The Newtown, Connecticut massacre of children has changed the
gun control debate to an extent no other event has in decades. One
of the reasons it has had such an effect is that it came at the
time when liberals are at the height of their power and
conservatives — and Republicans — are at their lowest ebb. It
also came at a time when the maneuvers between House Speaker John
Boehner and President Obama over solving the “fiscal cliff” crisis
fell apart, leaving Boehner severely weakened.
The Newtown children hadn’t even been buried before the usual
gun control liberals were demanding another “assault weapons” ban.
California Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein hit the Sunday shows two
days after the massacre advancing a new version of the ban she’d
authored in 1994. Chuckie Schumer, Nanny Bloomberg, and the rest
were up in verbal arms, demanding that DiFi’s approach — or
something more restrictive — be adopted forthwith. Nancy Pelosi
wanted the House to pass immediately a ban on magazines holding
more than ten rounds.
And with Republicans on the ropes, President Obama was hitting
hard. Obama quite evidently wants us to go over the fiscal cliff,
and has maneuvered around Boehner in the manner of Muhammad Ali:
he’s floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee. Obama
tasked Vice President Biden to head up a new gun violence task
force, which — as Obama said in the announcement — would be
reporting its demand for an “assault weapons” ban among other
things, such as more funding for mental health programs.
But Biden’s task force isn’t going to study gun violence. Obama
announced what he wanted in the report and demanded it be delivered
in January. His timing is another political master stroke: Obama is
bringing the gun “crisis” to a head at the same time that the
financial crisis will impose higher taxes across every sector of
the economy and the government will — just like it did in 2011 —
hit the ceiling on federal debt.
By engineering the gun debate so that it will come to fever
pitch at the same time as the economic mess, Obama is counting on
the strategy that has worked for him before. If you have enough
tumult and if the media are in full cry in support of your agenda,
your opponents will be demonized and rendered powerless to stop
what you want to do.
Here we have three “crises” — all of which deserve cautious
Constitutional solutions — that will be “solved” only by liberal
proposals when Obama invokes his tried and true “we can’t wait”
tactic. By saying we can’t wait for tax hikes or a debt ceiling
increase or gun control — all at the same time — Obama will be
able to get a series of legislation that, in the immortal words of
then-Speaker Pelosi, we’ll have to have Congress pass so we can
then find out what’s in them.
The Republicans — the New York Jets of politics — are in such
disarray that they’ll probably get beaten on all three issues.
What the Republicans should do — and, of course, aren’t doing
— is to form their own gun violence task force. With five or six
members drawn from the House and an equal number from the Senate,
they could come up with an anti-violence agenda that would actually
deal with the problem. How about some stringent measures aimed at
getting the states to take the dangerous mentally ill off the
streets? How about — as I
wrote last week — passing some equally-stringent measures to
get the states to strengthen school defenses without turning the
100,000 K-12 schools in America into armed camps?
A Republican task force could survey “assault weapon” bans. They
should start with Connecticut’s, which didn’t ban the “Bushmaster”
rifle Adam Lanza used to kill the children in the Newtown massacre.
That law
focuses on the cosmetic appearance of the weapon, not its
capability. DiFi wants to ban “assault weapons” but — by her
description of the bill she intends to introduce — her “ban” would
exempt at least 900 kinds of weapons.
Feinstein’s approach proves that gun control is a substitute for
dealing with the real problem, which is the dangerous mentally ill.
Unless and until the states act to ensure that these people — and
according to the forensic psychiatrists I’ve spoken to it’s usually
the high school age males — are identified and taken off the
streets, no gun control law will prevent more massacres like the
Newtown event.
The Republican counter-proposals should be crafted in the same
time that Obama’s will be. And if there’s no Republican gun
violence agenda, there will only be Obama’s to debate. It’s a
political cliché, but nevertheless true: you can’t beat something
with nothing. Right now, that’s what the Republicans have.
The NRA didn’t provide anything helpful in its Friday presser.
Saying, as NRA Executive Director Wayne LaPierre did, that the only
answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun — which,
in the moment of the shooting, is exactly right - still forfeits
the essential elements of any solution and, thus, the debate. We
need measures, the ones I described in last week’s
column, that will take the dangerous mentally ill off the
streets and make it harder for any shooter to get into a school and
harm the kids when he does.
Liberals want the “assault weapons” ban because they favor any
measure that will take guns out of the hands of Americans. They
will say that no one needs an “assault weapon,” which is probably
true. Unless you live in a place where you can’t leave your house
without facing gun violence, you don’t need a magazine-fed
semi-automatic rifle. But you may want one. Thousands of hunters
use magazine-fed semi-automatic rifles such as the Browning BAR. If
you miss on your first shot or wound the deer or bear you’re
hunting and need a quick follow-up shot, something like the BAR is
what you need. But this isn’t a question of need. It’s a question
of freedom.
If we are going to take effective action against events like the
Newtown massacre, it’s not our freedoms that should be limited.
We’ve protected the dangerous mentally ill so well that it’s
extremely difficult under most states’ laws, to take them off the
streets. And even where — as in Connecticut — the laws provide
the means to do so, those laws are not used effectively. Their
freedoms are trumping our right to safe schools, movie theaters,
and shopping malls.
Republicans should be hammering the issues that really underlie
the problem of protecting people from mass murders. Liberals want
to spend money on everything that increases government power. But
they don’t want to spend the money to do what’s needed to protect
school children. We’re already hearing that we can’t afford to put
a cop in every school.
Why can’t we? Hardening the targets that are our schools —
giving the teachers the training and the non-lethal means to
protect the children until the cops arrive — will be very
expensive. Over the next three months, while Obama manages the
three “crises” of tax rates, the debt ceiling, and gun control,
we’ll be told that the “assault weapons” ban will cost us nothing
and that the states can’t afford to do the other things we need to
protect school kids.
States can’t afford to not act. Their budgets are being blown by
Medicaid and other federal mandatory spending that could and should
be reduced or eliminated. If the federal government legislated the
savings that cut wasteful federal programs — such as Sen. Tom
Coburn details
in his “back in black” proposal — we could save $9 trillion in
government waste. That would pay for what states need to protect
schools hundreds or thousands of times over.
Over the next three months, congressional Republicans will be
fighting losing battles on gun control, taxation and the federal
debt ceiling. They needn’t lose, but they will as long as they
follow Boehner’s lead. New leaders need to take charge now, and
take us off the path Obama is mapping.
Obama is right on one thing: we can’t wait. But that for which
we can’t wait is for conservative leadership out of the mess that
Obama and Boehner have made. Gun control, like the fiscal cliff
Obama created with the help of congressional Republicans, isn’t a
solution to our nation’s biggest problems.
