Dance of the Reptiles (29 page)

Increasingly, doctors around the country are putting firearm ownership on their checklists of questions for patients. That’s because, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, one out of every 25 children delivered to pediatric trauma centers has a gunshot wound.

It’s likely that Florida will appeal Judge Cooke’s decision and try to reinstate the doctor-muzzling law. The governor thinks it’s a dandy piece of legislation and totally constitutional. His hapless scorecard in that area speaks for itself.

Tom Julin, a prominent First Amendment lawyer involved in challenging the statute, recently wrote in the
Sun-Sentinel
: “The fact of the matter is the NRA asked the Legislature to pass this law to censor doctors who might advocate gun control
the NRA opposes. Doctors who see children bearing bullet holes on a regular basis can be very powerful advocates.”

To do their jobs right, doctors are obligated to ask about anything that might affect the health of you and your family.

You certainly can’t be forced to answer those questions, just as your doctor can’t be forced to keep you as a patient. Take your funny-colored pee and move on.

January 12, 2013

Appropriate Job for Big NRA Backer

It’s only fitting that the NRA’s biggest tool in Florida is a funeral director.

He is Rep. Dennis Baxley, an Ocala Republican who does whatever the gun lobby wants.

Three days after the slaughter of first-graders in Newtown, Connecticut, Baxley made national headlines by suggesting that weapons should be carried by employees at public schools. Said he: “In our zealousness to protect people from harm, we’ve created all these gun-free zones, and what we’ve inadvertently done is we’ve made them a target. A helpless target is exactly what a deranged person is looking for where they cannot be stopped.”

So that’s the problem. It’s not crackpots with Bushmasters, it’s those darn gun-free zones.

And since a brain-free zone usually encircles Florida’s Legislature, count on some eager-beaver lawmaker to follow up on Baxley’s idea of arming teachers, coaches, maybe even cafeteria workers.

You might be wondering what kind of a person would advocate saturating our schools with loaded firearms. How about a grandfather of eight who lists his hobbies as fishing,
reading, and “listening to Gospel music”? Rock on, Dennis. Nearer my Glock to thee!

Although Baxley has been on the boards of child-protection groups in Marion County, the massacre of those innocent children in Connecticut failed to shake his faith in a guns-for-all philosophy. He’s been a longtime darling of the NRA. In 2004 the group gave him an A-plus rating and a Defender of Freedom Award, and four years later, it pumped $35,000 into his election campaign, according to
Mother Jones
magazine.

In return, Baxley has been obedient and loyal as a puppy. He’s responsible for Florida’s half-baked “stand your ground” law, now a go-to legal defense for any dope dealer or gangbanger who shoots down a rival on the street. The law has been so problematic for prosecutors that Gov. Rick Scott last year formed a task force to review it.

Baxley, of course, was given a prime seat. As head of the House Judiciary Committee, he’s in position to snuff proposed changes to the “stand your ground” statute. Similarly, any sane legislation that might limit access to weapons and mass ammo clips of the sort used at Sandy Hook Elementary would have to get Baxley’s approval, which will never happen. He’s way too tight with Marion Hammer, Florida’s top gun lobbyist and a cloud-mate of that jibbering NRA wing nut Wayne LaPierre. Both Hammer and LaPierre trade on the myth that they speak for America’s gun owners when they don’t even speak for the group’s membership.

A conservative pollster reported that more than 70 percent of NRA members surveyed support certain reforms that are rabidly opposed by the leadership—requiring criminal background checks on all gun buyers, for example, and banning firearm ownership by anyone on the FBI’s terrorist watch list.

Another fact that the NRA doesn’t brag about: Its funding increasingly depends on gun manufacturers, not gun owners. According to the Violence Policy Center, 22 firearms manufacturers, including Beretta USA and Smith & Wesson, gave almost $39 million to the NRA between 2005 and 2011. So it’s basically a corporate shill promoting itself as a grassroots defender of the Constitution.

In many states, the NRA has used campaign contributions and threats of retribution to secure political puppets such as Baxley. The successful tactic has given the lobby a clout that far outweighs the true size of its constituency. The NRA claims 4.3 million members. If you charitably assume it’s not padding the numbers, the total still represents just a tiny fraction of American gun owners, of whom there are at least 146 million. In other words, more than 97 percent of legal gun owners in this country—hunters, target shooters, people who keep or carry a firearm for protection—don’t belong to the NRA.

Many gun owners have multiple weapons (I own two, a shotgun and a rifle), but the vast majority don’t keep assault rifles or military-style semi-automatics of the type used on the moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado, the children in Newtown, or, more recently, four firefighters and an off-duty policeman in Webster, New York.

The latest wave of attacks has shaken up a few pro-NRA stalwarts like Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, who said: “I don’t know anybody in the sporting or hunting arena that goes out with an assault rifle. I don’t know anybody who needs 30 rounds in a clip to go hunting.”

Tragically, nothing so sensible is being heard from lawmakers such as Baxley, though he undoubtedly has embalmed enough young gunshot victims to realize that something needs to change.

April 7, 2013

A Stylish Tote for Your Ammo Clips

The National Rifle Association wants to give me a “heavy-duty” duffel bag.

It’s a nice one, too—roomy enough for an AR-15 and maybe a half-dozen 30-round clips. Stitched on the side is a bold-looking NRA patch. The bag is mine if I pay $25 and join up.

Like most gun owners in this country, I’m not an NRA member. It’s possible that Wayne LaPierre got my name off a mailing list from catalogs that sell hunting gear. LaPierre is the NRA’s perpetually apoplectic executive vice president. You see him on TV preaching against gun control, practically levitating with paranoia. He signed the letter that arrived with the nifty duffel-bag offer.

One thing about Wayne, he likes to underline. He’s also fond of boldface type and of capitalizing important words. This rises to a fever pitch when he’s writing about “anti-gun members of Congress”:

LaPierre might seem like an undermedicated wack job, but he’s just acting. His job is to frighten people and to sell more guns.

Major firearms manufacturers such as Smith & Wesson and Beretta have given millions of dollars to the NRA. Sturm, Ruger & Co. donated a dollar from every gun sale to the organization from May 2011 to May 2012, raising $1.25 million. This isn’t mentioned in Wayne’s letter. He calls the NRA a “grassroots membership organization,” when in reality it’s a coldhearted lobby for the gun industry.

And the industry definitely gets its money’s worth. The push in Congress to revive the ban on assault rifles is dead, and other modest reforms are in trouble, in spite of the nation’s horror at the massacres in Aurora, Colorado, and Newtown, Connecticut. The NRA scares politicians far more than it scares the average citizen. The senators who are now wimping out on broader background checks for gun buyers aren’t afraid for our Second Amendment rights; they’re afraid the NRA will bankroll their opponents in the next election.

Republicans cower most reliably, but spineless Democrats are in no short supply. A push to federally limit the capacity of ammo magazines to a mere 10 bullets is foundering strictly because the NRA opposes it.

Hunters and sport shooters don’t need 30 rounds to hit what they’re aiming at, but mass murderers, gangbangers, and cop killers love those big macho clips.

Buying bullets online is another convenience that the NRA is fighting to preserve. It’s how a disturbed University of Central Florida student, James Seevakumaran, compiled the arsenal that he intended to use against fellow dorm residents last month. (He killed himself during preparations, after his roommate called the police.)

The NRA wasn’t always quite so loony. It once supported comprehensive background checks on gun purchases and even took a position against guns being carried in public schools.
Now the group has swung 180 degrees, in sneering opposition to public sentiment. Polls show 90 percent of Americans favor background checks on all firearms sales, including those at local gun shows, which are currently unregulated.

LaPierre insists that background checks will lead to a “national gun registry,” which will then lead to mass confiscation of firearms by the government. Oh, sure. The same government that can’t afford to deliver mail on Saturdays is poised to send armed agents to every single house in the country to search for weapons.

The notion is ridiculous, and Wayne’s well aware of it. The NRA isn’t aiming for the mainstream support. The fringe is what they’re after—the spooked-out guys who were lining up to buy assault rifles after the mass shooting in Newtown.

By the way, those 20 murdered children and six murdered adults aren’t mentioned anywhere in LaPierre’s rousing membership letter. I double-checked all the underlined sentences and boldfaced paragraphs.

Not a single word, capitalized or otherwise, about how some nutcase with a Bushmaster fired 154 rounds in less than five minutes, turning a schoolhouse into a slaughterhouse.

His name was Adam Lanza, and he already owned a duffel bag. Investigators who opened it found 50 .22-caliber bullets, ear protection, binoculars, paper targets, and two NRA certificates, one each for the killer and his mother.

The organization says they were not card-carrying members. Lanza shot his mom before he drove to Sandy Hook Elementary.

His duffel bag didn’t have an NRA logo, but maybe next time.

There’s always a next time.

SHOCK, AWE, AND SWAGGER

June 15, 2003

And the Hunt Goes On

Rough draft of hastily canceled presidential address regarding the effort to locate weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
.

My fellow Americans,

Lots of people at home and abroad are increasingly skeptical about the existence of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons in Iraq. Perhaps this is because, after three months of looking, we haven’t found diddly.

However, I am urging you to be more patient with our search effort than we were with the United Nations’ search effort.

While it’s true that there’s nobody left in Saddam Hussein’s regime to “delay and deceive” us—as they did to those pushovers from the UN—the weapons hunt is still mighty challenging. Let me remind you for about the twenty-seventh time that Iraq is as big as California and is mostly desert.

Deserts are vast arid flatlands made up predominantly of sand. Sand is loose granular matter that is produced by the disintegration of rock. Rock is a formation of stony minerals … well, you get the picture.

According to our most current intelligence estimates, the Iraqi desert is made up of “jillions and kazillions” of grains of sand. One particle of anthrax the size of a single grain could infect thousands of innocent people. Therefore, it is our intention to search Iraq one grain of sand at a time until we’re absolutely sure that Saddam did not disguise any biological agent as desert cover.

How long will this take? I can’t answer that question. But now that we’ve occupied Iraq, what’s the big darn hurry? Heck, we basically own the joint.

I’ve been disturbed by the mounting accusations in Europe and elsewhere that the United States invaded on false pretenses. This is completely untrue. Granted, in the weeks preceding Operation Iraqi Freedom, I repeatedly asserted that we would go to war only to “disarm” Saddam Hussein’s regime, not to seize the country and take over its oil fields.

And yes, we ended up seizing the country and taking over its oil fields. So, in the absence of weapons of mass destruction, I certainly understand how some folks might be a tad suspicious.

I am outraged, however, that Democrats in Congress are calling for hearings to investigate whether this administration hyped the threat of a biological, chemical, or nuclear attack in order to justify military action against Iraq.

Okay, so maybe Saddam wasn’t as tight with Al Qaeda as we’d made him out to be.

And maybe I did stand up in front of the whole nation and say that Saddam might produce a nuclear warhead within a year. And yes, it turned out to be total hogwash based on a lame tip from discredited informants.