The Gun Fight -- and the regional and national scenes

Earlier this morning, I posted a piece on gun rights matters on Redbadbear. (That post immediately follow this one.) Since then, I've been watching the news conference, faithfully carried on CNN and MSNBC (or now NBC), in which Biden and Bloomberg and a few other people are trying to revive the "gun control spirit" which has been losing ground among  the public and in much of Congress.

It's something of a mystery as to why the Obama administration jumped into this.  Perhaps they sensed an easy victory or, maybe, it's seen as a diversion away from the basic and urgently pressing social justice issues in the country.  In any event, it's backfiring.  Gun and ammo sales are sky high all over the United States, gun rights groups are expanding rapidly -- NRA is close to the five million mark -- and the political ramifications for 2014 and 2016 ought to be pretty obvious.

Pro-gun rights sentiment is very strong in most of the country. In the West, from eastern California into the Mountain states, including the Pacific Northwest, and encompassing the Great Plains states (Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas west of Dallas), it's an extremely powerful force.  (Although those Plains states are sometimes mistakenly called "Mid-western," that's an erroneous label for sure.  I've lived and lived and worked in some of them -- and they're fundamentally Western in ethos and in their basic version of American culture..)  The South is extremely pro-gun rights as well -- and so is the Border South: including most of Missouri and at least most of West Virginia.  The Midwest -- Iowa to Buffalo, New York -- has plenty of gun rights activists, especially in the rural/small town/small city settings.  Even the Eastern states have a great many  gun rights folks -- and certainly Northern New England is extremely pro-gun.

So I really don't see any new gun control measures emerging into the far foreseeable future.  What has happened is that gun rights people have been stimulated in unprecedented fashion by the Obama administration and the gun control outfits.  And those pro-gun forces will now remain super vigilant and, in many cases, politically retaliatory.

Again, it's hard to see why the Obama people et al. stumbled into this. (My earlier post of today now follows immediately.)

Hunter Bear
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The "assault rifle" ban effort has been withdrawn in the Senate.  It's unlikely that any other Federal measure in that genre will pass.

Gun control people in a very few states, following the lead of New York, are trying to pass some measures,  Tough sledding on that score in most cases.  Colorado's governor has just signed a modest little gun control pak.  It's worth noting that the two gun control bastions in the state -- Denver and Boulder -- aren't representative of that Western state as a whole -- any more than Phoenix metro is representative of Arizona.  The Colorado sheriff's association has made it clear, as have its counterparts in a growing number of states, that it won't cooperate with the Feds on any attempts by the latter to seize firearms that it sees as legal and in legal hands.  Court challenges are likely and there's even heavy talk about recall [of the Gov} and referendum on that which he's signed.

Through all of this, the phony "military assault rifles" continue to be described as just that: "military weapons".  No end of explaining that they are superficially dressed up conventional semi-automatics has yet publicly -- publicly -- penetrated most of the gun control forces. Nor has the fact that fully automatic military weapons in civilian hands have been banned since 1934.  Scary talk serves the purposes of the anti-gun rights folks and they do have some fish that'll bite.

Nor are the gun control forces willing to let go of the narrow "militia" interpretation of the Second Amendment -- which was foisted back in the late '60s when gun control began to gather steam.  There is a vast amount of publicly available academic scholarship dealing with the formative period of the U.S. and the Constitution that attests to the Founders definitely seeing the Second as a multi-faceted individual right.  The 2008 USSC decision clarifying the 2nd as a full individual right and an "equal" member of the Bill of Rights isn't mentioned much by the gun control forces -- and, if it is, they airily dismiss it as "bad law."

And there's really never any mention by the gun control types of sensible and principled individual self-defense -- in the growing number of situations in this country, urban and rural, where official law enforcement isn't readily available.

I've often said and written that the "gun issue" should be left alone -- if politicians are really interested in meaningful social justice legislatation..  Gun controversy is far more statistically and pervasively divisive than abortion.  And "gun control" -- even aside from the fact that there are about 300 million guns in this country -- isn't going to make any real dent in the crime situation whose causes lie deep: e.g., racism, poverty, urban congestion etc.

The very flawed premise that a crime committed by a violent psychotic should be blamed on the "gun" -- and then gun owners all over the country should be penalized -- and the Constitution eroded -- doesn't seem at all illogical to the gun control people.

Their ethos is, "prohibit."  Interesting that one of their champions, having now been beaten back by the courts in his effort to ban certain soft drinks, is now crusading to force store owners to hide their tobacco products from public view.  If the NRA didn't exist, and it's now almost at the five million mark, gun rights would have gone down the tube long ago.  

Hunter Bear

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis 
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk 
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO
www.hunterbear.org 
(much social justice material)

See the new and expanded/updated edition of my "Organizer's 
Book." It's the inside story of the massive Jackson Movement,
bloody repression and murder, and more -- including a myriad
of organizing "lessons."  And with my new and 10,000 word
Introduction. http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm (". .a local activist's
 important account of the deleterious effects the involvement of 
national organizations can have on indigenous protest movements."
David Garrow in "The Age of the Unheralded", Progressive Magazine,
April 1990.

See my piece ON BEING A MILITANT AND RADICAL
ORGANIZER -- AND AN EFFECTIVE ONE:
http://crmvet.org/comm/hunter1.htm

The Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm
(Expanded in 2012. Photos. Material on our Native
background.)