E.J. Dionne: Obama takes on extremism on guns – The Washington Post

Obama’s proposals are moderation incarnate. By international standards, they are very cautious. The president did not call for registering all guns or confiscating assault weapons. He strongly endorsed the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment right to bear arms. He is operating within a broad consensus about what is possible and what can work.

An assault-weapons ban received 38 Republican votes in the House in 1994 and is backed by 58 percent of Americans, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll. Were those Republicans outside the mainstream? And what about that 58 percent of Americans? The poll also found that 65 percent favored a ban on high-capacity magazines, another part of the Obama plan, and 86 percent favored closing the gun-show loophole, part of the effort to make sure there are background checks for all gun purchases. …

“Enough,” Obama declared, insisting that change would come only “if the American people demand it.”

Will we?

E.J. Dionne: Obama takes on extremism on guns – The Washington Post

Obama Calls On Each And Every American To Stand Up To The NRA | ThinkProgress

“There will be pundits and politicians and special interest lobbyists, publicly warning of a tyrannical all-out assault on liberty” to “gin up fear or higher ratings or revenue for themselves.” Obama said that Americans have a responsibility to fight back against such smear campaigns…

“The only way we will be able to change is if their audience, their constituents, their membership says, this time must be different, that this time we must do something to protect our communities and our kids.” — President Obama

Obama Calls On Each And Every American To Stand Up To The NRA | ThinkProgress

The NRA pretends to represent gun owners. It does not. The NRA represents gun sellers. It’s real constituents grow rich off the fears and anger of consumers who rush to push money into the sellers’ hands. When the NRA wants more money, it talks more about the threat to the god-given rights blah blah blah. If you’re buying what they’re selling, you’re a simple fool — the perfect customer.

When guys who wipe their asses with $100-bills use the word “elitist,” it’s just bullshit. The NRA is a pusher and gun-fuckers are its junkies.

Scathing NRA commercial calls Obama ‘elitist hypocrite’ – NY Daily News

The powerful gun lobby released a highly-personal commercial calling the commander-in-chief an “elitist hypocrite” because his girls get armed Secret Service protection.

The NRA commercial was unveiled as President Obama prepared Wednesday to outline new gun control legislation.

Scathing NRA commercial calls Obama ‘elitist hypocrite’ – NY Daily News

The solution to gun violence is clear « Fareed Zakaria

In fact, the problem is not complex, and the solution is blindingly obvious. …

For most crimes — theft, burglary, robbery, assault — the United States is within the range of other advanced countries. The category in which the U.S. rate is magnitudes higher is gun homicides.

The U.S. gun homicide rate is 30 times that of France or Australia, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, and 12 times higher than the average for other developed countries.

So what explains this difference? If psychology is the main cause, we should have 12 times as many psychologically disturbed people. But we don’t. The United States could do better, but we take mental disorders seriously and invest more in this area than do many peer countries.

Is America’s popular culture the cause? This is highly unlikely, as largely the same culture exists in other rich countries. Youth in England and Wales, for example, are exposed to virtually identical cultural influences as in the United States. Yet the rate of gun homicide there is a tiny fraction of ours. The Japanese are at the cutting edge of the world of video games. Yet their gun homicide rate is close to zero! Why? Britain has tough gun laws. Japan has perhaps the tightest regulation of guns in the industrialized world.

The data in social science are rarely this clear. They strongly suggest that we have so much more gun violence than other countries because we have far more permissive laws than others regarding the sale and possession of guns. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has 50 percent of the guns.

There is clear evidence that tightening laws — even in highly individualistic countries with long traditions of gun ownership — can reduce gun violence. In Australia, after a 1996 ban on all automatic and semiautomatic weapons — a real ban, not like the one we enacted in 1994 with 600-plus exceptions — gun-related homicides dropped 59 percent over the next decade. The rate of suicide by firearm plummeted 65 percent. (Almost 20,000 Americans die each year using guns to commit suicide — a method that is much more successful than other forms of suicide.)

The solution to gun violence is clear « Fareed Zakaria

Richard Cohen: The debacle of gun control – The Washington Post, The Washington Post Published: January 14

All across the nation in recent days, political leaders have declared their intention to rein in guns, but all they have done actually is signal defeat. They have proposed this or that marginal program — something about magazines, something about bullets, something about background checks, something about assault rifles and maybe, just to be truly silly, something about mental health, as if the crazed shooter can be easily Rorschached. … All this and nothing about the core problem, which is handguns. They have remained out of bounds although they account for the vast majority of the 100,000 or so annual shootings — an astounding 1 million gun deaths since 1968. …

[T]he Second Amendment is more strictly interpreted than even the First. You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater, but you can bring a gun into it.

Richard Cohen: The debacle of gun control – The Washington Post

» Once, ‘Gun Nuts’ Had Good Point | ABQ Journal by Kathleen Parker

In one remarkable incident in May 1967, as recounted in The Atlantic by UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, 24 men and six women, all armed, ascended the California capitol steps, read a proclamation about gun rights and proceeded inside — with their guns, which was legal at the time.

Needless to say, conservatives, including then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, were suddenly very, very interested in gun control. That afternoon, Reagan told reporters there was “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”

The degree of one’s allegiance to principle apparently depends mainly on who is holding the gun. …

This still leaves open the loophole of private sales that do not require background checks, which President Obama wants to close. We will hear more about this in coming weeks, but the call meanwhile to ban assault weapons or limit magazines in the wake of the horrific mass murder of children and others at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut is hardly draconian. It won’t solve the problem of mentally disturbed people exacting weird justice from innocents, but it might limit the toll. Having to stop one’s rampage to reload rather breaks the spell, or so one would imagine.

One also imagines that the old Reagan would say there’s no reason a citizen needs an assault weapon or a magazine that can destroy dozens of people in minutes. He would certainly be correct and, in a sane world, possibly even electable.

» Once, ‘Gun Nuts’ Had Good Point | ABQ Journal