It’s been less than a week since the Orlando night club massacre. Unlike our politicians, I’m not one to instantly politicize tragedies like this but I feel it’s now appropriate to share some deep feelings I have about the issues it’s created. Most mass shootings always spark an outcry that goes nowhere for increased gun control. In this case, because the shooter pledged his allegiance to ISIS, the conundrum about what to do about radical Islamic terrorism is on equal footing with the firearms issue.
Let’s start with guns. I’ve been a Republican since Reagan ran for president in 1980 but I am not with the Grand Old Party when it comes to gun control. I was raised in New York City in the 1970’s and viewed guns as scary items that were possessed only by criminals and law enforcement. I was no longer living in New York when the first Republican mayor of my conscious lifetime was elected (in 1994) but that mayor, Rudy Giuliani, supported gun control. Giuliani, a former tough on crime District Attorney, supported the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, which expired in 2004. I bring up Giuliani because he represents the difficulty of surviving Republican politics if you’re not 100% behind the Second Amendment. America’s Mayor was in my view the best GOP presidential candidate in 2008 but his candidacy went nowhere because of his positions on guns and that he was pro-choice.
Now, it should be noted that the enactment of Assault Weapons Ban has been credited/blamed by many (including then President Bill Clinton) for the Democrats losing the House for the first time in 40 years. It boggles my mind but polling on this topic of assault weapons is split down the middle and not entirely along party lines. One third of all Democrats surveyed by CBS News last December were opposed to a nationwide ban on assault weapons.
Debate on gun control has been in the public eye for over 80 years. In response to mob-related gangland violence, in 1934 Congress passed the National Firearms Act, which imposed regulations on weapons such as machine guns, short barreled shotguns, grenades and bombs. To this day you cannot just walk into a store and buy a machine gun so to me the idea that it violates our Second Amendment rights to deny us the ability to purchase a high capacity magazine is just a slippery slope from the ban on the purchase of a machine gun.
That slope of course is why the National Rifle Association opposes any new gun regulations whatsoever. To me, the idea that any law-abiding citizen needs to have a gun that can shoot 30 rounds in 30 seconds is patently absurd. If a burglar is in your home and you need more than 10 bullets to stop them, you need some shooting lessons. If I’m wrong, somebody please show me all of the examples of mass shootings being prevented because an armed citizen shot them dead. I know, I know, you can ‘t show me these examples the gunmen always go to “gun free” zones where they know that nobody will fire back. The logic goes that if a couple of club goers had been packing heat on Saturday night, the outcome might have been different. I’m not really buying it but I’ll re-visit that topic at the end.
Anyway, the political controversy over assault weapons (or high-capacity magazines) is such that even House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (remembering what happened to her party in 1994) has recommended that her fellow Democrats not to focus on banning those weapons but rather on expanding background checks, something that has nearly universal support among all Americans.
To me the true scandal about the Orlando massacre is that Omar Mateen, who had been on the FBI’s watch list as recently as 2014, was able to walk into a store and legally purchase the guns that he used to murder 49 people and wound dozens more. The reason that his name did not come up on a background check was because the two different cases involving Mateen had been closed. Even worse, apparently the owner of another gun store called the FBI several weeks earlier because of a “very suspicious” man who had asked specific questions about body armor (which the store did not have available to sell). According to the store owner there was a follow-up conversation but the FBI never investigated further or visited the store.
So there are now various bills being proposed that would prohibit the sale of firearms to anybody on the “no fly” list and/or creating a secondary watch list so that somebody whose case had been “closed” (like Mateen’s had been) would still put up a red flag when attempting to buy a gun. I rarely give Donald Trump credit for anything but he at least is a Republican who is independent enough from the NRA’s lobbying prowess to declare that he wants to talk to them about getting their support for a weapons purchase ban for anybody who is on the “no fly” list.
On the surface, this seems like a painfully obvious thing to do. If you’re deemed a too risky person to get on an airplane you’re probably a too risky a person to own a firearm, especially a high-caliber one. Chris Cox, an executive director of the NRA, said he was happy to meet with Trump, that his organization does not want terrorists or people on the watch list to purchase or possess firearms but that there needed to be “due process protections” for “law-abiding Americans who are wrongly put on a watch list to be removed.”
Aye, there’s the rub. The NRA is so afraid that a law-abiding citizen might be denied their Second Amendment rights by mistake that they’re willing to risk a firearm falling in the hands of a potential terrorist or mass murderer. I understand that this can be frustrating. It doesn’t take more than a similar name or the wrong country visited that can put an upstanding citizen on a list with potential evil-doers. The late Senator Ted Kennedy was on the list and even someone of his stature required a few weeks of cutting through bureaucratic red tape to get off the list. Conservative writer and Fox News contributor Stephen Hayes was put on the watch list (he thinks) because of a one-way ticket he purchased to Istanbul, Turkey before flying out of Athens, Greece a few weeks later.
So here’s where we need a PC reality check. One of the things that frustrates me and many other Americans is the trend of political correctness run amok. Just a few examples:
- Giuliani as mayor of New York implemented a “stop and frisk” program that succeeded in taking weapons off the streets and lowering the crime rate but was controversial because it targeted blacks and Latinos. The program continued under Giuliani’s successor Michael Bloomberg but was halted recently by liberal Mayor Bill DeBlasio and has been blamed by many now for increased crime rates in Big Apple.
- Political correctness has been blamed in part for the Fort Hood massacre of 13 people carried out by Major Nidal Hasan. Warning signs of Hasan’s potential ties to Islamic radicals were ignored because the FBI was concerned about investigating a Muslim-American in the military, even as he was communicating with known terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki.
- Policies at the airport that provide for random secondary screening are just plain dumb. If you’re a little old lady, you’ve had an equal chance at a secondary search as a young Muslim male.
- And or course, the Obama Administration’s refusal to use the term “radical Islam” and it’s insistence on using PC terms like “man made disasters” (instead of “terrorism”), “workplace violence” (instead of “terrorist act”) and “justice involved individuals” (instead of “criminals”). If you missed that last one, I’m not kidding here. The Department of Justice came out with that doozy less than a month ago.
I could go on and on but there’s a point here. The point is that we need to stop being so politically correct. If that means that, as a law abiding young black man in a “bad” neighborhood, you may get stopped and frisked because many crimes are committed by people who look like you. If you’re young law-abiding Muslim and you’re at the airport, you may have to undergo secondary screening while the little old ladies go on their way because most terrorists look like you.
And so, if you extend this logic, if you’re accidentally on the “no fly” list, you can’t buy a gun without an extensive and time-consuming process. I’m sorry but it’s too bad for you. You are collateral damage in the war on terror except the only “damage” to you is that you can’t buy that gun today. Now you know what it’s like to be black or Muslim. We can’t have it both ways.
So, in a political environment where the NRA has virtually all elected Republican officials (and many Democrats) fearful of primary challenges if they dare offer nary one common sense word about gun control, is there anything that can be done? Any meaningful progress on gun control cannot exist without negotiating with the seemingly intractable NRA. So you do you negotiate with the leaders of the NRA? The answer is simple: you have to give them something that they want.
So this is my proposal:
- Create a nationwide conceal carry program subject to reasonable regulations. A law passed by Congress that legitimizes the premise that law abiding citizens should be able to protect themselves, even outside of the home, would be a huge win for the NRA.
- In exchange for the conceal carry carrot, the NRA would grant its blessing to the ban of high-capacity magazines and assault-style weapons, the types that have been used in so many of these mass shootings.
- Strengthen the background check system to thwart potential terrorists and close what’s known as the “gun show” loophole.
I am not naive enough that I don’t realize the potential implications or unintended consequences of a nationwide conceal carry program. The question about what are “reasonable regulations” would be the subject of intense negotiations but, to me, “reasonable” would include extensive training, a psychiatric test, and serious penalties for carrying while intoxicated. I not crazy about the idea personally, but I don’t see how you get #2 and #3 without giving something back.
I have no idea if the powers that be at the NRA would be open to any type of compromise like this. However, in a touch of irony, a deal like this is much more likely under a potential President Trump than President Hillary Clinton because the organization has hitched its saddle to the Donald with its official endorsement. This is one of the few upsides of Trump. He theoretically has the ability to make deals like this because his political ideology isn’t Republican or Democrat, it’s “Trumpian,” the Art of the Deal. Just to be clear, I am not remotely suggesting that Donald Trump is the “gun control” candidate; he obviously is not. But despite his many, many flaws, he presents intriguing potential.
On the other side, even if Clinton beats Trump in the kind of landslide election victory that turns both the House and Senate to the Democrats (certainly a strong possibility), there are too many Dems in gun-loving states who will remember the lessons of 1994 that it will be tough to accomplish anything meaningful. Barack Obama had both the House and the Senate in 2009 (when the Fort Hood shooting occurred as well as another 13-dead shooting in Binghamton, NY) and nothing happened then.
Everyone knows that the USA has a long-standing and strong gun culture. The country of Australia managed to enact significant gun control legislation two decades ago after a mass shooting but it is not going to happen in this country. Guns are baked into our national cake so anything we do must involve a buy-in by both sides.
I’m resigned to the fact that my proposal and others like it are pie in the sky but it’s an idea and the idea is based on the logic that in any negotiation, compromise is necessary.
Thanks for reading.
Chris Bodig