Fear and Extremism Are Good for Business

 

Texas officials on May 25th, led by Gov. Greg Abbott, 

explaining away the Uvalde massacre as a mental health issue

•  Fear and Extremism Are Good for Business

If you believe those oft-spoken words from the NRA – suggesting well-armed citizens are necessary to ensure that Congress and the federal government are reflective of their values – are just fluff, think again. Beginning with the aftermath of the Vietnam War, American small arms manufacturers (mostly in Connecticut and Massachusetts) were facing a disastrous shortfall in orders for weapons. They enlisted a non-profit gun safety organization, the NRA, to open a for-profit public relations/lobbying wing to push for greater consumer gun demand and limited if any government regulation. That was 1976, a time when there had never been a Supreme Court decision ruling that the Second Amendment embodied a universal American right to own a gun.

Based on the wildly successful and well-funded NRA efforts, that decision came in a 2008, a 5-4 ruling (Heller vs DC) based on what legal experts believe was a severely distorted analysis of the plain meaning of the Amendment. Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion applied his “originalist” logic to modern guns – skipping over the reality of flintlocks and musket from 1789 – essentially ignored the “well regulated militia” language as immaterial and invoked an interpretation of British law in the late 18th century that purportedly inspired that Amendment, a view that British jurists have found abysmally incorrect.

Subsequent federal courts, a trend that has accelerated with Trump-appointed judges, have widened Heller to apply to military-grade assault weapons, voided even modest state and municipal gun laws (for example, a California law requiring that, with few exceptions, one must be at least 21 to buy a gun) and generally supported red states’ loosening of gun laws, thus striking down blue states, facing rising big city gun crimes, attempting to control the carnage. There are now more guns than people in the United States, and by NRA estimates, over 15 million semiautomatic assault rifles in civilian hands.

In my May 26th Only in America blog, I presented specifics on the NRA’s pattern of making large campaign contributions, particularly to incumbent Republican Senators (a practice that extends to state offices as well), to make sure federal gun control legislation – which is favored by 90% of Americans even in red states – never happens… and that states struggling to create and enforce their own gun laws are stopped dead in their tracks by “federal preemption.” Despite our mass shootings that do not take place anywhere else in the world (other than nations at war), that Republican Senate bloc, bolstered by the cloture/filibuster rule that requires a 60% vote on most bills just to muster a floor vote, pretend that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” and defeat popularly supported legislation, even to provide universal background checks or increase federal agencies’ ability with increasingly well-armed domestic militia with a clear anti-democratic goal. You may have seen them marching on January 6, 2021.

But nothing brings home the dramatically nefarious goal of the gun lobby to sell as many guns as they can, for any reason they can think of: to cartels south of the border with marketing campaigns specifically targeting that segment, even including weapons engraved with Latin American heroes, to north of the border to fearful Americans, gangs in escalating turf wars… and yes, to tactically trained anti-democratic militia. To understand exactly how we got here, here some interesting observations from a former strategist for that gun lobby, Ryan Busse, writing an OpEd for the May 26th The Guardian (UK) entitled: Shootings aren’t a sign America is ‘broken’. It's working exactly as intended. While this is a longer piece, this excerpt is really worth reading:

For more than two decades, I worked in the highest levels of the firearms industry. I spent my career working to hold on to the principles of responsible gun ownership and fighting against the very predictable results of increasing extremism and the pursuit of profit above all else… I wrote my book Gunfight about the truth of what the industry has become and about my life fighting it from the inside. Today I’m a senior adviser to the gun violence prevention group founded by former congresswoman Gabby Giffords – not a career path I thought I’d have when I first started out in the firearms industry, but one that felt very necessary to me given what I experienced.

For the first few years of my career, which started in 1995, the industry adhered to self-imposed rules and norms – such as restricting tactical gear like that worn by the Buffalo and Uvalde shooters to the law enforcement and military sections of trade shows. Even up until about 15 years ago, self-imposed policies like this were strictly enforced by the industry’s own trade association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF). Industry norms prohibited displaying tactical gear, certain marketing campaigns or incendiary firearms names, for fear of what might spread throughout the country.

But as the increasing vitriol of the National Rifle Association (NRA) proved politically effective, some in the gun business realized this messaging could be adopted by the firearms industry to sell more guns. All that was required for success was a dedication to frighteningly dangerous rhetoric and increasingly powerful weaponry. Cultural norms and responsibility would have to go… The extreme risks and likely outcomes of such an experiment seemed obvious to me and to others. I refused to join the growing tactical market and worked to weaken the NRA behind the scenes. And I wasn’t the only one.

A number of other people in the industry sounded their own alarms about the impacts of ‘terrorist rifles’ and a nation with unlimited gun sales and insufficient responsibility. Those warnings resulted in the quick and very public loss of careers at the hands of the NRA and its growing radicalized troll army.

Everyone else got the message. Speaking up for responsibility was not to be tolerated. Unpleasantries like radicalized young men with too many guns were to be treated like diffuse pollution that could be dealt with by someone downstream. Even when unspeakable tragedies, such as the murders at Sandy Hook, were linked directly to shockingly irresponsible marketing campaigns that promised a metaphorical ‘man card’ to any young man who purchased an AR-15, the NSSF opted to look the other way.

For years, the NSSF worked behind the scenes to criticize and marginalize people like me who spoke up. Today the organization openly attacks anyone who speaks out in support of gun safety. But it has nothing to say about Kyle Rittenhouse or armed men menacing the Michigan capital. So far there is silence from the NSSF and the NRA on the 10 Black Americans murdered in Buffalo and the 19 children and two teachers murdered in Uvalde.

The NSSF helped craft a new world of gun lobby extremism in which profits are all that matter. With the election of America’s first Black president, the lobby embraced conspiracy-mongering, racism and fear campaigns. Gun sales soared from less than 8m guns in 2008 to more than 16m in 2016.

In 2016, the firearms industry was all-in on Donald Trump and even piped his 2017 American Carnage inauguration speech throughout the industry trade show like a religious ceremony. The industry celebrated because Trump was the perfect salesman for more guns. This system was simply being pushed to its next stage.

This Friday [5/27], Trump is scheduled to speak at the annual NRA convention in Houston – less than 300 miles from Uvalde. The convention hall will be full of NSSF industry members lining up to court Trump and his frenzied fans. The system continues to work just as it was designed by the NRA and NSSF; from their point of view, nothing about it is broken.

Right after the Uvalde massacre of elementary school children: “Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) is pushing a vote to advance a House-passed bill that would set up domestic terrorism offices across three federal agencies. Republicans argue the bill, spurred by alarm over the rise in incidents of homegrown violent extremism, is unnecessary and that Democrats are trying to score political points.” Washington Post, May 26th. It has zero chance of passage. Meanwhile, in Houston, Texas, the annual meeting of the NRA, replete with high profile Republicans speaking, took place at a venue where, by NRA rules, guns were not permitted. Yet, their overwhelming message: More guns to stop gun violence.

For those Republicans who believe teachers should be armed and cops (retired or current) should be stationed in every school in America, I remind them that cops outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, stood outside for an estimated 40 minutes, listening to gunshots inside the school, waiting for orders. It was a Border Patrol Agent who eventually shot the perpetrator. Teachers with guns? Every jurisdiction on earth, including some movements earlier even in the United States, that has pulled guns out of society watched gun violence drop accordingly. It’s the easy button, but we need to push it.

I’m Peter Dekom, and every legislator, every member of Congress and every judge voting or ruling against reasonable gun control has the blood of young children on their hands.