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Las Vegas rips apart the "good guy with a gun" justification, leaving only a flawed constitutional take to justify the madness
"As of this writing, the death toll in Las Vegas is 59, with over 527 injured, making it easily the deadliest gun massacre in modern U.S. history. (Characteristically, there have been some deadlier ones in the distant past, including in St. Louis in 1917 and Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873, but they're often left out of coverage because the victims were all black.)
According to some sources, this is the 338th mass shooting in 273 days of 2017, meaning America is now a place where at least once a day, someone shoots four or more people. After incidents like this, electing Donald Trump looks like a relatively minor symptom of our clearly worsening national insanity.
This latest window into our blood-sick culture may mark the end of an era. Las Vegas should push the gun lobby down to its last excuse, when it comes to justifying the marketing of military-grade weapons.
We're still in the "NRA has yet to respond" period of the story, a dependable trope in the weirdly inflexible script of these massacre tales. This "deafening NRA silence" period usually coincides with news from Wall Street showing sharp upticks in the share prices of arms manufacturers. (We've already seen this this week.)
Gun stocks always bounce in advance of surges in gun sales, which are driven by fears in prepper country of hardcore gun control legislation that, of course, never actually comes.
Such fears similarly always inspire periods of intense fundraising for pro-gun politicians and groups like the NRA. After the Sandy Hook massacre of 20 children, for instance, donations for the NRA went up 350 percent over the previous year. We'll surely see a similar surge after Las Vegas.
So the more horrifying the gun disaster, the more gun companies and gun lobbyists profit. From here the logic of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs comes violently into play. Aggressive, well-funded lobbying by an industry that claims a $49 billion impact to the national economy always trumps the relatively disorganized horror and revulsion of ordinary voters.
The dirty little secret here is that while politicians in both parties can score points with voters through verbal support for gun control, anti-gun voters tend not to punish them for not following all the way through.
George W. Bush is a classic example of a politician who had it both ways. He claimed moderate status on the issue by pledging to sign an extension of Bill Clinton's assault weapons ban if it passed Congress. But surprise, surprise, that bill never made it to his desk, and the ban expired in 2004.
Politicians tend to be very lucky when it comes to having to take brave public stands on gun issues. There are almost always just enough pro-gun converts in Congress to prevent gun control votes from having real meaning. Harry Reid, for instance, is a name Nevadans should be recalling this week, as he repeatedly aided the NRA in efforts to scuttle that same assault weapons ban.
Within the Beltway, everyone knows this game is mostly about money. The NRA, like the financial services industry or Big Pharma, is an easy source of campaign cash, and all politicians have to do to get it is master the art of selling purely commercial lobbying as heartfelt ideological advocacy.
This is relatively easy when we're talking about hunting rifles, gets dicier when the issue turns to concealed weapons, and then becomes an exercise in pure political whoring and pseudo-intellectualism once it comes to making up justifications for selling military-grade weapons to Internet shoppers..."
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-gun-lobby-is-down-to-its-last-unconvincing-excuse-w506851
"As of this writing, the death toll in Las Vegas is 59, with over 527 injured, making it easily the deadliest gun massacre in modern U.S. history. (Characteristically, there have been some deadlier ones in the distant past, including in St. Louis in 1917 and Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873, but they're often left out of coverage because the victims were all black.)
According to some sources, this is the 338th mass shooting in 273 days of 2017, meaning America is now a place where at least once a day, someone shoots four or more people. After incidents like this, electing Donald Trump looks like a relatively minor symptom of our clearly worsening national insanity.
This latest window into our blood-sick culture may mark the end of an era. Las Vegas should push the gun lobby down to its last excuse, when it comes to justifying the marketing of military-grade weapons.
We're still in the "NRA has yet to respond" period of the story, a dependable trope in the weirdly inflexible script of these massacre tales. This "deafening NRA silence" period usually coincides with news from Wall Street showing sharp upticks in the share prices of arms manufacturers. (We've already seen this this week.)
Gun stocks always bounce in advance of surges in gun sales, which are driven by fears in prepper country of hardcore gun control legislation that, of course, never actually comes.
Such fears similarly always inspire periods of intense fundraising for pro-gun politicians and groups like the NRA. After the Sandy Hook massacre of 20 children, for instance, donations for the NRA went up 350 percent over the previous year. We'll surely see a similar surge after Las Vegas.
So the more horrifying the gun disaster, the more gun companies and gun lobbyists profit. From here the logic of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs comes violently into play. Aggressive, well-funded lobbying by an industry that claims a $49 billion impact to the national economy always trumps the relatively disorganized horror and revulsion of ordinary voters.
The dirty little secret here is that while politicians in both parties can score points with voters through verbal support for gun control, anti-gun voters tend not to punish them for not following all the way through.
George W. Bush is a classic example of a politician who had it both ways. He claimed moderate status on the issue by pledging to sign an extension of Bill Clinton's assault weapons ban if it passed Congress. But surprise, surprise, that bill never made it to his desk, and the ban expired in 2004.
Politicians tend to be very lucky when it comes to having to take brave public stands on gun issues. There are almost always just enough pro-gun converts in Congress to prevent gun control votes from having real meaning. Harry Reid, for instance, is a name Nevadans should be recalling this week, as he repeatedly aided the NRA in efforts to scuttle that same assault weapons ban.
Within the Beltway, everyone knows this game is mostly about money. The NRA, like the financial services industry or Big Pharma, is an easy source of campaign cash, and all politicians have to do to get it is master the art of selling purely commercial lobbying as heartfelt ideological advocacy.
This is relatively easy when we're talking about hunting rifles, gets dicier when the issue turns to concealed weapons, and then becomes an exercise in pure political whoring and pseudo-intellectualism once it comes to making up justifications for selling military-grade weapons to Internet shoppers..."
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-gun-lobby-is-down-to-its-last-unconvincing-excuse-w506851
