Guns and Cuts: Hear the Big Dog Bark

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

13 February 10

ill Clinton has never been one of my favorites, but when the Big Dog tells the truth, the rest of us better take notice, whether on spending cuts or gun control.

"The debt problem can't be solved right now by conventional austerity measures," he told congressional Democrats at their annual retreat in Virginia. "And that's why Paul Krugman is right when he keeps talking about all these - everybody that's tried austerity in a time of no growth has wound up cutting revenues even more than they cut spending because you just get into the downward spiral and drag the country back into recession."

Many Republican leaders agree, but only in part. They correctly see cuts to the Pentagon budget as a threat to jobs, economic growth, and tax revenues. This is standard economics, going back to the late John Maynard Keynes and now widely accepted by economists across the political spectrum.

Where the Republicans differ is that they do not see cuts to non-military spending having the same negative impact. Why, I wonder, should economic logic apply one way to airplanes and tanks and a different way to Medicare, Social Security, and payments to the unemployed?

On gun control, Clinton sounded a similar cautionary note, with which Republicans largely agree while many Democrats tend to shut their minds. "Do not patronize the passionate supporters of your opponents by looking down your nose at them," he told a meeting of Obama's National Finance Committee, which several business leaders attended.

"A lot of these people live in a world very different from the world lived in by the people proposing these things," Clinton said. "I know because I come from this world." Clinton is talking political reality. Democrats have lost elections - and will lose more - by insulting law-abiding voters who grew up with guns as a normal part of their households.

Historically, these have been largely Protestants from small towns and rural states, especially in the South and West, but they now include working-class Catholic hunters across the Midwest. Those of us who come from non-gun cultures have disproportionately been big city Catholics and Jews, and we are influenced by our cultural prejudices every bit as much as supporters of the National Rifle Association (NRA) are influenced by theirs. We do, as Clinton says, tend to look down our noses at gun-owners, who do not need the NRA to point out what we're doing.

A prime example of our attitude problem cropped up when presidential candidate Barack Obama was taped at a 2008 fundraiser in San Francisco "explaining" small-town voters in Pennsylvania and the Midwest. He talked of how they "cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

In his off-the-cuff remarks, Obama blamed these frustrations on both the Clinton and Bush administrations for promising - and failing to deliver - new jobs. But he clearly showed condescension toward the culture of "God, Guns, and Glory." These elitist attitudes simply hand the National Rifle Association all the ammunition it needs to win support from law-abiding gun-owners and help gun-makers sell more guns.

The cultural divide goes even deeper and becomes inevitably entangled with race. In his widely read "The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery," the indispensable Thom Hartmann recently told how the "Right to Bear Arms" became part of the Bill of Rights because Southern plantation owners wanted a Constitutional guarantee for their use of "well regulated militias" as armed patrols to hold down slave rebellions. Intended or not, Thom's subtext was obvious. Liberal Americans need not respect the Second Amendment because it grew out of such racist thinking.

Thom sadly ignored the other two-thirds of the story. Following the Civil War, recently freed slaves took up guns to defend themselves from groups like the Ku Klux Klan and argued that the Second Amendment gave them the right to do so. The Supreme Court ruled against the blacks in Cruikshank (1875), claiming that the right to bear arms applied only to the state militias, which in time became the National Guard. Liberals have used this essentially racist argument to defend gun control down to the present day.

Those of us politically active in California in the 1960s will also remember that the beginning of modern gun control came when right wing members of the Legislature passed a new law to disarm the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.

None of this racially charged history should determine whether we are for or against reasonable gun controls. But history is what it is, and we all lose by citing only one side of the story and ignoring the other.

Given all this, we all need to wonder aloud whether the current gun control effort has unintentionally become less about actually saving lives and more about scoring symbolic points in a culture war that neither side can win.

Just think about where we are. If Congress could pass a law banning semi-automatic rifles, the ban would likely exempt existing "assault weapons," as did Clinton's largely ineffective ban in 1994. But the alternative would be worse. Do we really want the federal government attempting to confiscate weapons from otherwise law-abiding gun-owners? And either way, Congress won't touch handguns, which cause most firearm deaths.

Some of Obama's reforms - notably limits on large gun clips and better background checks and gun registration - clearly make sense and do not seriously threaten the rights most gun-owners want. But think how much more we would gain by putting even half of this new-found energy into mobilizing frustrated Americans with and without guns into a unifying fight against austerity and for those jobs that Obama is still promising but not delivering in anywhere near sufficient numbers.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he writes on international affairs. In 1981, he produced and reported the Frontline documentary "Gunfight U.S.A."