The one thing Cuomo and gun advocates agree on

North Country Public Radio had an interesting piece on how mental health advocates are protesting some provisions of New York's controversial gun control law.

By rights, the concept of banning the 'mentally ill' (whatever that means) should provide a great argument for gun advocates to add to their lawsuit against the gun law. After all, the sainted 2nd Amendment doesn't include an exception for them.

If nothing else, the law bans gun ownership for that group without due process, without even defining what 'mentally ill' means or a legal process for deeming people such, merely because some random psychiatrist deems them to be 'dangerous.' This alone should force at least part of the law they hate so much to be struck down.

The right to due process is also in the Constitution. Any other withdrawal of civic rights requires some sort of legal process. We see how fail-safe this lack of checks and balances has proven with the no-fly list.

Instead, the many gun advocates have chosen to make the 'mentally ill' a scapegoat so they don't have to be the scapegoat anymore. Since the law doesn't define mentally ill or any legal process for determining it, can a shrink decree you 'mentally ill' and 'dangerous' simply because you own a lot of guns? Gun advocates should be careful about this scapegoating because it may well backfire.

So we're left with the grotesquely hypocritical situation of many of gun advocates denouncing the idea of a government registry of gun owners while they are supporting a government registry of the 'mentally ill.'

Apparently, their contention is that gun ownership isn't a crime but being 'mentally ill' is.

Update: Most gun owners I know say that the mentally ill should not be allowed to own guns. Let's assume for a second that such a situation factors in a proper definition and due process. Here's a rhetorical question. Statistically, the mentally ill are far more likely to be VICTIMS of crime than perpetrators. So if guns are a deterrent, don't they need guns MORE than the population as a whole? Why should gun owners tell them to 'just rely on law enforcement' in a way they'd totally reject for everyone else?

Guns, property and voting

The controversial New York gun law passed recently contained a provision whereby gun registration information (such as addresses of registrants) would cease to be accessible to the general public. This came after the contemptible publication of gun owners’ addresses by a newspaper in the downstate’s Hudson Valley.

But my question is this. You are required to register with the government if you wish to exercise these three constitutional rights: gun ownership, voting and property ownership. But while the addresses of voters and property owners are considered public domain, available for any Tom, Dick and Harry to publish on the Internet (or for any stalker to target their victim), the addresses of gun owners, at least in New York state, are now private.

I’ve asked this question of many people but I’ve still never gotten an answer: why is the privacy of registrants’ information treated differently for gun owners than it is for voters and property owners?

 

Please note: This entry is NOT intended to debate whether one should have to register to exercise any of these rights. It’s acknowledging the fact that one has to and wondering why the personal information is subsequently treated differently depending on the right being exercised. Any comments that focus on whether one should have to register for any of these will be rejected so as not to hijack the intent of the discussion.

Trying to understand the gun culture

Note: this essay is about the gun culture, not about gun control legislation or proposals.

NCPR’s In Box blog has an interesting essay on northern New York’s cowboy culture.

I grew up in upstate New York and have spent virtually my whole life here. I’ve seen enough of isolated rural New York that I understand perfectly well why someone might feel the need to own a gun to protect their family and home. But while I get most of the gun culture, even if I don’t partake in it, there are still aspects about it that I simply don’t get.

An acquaintance of mine last week brought up the issue of guns last week following the passing of a gun control measure by the New York legislature and governor, the first since the Sandy Hook massacre. This was a bit surprising since we’d never directly talked politics before. He’s an evangelical Christian and very socially conservative (at least based on his Facebook page). He was extremely upset by the law. Fair enough.

He was so agitated that he was speculating on the possibility of moving to Canada or to Vermont... not mere ranting since he lives a stone’s throw away from the latter.

To him, the key issue seemed to be the mere (to my eyes) fact of having to register his weapons. when he asked if guns had to be registered in Canada and I said I think they did, he said the heck with that.

He seems like a nice reasonable person. Not a bloodthirsty fanatic. Not a drone intoning from a script. Not a raving lunatic blaming video games for Newtown. He is religious, pleasant, even boring, family man.

But the gun issue was so important to him, it seemed to trump his other views... to the point that as an evangelical social conservative, he’d considered moving to a far more secular country than ours and to a state where gay marriage was legal (and probably the most liberal state in the nation overall).

Evangelicalism seemed to be at the core of himself and his family’s everything, yet when guns were threatened, it seemed to trump even something as strong as religious belief. *This* is what I don’t get about gun culture... and frankly what unnerves me a bit.

Newtown did not change us

After the massacre of several dozen school children and others in Newtown, CT, there was plenty of talk Newtown “changed us,” it didn’t. Within a few days, Americans were back to their usual pantomime political tribalism..

It’s like I said the day after Newtown. If we’re not willing to change something about our society, then nothing will change. Not exactly high philosophy but it means if we’re not willing to change something significant, we simply have to accept that there will be lots of needless deaths in our country, whether by children or by mall denizens, whether via guns or via other means. If we’re not willing to change something about our too frequent use of violence as a means of first resort, then all the sorrow and hand-wringing will be continue to be as hollow as it’s been. America has been a violent society from the beginning. Far greater massacres have done little to curb these impulses, so I have no expectation that Newtown will make any significant dent in how we act.

There was a (presumably) pro-gun control graphic that made the rounds after Newtown. It pointed out the rate of gun deaths in various western countries, the US of course being the highest. I was struck by it but in a different way the the authors likely intended. I was struck the fact that the two countries with the lowest per capita death by gun rates on the list were the UK and Switzerland. 

Britain has virtually banned private handgun ownership and has very strict gun control laws. Switzerland has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world and, if I understand correctly, has very little in the way of gun control laws. These two extremes of these supposedly “causational” factors have both resulted in far lower gun-related deaths than our own country.

Focusing solely on gun control is taking the easy way out, because even if the gun control makes a positive impact, that impact will be too small to make any significant difference by itself. We need to look deeper.

The problem is greater than what guns or ammunition is available or whether every school janitor has an AK47.  So changing gun laws or creating national registries of gun owners or the mentally ill or arming every special ed aid and bus driver in schools may or may not help a small amount but will not fundamentally change the situation because it doesn’t address its broader problem. We have to look deeper and that’s not something we’re not nearly as good at as we are invoking the Nazis in every argument and then going back to American Idol.

Romney grants rights to foreigners that he denies to Americans

The juxtaposition of two stories on the front page of today's Oneonta Daily Star caught my eye: "Romney declares Jerusalem capital of Jewish state" and "Area gun enthusiasts take aim at critics."

The latter was the usual mainstream media story run in the aftermath of a mass shooting tragedy in which interviewees claimed that we didn't need more gun restrictions. It's shocking that the group interviewed, participants at a southern New York gun show, would come to that conclusion. Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney has agreed with this position.

The former was a story about Romney's visit to Israel. There, Romney said he would back an Israeli military aggression to knock out Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program, which played well with the militaristic government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Republican said that Israel had the 'right' to live next to a non-nuclear Iran.


At home, conservatives claim that everybody being armed makes things *more* safe.

Abroad, they claim that everybody being armed makes things *less* safe.

They need to pick a propaganda line and stick with it.

Additionally, Romney is claiming that Israelis have the 'rights' to live next to an unarmed neighbor and to aggressively disarm their neighbor to achieve that 'right.'

But he denies that Americans don't have any such rights.

Why does Romney claim a right for foreigners that he denies to Americans?

What country is Romney running to lead?

Update: One gun enthusiast interviewed in The Daily Star piece noted "In a free society, you are going to have crazies and there is no way to stop them." Can you imagine a conservative agreeing with that statement if the word 'crazies' was preceded by the word 'Islamist'?

Firing blanks

Perhaps the best argument in favor of expanded gun ownership is that maybe ordinary people need firearms to protect themselves from the gun fanatics.