At hearing for ATF nominee, more Republican obstruction

On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a high-profile hearing on President Obama’s nominee to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, B. Todd Jones.    Jones is an exceptionally qualified nominee.  He currently serves as both the acting director of ATF and as the U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota (a position for which he was unanimously approved by the Judiciary Committee in 2009).

B. Todd Jones

Though ATF plays a critical law enforcement role, including involvement in investigating tragedies like the Sandy Hook school shootings, the Boston Marathon bombing, and the industrial explosion in West, Texas, the agency has not had a permanent director since 2006 – that’s when the law was changed to require Senate confirmation That sad reality may continue, as Republican questions at the  hearing suggest that they may continue to obstruct executive nominees as a way to prevent agencies they don’t like from functioning.

Many Republican questions raised tangential concerns about Jones’s record.  For instance, the Committee’s ranking member, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa)—yes, the very same senator who wants to get rid of three judicial seats on the second most important court in the country, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals—pressed Jones to answer for a botched ATF operation, Fast and Furious.  But Jones  actually was brought in to clean up after the fact.

Moreover, just before the hearing ended, there was a telling exchange between Grassley and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.).  Sen. Grassley requested that the hearing record remain open for longer than the normal one week period, based on the expectation that  there were “a lot of things that could come up.”  Senator Klobuchar agreed to keep it open for two weeks.  Sensing dissatisfaction in Grassley’s reaction, she asked, “What would you like?”  Senator Grassley responded, “Until we get done with this whole [thing].”  While the senators’ quick negotiation seemed to be good-spirited, it sounds like  Sen. Grassley has no interest in quickly moving Jones’s nomination to the Senate floor.  This stonewalling is particularly hypocritical in light of repeated Republican statements that we don’t need new gun laws, we just need to “enforce the laws on the books.”  

Of course, Jones is just one of a slew of highly qualified Obama nominees that Republicans so farhave refused to confirm because they disapprove of the organization itself (see EPA Administrator nominee Gina McCarthy, CFPB director nominee Richard Cordray, Labor Secretary nominee Tom Perez, and three NLRB nominees.  If Republicans continue to hold agencies hostage by unfairly blocking confirmations, the Senate majority should revisit reforming Senate rules.

President Obama’s other audience

Will the Supreme Court help America complete its journey

 – or throw obstacles in the way?

When President Obama gave his second inaugural address Monday, it’s estimated that one million people gathered on the National Mall to hear him.  Tens of millions more heard the speech on television, radio or online.

But there also was a much more select audience – an audience of nine, seated just a few feet from the president.  Because several issues the president raised will be profoundly affected by actions of the United States Supreme Court, in some cases, within the next few months.

The president said:

Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law, for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal, as well.

And, in marking civil rights landmarks, the President pointedly included “Stonewall” along with Seneca Falls and Selma.

The Supreme Court can speed the journey, by voting to strike down the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, and upholding the ruling by the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals that California’s Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.  Or the court can make it a much longer, more tortuous journey by upholding discrimination.

The president said:

We the people declare today that the most evident of truth that all of us are created equal -- is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.

And he said:

Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote.

The famous march from Selma to Montgomery was a march for the right to vote – a right won with passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  But now, a challenge to a key provision of that law could significantly setback the progress won by Dr. King and those who marched with him.

The president said:

Together we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.

But over and over again, the Supreme Court majority has bent those rules to favor corporate special interests at the expense of the rest of us, something documented in detail in our First Monday documentary, Unequal Justice.

This term, the Court may bend the rules again, when it returns to the issue of forced arbitration in the case of American Express Co. v. Italian Colors Restaurant.

And, of course, the president alluded to the tragedy of gun violence:

Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for and cherished and always safe from harm.

The Supreme Court already has made that part of the journey more difficult.  The right-wing activist majority radically reinterpreted the Second Amendment, discovering an individual right to bear arms where none existed before.

Chief Justice John Roberts administers the Oath of Office

--White House photo

But even Justice Antonin Scalia did not close the door to all regulation of guns.  And whatever Congress may do in response to the Newtown tragedy, the Supreme Court may well have the final word.

That’s why something President Obama did not mention is at least as important as all of the subjects he raised in an excellent inaugural address: the need for a progressive judiciary – on our federal district courts, on our circuit courts of appeals and on the United States Supreme Court.

President Obama offers good first steps toward curbing gun violence

UPDATED, 4:00PM: President Obama announced some sound, sensible first steps to control gun violence today.  Groups supporting gun control are enthusiastic about the President's proposals, which now are available, along with background material on the White House website.  This is, of course, an issue AFJ has been concerned about for more than a decade.  We began producing documentaries on the issue in 2000: 

America up in Arms (2000):

Deadly Business (2001):

And since the Newtown tragedy we've been using this Blog to share the views of experts and pull together resources for turning grief into action.  We've grouped those posts here.

There is more perspective from Josh Sugarmann, Executive Director of the Violence Policy Center, an AFJ member.  He writes in The Huffington Post that while we all know about the fanatical behavior of the National Rifle Association, the gun industry's trade association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation also has responded to the Newtown tragedy in a manner best described as appalling.

GUEST BLOG: It’s time for a heart-to-heart discussion about guns

By Cathie Whittenburg, on-line communications consultant, 

States United to Prevent Gun Violence

Let’s have a deep, heart-to-heart discussion about guns.  Let’s not play the game the gun lobby wants to play, the one where they talk about guns as an absolute right and are constantly accusing us of wanting to ban all guns.  Let’s be clear right from the start, there is no organization out there working to ban all guns.  Period.  It doesn’t exist. And while the Supreme Court might have ruled that you have a right to own a handgun in your home for protection, Justice Antonin Scalia also wrote, “like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited.  It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”

As Americans we deserve the right to be safe and free from gun violence but we have allowed guns to saturate our society and threaten that freedom. One thousand people a day in this country are directly impacted by gun violence.  They are killed by firearms; shot and injured; or find themselves staring down the barrel of a gun, victims of armed robbery and aggravated assault with a gun. One thousand people a day, every day.

There are parts of our country where our children are suffering from clinical depression and have PTSD because of the level of gun violence that surrounds them on a daily basis.  And while, as a nation, we are no more or less violent than other industrialized countries, due to the overwhelming number of guns in this country our homicide rate is by far the highest. 

In 1982, when seven people died after taking Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide, the response was reforms in the packaging of over-the-counter drugs and federal anti-tampering laws. In 2001, a passenger on an airplane flying from Paris to Miami attempted to set off explosives hidden in his shoe.  In response to this incident, passengers at U.S. airports are now required to remove their shoes before proceeding through scanners.  Every year, defective and dangerous products are recalled, engineers study ways to make our roads and bridges better, agencies monitor and regulate the water we drink, the food we eat, the cars we drive, the airplanes we travel in, all in an effort to keep us safe.

Yet when it comes to gun violence, all too often the response from our elected officials is silence and an unwillingness to address the issue. Really?

The time is now to start a serious, national conversation about guns in this country.  Because this is an issue that affects real people and the impact of this discussion will last for a long time.

Yes, it’s important for you to call your Senators and Congressperson and tell them we need stronger gun laws.  But it can’t end there.  Call your state legislators too, call your city councilor, call your religious and business leaders, talk to your neighbors and the person standing behind you in the grocery store line.  Tell them you want to have a real discussion about guns. 

Ask them if they know the true dangers of having a gun in the home.  Tell them that while guns might be used to stop some crimes, they are far more likely to be used to commit crimes.   Mention that guns are the only consumer product not regulated for health and safety and as a result there are guns out there that can discharge just by being dropped.  Point out that if a civilian wanted to purchase a fully automatic AK-47 they would have to apply for a special federal gun license and then register the gun.  Ask why, then, is it OK for someone to buy a semi-automatic version of the exact same gun without so much as a criminal background check.  Ask them why anyone needs to be able to fire 30, 40, 100 rounds before having to reload. Point out that the Second Amendment refers to “arms” not “guns” and the very fact that you can’t go out and buy a nuclear weapon shows that regulation already exists.

STATES UNITED TO PREVENT GUN VIOLENCE CAN HELP

States United to Prevent Gun Violence wants to help you with these conversations.  We want you to feel prepared and excited and to give you information, because information has the power to change the culture.

● Sign-up to receive The GVP Report, our e-magazine for the gun violence prevention movement.  Every other week, we will send you a comprehensive overview of the issue, emerging news and trends, and ways to get involved in the movement.  Presented in an easy to read dashboard format, The GVP Report allows readers to quickly scan the content and link to articles of further interest.  The GVP Report is the only publication that offers a consistent, comprehensive, inclusive look at the gun violence issue in this country.  You can also read it online.

● Visit our website, and see if there is a state member group where you live.  If there is, give them a call and tell them you want to help.

One thousand people a day have their lives taken, injured or threatened with a gun.  When we allow anyone to buy a gun through a private sale at a gun show or over the internet – no matter how dangerous the person, no matter how dangerous the gun – no one is free from the threat of gun violence.  Let’s have a real, heart to heart discussion about how we will work to change this. 

Cathie Whittenburg is on-line communications consultant for States United to Prevent Gun Violence, (www.supgv.org) a member of Alliance for Justice.

The gun debate so far

Tomorrow, we'll have another guest blog, this time from AFJ member States United to Prevent Gun Violence, about how all of us can help reduce the number of gun deaths.  First, though, the debate so far, summed up as only Jon Stewart can:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Eddie Eagle is no alternative to gun control

We will leave most of the responses to the National Rifle Association’s callous, cynical statement about the Newtown tragedy to groups like AFJ members the Violence Policy Center, and States United to Stop Gun Violence.

But we couldn’t help but note that the NRA once again touted its “Eddie Eagle” program as supposedly promoting gun safety for children.

AFJ examined the Eddie Eagle program more than a decade ago, as part of Deadly Business, our First Monday documentary about how the gun industry markets its product.  In this excerpt from Deadly Business, Prof. Marjorie Hardy discusses the strong evidence that the program is a failure.  She says this of the NRA:

 I think they don’t care if it works.  I think this is their way of redirecting attention from gun laws and legislatures to saying: Look, we have this way of keeping kids safe so we don’t need all these laws on the books.  

When we checked the NRA website today we found all sorts of material touting the Eddie Eagle program – but no studies indicating that it actually works.

The full videos of DeadlyBusiness and our other First Monday documentary on gun control, America Up in Arms, are available here.

And on our Bolder Advocacy Blog: A look at the nonprofits leading the fight against the gun lobby.

Guest Blog: It was done on Tobacco. It can be done on guns.

By Dennis Henigan

I spent twenty-three proud years of my life as a lawyer and advocate for the gun control cause.  Countless times, after egregious acts of mass violence with guns were followed by cowardly excuses for inaction by our political leaders, I would wonder:  What will it take?  What kind of horror must our nation experience before the politicians finally defy the gun lobby and start protecting the American people?

After Sandy Hook, I think we may know the answer.  As our citizens confront the inconceivable reality of 20 first graders (and six caring adults) shot to death in their school, there is a palpable shared feeling that we can tolerate the slaughter no longer.  Deep inside our collective consciousness, we know that, if our leaders do nothing, we will suffer the horror again and again and again.  And we can’t stand the thought of it. 

   

Yes, Sandy Hook is different.  The attack on an elementary school classroom taps into our most elemental instinct as adults and parents -- to protect the children before all else.  I now work in the tobacco control movement and one parallel to guns is striking.  A key turning point on the tobacco issue was the revelation that the tobacco companies were deliberately acting to addict our children to a lethal product.   When the welfare of our kids is at risk, we insist that something be done. 

Everything I know about the gun issue tells me we are entering a period of unprecedented national self-examination about what gun violence is doing to our nation.  And we will not be satisfied with a conversation.  We must have action.

The American people can overcome the gun lobby, but only if we confront, and expose, three myths that have long dominated the gun debate and given the politicians a ready excuse for inaction. 

• First, we must not let the opponents of reform get away with the empty bromide that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”  Does any rational person really believe that the Sandy Hook killer could have murdered 26 people in minutes with a knife or a baseball bat?   Guns enable people to kill, more effectively and efficiently than any other widely available weapon. 
• Second, we must challenge the idea that no law can prevent violent people from getting guns.   This canard is refuted by the experience of every other western industrialized nation.  Their violent crime rates are comparable to ours.  But their homicide rates are exponentially lower because their strong gun laws make it harder for violent individuals to get guns. 
• Third, we must not accept the notion that our Constitution condemns us to the continued slaughter of our children.  It is true that the Supreme Court has expanded gun rights in recent years; it is equally true that the Court has insisted that the right allows for reasonable restrictions.  In his opinion in the Heller gun rights case, Justice Scalia listed restrictions on “dangerous and unusual weapons” among the kinds of gun laws that are still “presumptively lawful”.  Assault weapons that fire scores of rounds without reloading surely are “dangerous and unusual”.

The tobacco control movement overcame some equally powerful mythology to fundamentally alter American attitudes toward tobacco products.   The tobacco industry’s effort to sow confusion and uncertainty about the link between smoking and disease eventually was exposed as a fraud.  The entrenched view that smoking was simply a bad habit that individuals can choose to break was destroyed by evidence that the tobacco companies knew that nicotine was powerfully addictive and engineered their cigarettes to ensure that people got hooked and stayed hooked.   The assumption that smoking harms only the smoker was contradicted by the overwhelming evidence of the danger of second-hand smoke.  

Once these myths were exposed, attitudes changed, policies changed and we started saving countless lives.  Since youth smoking peaked in the mid-1990s, smoking rates have fallen by about three-fourths among 8^th graders, two-thirds among 10^th graders and half among 12^th graders.  A sea change has occurred on the tobacco issue.

Similarly fundamental change can come to the gun issue as well.  The myths about gun control, however, still have a hold on too many of our political leaders and their constituents.  We will hear them repeated again and again in the coming weeks of intense debate.  Every time we hear them, we must respond and we must persuade.

There is too much at stake to be silent.   

Dennis Henigan is Director of Policy Analysis and Research at the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and a former Vice President of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.  He is the author of Lethal Logic:  Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy (Potomac Books 2009)

Two more perspectives on the Supreme Court and gun control

● Jeffrey Toobin, in The New Yorker, on how members of the extremist majority on the Supreme Court, such as Justice Antonin Scalia, made a mockery of their own professed belief in "originalism" to radically revise the meaning of the Second Amendment:

Does the Second Amendment prevent Congress from passing gun-control laws? The question, which is suddenly pressing, in light of the reaction to the school massacre in Newtown, is rooted in politics as much as law.

Antonin Scalia

For more than a hundred years, the answer was clear, even if the words of the amendment itself were not. The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The courts had found that the first part, the “militia clause,” trumped the second part, the “bear arms” clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon.

Enter the modern National Rifle Association ... [which] pushed for a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that gave individuals, not just militias, the right to bear arms. It was an uphill struggle. At first, their views were widely scorned. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who was no liberal, mocked the individual-rights theory of the amendment as “a fraud.”

But the N.R.A. kept pushing—and there’s a lesson here. Conservatives often embrace “originalism,” the idea that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed when it was ratified, in 1787. They mock the so-called liberal idea of a “living” constitution, whose meaning changes with the values of the country at large. But there is no better example of the living Constitution than the conservative re-casting of the Second Amendment in the last few decades of the twentieth century. ... 

Read the full article here

And hear more from Jeffrey Toobin on a range of other issues in our recent conversation with him.

● The New York Times on how the Supreme Court ruling, written by Scalia, strking down the District of Columbia ban on handguns, while not preventing all gun regulation, further emboldened the National Rifle Association:

The N.R.A., emboldened by a Supreme Court ruling asserting an individual constitutional right to bear arms, has turned its attention to further broadening the market, lobbying state legislatures to allow concealed weapons in churches, schools and other public places and to restrict the discretion of local police in granting gun permits.

Read the full editorial here 

Does stopping the carnage require changing the Supreme Court?

Lisa McElroy, Associate Professor of Law at Philadelphia's Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law, wrote this in a column for The Huffington Post:

[T]he Supreme Court expert in me is talking to the mother in me. And the Supreme Court expert in me knows that the only way to even think about stopping the carnage that the mother in me hates is to appoint Justices to the bench who believe that the Court's current interpretation of the Second Amendment is wrong. Even one new Justice who believed that guns were for militias, not individuals, could vote to change the law, perhaps for decades, perhaps for the entire rest of my children's lifetimes. And my worries about putting my children on the school bus would be much more about whether the bus would crash or some mean kid would bully them than about whether they'd come home in a body bag. And my children would only have to worry about whether my grandchildren would be able to transport themselves home safely at the end of the day instead of whether those grandchildren would fall to the floor in some public school classroom, full of bullet holes.

Read the full column here
For more resources and commentary on gun control, see the previous post to this Blog.

Resources for turning grief into action

Among the bizarre, almost Orwellian ideas pushed by those opposed to gun control is the notion that somehow there is something unseemly about demanding action in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy such as the one in Newtown, Connecticut.

The gun lobby loves that idea because, of course, the one time when there is a chance of achieving any meaningful change is when such a tragedy is fresh in all our minds.  If not now, when?  As States United to Prevent Gun Violence, an AFJ member, says: Today is the day. 

The other phony argument is that to advocate for gun control is to "politicize" a tragedy.  Ezra Klein of The Washington Post has an excellent response to that one.

            So for those who agree that today is the day:

            Check out the websites of these AFJ members:

            ● States United to Prevent Gun Violence

            ● Violence Policy Center

            We’ve also found some useful reading, including:

           

            ● These powerful essays from The New Yorker

            ● Some remarkable data from Australia

            ● Some common-sense solutions from Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times

            ● Past posts to this Blog discussing District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court struck down the ban on handguns in Washington, D.C.

            ● The Associated Press previews the next gun case that may reach the Supreme Court

            ● UPDATE, 3:05 PM: See also Prof. Lisa McElroy’s commentary in The Huffington Post on the vital role of the Supreme Court

Gun control has, of course, been a longstanding concern at AFJ.  It’s been the topic of these First Monday documentaries:

America up in Arms (2000):

Deadly Business (2001):