The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (51 page)

There isn’t much that could be considered controversial in the treaty. Signatory governments agree not to export weapons to countries that are under an arms embargo or to export weapons that would facilitate “the commission of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes” or other violations of international humanitarian law. Exports of arms are banned if they will facilitate “gender-based violence or violence against children” or be used for “transnational organized crime.” Why does the United States need more time than the more than ninety other countries that had sufficient time to read and approve the text? The answer lies in the power of the gun lobby, the arms industry, and the apparent inability of President Barack Obama to do the right thing, especially if it contradicts a cold, political calculation.

The Obama administration torpedoed the treaty exactly one week after the massacre in Aurora, Colorado. In Colorado, Obama offered promises of “prayer and reflection.” As New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg said, commenting on Obama and Mitt Romney both avoiding a discussion of gun control, “Soothing words are nice, but maybe it’s time the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they’re going to do about it.” Gun violence is a massive problem in the U.S., and it only seems to pierce the public consciousness when there is a massacre. Gun-rights advocates attack people who suggest more gun control is needed, accusing them of politicizing the massacre. Yet some elected officials are taking a stand. Governor Pat Quinn of Illinois is seeking a ban on assault weapons, much like the ones in place in California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York.

The National Rifle Association’s executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, issued the threat before the U.N. conference that “Without apology, the NRA wants no part of any treaty that infringes on the precious right of lawful Americans to keep and bear arms.” The NRA organized letters opposing the treaty, signed by fifty-one U.S. senators and 130 members of the House. After the conference ended in failure, the NRA took credit for killing it.

Of course, there is nothing in the treaty that would impact U.S. domestic gun laws. The rights protected by the cherished Second Amendment (“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”) would remain intact. The NRA’s interest lies not only with individual gun owners, but also with the U.S. weapons manufacturers and exporters. The United States is the world’s largest weapons producer, exporter, and importer. It is the regulation of this global flow of weaponry that most likely alarms the NRA, not the imagined prospect of the U.N. taking away the legally owned guns inside the U.S.

Protesters outside the U.N. during the ATT conference erected a mock graveyard, with each headstone reading, “2,000 people killed by arms every day.” That’s one person killed every minute. In many places around the world, massacres on the order of Aurora are all too common. Days after Aurora, at least nine people were killed in a U.S. drone strike in northwest Pakistan. Pakistani officials said the victims were suspected militants, but the Obama administration deems all adult-male drone targets to be militants unless proven otherwise, posthumously.

After the conference wrapped without success, Suzanne Nossel said, “This was stunning cowardice by the Obama administration, which at the last minute did an about-face and scuttled progress toward a global arms treaty, just as it reached the finish line.” These words were doubly strong, as she criticized the very State Department where she worked previously under Hillary Clinton.

The U.N. has pledged to resume the effort to pass an arms trade treaty, despite the intransigence of the country that Martin Luther King Jr. called “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” Until then, bananas will remain more heavily regulated than battleships and bazookas.

July 25, 2012

Aurora Massacre: U.S. Gun Laws Guilty by Reason of Insanity

James Holmes, the alleged shooter in the massacre in Aurora, Colorado, reportedly amassed his huge arsenal with relative ease. Some of these weapons were illegal as recently as eight years ago. Legislation now before Congress would once again make illegal, if not the guns themselves, at least the high-capacity magazines that allow bullets to be fired rapidly without stopping to reload. Holmes bought most of his weaponry within recent months, we are told. Perhaps if sane laws on gun control, including the ban on high-capacity magazines, were in place, many in Aurora who are now dead or seriously injured would be alive and well today.

The facts of the assault are generally well known. Holmes allegedly burst into the packed theater during the 12:30 am premier of the Batman sequel
The Dark Knight Rises
, threw one or two canisters of some gas or irritant, which exploded, then began to methodically shoot people, killing twelve and wounding fifty-eight.

“Everybody sort of started screaming, and that’s when the gunman opened fire on the crowd, and pandemonium just broke out,” Omar Esparza told me. He was in the third row, with five friends out for a birthday celebration: “He started opening fire on the audience pretty freely, just started shooting in every direction, that’s when everybody started screaming, started panicking. A lot of people had been hit at that point at those initial few rounds, and that’s when everybody sort of hit the floor and started to exit.”

Esparza continued: “It sounded like the bullets had stopped, and it sounded like he was either switching guns or reloading his rifle. At that very second when we sort of heard the silence, we realized that that was our only opportunity of getting out or of dying. So, at that split second, we had to react and had to exit as quickly as possible. And we barely made it, too, because approximately a second after we had exited, we heard him starting to shoot again.”

That moment of silence may have been when one of the weapons jammed. CNN reported that “the semiautomatic rifle used in the Colorado theater killings jammed during the rampage . . . a law enforcement source with direct knowledge of the investigation said Sunday.”

Holmes allegedly had an AR-15 equipped with a 100-round drum magazine, as well as one or two Glock pistols with 40-round extended magazines and a Remington 870 shotgun that can fire up to seven shells without reloading. The AR-15 can fire from fifty to sixty rounds per minute. Holmes had a massive arsenal, easily acquired at retail stores and online.

Carolyn McCarthy is a member of Congress from Long Island, New York. Her husband was shot in the head and among the six killed in the 1993 Long Island Rail Road massacre. Her son also was shot in the head, but survived and remains partially paralyzed. She was a nurse back then, but when her congressman voted against the assault-weapons ban, she ran against him. She won and has been in Congress ever since.

McCarthy has introduced H.R. 308, the Large Capacity Ammunition Feeding Device Act. It would ban the sale or transfer of these large-capacity clips that enabled the massive casualties in Aurora, and in Tucson, Arizona, in January 2011 when Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot and six were killed. McCarthy told me: “The problem is, politicians, legislators across this country are intimidated by the NRA and the gun manufacturers who put so much money out there to say that ‘we will take you down in an election if you go against us.’ Common sense will say we can take prudent gun-safety legislation and try to save people’s lives. That is the bottom line.”

One group pushing the large-magazine ban is the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, named for Jim Brady, who was shot in the head and severely disabled during the 1981 attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. I spoke with Colin Goddard, who works for the group. He survived the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, in which thirty-two people were killed. Goddard was shot four times. I asked him about the refrain so commonly uttered now on television, that it’s too political to discuss gun control before the victims are even buried.

“This conversation should have happened before this shooting in the first place,” Goddard told me. “This is when people are outraged. This is when people realize that this could happen to them. We cannot wait. . . . Now is the time for a change. We are better than this.”

July 18, 2012

75 Years Later, the Lessons of Guernica

Seventy-five years ago, the Spanish town of Guernica was bombed into rubble. The brutal act propelled one of the world’s greatest artists into a three-week painting frenzy. Pablo Picasso’s
Guernica
starkly depicts the horrors of war, etched into the faces of the people and the animals on the 20-by-30-foot canvas. It would not prove to be the worst attack during the Spanish Civil War, but it became the most famous, through the power of art. The impact of the thousands of bombs dropped on Guernica, of the aircraft machine guns strafing civilians trying to flee the inferno, is still felt to this day—by the elderly survivors, who will eagerly share their vivid memories, as well as by Guernica’s youth, who are struggling to forge a future for their town out of its painful history.

The German Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion did the bombing at the request of General Francisco Franco, who led a military rebellion against Spain’s democratically elected government. Franco enlisted the help of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, who were eager to practice modern techniques of warfare on the defenseless citizens of Spain. The bombing of Guernica was the first complete destruction by aerial bombardment of a civilian city in European history. While homes and shops were destroyed, several arms-manufacturing facilities, along with a key bridge and the rail line, were left intact.

Spry and alert at eighty-nine, Luis Iriondo Aurtenetxea sat down with me in the offices of Gernika Gogoratuz, which means “Remembering Gernika” in the Basque language. Basque is an ancient language and is central to the fierce independence of Basque-speaking people, who have lived for millennia in the region that straddles the border of Spain and France.

Luis was fourteen and working as an assistant at a local bank when Guernica was bombed. It was market day, so the town was full, the market square packed with people and animals. The bombing started at 4:30 p.m. on April 26, 1937. Luis recalled: “It went on and on for three and a half hours. When the bombing ended, I left the shelter and I saw all of the town burning. Everything was on fire.”

Luis and others fled uphill to the nearby village of Lumo, where, as night fell, they saw their hometown burning, saw their homes collapse in the flames. They were given space to sleep in a barn. Luis continued: “I don’t remember if it was at midnight or at another time, as I did not own a watch at the time. I heard someone calling me. . . . In the background, you could see Guernica on fire, and thanks to the light of the fire, I realized that it was my mother. She had found my other three siblings. I was the last one to be found.” Luis and his family were war refugees for many years, eventually returning to Guernica, where he still lives and works—as did Picasso in Paris—as a painter.

Luis took me to his studio, its walls covered with paintings. Most prominent was the one he painted of that moment in Lumo when his mother found him. I asked him how he felt at that moment. His eyes welled. He apologized and said he couldn’t speak of it. Just blocks away stands one of the arms factories that avoided destruction. It was the plant where chemical weapons and pistols were made. It is called the Astra building. While Astra has moved away, the weapons company maintains its connection to the town by naming is various automatic weapons the “Guernica,” designed “by warriors, for warriors.”

Several years ago, young people occupied the vacant plant, demanding it be turned into a cultural center. Oier Plaza is a young activist from Guernica who told me, “At first the police threw us out, and then we occupied it again, and finally, the town hall bought the building, then we started this process to recover the building and to create the Astra project.”

The aim of the Astra project is to convert this weapons plant into a cultural center with classes in art, video, and other media production. “We have to look to the past to understand the present, to create a better future, and I think Astra is part of that process. It is the past, it is the present, and it is the future of this town.”

From Picasso’s
Guernica
to Luis Iriondo Aurtenetxea’s self-portrait with his mother to the efforts of Oier Plaza and his young friends, the power of art to turn swords into plowshares, to resist war, is perennially renewed.

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