Tag Archives: guns

A Primal Scream

Notice: I was interviewed for a podcast (“What the Gerrymander”) that will drop at midnight tonight. You can find it here, if interested: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-the-gerrymander/id1668429440

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Wanda Sykes has the ability to be both funny and a dead-on critic of social insanity. A recent quip making the rounds on social media will illustrate: “Until a drag queen walks into a school and beats eight kids to death with a copy of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ I think you’re focusing on the wrong shit.”

The quote perfectly encapsulates what frustrates and angers the vast majority of Americans– people posturing as “pro life” and insisting that their censorship and homophobia are intended to “protect children,” while adamantly opposing rational gun regulation.

The priorities of the Right don’t just seem incompatible to most of us, they increasingly seem incomprehensible. But a book I recently read, suggested by a commenter to this blog, gave me a better understanding of the context of today’s culture wars and those who fight them. It was Stephen Prothero’s Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars (Even When They Lose Elections).

Prothero filled in some details of U.S. history that I’d previously missed. For example, I knew that Thomas Jefferson was criticized for his departures from orthodox Christianity, but I had not previously understood how incredibly widespread and vicious that criticism was. As a member of a marginalized minority, I was aware that American Catholics had also been subjected to significant discrimination–but I had no idea of the extent and duration of America’s anti-Catholicism. A colleague who studied Mormon history had clued me in about anti-Mormonism, but–again–I had been unaware of the extent of the cultural animus focused on Mormons.

These and other revelations really did provide a context–and predicted outcome– for our current cultural battles.

As Prothero points out, it is almost fore-ordained that the “liberal” side (the forces militating for inclusion and acceptance–i.e., the “woke” side) will win such conflicts. That’s because these “wars” only begin when the people waging them realize they are already close to losing–that the social environment is already significantly changed from the certainties with which they are comfortable, and within which they are privileged.

For some number of Americans, that loss is terrifying and unsupportable.

In analyzing partisan jockeying for the upcoming election, Jennifer Rubin identified  positions being taken by the GOP–on abortion, guns, and LGBTQ+– issues that clearly repel a majority of Americans, and explained that “Voters enthralled with turning politics into primal scream therapy don’t much care about a viable agenda or electability.”

Bingo!

Together, Rubin and Prothero explained what I previously found incomprehensible. For those of us who expect rational behavior by partisans engaged in an electoral contest, the recent trajectory of the Republican party has been mystifying. After all, it isn’t that Republican strategists don’t know that abortion bans, for instance, are costing them elections; as a recent Roll Call article reported.

The generic ballot has shifted toward Democrats, with Republicans losing ground among independents on the abortion issue, according to a new polling memo from a GOP firm that fell into Democratic hands.

“There has been a 6 point swing in the last year on the Generic Senate ballot from R+3 to D+3. This movement is [led] overwhelmingly by Independent and NEW voters that identify abortion as one of their top issues,” according to a “National Issue Study” by co/efficient, which was in the news recently as one of the pollsters for Kentucky Republican gubernatorial nominee Daniel Cameron.

The poll, conducted April 20-24, had similar findings on the House side. “There has been a 10 point swing in the last year on the Generic House Ballot from R+6 to D+4. This movement is [led] overwhelmingly by Independent and NEW voters that identify abortion as one of their top issues,” it said on slide seven. “Reproductive Freedom is the #1 issue among those that DID NOT vote in 2020.”

Other polling has confirmed the negative response of voters to efforts to demonize drag queens, attack trans youth, censor books and turn librarians into felons. These are not rational policy positions for a political party aiming to win elections. Given sufficiently large turnout by opposition voters, not even extreme gerrymandering and the Electoral College can save GOP control.

Prothero’s book, Sykes’ quip, and Rubin’s observation all point to the same conclusion. As Prothero put it, America’s intermittent culture wars only begin when the warriors realize they are on the cusp of losing.

What we are experiencing right now is their “primal scream.”

“Woke” folks will win the culture. The danger, however, is the considerable harm that will be done in the meantime in places like Indiana where Republicans pandering to the screamers remain in power.

Absent massive turnout by Democrats, independents and new voters, rational Americans can still lose the vote.

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Let’s Talk About Federalism

Ah, federalism! In the abstract, “laboratories of democracy” and a component of those “checks and balances” the Founders established.

Two hundred plus years later, a mess.

Very few students came into my classes with an understanding of the term or the multiple and often confusing ways in which federalism operates in the 21st Century. (That confusion was clearly shared by the author of a recent Washington Post essay who didn’t seem to understand when state-level prosecutors like Bragg can charge violations of both state and federal laws in a single prosecution. In all fairness, however–as I so often told my students– it depends, and it’s complicated.)

Actually, in addition to gerrymandering, the Electoral College, the filibuster, and the number/ terms of Supreme Court Justices, it’s also past time to revisit and revise the divisions of authority between state and federal governments.

Our relatively strong federal government was founded in reaction to the serious and multiple problems the country experienced under the Articles of Confederation, which gave states far too much authority.  In recent years, however, we seem to have forgotten about the very negative consequences of government fragmentation that prompted the Founders to establish a strong central government.

Obviously, not all policies need to be nationally uniform–there are plenty of areas where local control is appropriate. However, questions about who is entitled to fundamental rights–and what those rights are–isn’t one of them, as the patchwork of approaches to reproductive freedom that’s emerging is likely to demonstrate. Forcefully.

The (belated) application of the Bill of Rights to state and local governments was meant to establish a floor–to ensure that a citizen moving from say, New York to Indiana, would not thereby experience a reduction of her fundamental rights as an American citizen. Justice Alito’s evisceration of the substantive due process clause is–among other incredibly negative things– a step back toward the fragmentation of the Articles of Confederation.

The need for substantial national uniformity isn’t confined to civil liberties. Over the 200+ years of American statehood, the need to rationalize and unify large areas of the law gave rise to the work of the Uniform Law Commission; that body developed the Uniform Commercial Code– a comprehensive set of laws governing all commercial transactions in the United States. It has national application, but it isn’t a federal law–it had to be adopted by each state’s legislature.

As the Commission’s website explains,

Uniformity of law is essential in this area for the interstate transaction of business. Because the UCC has been universally adopted, businesses can enter into contracts with confidence that the terms will be enforced in the same way by the courts of every American jurisdiction. The resulting certainty of business relationships allows businesses to grow and the American economy to thrive.

Commerce is hardly the only area where uniformity is desirable and/or necessary. Federal action in the face of a pandemic would certainly seem to qualify, and before the incompetence and massive ignorance of the Trump administration, the federal government largely directed public health responses to threatened outbreaks.  A lot of people died as a result of Trump’s decision to leave COVID response to the states.

I won’t even address the insanity of leaving gun laws to the states in a country as mobile as the U.S.

Then there’s the environment. ( Air and water don’t stay in Indiana.)

The Indiana Capital Chronicle recently reported on efforts by Indiana lawmakers to give the General Assembly power over decisions that are currently left to state agencies  staffed with experts who implement state and federal environmental laws— a move that  would put Hoosiers’ health and environment in jeopardy.

A sweeping, 54-page amendment was added last week to the administrative rulemaking bill, which additionally seeks to put lawmakers in charge of new pesticide regulations and prevent state environmental regulators from making stricter coal ash rules than federal ones.

Indiana’s legislators already believe they know more than doctors; now they think they’re experts in environmental science. Given their consistent subservience to the state’s utilities, passage of this bill would be a huge step backwards.

No serious student of governance believes that, in a country as large and diverse as the United States, all decisions should be made at the federal level. The question with which we should be grappling is “which responsibilities are properly federal and which matters are properly left to state or local governments?” .

What laws need to be uniform if we are to be the United States of America, rather than a haphazard collection of Red and Blue fiefdoms?

I’m willing to leave zoning decisions up to local municipalities, and a substantial portion of criminal justice measures up to the states. When it comes to guns, the environment or fundamental rights, not so much…

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Choices

I recently came across a Facebook post that perfectly summed up America’s continuing failure to make sane public policy consistent with the country’s founding premises. It pointed to the absurdity of far-right definitions of “freedom”:

You can regulate a human body, but not a coal plant. You can regulate the speech of a teacher, but not the money-as-speech of a corporation. You can coerce a child to pray in school, but not keep guns out of the classroom.

“You” are American lawmakers.

The post attributed these truly insane results to the Supreme Court, and the Court certainly deserves a considerable part of the blame, but so do the lawmakers who play to–or are part of–  the Rightwing fringe.

The Indiana legislature is a good example. In the wake of the Dobbs decision, our legislative overlords took hardly any time to ban abortion, but has struggled–and frequently failed– to regulate environmental hazards. The state has the most miles of rivers and streams too polluted to swim in, and we also lead the country in toxic emissions, among other deficiencies. The legislature’s focus on culture war issues routinely takes precedence over concerns for  public health, and lawmakers’ concern for the rights of farmers and utilities just as routinely outweighs concerns about the environment.

Our Hoosier lawmakers have a long history of telling teachers what to do–from older efforts aimed at prescribing how they should teach reading to periodic instructions about “character” education, to the more recent efforts to keep them from teaching about the less laudatory parts of our history or recognizing the existence of LGBTQ citizens. These persistent efforts have not been matched by efforts to restrain the influence of corporate dollars.

And don’t even start me on the Indiana General Assembly and guns. The pious hypocrites who continually try to shoehorn God into public school classrooms–and  failing that (due to that pesky First Amendment Establishment Clause) support the vouchers that siphon money from Indiana’s public schools and send them to private religious schools–continue to make firearms more easily available, most recently by ignoring law enforcement testimony and public opinion and eliminating the need to obtain a permit.

The hypocrisy is overwhelming.

The same “freedom fighters” who were outraged by mask mandates during the pandemic see no inconsistency with mandates to carry a pregnancy to term. They claim the “God-given right” to be free of a minor inconvenience that would protect their friends and neighbors, but are perfectly willing to interfere with medical science and the bodily autonomy of women.

Lawmakers who are solicitous about protecting factory farms from “onerous” regulation show considerably less concern about protecting the environment and the health of their constituents, despite evidence that those farms are massive polluters.To focus on just one element of that pollution, researchers tell us that industrial livestock farms produce up to 1.37 billion tons of manure annually—and that that’s 20 times more fecal waste than the entire U.S. human population, posing serious pollution risks to water and air.

The Indiana lawmakers who insist upon protecting the untrammeled, unimpeded right to own guns–including weapons more appropriate for war than personal protection–are blithely unconcerned with the havoc and death those weapons cause.

IN AN AVERAGE YEAR, 931 PEOPLE DIE BY GUNS IN INDIANA. WITH A RATE OF 14 DEATHS PER 100,000 PEOPLE, INDIANA HAS THE 19TH-HIGHEST RATE OF GUN DEATHS IN THE US.

In Indiana, 61% of gun deaths are suicides and 36% are homicides. This is compared to 61% and 36% respectively, nationwide.

The rate of gun deaths in Indiana increased 30%↑ from 2009 to 2018, compared to an 18%↑ increase over this same time period nationwide. In Indiana, the rate of gun suicide increased 24%↑ and gun homicide increased 49%↑ from 2009 to 2018, compared to a 19%↑ increase and an 18%↑ increase nationwide, respectively.

Across the nation, deadly attacks on schoolchildren are accelerating. The same legislators who are willing to tell education professionals how to teach and what to say remain unwilling to require even minimal background checks as a condition of buying the lethal weapons increasingly used to mow down the children in those classrooms.

There are, obviously, many other examples of misplaced legislative zeal.

The basic question citizens need to confront is: what is government for? What sorts of rules should government have the authority to impose, and what matters are properly left to each individual?

Our system was founded on the principle that Individuals should be free to pursue their own ends–their own life goals–so long as they did not thereby harm the person or property of someone else, and so long as they were willing to accord an equal liberty to their fellow citizens.

Hoosier lawmakers continue to get it backwards.

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Indiana Legislators Don’t Care What You Want…Or Don’t

The Indiana Capital Chronicle is one of a handful of new media sites trying to fill the dangerous void in news about local and state government. (As I frequently complain on this site, so-called “legacy media” like the Indianapolis Star have emptied their newsrooms of reporters as they’ve focused on cutting costs at the expense of real journalism. The result has been a news desert when it comes to informing citizens about their state and local governments.)

A recent column in The Capital Chronicle focused on what is perhaps the most annoying characteristic of Indiana’s General Assembly–its pursuit of legislation untethered to the needs or desires of Hoosier constituents.

As the columnist began;

My Christmas wish is pretty simple: I would like lawmakers to listen to what Hoosiers want. ALL Hoosiers, not just the loudest slice of their Republican constituents.

Poll after poll and survey after survey shows what Indiana residents are worried about, and what they aren’t.

Bellwether Research’s latest poll in early December surveyed 1,100 Hoosiers representing both the demographic and geographic layout of Indiana. It asked about their top priorities.

Wishes one and two were lowering health care costs and affordable housing, at 31% and 21% respectively….Next up was increasing K-12 education funding at 17%. Nothing after is in double digits

As Hoosier lawmakers prepare for the upcoming session, however, they are signaling their preoccupation with culture-war issues. Some are focusing on restricting dissemination of abortion pills through the mail; according to the polling, exactly 3% of Hoosiers care about restricting access to mailed abortion pills. (Quite the contrary: according to the article, the GOP’s own internal polling reveals that a solid majority supports abortion rights, and a survey by Ball State found that 56% of Hoosiers believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.)

That poll also found that 56% of Hoosiers believe marijuana should be legal for personal use and 29% for medicinal purposes. Only 15% say it should not be legal…

Surveys also find only 6% of Hoosiers making oversight of K-12 curriculum a top concern, but the “usual suspects” in the Indiana Statehouse are busy preparing bills to combat “critical race theory,” which is not only not being taught, but is a rather rarified field of research into American legal systems pursued by a subset of law professors. Use of the terminology is not only inaccurate, it is intentionally misleading–a none-too-subtle “dog whistle” to White supremicists who want teachers to ignore certain aspects of the national story.

And of course, it wouldn’t be Indiana if our legislature failed to pick on LGBTQ Hoosiers. House Education Chairman Robert Behning has promised introduction of a “don’t say gay” bill–demonstrating that Indiana lawmakers aren’t intimidated by that pesky court ruling that found Florida’s “Don’t say gay” bill unconstitutional.

Most lawmakers send out constituent surveys on hot topics that they know will be coming up. They are clearly less scientific than the polls I have mentioned but even when legislators directly hear from their most engaged constituents they ignore the results.

Remember gun licensing from earlier this year? Not a single survey — that journalists could find — supported abandoning the carry permit. In fact they almost all said to keep the system as-is. But legislators tossed the licensing out with the bathwater — against advice of the Indiana State Police superintendent and the majority of law enforcement groups.

Growing up I was always told, “be careful what you ask for.” It seems lately the phrase for Hoosiers should shift to, “be careful what you DON’T ask for,” because you are increasingly more likely to get it.

The disconnect between what Hoosiers want and what we get from our lawmakers is a direct result of gerrymandering that produces safe seats and allow lawmakers to ignore the policy preferences of a majority of Indiana citizens.

Gerrymandering, after all, is the very best voter suppression tactic. Why bother to vote when the result has been foreordained–or, to use Trump language, when the election has been rigged? Gerrymandering amplifies the power of the fringes–the ideologues and culture warriors who vote in primaries–and effectively disenfranchises the rest of us.

Reporting on the antics at the Statehouse is one of the very few checks on lawmakers bent on pursing their own cultural fixations, and central Indiana has been ill-served by the Star’s devolution into sports and what has been called the “beer beat”–reports on new watering holes. That makes the arrival of the Indiana Capital Chronicle very welcome. The Chronicle describes itself as an “independent, nonprofit news organization dedicated to giving Hoosiers a comprehensive look inside state government, policy and elections.”

It’s probably wishful thinking, but perhaps a “comprehensive look” at what Harrison Ullmann dubbed the World’s Worst Legislature will trigger efforts at reform….

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What Now For Gun Control?

Congress appears to be on the cusp of passing a gun-control measure, breaking a 30-year standoff. The bill takes baby steps toward the sort of gun measures that would meaningfully reduce the carnage, but the fact that Congress is passing anything  must be applauded as progress.

Of course, whether those baby steps will survive the horrendous, twisted logic of the Supreme Court’s recent evisceration of government’s ability to control armed mayhem remains to be seen.

Given that astonishing and dishonest opinion, what can be done?  

As a recent article from Talking Points Memo reminds us, it’s always, ultimately about the culture– and cultures are shaped by prevailing narratives.

An object, cloaked in an aura of glamor and cool, is, or at least feels, ubiquitous in American society. The object is a clear threat to public health — though that fact often gets eclipsed by arguments emphasizing the rights of those who like to use the object. Powerful, monied and well-connected special interest groups stand behind the object, and work fervently to thwart regulation and restrictions on it. 

Today, that object is a gun. In our recent past, it was a cigarette. 

Most readers of this blog remember when cigarette smoke was everywhere. We encountered it on airplanes, in bars and restaurants, and in our offices. The federal government was loathe to act; the FDA didn’t even get authority to regulate tobacco until 2009.

So–if government didn’t drive the change, what explains the anti-cigarette movement’s incredible success? In 2020, the most recent year for which the Centers for Disease Control provides data, 12.5 percent of Americans over the age of 18 smoked. In 1965, it was 42.4 percent.

That’s a pretty impressive victory. The question is, can we use the tactics that were so successful against Big Tobacco to get meaningful gun control, especially since the Court has evidently all but neutered government? 

Gun owners are in the minority. Smokers were also a minority — but, as the article notes, they were a powerful minority.

“In the 20th century, the smokingest segments of Americans were white men; now, the most gun owningest segments of Americans are white men,” Sarah Milov, associate history professor at the University of Virginia and author of “The Cigarette: A Political History,” told TPM. “The consequence of that for non-gun owning Americans is that they live in a world where public space is governed by the political demands and practices of what is truly a minority.”

The gun and cigarette lobbies spent millions obscuring that fact, presenting guns and cigarettes as foundational and ubiquitous parts of American life. Resistance to them, then, is futile — even unpatriotic.

The anti-smoking campaign changed attitudes about smoking in public places. They countered arguments about smokers’ rights by focusing on the harm to those unable to avoid second-hand smoke. When Big Tobacco fought no smoking rules for bars and restaurants, arguing that customers who didn’t like smoky venues could go elsewhere, activists pointed out that workers in those establishments had no such choice.

Experts think there are lessons to outsource to the fight for gun regulation: the anti-tobacco movement was coalitional, with outposts in every state; activists quickly realized the power of changing the narrative and stigma around public smoking, and of centering the rights of nonsmokers being harmed by cigarette smoke; instead of despairing at Congress’ coziness with big tobacco, they took the fight to local government. 

Even before the Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen,  ALEC had made it impossible to enlist most local governments in the movement to control weapons; a majority of states have so-called “pre-emption” statutes drafted by ALEC, preventing local governments from regulating firearms and ammunition.

The gun industry also benefits from a seriously devoted fan base. Many — though far from all — gun owners see their firearms as more than a recreational tool or even a means of self defense. The cult of the gun has grown so powerful that some owners consider it a part of their identity: shorthand for individualism and freedom, for triggering the libs and intimidating a federal government that supposedly wants to change their way of life. 

Even the tobacco industry’s biggest customers largely lacked that fervor.

Despite these considerable disadvantages, gun control advocates can begin to change the narrative from the NRA’s emphasis on gun owners’ rights. We can form coalitions emphasizing the rights of the rest of us–a clear majority– not to be shot and not to live in constant fear for ourselves and our children.

It took a long time to change the culture around smoking, but when the narrative changed, so did the culture– and when the culture changes, so (eventually) do the laws–and even Supreme Court opinions. 

Speaking of changes, tomorrow I’ll consider the radicalization of the Court…

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