America + guns: should the world intervene?

This photo is from a post I wrote in March of some of the families of the Newtown shooting victims at the White House. This is their reaction on learning that the US Senate had rejected expanding background checks for gun purchases.

I wrote then that “it should shame America”.

Henry Porter wrote for The Guardian:

In a country where people are better armed and only slightly less nervy than rebel fighters in Syria, we should note that dealing with the risks of scalding and secondary smoke came well before addressing the problem of people who go armed to buy a latte. There can be no weirder order of priorities on this planet.

That’s America, we say, as news of the latest massacre breaks - last week it was the slaughter of 12 people by Aaron Alexis at Washington DC’s navy yard - and move on. But what if we no longer thought of this as just a problem for America and, instead, viewed it as an international humanitarian crisis - a quasi civil war, if you like, that calls for outside intervention? As citizens of the world, perhaps we should demand an end to the unimaginable suffering of victims and their families - the maiming and killing of children - just as America does in every new civil conflict around the globe.

The annual toll from firearms in the US is running at 32,000 deaths and climbing, even though the general crime rate is on a downward path (it is 40% lower than in 1980). If this perennial slaughter doesn’t qualify for intercession by the UN and all relevant NGOs, it is hard to know what does.

To absorb the scale of the mayhem, it’s worth trying to guess the death toll of all the wars in American history since the War of Independence began in 1775, and follow that by estimating the number killed by firearms in the US since the day that Robert F. Kennedy was shot in 1968 by a .22 Iver-Johnson handgun, wielded by Sirhan Sirhan. The figures from Congressional Research Service, plus recent statistics from icasualties.org, tell us that from the first casualties in the battle of Lexington to recent operations in Afghanistan, the toll is 1,171,177. By contrast, the number killed by firearms, including suicides, since 1968, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI, is 1,384,171.

That 212,994 more Americans lost their lives from firearms in the last 45 years than in all wars involving the US is a staggering fact, particularly when you place it in the context of the safety-conscious, “secondary smoke” obsessions that characterise so much of American life.

Everywhere you look in America, people are trying to make life safer. On roads, for example, there has been a huge effort in the past 50 years to enforce speed limits, crack down on drink/drug driving and build safety features into highways, as well as vehicles. The result is a steadily improving record; by 2015, forecasters predict that for first time road deaths will be fewer than those caused by firearms (32,036 to 32,929).

Plainly, there’s no equivalent effort in the area of privately owned firearms. Indeed, most politicians do everything they can to make the country less safe.

More >> American Gun Use Is Out of Control. Shouldn’t the World Intervene?

Here's a website which deserves more attention: 2

Here's a website which deserves more attention.

No More Mister Nice Blog is a great read on American politics. Written by liberal New Yorker Steve M. (and he seems to have hidden his surname well) it's a wry take with occasional verges into a bite on liberal shibboleths and general faffing about, specifically Democrat waffling.

His sometimes hilarious writing reminds me of another discovery of mine from the last election campaign, the comical stylings of Charles P. Pierce at Esquire magazine.

On a simple blogger template, his 20 (?) posts per page is mainly text, so an easy load and a ripping long read, if you're at all interested in what the cousins across the water are up to.

Just to pick a couple of recent posts at random, he analysed a cover story from the National Rifle Association (NRA)'s magazine titled 'How and When Obama Will Come for Your Guns'. He does this quite often, fisks something from 'wingnuttia', poking fun but usually with a serious edge.

The story reads like something from the 'Left Behind' best-selling series of 'rapture' novels, or as he calls it apocalypse porn.

It imagines a future where Obama wins the Presidency again, a pretext arrives and through executive orders he manages to 'come furyer guns'. Insane then and even more insane looked at now, when the slaughter of twenty small kids looks like producing no change on gun policy.

This is as crazy as birtherism or 9/11 trutherism. It should be the sort of thing that gets published and read only on the fringes of society. And yet the organization that publishes this is the organization that determines America's gun agenda.

Imagine if no election law could be passed in this country without the imprimatur of a powerful lobbying organization led by Orly Taitz [birther leader]. Imagine if the Centers for Disease Control were powerless to respond to any epidemic in a way that ran afoul of [anti-vaccine former Playboy model] Jenny McCarthy.

That's where we are on guns.

In another post ('Testing whether barrel has a bottom') he discusses the rather remarkable news that Tony Perkins is being floated as a Republican candidate for the Senate from Louisiana.

Perkins runs a Christianist outfit called the Family Research Council, designated a 'hate group' by the Southern Poverty Law Centre. He has a history of associating with white supremacists and defended the former Republican Missouri Senate candidate Todd "legitimate rape" Akins.

Perkins regularly appears on TV opposing gay rights, something which various groups have protested given that his more outrageous statements off camera are never brought up so he's allowed to appear vaguely normal.

Steve wants Perkins to get the nomination:

I hope the 2014 Senate field for the GOP is literally 100% nutjobs. I hope they're all as far right as Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. I hope it's Steve King and Paul Broun and Joe Miller and this guy. I hope some teabagger beats Mitch McConnell in the primary by dubbing him a liberal. I hope this happens coast to coast.

I know that even this probably won't work, but if anything could get the Beltway establishment, and thus the general public, to grasp that maybe, possibly, the Republican Party as currently configured is a menace to American society, it would be the systematic replacement of all of its arguably within-the-pale politicians with the most batshit-crazy extremists.

And yeah, I know that some of these clowns could win in their states, including Perkins. But the only way it might become clear to the establishment and public that the GOP is crazy is if there's no one left in the party's front ranks to provide a veneer of respectability, because they've all been replaced by lunatics.

More here.