Is there anyone who believes the Tucson shootings will change anything? That the deaths of six people, including a 9-year-old girl and a federal judge, will lead to stricter gun control? Or even just a slightly more civil political debate? 

Probably not in Pittsburgh. 

Less than two years ago, after all, we lost three police officers to a deranged gunman of our own. Did that prompt any softening in the national mood? Ask Gabrielle Giffords.

Of course, there’s little evidence that right-wing rhetoric motivated Jared Loughner, the accused Tucson shooter, to try to assassinating the Democratic Congresswoman. But as Pittsburghers know, even if there were evidence, it wouldn’t matter. 

By most accounts Richard Poplawski, the man accused of the Stanton Heights shootings, actually was a fan of right-wing talk radio. “Rich, like myself, loved Glenn Beck,” a friend of Poplawski told journalist Will Bunch, adding that Poplawski was especially fixated on Beck’s warnings of a complete societal breakdown.

That doesn’t make Beck responsible, of course. The people who commit these crimes are diseases looking for a symptom. And they can find a trigger for their madness anywhere. Loughner’s reputed reading habits — which range from Karl Marx to Ayn Rand — demonstrate how diverse a deranged gunman’s literary tastes can be. For that matter, President Ronald Reagan was nearly assassinated by a guy inspired by the movie Taxi Driver. 

So it’s unfair to say such crimes result from right-wing rhetoric. Better to say they merely reflect it. Put simply: This is how things would be if people took that language seriously — if they really believed, for example, that “Second Amendment remedies” might be necessary to avert the threat of death panels being established by traitorous Democrats.  

The vast majority of people who use such rhetoric don’t take it seriously. Using labels like “traitor” and “terrorist” is the right-wing political equivalent of Viagra — it’s marketed to old white guys who need a spark to get excited. When they say Democrats are “traitors,” they mean it metaphorically. Even Glenn Beck occasionally takes a moment to note that — while George Soros may be destroying your country, your freedom and your children’s futures — why, that’s no reason to lash out.  

So the problem isn’t that crazed gunmen occasionally echo contemporary political rhetoric. The problem is that plenty of contemporary political rhetoric sounds like it’s being muttered by crazed gunmen. You might think that seeing a Democrat get gunned down might check the urge to demonize Democrats. Not because of a causal relationship, necessarily, but because it just seems indecent. Because it reminds you that, whatever your disagreements, you do share a common humanity — a common vulnerability — that your words have long ignored.

But these days, conservatives are too busy making themselves out to be the victims. You can hear it in Sarah Palin’s shrill denunciations of “blood libel,” just as you could hear it after the Stanton Heights shootings, on talk radio or the online gun-rights forums Poplawski frequented. (“[H]ow long will it be before some of us are faced with the choice of give up our guns or resist?” one participant fretted hours after the shooting.)

Political celebrities use First Amendment freedoms to stoke our fear, and then we rally around Second Amendment freedoms to defend ourselves from the phantoms they create. And when some lunatic lashes out at those demons, we grip the gunstock even tighter. The Arizona Republic reports that sales of Glocks and large-capacity magazines — the type apparently used in Tucson — have surged since the shooting. Gun owners fear the magazines will be banned in the future.  

To borrow Sarah Palin’s happy phrase, these folks aren’t retreating, they’re reloading. And I don’t mean that metaphorically. 

They have nothing to worry about. The lesson of Pittsburgh is that once the prayer vigils are over, nothing changes. If Poplawski’s access to an AK-47 didn’t prompt a serious look at firearm laws, neither will the extended magazines used in the Tucson shooting. 

Which is why those self-styled Tea Party radicals are wrong. The Tree of Liberty won’t be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It will be watered — over and over — with the blood of police officers, public officials and 9-year-old girls.  

This article appears in Jan 13-19, 2011.

E-mail Chris Potter about this post.

6 replies on “Firing Blanks”

  1. Prove gun controls are effective.

    http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf

    “This Article has reviewed a significant amount of evidence from a wide variety of international sources. Each individual portion of evidence is subject to cavil—at the very least the general objection that the persuasiveness of social scientific evidence cannot remotely approach the persuasiveness of conclusions in the physical sciences. Nevertheless, the burden of proof rests on the proponents of the more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death mantra, especially since they argue public policy ought to be based on that mantra. To bear that burden would at the very least require showing that a large number of nations with more guns have more death and that nations that have imposed stringent gun controls have achieved substantial reductions in criminal violence (or suicide). But those correlations are not observed when a large number of nations are compared across the world.”

    “In 2004,the U.S. National Academy of Sciences released its evaluation from a review of 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and some original empirical research. It failed to identify any gun control that had reduced violent crime, suicide, or gun accidents. The same conclusion was reached in 2003 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s review of then; extant studies.”

    “Study Shows Brady Bill Had No Impact on Gun Homicides”
    http://www.law.virginia.edu/html/news/2003_spr/cook.htm
    “Study finds Brady Act ineffective in reducing homicides”
    http://dukechronicle.com/article/study-finds-brady-act-ineffective-reducing-homicides
    “The Task Force found insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws or combinations of laws reviewed on violent outcomes.” The CDC is vehemently anti gun and interpreted its results to show not that the
    “more guns equal more death” mantra is erroneous, but only that the scores of studies it reviewed were inconclusively done.
    http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr5214a2.htm

    http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr59/nvsr59_02.pdf
    This shows that the death rate actually increased at the implementation of the “Brady Bill” in 1993 before returning to a downward trend, which dropped even faster after the 1994 AWB expired in 2004. Mind you it has been steadily declining since 1980.

    http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp

    Check out all those pretty charts showing less crime after right to carry laws are passed and more after gun bans are passed, references are included.

  2. The long-winded comment above is trying to distract from the reality that the US has more guns and more gun violence than the rest of the Western world.

    Europe, Japan, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, etc. all have more restrictions on gun ownership than the US, where gun ownership is a constitutional right. The US has higher rates of violent crimes, and a much higher rate of deaths caused by firearms. That’s all you need to know.

  3. Dismissing the facts has no bearing on the actual discussion. If you would of read the Harvard Law School study it would of explained why comparisons such as that are impossible on their face due to socioeconomic differences.

    In the UK each gun control law increased the homicide rate.

    The Czech Republic has very lax gun laws and a crime rate similar to New Zealand.

    You can make comparisons like that all you like but the evidence I presented clearly indicates the fallacy that gun control laws reduce crime.

  4. You disqualify yourself when you write things like “If you would of read.” Really? “would of”? Your spelling gives away your education level.

    You can trumpet that report all you want, but you did not understand what you read. Whether “each gun control law” in the UK increased the homicide rate is not the point, the point is what that rate would have been in the absence of that law (what is commonly known as the ‘counterfactual,’ an outcome you can never observe but have to estimate somehow if you are going to make statements like yours). And the Czech republic may have relatively lax gun laws, but they certainly have relatively low gun ownership rates in their towns and cities. And that’s the whole point: gun ownership is, and has always been, correlated with gun violence. The US has higher gun ownership rates and higher gun violence rates than any other Western country in the world. That is a disgrace and needs to change.

  5. Grammatical errors disqualify nothing. It is not one study and you provide no evidence other than “another country/countries has/have gun control and less gun homicide so that means gun control works”. In the UK they recover hundreds of guns per month with automatic capabilities and “high capacity” magazines despite the gun bans. Police in certain areas now need to wear body armor.

    Your premise that gun ownership is directly related to “gun violence” has no evidence to back it up other than your opinion. You also ignore the link of less guns leading to higher rates of burglary, robbery and other crimes. You also ignore socioeconomic differences between countries.

    Maybe you should try reading the studies before you dismiss them out of hand. Maybe you should go argue with the National Academy of Science because by their study, you are wrong.

    Firearms account for less than 0.5% of deaths in this country, you stand more likelihood of dying in a fall.

  6. i understand you even if the pompous idiots before me didnt the cow is already out of the barn on that one just like trying to eliminate drugs

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