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l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 1 by Jed Babbin
The Newtown, Connecticut massacre of children has changed the gun control
debate to an extent no other event has in decades. One of the reasons it has
had such an effect is that it came at the time when liberals are at the
height of their power and conservatives — and Republicans — are at their
lowest ebb. It also came at a time when the maneuvers between House Speaker
John Boehner and President Obama over solving the “fiscal cliff” crisis
fell apart, leaving Boehner severely weakened.
The Newtown children hadn’t even been buried before the usual gun control
liberals were demanding another “assault weapons” ban. California Democrat
Sen. Dianne Feinstein hit the Sunday shows two days after the massacre
advancing a new version of the ban she’d authored in 1994. Chuckie Schumer,
Nanny Bloomberg, and the rest were up in verbal arms, demanding that DiFi’
s approach — or something more restrictive — be adopted forthwith. Nancy
Pelosi wanted the House to pass immediately a ban on magazines holding more
than ten rounds.
And with Republicans on the ropes, President Obama was hitting hard. Obama
quite evidently wants us to go over the fiscal cliff, and has maneuvered
around Boehner in the manner of Muhammad Ali: he’s floating like a
butterfly and stinging like a bee. Obama tasked Vice President Biden to head
up a new gun violence task force, which — as Obama said in the
announcement — would be reporting its demand for an “assault weapons” ban
among other things, such as more funding for mental health programs.
But Biden’s task force isn’t going to study gun violence. Obama announced
what he wanted in the report and demanded it be delivered in January. His
timing is another political master stroke: Obama is bringing the gun “
crisis” to a head at the same time that the financial crisis will impose
higher taxes across every sector of the economy and the government will —
just like it did in 2011 — hit the ceiling on federal debt.
By engineering the gun debate so that it will come to fever pitch at the
same time as the economic mess, Obama is counting on the strategy that has
worked for him before. If you have enough tumult and if the media are in
full cry in support of your agenda, your opponents will be demonized and
rendered powerless to stop what you want to do.
Here we have three “crises” — all of which deserve cautious
Constitutional solutions — that will be “solved” only by liberal
proposals when Obama invokes his tried and true “we can’t wait” tactic.
By saying we can’t wait for tax hikes or a debt ceiling increase or gun
control — all at the same time — Obama will be able to get a series of
legislation that, in the immortal words of then-Speaker Pelosi, we’ll have
to have Congress pass so we can then find out what’s in them.
The Republicans — the New York Jets of politics — are in such disarray
that they’ll probably get beaten on all three issues.
What the Republicans should do — and, of course, aren’t doing — is to
form their own gun violence task force. With five or six members drawn from
the House and an equal number from the Senate, they could come up with an
anti-violence agenda that would actually deal with the problem. How about
some stringent measures aimed at getting the states to take the dangerous
mentally ill off the streets? How about — as I wrote last week — passing
some equally-stringent measures to get the states to strengthen school
defenses without turning the 100,000 K-12 schools in America into armed
camps?
A Republican task force could survey “assault weapon” bans. They should
start with Connecticut’s, which didn’t ban the “Bushmaster” rifle Adam
Lanza used to kill the children in the Newtown massacre. That law focuses on
the cosmetic appearance of the weapon, not its capability. DiFi wants to
ban “assault weapons” but — by her description of the bill she intends to
introduce — her “ban” would exempt at least 900 kinds of weapons.
Feinstein’s approach proves that gun control is a substitute for dealing
with the real problem, which is the dangerous mentally ill. Unless and until
the states act to ensure that these people — and according to the forensic
psychiatrists I’ve spoken to it’s usually the high school age males —
are identified and taken off the streets, no gun control law will prevent
more massacres like the Newtown event.
The Republican counter-proposals should be crafted in the same time that
Obama’s will be. And if there’s no Republican gun violence agenda, there
will only be Obama’s to debate. It’s a political cliché, but nevertheless
true: you can’t beat something with nothing. Right now, that’s what the
Republicans have.
The NRA didn’t provide anything helpful in its Friday presser. Saying, as
NRA Executive Director Wayne LaPierre did, that the only answer to a bad guy
with a gun is a good guy with a gun — which, in the moment of the shooting
, is exactly right - still forfeits the essential elements of any solution
and, thus, the debate. We need measures, the ones I described in last week’
s column, that will take the dangerous mentally ill off the streets and make
it harder for any shooter to get into a school and harm the kids when he
does.
Liberals want the “assault weapons” ban because they favor any measure
that will take guns out of the hands of Americans. They will say that no one
needs an “assault weapon,” which is probably true. Unless you live in a
place where you can’t leave your house without facing gun violence, you don
’t need a magazine-fed semi-automatic rifle. But you may want one.
Thousands of hunters use magazine-fed semi-automatic rifles such as the
Browning BAR. If you miss on your first shot or wound the deer or bear you’
re hunting and need a quick follow-up shot, something like the BAR is what
you need. But this isn’t a question of need. It’s a question of freedom.
If we are going to take effective action against events like the Newtown
massacre, it’s not our freedoms that should be limited. We’ve protected
the dangerous mentally ill so well that it’s extremely difficult under most
states’ laws, to take them off the streets. And even where — as in
Connecticut — the laws provide the means to do so, those laws are not used
effectively. Their freedoms are trumping our right to safe schools, movie
theaters, and shopping malls.
Republicans should be hammering the issues that really underlie the problem
of protecting people from mass murders. Liberals want to spend money on
everything that increases government power. But they don’t want to spend
the money to do what’s needed to protect school children. We’re already
hearing that we can’t afford to put a cop in every school.
Why can’t we? Hardening the targets that are our schools — giving the
teachers the training and the non-lethal means to protect the children until
the cops arrive — will be very expensive. Over the next three months,
while Obama manages the three “crises” of tax rates, the debt ceiling, and
gun control, we’ll be told that the “assault weapons” ban will cost us
nothing and that the states can’t afford to do the other things we need to
protect school kids.
States can’t afford to not act. Their budgets are being blown by Medicaid
and other federal mandatory spending that could and should be reduced or
eliminated. If the federal government legislated the savings that cut
wasteful federal programs — such as Sen. Tom Coburn details in his “back
in black” proposal — we could save $9 trillion in government waste. That
would pay for what states need to protect schools hundreds or thousands of
times over.
Over the next three months, congressional Republicans will be fighting
losing battles on gun control, taxation and the federal debt ceiling. They
needn’t lose, but they will as long as they follow Boehner’s lead. New
leaders need to take charge now, and take us off the path Obama is mapping.
Obama is right on one thing: we can’t wait. But that for which we can’t
wait is for conservative leadership out of the mess that Obama and Boehner
have made. Gun control, like the fiscal cliff Obama created with the help of
congressional Republicans, isn’t a solution to our nation’s biggest
problems. |
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