Now the Washington Post has published a 3,000 word article, "As Mexico drug violence runs rampant, U.S. guns tied to crime south of border", which tells the same general story, but does a very good job of laying things out in a newspaper-style fashion, connecting the broader story with the particular. It's one of two stories published this week as part of the Post's year-long investigation collected on its website as a package of stories and features, "The Hidden Life of Guns", which highlights the patterns of gun violence, the role of a small number of problem dealers, the difficulties faced by law-enforcement, and the role of the NRA in creating those difficulties.
What struck me more forcefully than ever, in light of my recent blogging about the role of oligolopies in running up our federal debt, among other things, was the degree to which our gun violence problem in America can be seen as a classic problem of oligolopy, in which a powerful, concentrated industry (the manufacturers, not the dealers) makes obscene profits, while externalizing enormous hidden costs--in this instance, the premature deaths of thousands upon thousands of people every year, and the debilitating injuries of many, many more. Below, I'll list a number of the stories in the series with some highlights from them. But I'd like to begin with the opening paragraphs of the Post's new story that caught my eye. This is the sort of work that shows that serious journalism is still being done--yes, even by the Washington Post--and that shames so much that passes as journalism today.
The Post's new story began thus:
No other state has produced more guns seized by police in the brutal Mexican drug wars than Texas. In the Lone Star State, no other city has more guns linked to Mexican crime scenes than Houston. And in the Texas oil town, no single independent dealer stands out more for selling guns traced from south of the border than Bill Carter.
Carter, 76, has operated four Carter's Country stores in the Houston metropolitan area over the past half-century. In the past two years, more than 115 guns from his stores have been seized by the police and military in Mexico.
As an unprecedented number of American guns flows to the murderous drug cartels across the border, the identities of U.S. dealers that sell guns seized at Mexican crime scenes remain confidential under a law passed by Congress in 2003.
Eight of the top 12 dealers are in Texas, three are in Arizona, and one is in California. In Texas, two of the four Houston area Carter's Country stores are on the list, along with four gun retailers in the Rio Grande Valley at the southern tip of the state. There are 3,800 gun retailers in Texas, 300 in Houston alone....
Clearly, there's a lot of anger in America right now.
Much of it justified, as some can afford shower curtain rings that would dwarf others' weekly wages (and the latter are the ones who are lucky enough to have jobs). When you take this fact, combine it with the Orwellian "Newspeak" so pervasive in our media (which David Neiwert has written so articulately about), and multiply that by the NRA's mission to fight for the rights of criminals, the mentally ill and even terrorists to have access to guns, you have a toxic stew, ready to erupt.
Scene: Panama City, Florida. A school board meeting is interrupted by a man with a criminal record of assault (with a gun) waving a gun, and furious that his wife lost her job, his benefits have run out and the board members were unwilling to raise sales taxes so she and others like her wouldn't be fired (it should be noted that reports are still sketchy, so not all of what he says about his wife and himself during the 5 minutes when the board members try and talk him down can be confirmed yet).
-Ken Buck, Colorado's Republican Senate candidate, was once an assistant federal prosecutor.
-There was an Aurora gun dealer who sold guns illegally and had 37 counts thrown at him. This was a violation of federal law, nothing to sneeze at.
- Ken Buck didn't pursue the prosecution.
-Ken Buck shared information with the defense team. That's right, he tipped them off. How's that for law enforcement? Then he resigned. Was he forced to?
-Ken Buck was reprimanded... by a Republican U.S. Attorney. A partisan witch hunt? Not so much.
-The illegal gun dealer benefited from Ken Buck's unethical, sleazy behavior. He was convicted of a misdemeanor.
Yesterday I wrote about transpartisan opposition to the Van Hollen campaign finance bill written in response to the Citizens United decision. After some late-day maneuvering in which Van Hollen agreed to lower the exemption for political organizations to those with memberships over 500,000 instead of 1 million in response to objections that the bill exclusively favored the NRA, it turned out to not be enough, as Speaker Pelosi announced last night the bill would be pulled from the floor. It was scheduled for a House vote today. Politico:
Pelosi summoned the Blue Dogs and CBC to back-to-back meetings this afternoon, but was unable to overcome their opposition to the legislation. The Blue Dogs are concerned that opposition from the Chamber, National Federation of Independent Business, National Association of Realtors and other business groups will damage their reelection prospects in the fall.
The CBC, on the other hand, was unhappy about an exemption to the bill granted to the National Rifle Association agreed to by Van Hollen. While the exemption was later extended to other groups, the CBC remained concerned about the bill's potential impact on the NAACP and other progressive groups.
Democratic lawmakers were largely tight-lipped leaving Pelosi's office late Thursday afternoon, although it was clear that momentum was clearly building against a Friday vote.
By early evening, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer's (D-Md.) office formally announced that the vote had been canceled.
I had posed the question of whether pretty much every broad interest group across the ideological spectrum would be able to gin up enough opposition on the one side, with the NRA alone on the other in support of the bill. In this case, it turned out to be gun control proponents and Blue Dogs who allied to bring down the bill (at least temporarily). Groups ranging from Progress Now Colorado and the Sierra Club to the hospitals' association and Chamber of Commerce had publicly urged members to vote against the bill, and in the end, that helped make the difference.
Personally, I am happy, as a bill that gives more power to the already-too-powerful NRA was unacceptable. The bill was written to benefit one singular bad actor. I want a strong campaign finance bill but the playing field needs to be leveled.
(I was going to write something about the NRA & gun madness this weekend. But then things got crowded. And then Cliff contacted me. This is the result. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
This week two fresh pieces of evidence came to light that prove once again that this country's guns nuts & the leadership of the NRA (one in the same?) are seriously out of touch with anything one might call reality.
First, we have the elites who run the NRA. While they believe it makes sense for potential terrorists actively under investigation by the the FBI or DHS to buy whatever firearm strikes their fancy, it turns out, as you can see in the video just below, their members feel somewhat differently.
Then there are the open carry nuts (see video #2 below), who think it makes sense to openly display their weapons while you're eating at a local diner or getting your coffee at Starbucks. Sadly for them, a new poll commissioned by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun violence dispels any myth that the public is with them on this one either.
As Paul Rosenberg has pointed out in this space before, The NRA represents nobody except the big gun manufacturers.
Full Disclosure: I am proud to consult for Mayors Against Illegal Guns & The Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence
A couple of weeks ago, Sadie Baker made the following comment in a diary by Chris:
The NRA is a money laundering operation for arms dealers. They pay Congress to keep gun laws loose so they can sell guns to criminals, and then sell guns to people who are afraid of criminals. It is a bottomless pit of money. Our side has never had, and never will have, a similar source of revenue.
"Not a new thought, but a far too-uncommon one--and SO well expressed," I wrote to her, and asked her to elaborate about how came to see this so clearly. In response, she wrote:
The way I figured this out is because of the gunshow loophole. And I became aware of the gunshow loophole when I had a friend going through a divorce. Her soon-to-be-ex-husband was a convicted felon who always had as many guns as he wanted, and it was a scary time. From my friend I learned that her husband bought guns at gunshows, and from individuals (one of them a marshal!) and sometimes from ads in the paper or on ebay. I realized that rhetoric to the contrary, there are no gun laws worth speaking of in this country.
Everything else comes from stuff I read, and of course now I can't lay my hands on exactly what I read when or where. But to summarize:
Gun manufacturers do market research the same as every other manufacturer in the world. They know that the legitimate market for their product in the US is x, yet they consistently produce something like 3x, why?
The store that sold the DC sniper his guns had been under investigation for years because the owner kept "losing" guns and having them "stolen," consistently, yet the ATF was helpless to shut him down because the laws required him to be given second chance after second chance.
If you talk to any gun afficiando anywhere, they always claim their arsenals are for protection. They need them because criminals have guns! Also they oppose any sort of sensible gun laws because they "know" criminals will get guns anyway, and only honest people like themselves will be disarmed.
They even oppose things like fingerprinting guns, on the argument that "criminals will file the borings away," nevermind the fact that most burglars don't wear gloves and most rapists don't use condoms. In other words, although most criminals can protect themselves from basic forensics they still don't. And we don't [use] that as an argument to take away other kinds of forensics. So who does the lack of fingerprinting protect, anyway? Not honest people since they aren't the ones commiting crimes. The only ones it protects are the dirty dealers who knowingly and deliberately sell to criminals.
Then I ran across someone somewhere who called the NRA "the gun manufacturers lobby" and it clicked.
This is a great example of plain old common sense thinking that virtually impossible because of rightwing hegemony--hegemony defined as "ideology in drag as common sense." To put it more exactly, it's an example of how hegemony displaces and replaces common sense, and it does so by creating a fantasy world, which has its own common sense.
Gun Lobby Files New Suit in D.C. Over Federal Restrictions
Gun rights advocates have filed a new lawsuit in D.C. federal court, this time seeking to make it possible for American expats to buy guns when they're back home in the United States.
The suit, filed Friday at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, challenges a government requirement that forces gun buyers without a federal firearms license to fill out their state of residence on a special transaction form. It also targets a law that bar gun dealers from selling fire arms to non-U.S. residents for anything other than hunting or sports purposes.
