It's not about prohibiting gun sales to law abiding citizens

It’s about prohibiting the sale of guns to drug dealers, the mentally ill and those with criminal backgrounds. The City of New York, under the authority of Mayor Michael Bloomberg - not exactly a ‘liberal’ - has mounted an undercover investigation of just how easy it is for anybody to buy weapons the same as the Tucson shooter, Jared Loughner, used.

This is simply outrageous. This isn’t about hunting or personal home/business protection. This is all about the blatant big business of selling illegal guns to dangerous people who intend to use them to inflict death and injury … often upon innocent citizens who are simply in their way. Don’t let the NRA tell you differently. They are bought and paid for by the firearms industry.

This ‘buy’ was at a Phoenix, Arizona gunshow just two weeks after the Tucson shooting.

The investigators were able to conduct similar buys at gunshows - including Crossroads of the West - in Ohio, Tennesee and Nevada. Yes, Nevada. They’ll be back in Reno on February 26 and 27, 2011.

Gun sellers are skirting the law by selling weapons as ‘private citizens’. According to laws, you cannot sell a gun, as a private citizen, to a buyer if you know that buyer is a felon or drug abuser. That’s nice. But how can you know? Well, if the prospective buyer tells you straight out ….

Just two weeks after the tragic shooting in Tucson, Arizona, private investigators went to a gun show in Phoenix, Arizona — one of thousands of such shows that occur across the country every year — to test two basic questions:

How easy is it to buy a gun without a background check?

• Answer: In a matter of minutes, an investigator purchased a Glock 9 millimeter and two high capacity magazines, similar to the weapon used by Jared Loughner, without background checks.

And, would unlicensed sellers sell guns to people who said they probably could not pass a background check?

• Answer: Yes. An undercover investigator purchased two 9 millimeter pistols from two different sellers, even after the investigator told the sellers that “I probably couldn’t pass a background check.”

Private gun sales, like those at gun shows, occur with no background checks, and provide a dangerous loophole that fuels the interstate and international market for illegal guns. These loopholes in our system make it too easy for dangerous people to get their hands on guns.

You can also watch videos from the 2009 Gun Show Undercover Investigation where 19 of 30 private sellers - 63% - broke the law by completing a sale to a buyer who they thought could not pass a background check: http://www.gunshowundercover2009.org.

Join other rational Americans who would like to see this loophole closed, and put us on the path to a safer country.

Two shows to catch: Guns on NPR, supermarkets on CNBC

On NPR’s Fresh Air this afternoon:

The History and Browing Influence of the NRA

4:00 p.m. locally on KUNR. Check local times and listings.

The shootings in Tucson reopened a debate on one of the most contentious issues in American politics: gun control.

Political scientist Robert Spitzer says that, in the wake of the Tucson shootings, improving record-keeping to block sales to the mentally ill stands the best chance of moving forward — but we’re unlikely to see any other gun laws tighten.

“Similar events in the past have changed the calculus of how the government has responded to gun violence, but the political atmospherics of the first decade of the 20th century very much run against the idea that there will be any significant change in federal or state gun laws as a result of the Tucson shooting,” he tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, “even though there are some clear public policy changes [concerning gun control] that could be made that have or will be introduced into Congress soon and that most people seem to agree with.”

Spitzer, the author of the book The Politics of Gun Control, has written extensively about the history of the NRA, historical and current interpretations of the Second Amendment and the history of gun control laws.

Read more here ….

On CNBC, Tyler Mathisen has this piece that is so important to the weekly bottom line for our familes …

Supermarkets Wage War for Your Dollars

9:00 p.m. local time on cable. Check listings.

In every aisle of every supermarket, it’s the commercial equivalent of war.

The competition for the $1.5 billion a day Americans spend on groceries is cutthroat, with the battle playing out on the shelves in front of you. The stakes are so high because the profit margins are so low — 1.5 to 2 percent is typical.

In a typical supermarket, nearly 50,000 products fight for your attention: all those bottles, cans and boxes raising the same battle cry — “take me” — without saying a single word.

Every day, at virtually every one of the nation’s more than 35,000 stores, merchants employ a dizzying array of high- and low-tech tools in their struggle to grab a bigger share of the $500 billion spent every year at U.S. supermarkets.

When you enter a store today, you’re being watched, trailed, and analyzed, in ways you’d never imagine. From heat maps tracking which aisles you walk down, to video monitoring, to the loyalty card on your key chain, supermarkets use every method they can to learn as much as they can about you.

To wind up in your cart, every product has to communicate the right message.

Read more here …

You'll have to pry my cold, dead fingers from my T-shirt

I’ve just read another great editorial by Robert C. Koehler, Tribune Media Services, called ‘Guns That Talk’. As Koehler says, “it’s like truth or dare. And it’s legal.”

Isn’t it puzzling that guns outside an event where Obama is going to speak is alright, but a T-shirt message at a Bush event warranted getting taken away by the Secret Service. Do these same gun toters and their defenders remember that we’ve had four presidents and one presidential candidate assassinated, not to mention Gerald Ford staring down a would be assassin and James Brady taking a bullet for Reagan?

Even more disturbing are those who would not only defend this type of ‘free speech’ but encourage it. Yes, encourage it during some of the most heated summers of public discourse in recent memory. Free speech has taken on some curious meaning in these troubled times. I call it wildly irresponsible.

You have to ask ‘Why?’

Click to read more ...

Just a little research goes a very long way

Another one of ‘those’ emails came the other day. The “ohmygawdthey’regonnatakemygunsaway!” rants, and it had all the hallmarks of urban legend, but the well-meaningsender was guilty of a lack of due diligence,launching it to his usual blast list anyway.

The funny irony of this one was,not only did the mainstream sites, like Snopes.com and About.com: Urban Legends, say it was complete baloney, but I easily found a wealth of fringe Second Amendment sites that said exactly the same thing.

As usual, it took me less than five minutes to find this out. What I can’t understand is why friends, and in this case one who is retired law enforcement, couldn’t take the same deep breath before hitting the Foward button.

Here’s the email, so you’ll recognize it:

Click to read more ...

Broken only by gunfire: The silence of the gun rights crowd

Just a quick aside regarding the recent tragic shooting incident at the Holocaust Museum: that same day, I got another forwarded email from an aquaintance who worries a lot about the right to bear arms … lots of them, of any type.

Click to read more ...

When will we reach the tipping point on guns?

The following is a good post by Cenk Uygur, of the Young Turks:

How many shootings do there have to be in the news before we wonder about the wisdom of allowing just about anyone to get a gun in America? Our gun culture is completely out of control.

In just the last two days we have had 13 people killed in Binghamton, NY with a 9 mm and a .45-caliber, three police officers shot and killed in Pittsburgh with an assault rifle and two other guns, and a five children killed with a shotgun in Washington at the hands of their own father. How many will it take before we say enough is enough?

How about the eight people killed in a nursing home in North Carolina a couple of days before these shootings? How about the ten killed in Alabama a couple of weeks earlier? Is there any point when gun rights advocates would admit that we have too much gun violence in America? What will it take for them to acknowledge the most obvious thing in the world?

Of course, their answer is that we don’t have enough guns in the country. If we just allowed concealed weapons at schools, nursing homes, work, bars, airports and just about anywhere else you can imagine, then we would have less gun violence. Yes, maybe in bizzaro world, but in this world the more guns we have had in this country the more people have been shot … with guns.

The Washington case is a good example. Would that father really have been able to kill his four young daughters and his young son without a shotgun? Maybe, it’s happened before. But it would have been a hell of a lot harder and hell of a lot less likely. And what would have been the NRA alternative fix here - arm the kids?

I know it’s a political impossibility, but we need to reign in the permissive gun culture in America. I’ve gone to a shooting range several times. I get the allure of it. It’s fun and empowering. Until someone gets their head blown off. It’s madness that almost anyone can stroll into a Wal-Mart and walk out with a deadly weapon. Guns should be the hardest things to get in America, not the easiest.

So, will a sizeable group of politicians have the courage to step up and demand tighter regulations of firearms in this country after all of these shootings? Have we reached the tipping point? And if not, what will it take? How many more mass murders do we have to go through before we realize how crazy this is?

Cenk, it’s going to take a lot more apparently.

I have any number of friends here in Nevada who deeply believe that if everybody was ‘packing’ then the problem would be solved. This is, of course, merely justifying their own need or desire to have lots of weapons and addresses none of the realities of the easy availability of firearms in America.

I also think it’s self-delusional.

They also use the hoary old fall back position of guns being a part of the western American cultural zeitgeist, which comes about when you watch too many cowboy movies, and can’t tell the difference between John Wayne the actor and real life.

I don’t think any of these people have ever had to face the harsh realities of gun violence. I have.

My father was one of those who was always ‘packing’, as an ardent NRA member and true believer John Birch Society member. We had a small arsenal in the house when I was growing up. For years, I figured that if he pulled a gun on people enough times, he’d kill somebody. He did.

Rather than solve anything, it destroyed a lot.

These gun rights advocates should meet James Brady. I did. I can’t imagine not supporting the Brady Bill, and any bans on owning high powered assault weapons - that are in fact fueling the violence just over the border in Mexico - which will in time spill right over into our communities.

This is where the role of government and leadership is so important. We need government to tell the people who are not capable of stepping back and rationally seeing the facts for themselves, what they can and cannot do.

I do see a bit of change though. One of my gun owning, hunter friends did admit today that nobody needs to own an assault weapon. That was a big step for him, and he is disgusted with all this violence.

Again, it takes leadership - which American hasn’t had for quite some time.

maven

Update on Monday, April 6, 2009 at 22:19 by mavenandmeddler

I thought this quote from Bill Watterson to be particularly apt:

“Careful. We don’t want to learn from this.”