is more like to adjust their policies?

Speaking of adjusting policies, have you heard the story of how Walz went from being beloved by the NRA to get constant F ratings from them? His daughter talked to him about how he was the only person she knew who had the power to prevent school shootings. So she talked and he listened. He prioritized life over lobbyists. Action instead of just thoughts and prayers.

Can you see JD Vance doing that? I can't. He's too busy insulting legal immigrants and letting women bleed out from miscarriages because doctors have to wait 'until the mother's life is in danger' to perform D&Cs. You know, that procedure to 'clean out' a woman after a miscarriage. It's technically an abortion and some doctors would rather wait until a woman is in septic shock than risk a jail sentence for obeying their Hippocratic oath. But Vance adjusting his stance on abortion laws to save lives is less important than making a stand against... I dunno, anti-evangelical behavior 🤷🏼‍♀️

Look, I know it's disheartening. It's fucking heart wrenching just to hear about what's happening in Gaza. But throwing your vote away does no one any good. If you want to make a difference, being indifferent with your vote is not the way to go.

Have you tried talking to your local/state politicians? Have you joined any organizations? Donated? What have you done?

For those of you who say that I'm afraid of the bad orange man, you know what- yeah. I'm afraid of what he could do. My daughter is already going to grow up with less rights than I had. Gods help her if she'd move to a different state; in some of the more restrictive states a woman has more bodily autonomy as a corpse than she does if she's pregnant.

Harris/Walz isn't the best choice but they are the better choice. Pro-union, pro-children, pro-education, pro-choice, pro-GBLTQ+, pro-environment.

If you're waiting for the perfect candidate, you're going to be waiting for a while.

[butch-reidentified]

Today marks 6 years since a man who had openly expressed such violent desires took 17 innocent lives in Parkland, FL, just 20 minutes from my home. I know some of the survivors because of my own history having been at Pulse. My wife knew one of the victims because she grew up right here. He used to teach at her school when she was in high school, and died a hero trying to save lives.

Today marks the last anniversary before that building is torn down and gone forever. I imagine there are mixed feelings about this in the community, as the debate regarding the future of the site of the Pulse shooting continues. I myself was once of the mindset that it should stay, but no longer feel this way. It has been long enough; sooner or later we must move forward.

I know that today is a holiday, but I ask that you spare a minute or two today to look into causes like Change the Ref, and donate if you can.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Nick Anderson

* * * *

America today is caught in a plague of gun violence.

It wasn’t always this way. Americans used to own guns without engaging in daily massacres. Indeed, it always jumps out at me that the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929, when members of one Chicago gang set up and killed seven members of a rival gang, was so shocking it led to legislation that prohibits automatic weapons in the U.S.

Eighty-nine years later, though, in 2018, another Valentine’s Day shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killed 17 children and wounded 17 others. In response, then-President Donald Trump called for arming teachers, and the Republican-dominated Florida legislature rejected a bill that would have limited some high-capacity guns.

Our acceptance of violence today stands in striking contrast to Americans’ horror at the 1929 Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Today’s promotion of a certain kind of gun ownership has roots in the politics of the country since the Supreme Court handed down the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision, which declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Since Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted a government that actively shaped the economy, businessmen who hated government regulation tried to rally opposition to get rid of that government. But Americans of the post-World War II years actually liked regulation of the runaway capitalism they blamed for the Great Depression.

The Brown v. Board decision changed the equation. It enabled those who opposed business regulation to reach back to a racist trope from the nation’s Reconstruction years after the Civil War. They argued that the active government after World War II was not simply regulating business. More important, they said, it was using tax dollars levied on hardworking white men to promote civil rights for undeserving Black people. The troops President Dwight Eisenhower sent to Little Rock Central High School in 1957, for example, didn’t come cheap. Civil Rights, then, promoted by the newly active federal government, were virtually socialism.

This argument had sharp teeth in the 1950s, as Americans recoiled from the growing influence of the U.S.S.R., but it came originally from the Reconstruction era. Then, white supremacist southerners who were determined to stop the federal government from enforcing Black rights argued that they were upset about Black participation in society not because of race—although of course they were—but rather because poor Black voters were electing lawmakers who were using white people’s tax dollars to lay roads, for example, or build schools.

In contrast to this apparent socialism, southern Democrats after the Civil War lionized the American cowboy, whom they mythologized as a white man (in fact, a third of the cowboys were men of color) who wanted nothing of the government but to be left alone (in reality, the cattle industry depended on the government). Out there on the western plains, the mythological cowboy worked hard for a day’s pay for moving cattle to a railhead, all the while fighting off Indigenous Americans, Mexicans, and rustlers who were trying to stop him.

That same mythological cowboy appeared in the 1950s to stand against what those opposed to business regulation and civil rights saw as the creeping socialism of their era. By 1959, there were 26 Westerns on TV, and in March 1959, eight of one week’s top shows were Westerns. They showed hardworking cowboys protecting their land from evildoers. The cowboys didn’t need help from their government; they made their own law with a gun.

In 1958, Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona rocketed to prominence after he accused the president from his own party, Dwight Eisenhower, of embracing “the siren song of socialism.” Goldwater had come from a wealthy background after his family cashed in on the boom of federal money flowing to Arizona dam construction, but he presented himself to the media as a cowboy, telling stories of how his family had come to Arizona when “[t]here was no federal welfare system, no federally mandated employment insurance, no federal agency to monitor the purity of the air, the food we ate, or the water we drank,” and that “[e]verything that was done, we did it ourselves.” Goldwater opposed the Brown v. Board decision and Eisenhower’s decision to use troops to desegregate Little Rock Central High School.

Increasingly, those determined to destroy the postwar government emphasized the hardworking individual under siege by a large, grasping government that redistributed wealth to the undeserving, usually people of color. A big fan of Goldwater, Ronald Reagan famously developed a cowboy image even as he repeatedly warned of the “welfare queen” who lived large on government benefits she stole.

As late as 1968, the National Rifle Association supported some forms of gun control, but that changed in the 1980s as the organization affiliated itself with Reagan’s Republican Party. In 1981, an assassin attempted to kill the president and succeeded in badly wounding him, as well as injuring the president’s press secretary, James Brady, and two others. Despite pressure to limit gun ownership, in 1986, under pressure from the NRA, the Republican Congress did the opposite: it passed the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act, which erased many of the earlier controls on gun ownership, making it easier to buy, sell, and transport guns across state lines.

In 1987, Congress began to consider the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, otherwise known as the Brady Bill, to require background checks before gun purchases and to prevent certain transfer of guns across state lines. As soon as the measure was proposed, the NRA shifted into high gear to prevent its passage. The bill did not pass until 1993, under President Bill Clinton’s administration. The NRA set out to challenge the law in the courts.

While the challenges wound their way upward, the idea of individuals standing against a dangerous government became central to the Republican Party. By the 1990s, men increasingly vowed to take up arms against the government that talk radio hosts told them was bringing socialism to America. After April 19, 1993, when federal officers stormed the compound of a religious cult whose former members reported that their leader, David Koresh, was stockpiling weapons, talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones warned that the government was about to impose martial law. Angry opponents of the government began to organize as well-armed “militias.”

In 1997, the NRA’s challenges to the Brady Bill had made their way to the United States Supreme Court. Printz v. United States brought together the idea of unfettered gun ownership and Republican government. The court held that it was unconstitutional for the federal government to require states to perform background checks. This both freed up gun purchases and endorsed states’ rights, the principle at the heart of the Republican policy of dismantling the active government that regulates business and protects civil rights.

We are in a bizarre moment, as Republican lawmakers defend largely unlimited gun ownership even as recent polls show that 84% of voters, including 77% of Republicans, support background checks. The link between guns, cowboys, race, and government in America during Reconstruction, and again after the Brown v. Board decision, helps to explain why.

[Heather Cox Richardson :: Letters From An American]

[ritchiepage2001newaccount]

WHY UNIVERSAL BACKGROUND CHECKS ARE JUST AS UNLIKELY AS EVER, UNFORTUNATELY

I'm a leftist (Libertarian-Socialist), who votes progressive, because I live under an "elected" government, and I had thought I had purged the MSNBC/CNN Nation from my friends list, but apparently not, as my timeline is just chock-full of media-driven hysteria over current events, so here's a primer:

"Liberals" who think their arguments are clever or relevant to the Second Amendment are exhausting.

They are not the left; they are just one half of the good cop/bad cop act of the corporate owned fire-hose of bullshit that is the corporate media, and corporate America's governing criminal cartel/duopoly.

Both cults "I like simple and ineffectual 'solutions', because they make me feel like I'm doing something, and I'm just stinky with fear."

There are over a hundred million legal gun owners, who some want to punish for somebody else's crime.

Well, there are some things to consider.

We've been a heavily armed country since 1621, and yet the epidemic of daily mass-shootings didn't begin until 20 April 1999 (Columbine), at a time when gun ownership was at an all-time low, and five years after Clinton's assault-weapons ban, so maybe guns aren't the variable.

Worth noting: One of the first things the "Pilgrims" did when they betrayed the Native Americans, was disarm "King Phillip" and his men.

Maybe, just maybe, dead school-children are the price of the neoliberalism practiced under the "Washington Consensus" of BOTH right-wing authoritarian parties since the 1980's? When your country offers you no prospects, and you become terrified of the future, what then? Fear can make unstable people do desperate things. Add to that a culture of celebrity, and what could possibly go wrong?

Another factor that goes completely unexamined, is the way Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill emptied our state hospitals onto our streets, and onto families ill-equipped to deal with the sometimes violent mentally ill.

Thank God, the "solution" is so simple…

Also, 84% of NRA members support universal background checks. The problem is, every time a bill comes up for a vote, Democrats add poison pill amendments guaranteeing defeat in the legislature (and the courts), and then they proceed to tell the TV cameras that "once again the GOP and the gun lobby have voted down background checks and defied the will of the people", or some such nonsense.

If you want to watch Dems sabotage universal background checks (while Republicans roll their eyes and face-palm) in real time, go here:

P.S. You can probably guess which one of these three groups I belong to (Hint: It's the one that's growing and actually decides elections):

LaborPartyNow!!!

P S The line, "You don't need 30 rounds to shoot a deer!" is not clever.

The Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting tools, toys for hobbyists (target shooting), or even weapons for self-defense.

It's about ARMS!!!

It's about the individual citizen's right to arms, so they'll be prepared to join a militia, not the other way around. ‘Well regulated’ at that time, simply meant, ‘efficient.’ In other words, in order for a muster to be efficient, civilians needed to be already armed.

So the "collective rights" argument has a couple of problems that make it quite unhinged from history and reality.

1) As I've mentioned above, Americans have always been relatively heavily armed. How did that happen in a collective rights paradigm?

2) Contrary to what you were probably taught in school, by the time of the Confederate artillery barrage on Fort Sumter, the war over slavery had already been going on for over six years, and was fought entirely by independent volunteer militia's. Fort Sumter was just the beginning of official involvement by government troops. How did that happen in a collective rights paradigm?

3) In what universe do government forces need to have their right to arms protected?

4) Since when do National Guard members keep National Guard arms (Hint: they're kept at the armory, and have been since colonial times)?

5) Obviously, "Liberals" are stupid.

Again: #LaborPartyNow!!!

P P S That was ENTIRELY the point of the first fruits of dissent, the 10 Amendments we've come to call the BILL OF RIGHTS (which have become a beacon to aspiring democrats all over the world), to protect INDIVIDUALS from the government they had just created. #TrueStory

[truth4ourfreedom]

HOW MUCH THE NRA AND THE 'EVIL' GUN LOBBY SPENDS EACH YEAR.

The popular narrative from prohibitionists is that the lack of legislative support for various gun control schemes is due to aggressive lobbying. The story goes that “blood money” from the National Rifle Association and other gun lobby efforts along with the firearm industry has a stranglehold on elected officials who are just pining to do “the right thing” but are being drowned out by all the cash.

How much money is actually spent by the NRA on lobbying? How does this compare to lobbying efforts from elsewhere?

Statista is a German online platform specializing in data gathering and visualization in German, English, Spanish, and French. The company provides statistics and survey results presented in charts and tables. Its main target groups are business customers, lecturers, and researchers, offering subscriptions to a database of companies in the same manner as Bloomberg L.P.

Statista’s data partners include the Federal Statistical Office, the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research, the OECD, and the German Institute for Economic Research. Other partners include the Financial Times and Fortune. Financial Times Germany named them among the winners of the start-up competition, Enable to Start.

Major U.S. Political Lobbying

The big three in major U.S. political lobbying are Pharmaceuticals/Health Products ($357 million per year), Electronics Manufacturing ($180 million per year), and Insurance ($153 million per year.)

Major annual lobbying expenditures in the United States

www.statista.com/statistics/257364/top-lobbying-industries-in-the-us

Critical note: Statista felt compelled to add the following footnote to this chart:

The NRA and lobbying: One of the most famous lobbying organizations in the United States is the National Rifle Association (NRA), which lobbies lawmakers in favor of gun rights. However, despite this, it only spent around 2.2 million U.S. dollars on lobbying expenditures in 2020.

Apparently, they received so many inquiries as to why the NRA wasn’t included in that chart above they included the answer right underneath: the NRA spends a marginal fraction on lobbying compared to the actual big spenders.

NRA (bottom) compared to the actual big lobby efforts.

Gun Lobby Money:

The NRA typically spends a few million dollars per year on lobbying. From 1998-2022, the most the NRA spent on lobbying in a single year was just over $5 million. Most years it’s between 1.5-2.5 million.

www.statista.com/statistics/249398/lobbying-expenditures-of-the-national-rifle-associaction-in-the-united-states/

The National Shooting Sports Foundation also lobbies. In 2023, according to federal records, the NSSF spent the most in lobbying in its 60-year history: $5.4 million on federal lobbying, slightly more than the NRA’s all-time annual record amount.

Anti-Gun Lobbying:

Firearm prohibitionists claim there is some large grassroots movement to push for legislative restrictions. It turns out that many anti-gun organizations are astroturfing fronts funded as tax deductions by a small group of very wealthy donors. These “organizations” provide no services with all funding received as contributions.

As an example, “March for Our Lives” bills itself as a grassroots movement of young people working to restrict gun ownership under the guise of safety. In reality, this is a front group funded by a few dozen donors. According to public tax documents for March for Our Lives, the group is funded almost entirely by large tax-deductible donations in excess of $100,000 with less than 1% of all donations from people donating less than $5,000. Nearly 100% of “March for Our Lives” income is Contributions serving as a tax deduction for donors and no Program Services are offered. Contrast this to the NRA’s public tax records where nearly half of the income is from Program Services and about a third is from Contributions.

Lobby Money Breakdown

Pharmaceutical companies spend the most on lobbying, much more than any other industry or sector. Pharmaceutical companies spend more on lobbying than second and third place (Electronics Manufacturing and Insurance) combined. Novo Nordisk, the maker of the obesity drug Ozempic, has spent $10 million per year just to lobby for that one drug with their primary effort pushing for the passage of the proposed Treat and Reduce Obesity Act which would emphasize regular prescription by doctors to patients for Ozempic. That doesn't count the $100 million Novo Nordisk has spent in advertising this drug to the general public.

Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, appointed to the current Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, has declared that “obesity cannot be treated with exercise and good diet” and is pushing for more pharmaceutical interventions. This push is for drug interventions such as Ozempic. Prior to this appointment, Dr. Stanford had been a paid consultant for Novo Nordisk.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on bump stocks on Friday, legalizing a device that can effectively transform semiautomatic rifles into machine guns. Predictably, the court split 6–3, with the Republican-appointed justices carving a massive loophole in federal law at the behest of the firearms industry. Justice Clarence Thomas’ majority opinion is rooted in historical misrepresentations and utterly implausible manipulations of the statutory text. It enables future mass shooters to equip their AR-15s with an attachment that increases the rate of fire exponentially, to up to 800 rounds per minute.

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed the decision on Saturday’s episode of Amicus. They were joined by David Pucino, an expert in firearms law and legal director of the Giffords Law Center. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

DAHLIA LITHWICK: Justice Thomas makes the claim that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms did a complete 180° on how it viewed bump stocks, suddenly changing their minds after the Las Vegas massacre and deciding that, actually, they are machine guns. That’s just not true, right?

MARK JOSEPH STERN: This idea that ATF said bump stocks were 100% legal, then turned around in response to political pressure and said they were unlawful all along—that’s a misrepresentation of history. What really happened was that gunmakers were developing various tools to help make semiautomatic rifles fire at a higher rate. ATF looked at these and said some were potentially legal while others were not, on a case-by-case basis, without making a formal determination at the agency level. Some were snuck through under false pretenses as an accommodation for disability. And when ATF decided to take a holistic look at this issue after the Las Vegas shooting, it decided that, when bump stocks operate a certain way—basically, enabling automatic fire—they are illegal. That, to me, is doing exactly what an agency is supposed to do. ATF looked at the facts on the ground. It looked at its mandate from Congress. It looked at its own past decisions. And it harmonized them as best it could in accordance with what experts at the agency say the facts are. To see Thomas slander ATF as caving to political pressure, then using this charge to overrule the determination of ATF’s own firearm experts—it seemed to me the height of arrogance.

DAVID PUCINO: I think it’s important to remember that there was really careful work going on at ATF to make these determinations on a case-by-case basis. The agency was faced with a problem: Folks in the firearm industry were trying to get around the laws on the books. When an agency comes out and says, “This is what the law is,” the industry is going to try to get around it. And the agency has to decide if they’ll succeed. What’s really striking here is that ATF was doing that engagement, and the Supreme Court came in and usurped it here in a way that’s totally unworkable if you apply it beyond the favored political constituency of the gun industry. It’s absurd to have the Supreme Court putting all this work into deciding the mechanics of a firearm and whether it meets the statute and trying to overrule an agency that made those same determinations. That’s not a workable way to do government. If every difficult regulatory decision made in this country that might’ve gone one way or another goes up to the Supreme Court, that’s all the justices would ever be doing. You’d need a thousand Supreme Courts to handle it. The volume of work that comes out of the administrative state is not something that the Supreme Court can analyze in this way, at least not in any sort of reasonable manner, and I don’t think they would ever even pretend to. But what you have here is a particular, favored constituency that is bringing these questions. And then, all of a sudden, the court decides to drop everything and figure out how this gun works. Now, the way ATF does that is to sit down and actually look at the firearm. They’re going to bring in their experts and make those determinations. But the way the Supreme Court does it is they look at an amicus brief by the Firearms Policy Coalition and co-sign it.

LITHWICK: That’s the group that created the six graphics and a gif that Justice Thomas used to illustrate how semiautomatic rifles work. Why was it notable that he copied and pasted their material into a Supreme Court opinion?

PUCINO: The National Rifle Association is not what it used to be, and that’s created a gap. And what has gone into the gap are a bunch of further-right organizations that are trying to take the mantle of the NRA by being as extreme as possible. Foremost among them is the Firearms Policy Coalition. Friday was a real moment for them. It’s one of the most extreme groups; it uses extraordinarily violent rhetoric. And it’s putting out material that’s getting blessed by a majority opinion of the Supreme Court. You have to take a step back and look at where we are—I don’t think that’s anything you could imagine happening even 10 years ago.

LITHWICK: You’re both hitting on a big theme of this term, which is the Supreme Court making it impossible for agencies to do pretty much anything. And it seems awfully important when you have Clarence Thomas substituting his judgment for ATF’s with what Justice Sotomayor pointedly calls “six diagrams and an animation.” The majority was just like, I know everything, here’s a Peanuts comic strip. It seems as if Thomas was trying to explain his tortured interpretation to the public, to make it accessible, but eliding the agency’s own expert views in the process.

PUCINO: The idea that you can get the amount of expertise that goes into technical determinations made by ATF by simply looking at briefs and diagrams—I mean, just, no. Obviously not. The amount of time that even clerks, let alone justices, require to do a deep dive on these issues, the depth of understanding they’re going to need—it won’t come anywhere near that of an expert who’s working on this full time. This is their whole job. It’s what they’re trained to do.

STERN: You can really only justify Thomas’ reading, in my view, if you start from the conclusion that the bump stock ban is unlawful and work your way backward, butchering the text to mean something it just doesn’t. This isn’t how ordinary people use the English language and, as Sotomayor showed, it isn’t how members of Congress who voted on this law used English when they wrote it in 1934. If “textualism” can be deployed in such an underhanded and cynical way, I don’t think it’s really getting us anywhere. It’s just another pretext for the Supreme Court to reach whatever result it wants.

This is part of Opinionpalooza, Slate’s coverage of the major decisions from the Supreme Court this June. Alongside Amicus, we kicked things off this year by explaining How Originalism Ate the Law. The best way to support our work is by joining Slate Plus. (If you are already a member, consider a donation or merch!)

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice:

During Donald Trump’s first term, Republicans dismissed well-founded concerns that he wouldn’t leave office willingly as “silly.” And then January 6 happened. Trump’s coup attempt wasn’t an aberration. If he returns to power, it’s likely he and his minions will push to abolish the 22nd Amendment and its maximum of two terms for presidents — in fact Project 2025 is already scheming to do just that. And you don’t have to take it from us. Just listen to the man himself. Last weekend, Trump gave a speech to the NRA where he openly mused about serving three or more terms. “FDR, 16 years … he was four terms. I don’t know, are we going to be considered three terms or two terms, you tell me?” Trump here, as elsewhere, presents his assault on the Constitution and rule of law as a kind of semi-coherent joke. But looking at his history and plans for the future, his fantasies about making himself ruler for life don’t seem very funny.

Trump loves fantasizing about becoming America’s Putin

After much debate among the founders, presidential terms were originally fixed as four year terms with no limits on reelection. George Washington, the first president, resigned after his second term rather than seeking reelection. The presidents who followed Washington all followed his lead and did not seek a third term. Over the years there was considerable debate about whether to formalize the two-term norm. The question took on additional urgency when Franklin Roosevelt sought and won a third term in 1940 and then a fourth in 1944 before dying in office in 1945. Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats were determined that there should never be another FDR, and they managed to pass the 22nd Amendment, which formally imposed a two-term limit. Whether you think that’s good policy or not, Trump’s interest in serving three or more terms has nothing to do with the merits and everything to do with his desire to become America’s Putin.

Trump’s signaled for years that he likes the idea of holding onto the presidency for as long as he can. While he was in office, he floated the idea that he could serve more than two terms semi-regularly. During a July 2019 Turning Point USA conference in DC, for instance, someone yelled out from the crowd, “President for life!” Trump chuckled and replied, “That’s what they’re afraid of, you know.”

Trump kept dreaming of an eternal MAGA rein as the 2020 campaign heated up. In January of that year, during a CNBC interview, Trump mused, “President Xi — president for life, okay? It’s not bad.” In February, immediately after being acquitted in his first impeachment, Trump shared a video which showed campaign posters for a Trump 2044 run — essentially a fantasy of rule by Trump eternal. By August 2020, Trump came up with a reason he deserved three terms — the Russia investigation. He said during a rally in Wisconsin that he’d win a second term “and then after that, we’ll go for another four years because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.”

[...]

Of course, no one spied on Trump’s campaign; he was complaining because the investigation into Russian influence on the 2016 election implicated his campaign. In any case, the Constitution doesn’t give presidents a “redo” term if they feel they’ve been treated unfairly. Trump was, as usual, just rummaging around in his backbrain for some garbled excuse to justify his limitless lust for power. Trump sycophants have picked up the hint and started to lay the “intellectual” groundwork for giving Trump the third (and fourth, and fifth) term he wants. In March, Peter Tonguette at the American Conservative argued that the 22nd Amendment is an “arbitrary restraint on presidents who serve nonconsecutive terms.”

[...]

Americans don’t like dictatorship. Remind them of that.

Trump running in 2028, and 2032, and on and on, MAGA without end, is a terrifying thought — and not just for Democratic partisans. Democratic and Republican strategists have both found that undecided voters are very concerned that Trump would not step down in 2028. It’s a fear that consistently pushes voters towards Biden. Democrats have so far not focused much attention on the possibility that Trump will never leave office. But maybe they should. Forcing Trump to talk more about his 2028 plans can only discredit him. Voters need to be reminded that the only way to ensure that Trump doesn’t rule for life is to vote him down now, before he gets into position to abolish the horserace, the Constitution, and any vestige of democracy we have left.

Noah Berlatsky wrote in Public Notice that Donald Trump’s plan to circumvent the 2-term limit for the Presidency isn’t a joke, but a serious authoritarian power grab to turn our nation into Russia.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

On June 20, I'm keynoting the LOCUS AWARDS in OAKLAND.

#15yrsago Student challenges prof, wins right to post source code he wrote for course https://memex.craphound.com/2009/06/10/student-challenges-prof-wins-right-to-post-source-code-he-wrote-for-course/

#15yrsago France’s three-strikes copyright rule is unconstitutional and hence dead https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2009/06/10/hadopi-is-dead-three-strikes-killed-by-highest-court/

#15yrsago The Brain that Changes Itself: hopeful book on the science of neuroplasticity https://memex.craphound.com/2009/06/10/the-brain-that-changes-itself-hopeful-book-on-the-science-of-neuroplasticity/

#10yrsago National anti-censorship orgs protest cancellation of Little Brother summer reading program https://ncac.org/incident/little-brother-pensacola

#10yrsago Piketty’s inherited-wealth dystopia: private capital millionaires multiply https://www.bbc.com/news/business-27774753

#10yrsago How Heinlein went from socialist to right-wing libertarian https://newrepublic.com/article/118048/william-pattersons-robert-heinlein-biography-hagiography

#10yrsago Whistleblower org says it will go to jail rather than turning over its keys https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/to-defeat-encryption-feds-deploy-the-subpoena/

#10yrsago Texas school bans sunscreen because a child might drink it https://web.archive.org/web/20140608074518/http://www.keyetv.com/news/features/top-stories/stories/san-antonioarea-school-district-do-not-bring-sunscreen-school-18590.shtml

#10yrsago Small town sheriff buys tank: “the United States of America has become a war zone” https://www.indystar.com/story/news/2014/06/07/police-officer-safety-surplus-zeal-military-equipment-spurs-debate-mrap-military-vehicle/10170225/

#5yrsago A grandmother is suing the TSA for strip searching her to get a look at her panty liner, on Mother’s Day https://professional-troublemaker.com/2019/06/06/tsa-strip-searches-grandmother-on-mothers-day-for-over-feminine-hygiene-product-gets-sued/

#5yrsago A trove of leaks show that Brazil’s “anti-corruption” task force was secretly trying to oust Lula and install a far-right strongman https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/brazil-archive-operation-car-wash/

#5yrsago Americans are too poor to survive whether or not they’re working https://eand.co/half-of-americans-are-effectively-poor-now-what-the-c944c518db6a

#5yrsago Competition can fix Big Tech, but only if we don’t make “bigness” a legal requirement https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/06/06/regulating-big-tech-makes-them-stronger-so-they-need-competition-instead?fsrc=gp_en?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/regulatingbigtechmakesthemstrongersotheyneedcompetitioninsteadopenvoices

#5yrsago Weekend SIM-swapping blitz targets US cryptocurrency holders https://www.zdnet.com/article/wave-of-sim-swapping-attacks-hit-us-cryptocurrency-users/

#5yrsago The NRA begs gun nuts for donations, spends lavishly on its board of directors and execs https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/nra-money-flowed-to-board-members-amid-allegedly-lavish-spending-by-top-officials-and-vendors/2019/06/09/3eafe160-8186-11e9-9a67-a687ca99fb3d_story.html

#5yrsago On Grenfell’s second anniversary, 60,000 Britons are still living in firetraps clad in the same deadly, decorative materials https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/grenfell-tower-fire-material-high-rise-buildings-flat-block-a8946276.html

#1yrago Links, dumped https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/10/in-the-dumps-2/#do-the-humpty-dump