These are dangerous days. In our uncertain political and economic times, the U.S. is experiencing a surge in right-wing violence and intimidation. Perhaps driven by fear of these uncertainties, individuals with such a radical ideological bent are increasingly threatening to harm our democratic civic institutions and progressive-minded political and social organizations. The rise in hate groups and individuals is being nurtured by reckless, mendacious broadcast and print media pundits - including elected officials and political candidates - who incite violence against these targets.
Take, for example, the July 18, 2010, incident involving Byron Williams in Oakland, California. Williams, an ex-felon and self-professed fan of Fox News' Glenn Beck, was strongly influenced by Beck's tirades against organizations like the ACLU and San Francisco-based Tides Foundation that claimed the groups are "shady organizations" that funnel money to "some of the most extreme groups on the left" and are working to take control of the U.S. government. In fact, Williams was so upset that he donned body armor, armed himself with three guns, and set out to "start a revolution" by killing people at the Northern California ACLU and the Tides Foundation. Williams may have succeeded in his murderous goals had he not been stopped for erratic driving by the California Highway Patrol in Oakland and engaged them in a freeway gun battle, only to be ultimately subdued by law enforcement.
In August 2009, the Southern Poverty Law Center issued a report detailing the rise in anti-government militias and right-wing hate groups that have been resurrected, in part, with the support of right-of-center elected officials and certain mainstream media outlets. Recently we've heard increasingly violent threats from radical political candidates faced with the prospect of losing an election to a political rival promoting "Second Amendment remedies" as a way to remove their opponents from office. Other extremists have advocated for the violent overthrow of the government and use guns and other violent imagery in political messages. Such motivational rhetoric would ring hollow and fail to pose a legitimate threat to members of civil society if those susceptible to acting upon such rhetoric did not have access to essential ingredients to facilitate violence: guns and ammunition.
Firearms and ammunition are too easily accessible in this country, and flaccid federal and state gun laws are primarily to blame. Glaring gaps in our gun laws allow criminals and other prohibited possessors access to firearms through traffickers, straw purchases, and private firearm transfers at gun shows and elsewhere, allowing such individuals to evade background checks and recordkeeping requirements and obtain guns. Except in a select few states, private firearm sales - those that do not involve federally licensed dealers - aren't subject to background checks. Alarmingly, private gun transfers account for an estimated 40% of all firearm transfers each year. Such loopholes keep us awash in guns and allow the public to be easily victimized by a prohibited possessor carrying a firearm. In 2007 alone, FBI statistics show that 385,178 crimes were committed with guns.
Our current patchwork of minimal federal gun regulation and wildly varying state laws is ineffective in making significant reductions in gun deaths and injures, and serves to arm criminals and militia types. States with strong laws designed to reduce gun deaths and injuries are undermined by traffickers who use the laws of weaker states to obtain guns and then pour these guns into the "strong law" states - into the waiting hands of militiamen, and even felons and the mentally ill.
How can we stem such easy access to guns? A growing body of evidence indicates that stronger firearm regulations may be having a positive effect at deterring gun violence. Recent research by Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG) finds that states with weak gun laws are disproportionately the top sources of firearms recovered in out-of-state crimes. States with weak gun laws also are the source of a greater proportion of guns recovered in crimes shortly after their initial purchase, which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives considers a key indicator of illegal gun trafficking.
Legal Community Against Violence (LCAV) recently completed its own review of gun laws, gun death rates and crime gun export data, ranking states on a scale of 1 to 50 based on the depth and quality of the states' gun regulations. LCAV's analysis reveals that many states with the strongest gun laws have the lowest gun death rates, and vice-versa. This analysis also finds that states with strong laws and a low percentage of household gun ownership tend to have significantly lower gun death rates and crime gun export rates than states that do not fit these criteria. (Crime gun export rates measure the number of traced guns initially purchased in one state but recovered at crime scenes in other states.) While more research must be done to further connect strong gun laws with decreases in gun death and injury, the work of MAIG, LCAV and other public safety-minded organizations points toward tough gun regulation as a cure for gun violence - and a way to keep firepower out of dangerous hands.
Our notoriously weak gun laws are not inevitable: extensive regulation of firearms and ammunition are the norm in most developed - and many developing - nations across the globe. Look no further than the experiences of some of our closest allies to see that strong gun laws work. For example, since Australia and Canada instituted significant gun regulation in the 1990s, both nations have seen gun deaths decline. Not surprisingly, gun death rates in most developed nations are far lower than in the U.S. Our lenient laws and under-funded, defanged law enforcement agencies charged with enforcing our weak laws actually help fuel the gun violence rampant across our borders with Mexico and, to a lesser extent, Canada.
Yet we continue to regress on the critical matter of gun violence prevention, allowing nearly 100,000 Americans to be killed or injured with firearms each year. The confluence of armed violence as a perceived solution to our political, social and economic woes, and lax gun laws that make firearms readily available to anyone in our society, produce a recipe for disaster - as we witnessed in the Fort Hood massacre in 2009. It also provides an easy opportunity for a home-grown terrorist eager to target government, ideological opponents, immigrants, members of certain religions, or any entity or individual that person perceives as a real or imagined threat.
These home-grown terrorists aren't naturally grown, rather they are nurtured into existence by right-wing politicos and pundits eager for cheap political or economic gain. They threaten or commit violence and create an atmosphere of fear that deters debate and stifles action in our political process. Incitement to violence as perpetrated by these pundits is not a virtue of civil society or the individual, and hardly indicative of "reclaiming the civil rights movement" or promoting civil liberties - values these pundits claim to represent. Their vitriol does not fall on deaf ears, but on elements of the public eager to perpetrate the violence, with quick access to the firepower that can cause devastation.
Let's work to ensure that strong, sane gun violence prevention laws become the norm in our country, as they are in other developed nations. We can stifle the violence of the right and, in the process, make the nation safer for all.
Wayne Besen: Anti-Gay Hate Groups Waiting in the Wings
Give them back there Diganity and Privacy by treating them as Adults instead of Preschool Childeren in Class getting punished or restricted because little Johnny did something bad or stupid to get hurt or someelse hurt.
You punish or restrict Little Johnny, not the whole Class.
When you treat grown adults as Children expect a Backlash.
“He who cannot protect himself or his nearest and dearest or their honor by non-violenÂÂtly facing death, may and ought to do so by violently dealing with the oppressor. He who can do neither of the two is a burden.â€--ÂÂM. K. Gandh
"Poorly educated, terribly informed, intellectually deficient and downright stupid people need idols. They feel angry, frustrated, ignored, cheated and disillusioned by so much going on in American society. They find the emotional, political and philosophical rants by talk show, loud mouth celebrities matching and justifying their feelings. Of course, those celebrities work hard to fan the flames of all that unhappiness and discontent, and also perpetuate ignorance and hate. They sell stupidity to gullible dummies, teaching them who to blame for their misery.
Either they were born stupid (a harsh but true statistical reality) or the many ups and downs of life have robbed them of any critical thinking ability to see through the idiocy that these purveyors of poison peddle while making obscene millions of dollars."
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/joel-s-hirschhorn/31809/loud-talk-small-minds
so about 1% of the u.s. population is affected by "gun violence" at all...
and a little more than 1% or guns in the country are used in a crime...
thanks for making the gun control argument even less important...
remember what paul helmke says...less than one person per state per day is murdered with a gun of any kind...
http://www.lcav.org/Gun_Laws_Matter/Gun_Laws_Matter_Chart.pdf
http://www.lcav.org/Gun_Laws_Matter/Methodology.pdf
An employee of LCAV is citing studies done by LCAV in order to infringe on the Constitional Rights of all Americans?
Yep, a bunch of self-serving lawyers attempting to subvert the highest laws of our land.
They are not that accessible. In the US, to buy a fully automatic rifle like an AK-47, i'd need about $12k, not including the $200 tax, and about 4 months to process the paper work. However in Somalia, i could get one for the price of a young, succulent goat, or roughly $35. That's what I consider easily accessible.
Other than that, I wish for you a safe, happy and secure Thanksgiving.
LOL
Care to site a source for that whopper? I've been going to gun shows for a LOOOOOOONG time and have never seen a single one.
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2010/11/23-6#
You will have to click the "show all" link at the bottom of the page to get to the "comments" section.
Take another comparison: LCAV ranks Maryland 7th-best, just ahead of New York and Rhode Island, the firearm-related deaths rates of which are only 42 percent and 29 percent that of Maryland.
The LCAV study shows conclusively that there is NO CORRELATION between gun laws in a state and gun violence rates in that state.
Further, Canadian, English and Australian rigid gun laws imposed since the 1990's may well have reduced GUN deaths, but those nations have experianced INCREASED violent crime, while overall violent crime rates in the US are dropping.
Telling an English householder who has just been beaten during a home invasion that "at least no one got shot" isn't very comforting.
In fact, since the rise of England's change in self-defense laws, home invasions during the time people are at home have increased, since the bad guys know that the home owner can not defend themselves. Burglaries in the US almost uniformly occur when no one is home due to fear of homeowners weapons.
I'll take our way, thanks.
http://www.lcav.org/content/state_local.asp
Also it's odd that he only complains about "right wing" violence. I guess left wing violence from people like the guy who took hostages in the Discovery Channel HQ is just fine as well.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/11/22/national/w064923S94.DTL
Also, Title 18, U.S.C., Section 241 says that a hate crime is:
If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same;...
LCAV is trying to oppress your enjoyment of the right to keep and bear arms (the Second Amendment to the Constitution)… which is a hate crime…
Americans concerned about the anti-government sentiment and rights of gun owners over all others mindset of many gun aficionados should be rightly alarmed, and thanks to Hoover and others for making the public at least a little more aware.
The right of the people to keep and bear arms wherever we may go is a far more essential and basic a right than the privilege of voting ever was. No compromise. None. Those who do not qualify to keep and bear arms wherever they go may not vote.
So which is it? Is there significant rise in the number of "hate groups," as reported by the SPLC? Or, is the rise in the number of "hate groups" at all time record lows, as reported by the SPLC?
They can't have it both ways, unless, of course, the whole point of the exercise is to scare their elderly donors out of a few million more donor-dollars. After all, the SPLC is down to its last $190 million tax-free dollars.
http://wp.me/pCLYZ-6I
The most ironic (read: "hypocritical") thing about the Southern Poverty Law Center is that NOT ONE of its top ten, highest paid executives is a minority.
http://wp.me/pCLYZ-67
In fact, according to the SPLC's hometown newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser, despite being located LITERALLY in the back yard of Dr. Martin Luther King's home church, the SPLC has NEVER hired a person of color to a highly paid position of power.
These are your "experts"??