Mass Murders are Good for Business

By Walter Brasch

      Shortly after the mass murders at Umpqua Community College near Roseburg, Ore., President Obama predicted the extreme right wing would crank out press releases declaring the nation needs fewer gun control laws and more guns.

      The pro-gun lobby didn’t disappoint him.

      Shortly after the mass murders in a Charleston, S.C., church in June, NRA board member Charles Cotton, an attorney who fired his first shot when he was four years old, had claimed if the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a state senator “had voted to allow gun owners to carry their own weapons [into churches], eight of his church members  . . . might be alive.”

       After the shootings in Oregon, Cotton said had the students been carrying guns, there would have been no mass murder. “How carefree do you have to be with all of the mass shootings that are going on throughout America to not have something as simple and convenient as a small knife when you go to class, let alone a gun with which to protect yourself?” Cotton asked.

      The Republican presidential herd called for even more guns in a culture that has made Americans inured to violence. Presidential candidate Jeb Bush said, “Stuff happens.”

      The absurdity of arming all of America is that there are no requirements that anyone with a gun needs to know how to use that gun. The possibility of any one person with a hand gun being able to react faster than the shooter, be more accurate than the shooter, or not accidentally wounding or killing others is high. Heavily armed police, better trained in weapons than most Americans, did not kill the shooter, who wore body armor; the shooter killed himself.

      The shooter’s mother, who said she got all her knowledge about guns from her son, acknowledged he was autistic and a head-banger. In their house were 20 guns, including semi-automatic assault rifles; the killer used six of those guns at the college.

      Those who believe in no gun regulation say the solution is better mental health counseling. That may be a small part of the solution, but there are numerous questions. If a mother recognizes there may be a problem with her son but does nothing, who is responsible for compelling someone to see a counselor? Should the government step in to order counseling? Could this violate certain Constitutional rights? If the gun-proponents want the government to intercede, how do they reconcile their conflicting belief of limited government intervention in all matters against mandatory mental health counseling? Equally important, if they believe in more mental health counseling, why have they refused to vote for or approve funds for more mental health clinics? One fact is not accepted by the gun-rights absolutists.  “Only 3%-5% of violent acts can be attributed to individuals living with a serious mental illness,” according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and those with mental illnesses “are over 10 times more likely to be victims of violent crime than the general population.”

      There are more than 310 million guns in civilians’ possession in the United States. That’s one for every person from birth to death, and the highest per capita gun ownership rate in the world. During the past decade, there have been about 301,000 Americans killed by guns; that is about 4,250 times greater than all deaths from terrorists in the United States.

      In 1996, Congress blocked funding for the Centers for Disease Control to collect and analyze data about gun violence; it extended that ban this past July. In 2013, Congress had refused to pass common sense proposals to reduce gun violence. About 85 percent of all Americans want universal background checks, according to a non-partisan Pew Research poll in July. A majority of Americans want a limit on the size of ammunition magazines, and bans on assault weapons and civilians owning armor-piercing bullets. The politicians’ greed and loyalty to gun manufacturers is greater than their responsibility to their constituents and, more important, to discovering the truth

      The gun manufacturers, which receive about $6 billion in income each year, help fund the NRA and other pro-gun organizations. It’s simply a business decision. Nothing more.

Last year, the NRA spent $37 million on campaign donations and lobbying. In 2012, the NRA spent about $14 million trying to defeat President Obama in his successful run for a second term, according to The New York Times. Failing to stop the President from a second term led to even more gun sales. “It’s been off the chart, Gary Jessup of UT Arms in Kansas, told the Kansas City Star. About 4.7 million background checks were recorded in November and December 2012, according to the FBI, as the extreme right-wing descended into a cavern of fear, swathed by delusional paranoia.

       The NRA isn’t protecting the legitimate hunters and target shooters. Several former NRA presidents and board members in a delusional descent into paranoia, have said the NRA and gun-toting Americans are what keep the federal government from invading the states and seizing authority. Former NRA president David Keene told the Daily Caller that the Second Amendment “was not written to protect squirrel hunters.” Fred Romero, an NRA field representative, said the Second Amendment, which NRA and gun-rights organizations cling to as if it was Linus’s baby blanket, “is not there to protect the interests of hunters, sports shooters and casual plinkers [but] as a balance of power. [It is] a loaded gun in the hands of the people held to the heads of government.” Former NRA president Sandy Froman believes, “We are at war” within America and “my fellow NRA members are at the heart of national defense.” Most of the NRA staff and members of the board believe the president of the United States is a tyrant—some compare him to Hitler—who wants to disarm all Americans. It is this kind of thinking that forced former president George H.W. Bush to renounce his life membership in the NRA when the leadership declared federal agents to be “jack-booted thugs.”  It is this paranoid fear that allows gun manufacturers to create more guns, where every shooting spurs profits at local gun stores, and which helps the NRA and similar organizations to throw money at politicians to assure that fear, re-elections, and profits are what matter, not lives.

      Instilling fear into the people is what sells guns and buys politicians. Candi Kinney, owner of a gun store near Umpqua Community College, said the murders helped spur sales of guns, and ordered even more AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifles. “There’s always a rush on them after a big shooting,” she told the Guardian.  

      As World War II was coming to an end, and as the Allies began liberating the concentration camps where the Nazis murdered and tortured more than six million Jews, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered his troops to bring the civilians from nearby villages to the camps. He wanted the villagers to see those who lived, whose possessions and gold teeth were torn from them, and whose flesh now barely hung on their bones. He wanted the civilians—most who falsely claimed they didn’t know about the genocide—to see the crematoriums, whose smoke they had to have seen, whose odors they had to have smelled.  He wanted the civilians to go to the edge of forests, where Nazis murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews, and where the nearby villagers gleefully watched their soldiers and collaborators shoot pistols and automatic weapons that would end the lives of infants and grandparents, shopkeepers and mill workers, and some of the world’s most brilliant artists, writers, musicians, and scientists. Decades later, extreme right-wing militant Americans foolishly claim if the Jews had guns, the holocaust would never have occurred.  

      Let’s now require all politicians, and all those who believe fewer gun laws and more guns will solve the murder problem, to go to the crime scene. Let every politician and gun-rights advocate within 25 miles of a mass murder walk where the victims once walked. Let them see the blood and bodies shredded by copper, steel, and lead. Let them witness the police and medical personnel trying to do their jobs, while doing their best to hide their own tears and rage. Let them hear the cries of the families and friends. Make them go to the morgue and watch autopsies on bodies that can talk only to medical examiners. Make them go to the funerals, to again hear the crying of the families and friends, who talk about lives lost decades too early.  

      The only thing most politicians want to do after every mass shooting is to say their thoughts and prayers are with the families of those killed and wounded. But, their words are as hollow as their logic. Let the truth ring true, that the politicians were bought and paid for by the gun industry, and that is why common-sense gun reform was voted down, and the violence continues.

      [Assisting on this column was Rosemary R. Brasch. Walter Brasch is an award-winning author/journalist, whose latest book is Fracking Pennsylvania, a look at the health, environmental, political, and economic issues affecting the American population.]

Packing Heat in the Brothers’ ’Hood

by Walter Brasch

     A group of white gun-rights advocates plan to sling rifles, shotguns, and semi-automatic assault weapons onto their bodies, and walk through a Black neighborhood in Houston.

     What could possibly go wrong with that?!

     The march through Houston’s Fifth Ward is planned for August 16 to educate Texans about their rights to openly carry firearms.

     To deflect criticism that the march is racially-insensitive, the testosterone-enhanced group, apparently with straight faces to hide its freeze-dried minds, says all it wants is for racial equality.

     It says because the state charges $250 for a gun permit, it unfairly discriminates against Blacks who have twice the poverty rate as Whites, and that’s why the Whites are going to march in a Black neighborhood.

     Not only are these civil rights leaders going to “help” the Blacks, they even found a Black to march with them.

     That Black is Maurice Muhammad, who believes it’s acceptable to kill police officers, and who has openly called for a race war in the country.

     The leader of the march is C.J. Grisham, who won’t be carrying a concealed weapon. Whatever he carries will be out in the open. That’s because he has a criminal record that forbids him from carrying a concealed weapon. His conviction stems from an incident in 2013 when he carried an AR-15 on an urban hike with his teenage son—because, you never know when a herd of feral kittens will attack you. His hike occurred not far from Fort Hood where, in 2009, an Army officer launched an assault that left 13 dead and 30 wounded.

     A police officer stopped Grisham; he resisted. In Texas, it’s legal to openly carry semi-automatic assault weapons; it is not legal to resist arrest and attack police officers. Grisham was so upset that his most sacred of all rights—the right to openly be stupid—was violated that he created Open Carry Texas. A jury later found him guilty of interfering with the duties of a police officer. He was fined $2,000, the maximum penalty.

     Between arrest and conviction, he and his newly-formed posse decided that because Texas allows the open display of weapons of semi-mass destruction they would just go to a few department stores and restaurants, carrying their big boy toys. As expected, customers panicked, and store managers asked them not to take their guns to town. Naturally, CJ and his hole-in-the-head gang had to explain their rights under Texas law, leading to headlines and a PR disaster. A couple of months later, because sometimes it takes awhile to realize the implications of mental derangement, OCT announced it wouldn’t unleash its arsenal on Chuckie Cheese. Grisham told the Dallas News the reason was because “the gun-control extremists had hijacked our photos, and it was taking away from the focus of our mission.” Apparently, Grisham didn’t mind terrorizing Texas citizens; he did mind that liberals had pictures of what he was doing. Nevertheless, for those who miss being terrorized by nimrods showing off their phallic symbols, they can just show up at the Almeda or Galleria malls near Houston every Saturday morning.

     Grisham continued his somewhat uncivil protest at a Veteran’s Day celebration at the state capitol in Austin. The Texas legislature and the executive branch oppose all them gal-dang lib’ral gun control freaks who cite statistics like how the more than 330,000 Americans were killed in the first decade of the 21st century, more than 20 times greater than all the deaths in 22 countries that are closest to the U.S. in wealth and population. They dismiss statistics that reveal there is a 22 times greater possibility of death by firearms if a home has a gun as opposed to one that doesn’t have a gun. They sneer at the facts there are more pre-school children are killed by guns than police officers killed in the line of duty.

     These heavily-lobbied legislators believe everyone has a constitutional right to carry and shoot off their mouths or someone else’s legs. But, they also believe there shouldn’t be any guns in the Texas capitol. It’s a survival issue—if the press, visiting school children, and cantankerous legislators all had guns, within a few months there would have to be new elections to replace those who gave their lives for the cause of gun rights advocacy.

     The cost to taxpayers of interim elections is a problem for a state that has willingly accepted being under siege by the Tea Party whackadoodle brigade whose mantra of “no guvmint; no taxes” is its justification for whatever it’s trying to justify.

     Grisham was politely told three times by police to remove his handgun; three times he explained, in a way that family newspapers can’t reproduce exactly, how he had his rights. Grisham is now trying to convince the Texas legislature that openly carrying handguns, just like in the Wild West, is also the citizens’ rights.

     Would there be the same level of Second Amendment concern if a Black or Hispanic gang strapped on weapons and marched through white suburbia— just peaceful-like, y’know. Just to educate the folk about the right to carry guns.

     [Dr. Brasch, an award-winning journalist, is author of 20 books, including Fracking Pennsylvania, an overall view of the health, environmental, political, and economic issues.]

Insanity Extends Beyond the Shooters

by Walter Brasch

      During this past week, in Scranton, Pa., a 16-year old put two bullets into the head of a taxi driver and then stole about $500 earned by the cabbie that evening.

      The teen, who showed no remorse when arrested a few hours later, mumbled a few words about his reasons. He said he murdered the cabbie “’Cause that’s what I do to people that don’t listen.” The teen thought the cabbie was taking too long to get him to his destination. The driver was a 47-year-old man with a wife and two children. The gun was an unlicensed 9-mm.

      A few days later, in Payson, Ariz., a three-year-old boy found a loaded semi-automatic gun in the apartment of family friend, began playing with it, and accidentally killed his 18-month-old brother. Police recovered several other weapons from the apartment.

      In Homestead, Fla., a 28-year-old man, who admitted he was drinking and using cocaine, was showing off an AK-47 at a picnic. His six-year-old nephew picked up the gun when no one was watching, played with it, and accidentally killed his own grandfather.
      In Logan County, Okla., a Sheriff’s deputy killed a family dog. The homeowner says she had politely asked the deputy not to come onto her property because she didn’t know how her two dogs would react. The deputy, who had no warrant, opened the gate and was met by one of the two dogs, who began sniffing the deputy. Witnesses say the deputy then pulled his gun, waved it at two children, and then killed the dog.

      In Isla Vista, Calif., a 22-year-old man with a history of mental problems, stabbed his three roommates, and then drove near the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara. In about 10 minutes, he murdered three more students and wounded 13 more before committing suicide.  Police say the killer had three 9 mm. weapons and about 400 rounds of ammunition, all of it purchased legally.

      The father of one of those killed, to a standing cheering crowd of 20,000 at a memorial service, called for an end of gun violence. “How many more people are going to have to die in this situation before the problem gets solved?” he demanded.  He accused politicians of having “done nothing” to stop the mass murders. He had previously told journalist Anderson Cooper that politicians had called him to express their sympathies.  But the father said he told the politicians, “Don’t tell me you’re sorry about my son’s death until you do something.” At the football stadium, the father, who had carefully prepared his speech, declared his son’s murder, and those of five other students, and those of thousands a year who were killed by gunfire, “died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the NRA.” The grieving father said, “Too many people have died, and there should be not one more.” The crowd picked up on his words, and began chanting, “Not one more!”

      More than 2,300 miles to the East, Samuel Wurzelbacher, forever known as “Joe the Plumber” after he became the darling of the extreme right wing during the 2008 presidential campaign, again crawled out of a hole to defend what he believed was his God-given right to defend gun rights. In an open letter, he pretended to be sympathetic to the families of those murdered, but declared, “Your dead kids don't trump my Constitutional rights.” With mangled grammar, he then told a grieving nation, “The proliferation of guns, lobbyists, politicians, etc.; will be exploited by gun-grab extremists as are all tragedies involving gun violence and the mentally ill by the anti-Second Amendment Left.”

      After the Sandy Hook massacre in December 2012, that left 26 dead, including 20 children between the ages of six and eight, America seemed determined to finally act against irresponsible purchase and ownership of guns. But, politicians with spines of Jello went into the fetal position before the financially-lucrative NRA support, and refused to improve laws about background checks for gun sales, whether from a dealer, at a gun show, from companies that advertise in any of several dozen gun magazines, or on the Internet; they refused to ban assault weapons; and they refused to restrict the size of gun magazines.

      The Georgia legislature is the latest to flex its steroid-driven brain, and pass a law that allows people to carry guns wherever they want. That would include bars. (Whatever could go wrong in a roomful of liquor, booze, and firearms?) Colleges. (Imagine 18-year-olds upset with their roommates or the profs who just gave them lower grades than they thought they deserved?)  And churches. (Obviously, no one thought to ask ‘What Would Jesus Do?' It shouldn’t take anyone with even one point of an IQ to figure out what the man Christians know as the Prince of Peace would think about firearms in houses of worship.)
      Gun-toting extremists picketed several private-enterprise restaurant chains that restrict patrons from carrying weapons. These whackadoodles are the same ones who claim that private enterprise is more important than government, but acknowledge private rights only if it agrees with their own distorted logic. 

       A CBS poll revealed about 85 percent of all Americans, including gun owners, support federal legislation to require thorough background checks on all persons planning to buy a gun. Apparently, the NRA leadership, far more reactionary than most of its members, believes hunters and those protecting their houses from burglars or the “jack-booted thugs” the NRA leadership once called federal law enforcement agents, need military-style assault weapons with a 100-round magazines.

      Just as politicians crave NRA money, the NRA knows it has millions of dollars of funding from gun manufacturers. Last year, American gun manufacturers earned about $12.6 billion from the sale of more than 5.5 million firearms, about half of them handguns. About 60 percent of the sales went to civilians, according to the Department of Justice. Another three million guns were imported. There are more than 310 million firearms in civilian possession, according to the FBI. The United States has one of the highest rates for gun violence in the world.

       Joe the Plumber and NRA executive director Wayne LaPierre, significant blemishes upon the Constitution and the principles of the Judeo-Christian philosophy, will continue to get media exposure. Their names will continue to be known. Their paranoid rants will continue to draw praise from hundreds of thousands who don’t know much about the Constitution, and believe President Obama—whom they know to be a Kenyan socialist Muslim—is secretly plotting to seize every one of their guns and turn the United States into a dictatorship.

      Within a few weeks, as other murders are committed, we will forget the names of those killed this past week.  Their names will no longer be important; how they were killed will no longer matter. But before we develop mass amnesia, and begin to believe that murder is just a part of the American culture, let’s take a few moments to remember. In Scranton, the 47-year-old cabbie, a mechanic who had slightly more than a month earlier changed jobs, is Vincent Darbenzio. The grandfather in Florida is Juan Manuel Martinez Sr. The dog was named Charlie. In Isla Vista, the students killed were George Chen, 19 years old; Cheng Hong, 20; Katerine Cooper, 22; Christopher Michaels-Martinez, 20; Weihan Wang, 20; and Veronika Weiss, 19. (Chris’s father, Richard, is the one who publicly called out politicians and the NRA.)

      During the week they and the 18-month-old in Arizona died, there were about 200 more deaths from firearms, according to the FBI. Few of those deaths made anything more than a two-column newspaper headline, the story usually confined just to local news. During this year, more than 32,000 will be killed by firearms; about 2,000 will be children.

      The NRA leadership and the few extremists it protects mouth the motto of the gun culture—“guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” They screech the paranoid fear that all guns will be registered and then confiscated. These juveniles trapped in the bodies of adults ignorantly bleat that if they or their children had been armed, the only one killed would be the person who committed the mass shootings. What they don’t acknowledge is that even the better-trained, better-armed police were unable to kill the shooter. They say there needs to be better laws against those with mental illnesses having guns. That part is true. But also true is that the lack of sane gun laws, which protect all people—including gun owners—is because the insanity is not just those who commit murder, but many who wrap themselves in the Second Amendment, ignorantly proclaiming, with no legal knowledge, they have a right to keep whatever arms and ammunition they want, and any gun law violates whatever they think is their ego-inflated divine inspiration.

      [Dr. Brasch is author of 20 books; the latest ones are Fracking Pennsylvania and Collateral Damage in the Marcellus Shale. He is also a semi-active trap shooter.]

NRA Liars and Congressional Cowards

 by Walter Brasch

President Obama cast off his “No Drama Obama” garb, and became the fiery leader of hope and change that Americans first elected in 2008. At a speech in Hartford, Conn., the President, frustrated by Republican obstructionism, demanded of his audience, “If you believe that the families of Newtown and Aurora and Tucson and Virginia Tech and the thousands of Americans who have been gunned down in the last four months deserve a vote, we all have to stand up.” He demand, “If you want the people you send to Washington to have just an iota of the courage that the educators at Sandy Hook showed when danger arrived on their doorstep, then we’re all going to have to stand up.”

He wanted the people to let Congress know it was “time to require a background check for anyone who wants to buy a gun so that people who are dangerous to themselves and others cannot get their hands on a gun.” He wanted the people to let Congress know, “It’s time to crack down on gun trafficking so that folks will think twice before buying a gun as part of a scheme to arm someone who won’t pass a background check.” He asked the people “to tell Congress it’s time to restore the ban on military-style assault weapons, and a 10-round limit for magazines, to make it harder for a gunman to fire 154 bullets into his victims in less than five minutes.” He pleaded that the people “have to tell Congress it’s time to strengthen school safety and help people struggling with mental health problems get the treatment they need before it’s too late.”

But, what he really wanted was a vote. A simple up-or-down vote. The people, said the President, at the very least “deserve a vote” not more obstructionism. 

Smirking with NRA drool slathering his five-term Senate body, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) wasn’t about to let that happen. He didn’t want a vote, even a watered down version that would have all the ferocity of a baby canary.

McConnell said he would filibuster all proposed legislation.

The Senate Republicans, who believe they’re the “law and order party,” have rolled over and allowed the NRA to pet them on their pork-bellied tummies. For more than three decades, the NRA and explosives manufacturers successfully lobbied Congress the to prohibit the use of taggants in explosives. These taggants would identify bombs before detonation and enable agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and explosives (ATF) to trace manufacturer and sale of the explosives after explosion. For six years, the NRA blocked the appointment of any nominee to head the ATF. With NRA paranoia guiding their own actions, the Republicans have also forbidden the ATF from creating a computerized database to better analyze and evaluate applications for firearms, and have left the ATF underfunded and undermanned. This would be the same ATF that, with fewer resources, now plays a major role in the Boston Marathon murders.

Five weeks after the murders in Newtown, the McConnell for Senate campaign told the voters they were “literally surrounded” by those who want to take their guns away. In a robocall to his constituents, he parroted the NRA erroneous claim that, “President Obama and his team are doing everything in their power to restrict your constitutional right to keep and bear arms.”  This would be the same senator who, in 1991, supported Joe Biden’s bill that led to a 10 year ban on semi-automatic and automatic weapons. This is the same senator who, in 1998, voted to support Barbara Boxer’s bill that required trigger locks for the purchase of every hand gun. In less than a decade, McConnell turned to the extreme Right and became little more than an NRA lackey, willing to wrap himself in a faulty interpretation of the Second Amendment and block the will of 90 percent of the American people, including a majority of all NRA members and gun owners.

Republic political strategist Karl Rove told journalist FoxNews reporter Chris Wallace, “People want this issue to be discussed, they want it to be decided and we don’t need to block everything in the Senate.” By a 68–31 vote, with 16 Republicans joining 52 Democrats, the Senate agreed to allow discussion on proposed gun control bills.

The first of several Senate bills, Wednesday, resulted in a 54–46 vote to expand background checks for gun purchases to include all internet and gun show sales, strengthen penalties for gun trafficking, and help fund additional school security. The bill, known as a compromise proposal, was sponsored by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), both of whom carry “A” ratings by the NRA. Five Democrats voted against the bill; four Republicans voted for it.  However, because of the 60-vote rule invoked by the NRA-fed obstructionist Republicans, and agreed to by the Democrats, it failed. The NRA, exercising its usual fear-mongering tactics, spread a $500,000 robocall campaign the day of the vote, and claimed the bill would lead to a national gun registry; provisions in the bill specifically excluded that possibility. President Obama would later say that the “gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill.”

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, on behalf of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, representing more than 900 American cities, called out the 46 senators who voted against the bill. “Today's vote is a damning indictment of the stranglehold that special interests have on Washington,” said Bloomberg. “More than 40 U.S. senators would rather turn their backs on the 90 percent of Americans who support comprehensive background checks than buck the increasingly extremist wing of the gun lobby.” Gov. Dan Malloy (D-Conn.) said the minority “who voted against this proposal should be ashamed of themselves.” aid the Senate had “ignored the will of the American people,” adding that those senators who voted against the expanded background checks chose to “obey the leaders of the powerful corporate gun lobby, instead of their constituents.” Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who has spent two years in recovery from an attempted assassination, said the failure to pass meaningful legislation was “based on political fear and on cold calculations about the money of special interests like the National Rifle Association.”

In rapid succession, a ban on assault weapons, a ban on high-capacity gun magazines and a bipartisan compromise to expand background checks for gun purchasers all failed to get the 60 votes needed. Even a bipartisan amendment to impose stiff penalties on gun traffickers was defeated, receiving 58 votes.

New York, Colorado, and Maryland have all recently passed common-sense gun safety reforms without violating anyone’s Second Amendment rights. The people of this democracy demand better controls over who can own guns. But until the members of Congress develop that one iota of courage that President Obama asked for, the United States will continue to have the highest number of guns per population of 178 countries—and also rank among the world’s top 10 countries in the rate of deaths per population from guns.

The No News News Media

by Walter Brasch

There was a lot of news this past week.

Some of it was even reported by the news media.

First, there was a football player from Notre Dame who either did or didn’t know that his girlfriend was or wasn’t real, but died sometime during the season. Six column headlines for several days announced the fraud. Network news and talk show hosts rehashed it almost daily.