About the Senate Vote Against Every Change to Gun Control Laws

“The next few weeks represent a once in a generation opportunity to harden the nation’s gun laws” said a New York Times edit a month after the killings at the Sandy Hook school in Connecticut. “With the deaths of Newtown’s children still so fresh, the public will be repulsed by lawmakers who stand aside and do nothing”.

We were not so optimistic. On this page in December we had said, “Who can say whether the passage of months will again — as it always has — erode resolve and see the nation’s leaders drift away from action, if not by the President, then by a Congress that did nothing even when one of their own was shot”, referring to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

"Drift away" turned out to be the inapt term, but the result was the same. The Senate voted to scuttle every proposed gun reform — a ban on assault weapons, a prohibition against magazines exceeding ten rounds, and the one measure that seemed possible, expanding background checks — following the rules of our new form of democracy that requires a super-majority for anything to change, and is ruled by a special interest group that can trump the desires of 90% of the public, that being the overwhelming majority of the public that in polling wanted background checks for all gun buyers. So after the horror of Newtown, and before that Aurora and Virginia Tech and Columbine, absolutely nothing will have changed, leaving us to await the next school massacre.

Is this what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they wrote "Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings"? Did they really have in mind that democracy only begins at a 60% vote threshold, and, short of that, the majority is to be thwarted and the minority is to rule?

As for background checks, we are left with the illogic that those who buy a weapon in a gun store will have their backgrounds looked into, but the other 40% — among whom are criminals and the mentally disturbed — can execute an end run to buy at a gun show, where no one checks anything more than for a valid credit card.

Half the households in America are the quiet owners of some 300 million firearms, but it is the highly vocal NRA, with only 4.5 million members, that wins media attention. Its chief spokesman, Wayne LaPierre, has tirelessly waged a campaign of fear, describing this country as a violent dystopia, warning us of “Hurricanes. Riots. Terrorists. Lone criminals. It’s not paranoia to buy a gun. It’s survival”. “It must be terrifying to be Wayne LaPierre”, wrote Alex Seitz-Wald at Salon.com.

He has a particular animus toward President Obama, declaring this past election “the most dangerous … in our lifetime”. Time magazine reports him at rallies saying, “That lying, conniving Obama crowd can kiss our Constitution!”. In a speech at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) he said, “All that first-term lip service to gun owners is part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment during his second term”.

That the government is the enemy is what the NRA “ginned up”, to use President Obama’s words. Several took up this theme. Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News analyst, said on one of the channel’s blogs, “the Second Amendment was not written in order to protect your right to shoot deer, it was written to protect your right to shoot tyrants if they take over the government”. In defense of assault rifles he wrote in the Washington Times that the Second Amendment “protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon us.” Even longtime Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley is taken in by this meme: “When the universal background checks don’t work, then registration will be proposed to enforce them. And when that doesn’t work, because criminals won’t register their guns, we may be looking at confiscation”. No one in government has made any move toward or spoken of confiscation. None of the proposed laws take guns out of circulation. Yet that phobia was the basis for Grassley’s voting in committee against a bill calling for background checks.

And that is the lurking fear of many gun advocates — that civil unrest caused by joblessness and income disparity, say, could bring the increasingly militarized police forces of the country or the military itself into our streets to crush civilian uprisings. "The principle underlying the Second Amendment is resistance to federal tyranny," says David Kopel of the Cato Institute. "The weapons that would be most suited to overthrow a dictatorial federal government would, of course, be weapons of war, and not sports equipment".

It is this paranoia that has sent thousands to the sales counters of gun shops across the country, right after Obama was first elected and with a huge uptick after Sandy Hook. Sales are booming. Gun manufacturer Mossberg is running three shifts a day. That distrust of government, mixed with anger that now even presidents can be black, has also led to a huge swelling of gun-toting hate groups in the U.S. In its census a year ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that, “from 149 groups in 2008, the number of Patriot organizations skyrocketed to 512 in 2009, shot up again in 2010 to 824, and then, last year, jumped to 1,274”.

The NRA and gun proponents militate for their perceived rights behind a barricade of a revised Second Amendment. Before the NRA began campaigning three decades ago, the interpretation of the amendment
“was a settled question, and the overwhelming consensus, bordering on unanimity, was that the Second Amendment granted a collective right”, not an individual right, to bear arms, Carl Bogus, a professor who served as editor of “The Second Amendment in Law and History”, tells us. It wasn’t even debated. A Washington Post article cites research by Robert Spitzer of the State University of New York that unearthed only 11 articles on the subject in law journals between 1911 and 1959, all of which voiced the prevailing view that the amendment referred to “citizen service in a government-organized and -regulated militia”, and that despite enactment at the midpoint in 1934 of the National Firearms Act, which apparently caused little stirring of a contrarian opinion. By the ‘90s, Spitzer counted 87 in that decade alone, most taking the new individual right position.

Which makes it remarkable that the NRA could have turned this about to such a degree that the Supreme Court in 2008’s District of Columbia v. Heller would rewrite all precedent. In his majority opinion Justice Antonin Scalia said, “The second amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm, unconnected with service in a militia”.

That view has become the norm. Politicians routinely speak of “protecting our Second Amendment rights”, meaning the right of individuals to bear arms. Even the president says this, and in states around the country laws are being re-written to permit open carry of guns.

Pushing the NRA to extremes is yet another group, Gun Owners of America, with only 300,000 members. They were encouraged to flood Coburn’s inbox with e-mail, and that purportedly caused Coburn to wimp out of the deal with Schumer. Yet here we see a senator caving in to a tiny sliver of malcontents so over the edge that they lobby to eliminate gun-free school zones, want no restriction on gun issuance to veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, and are working to get rid of background checks altogether. (By February, the FBI had denied 72,659 attempted gun purchases under the background check system; half had criminal records).

It is pretty much settled that Americans will be allowed to own guns. What should bother all Americans, however, is that the NRA’s absolutist stance has made for a perversion of the democracy that the organization presumably believes it defends. With its refusal to compromise and its threats to campaign against any Congress member who dares break ranks, it is the NRA that has created a tyranny. Their policy is to force their rules — all of them — on the country. The rest of the public is to have no say whatever.