Since Friday's mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut there has been an almost constant chorus about how the tragedy is a "game changer" in America's gun politics. Some of the calls for reform have actually been quite moving, such as MSNBC host and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough's just this morning.
If you don't know anything about the American government or society, you might actually believe that "nothing will ever be the same." Sadly, that isn't going to be the case. There will be no fundamental change in America for several reasons.
As I explained yesterday, this isn't about guns, movies, video games, or even mental health. It's about something fundamental to the American character that leads them to resolve conflicts with violence. Even English-speaking industrialized countries with ready access to weaponry don't have anything close to the homicide rates of the United States.
That's well beyond the capacity of a government, even the world's most powerful government, to solve. Yes, you can incarcerate even more of your citizens - and the United States already has the largest prison population in the free world - but that does nothing to address the underlying issue. Were it otherwise, American criminal justice would have done away with this ugly phenomenon decades ago. Instead, it has gotten worse and the victims are now first graders.
One of the reasons that I have no faith in anything changing is something that we've already seen. Too many Americans are casting blame at their government, which I suppose is to be expected. But that ignores that in a constitutional republic, you don't just get the government you deserve, you get the government you vote for.
And what the American people have voted for couldn't be clearer. Over the last 50 years of federal elections, the re-election of American incumbents has been somewhere in the neighbourhood of 97%. In every election all one hears is constant clamoring for change, but voters never actually mark their ballots for it.
That's not the fault of the government, the politicians, the law, or even the money in politics. That is a perfect representation of the intellectual, physical and moral laziness of the voter. Unless and until the people start accepting responsibility for what their country has become, dreams of change will remain precisely that, dreams.
If people are unwilling to change their government in a fundamental way from time to time, what right do they have to believe that their government is ever going to change anything at all? The politicians rightly know that they risk nothing by maintaining the status quo, so what reason do they have to do anything but that? "Hope and change" is a slogan, it is not an agenda.
I remember how 9/11 was supposed to "change everything," too. However, it didn't take long for people to rail against the security measures put in place to prevent it from happening again. The modern attention span is virtually non-existent. No matter how terrible the tragedy, no matter how brutal the carnage, people will put it out of their minds as soon as their daily routines are negatively impacted.
Change starts with the people. Expecting the government to change absent the will of the people is little more than wishful thinking.
But there are practical challenges Washington would face.
Here's an interesting fact, which reinforces something else I noted yesterday;
Even if the political will existed to do something meaningful, numbers like 270 million are too large to reasonably do anything about. The American military couldn't even begin to disarm an Iraqi insurgency, even without the inconvenience of the Bill of Rights getting in the way.
There are an estimated 270 million guns in the hands of civilians in the United States, making Americans the most heavily armed people in the world per capita. Yemen, a tribal nation with no history of strong central government or the rule of law, comes in a distant second.
Let's assume that you could get an effective gun control ban through Congress, which I don't believe that you can. That would almost certainly only affect the manufacture and sale of new weapons. There would still be 270 million existing guns out there in America.
People still own perfectly functional firearms from the Civil War, which was a century and a half ago. How long do you suppose that a modern AR-15 is designed to last?
Not only does the Sandy Hook massacre not "change everything," it won't even change the United States Senate.
The Senate was deliberately designed to frustrate passionate calls for immediate change. The Founders knew that good rarely comes from the inflamed masses, but lasting damage to a constitutional republic often does.
A gun control bill might actually the pass the Senate. I'm not discounting entirely the idea that it will. However, I can assure you that it will be so gutted that it will only give the appearance of doing something, a legislative phenomenon that the Senate specializes in.
Always remember that there was an assault weapons ban that looked like it accomplished something during the Clinton administration. It, like the bill likely to be introduced soon, was written by Senator Dianne Feinstein.
The practical effect of the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act of 1994 was as follows;
That law banned 19 specific types of semiautomatic weapons – guns that reload new rounds of ammo automatically – and magazine clips that could hold more than 10 rounds.
It also banned guns with at least two "military-style features," effectively eliminating 118 models, according to this 2004 University of Pennsylvania study commissioned by the DOJ's research arm.
Despite these limitations, critics of the law say, people could still get their hands on semiautomatics.
The U Penn report suggested that semiautomatic weapons could maintain their essential functions even if gun makers got rid of the "military-style features" banned by the 1994 law.
The report found the assault weapons ban "targets a relatively small number of weapons based on features that have little to do with the weapons' operation, and removing those features is sufficient to make the weapons legal."
For example, after the ban, gun makers marketed "legalized" versions of the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, which was exactly the same as the outlawed version, but came without accessories such as threaded barrels.
Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the NRA, also made that point when speaking to PBS in 2004. The government only sought to limit guns containing certain "cosmetic features" such as a bayonet mount, according to LaPierre.
"The guns have been marketed the last 10 years without the cosmetic accessories," he said. "The same guns have been there for the past 10 years."
And, under the ban, gun enthusiasts could buy any semiautomatic they wanted to – as long as it was made before 1994. (emphasis in original)
Were I to make an educated guess, I would say that any new bill will closely resemble the 1994 law. And that will make it meaningless. After all, there were a number of mass shootings - including school shootings - with assault weapons between 1994 and 2004, when the law expired.
On the other hand, threaded barrels will probably disappear again. And that will probably be enough to make most people feel better.
The assault weapons ban only made cosmetic changes and primarily existed to make Democrats feel good about themselves while providing the American people with the illusion of reform.
It's notable that the National Rifle Association didn't challenge the '94 ban in court. Senator Feinstein said yesterday that they didn't because they knew the ban would be upheld. One of the Supreme Court's staunchest conservatives, Antonin Scalia, has also said that such a ban would likely survive judicial review.
But the fact is that the ban wasn't challenged because it was exactly what the lobbyists wanted. Why would they want to draw attention to the fact that it was entirely cosmetic and fundamentally changed nothing?
I'm about to tell you something that isn't just an important thing to know about democracy, it's the only thing you need to know about democracy.
You don't matter to your representatives a tenth as much as the lobbyists do. Why should you? After all, the lobbyists are usually former staffers or colleagues of your representative. There are far deeper relationships there than you'll ever share, even if you ignore the money and political support involved.
If you look at the innards of any "major reform" over the last 30 years, you very quickly come to understand that they not only don't do what they advertise, they don't do much of anything at all, except serve the interests of an impacted lobby somewhere. They lobbyists don't usually win, folks, they always win. And as long as the revolving door between government and lobbying is allowed to exist, they always will.
So does Sandy Hook "change everything?" Not even close. A lot of people will make a lot of noise and make a huge display of rending their garments until the funerals are over, at which point business as usual will resume. Then there will be another Sandy Hook, perhaps with even younger victims, and the process will repeat itself.
As I said both yesterday and in this post, I don't think that any ban is going to be especially effective for the many practical reasons that I listed. But you will probably get a sideshow of people appearing to do something to placate you for maybe six weeks.
Here's how I know that nothing is going to change in a serious way. Because your democracy is what you make it, and nobody is particularly interested in their democracy. Learning how your government works and why is hard, often tedious work, which is why very few people bother doing it.
What I haven't seen anyone point out is that this is so much bigger than Sandy Hook. This is about everything your government does. If you leave it to the politicians and their lobbyist cronies to stop the next Sandy Hook, you're guaranteeing that there will be another one. And another one after that. Just as there will be another massive bank failure that takes down the economy, there will be another Sandy Hook.
And people will look everywhere except the one place they should look first: the mirror.
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