How the NRA Enables Massacres

By Cliff Schecter, The Daily Beast

25 May 14

As a shooting spree leaves seven dead in California, the gun lobby is trying to thwart attempts to study gun deaths and officials who see gun violence as a public health crisis.

et another massacre occurred last night at an institution of learning, this time the University of California, Santa Barbara. The price we paid for the National Rifle Association’s “freedom” was seven people murdered and seven injured at nine different crime scenes.

A young man who Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown called “severely mentally disturbed” drove by various student hangouts to commit an act of “premeditated mass murder” apparently—according to videos posted to YouTube and threats made to women on campus—due to his anger at being “rejected” by women on campus.

Of course, this is all too familiar: a young aggrieved male, mentally disturbed, threatening others—especially women—but still able to get his hands on a high-capacity magazine of the variety used in so many other mass murders. This doesn't happen in any other high income country with the regularity it does here; in fact, it almost never happens in any of them.

But here, in the good ole US of A, we’ve allowed a group of rich, entitled thugs who run an operation fronting for arms dealers—guys who represent a minority position on pretty much every issue having to do with reasonable regulation of firearms even among gun owners—to dictate our policies to cowardly, careerist politicians.

I already hear the outrage from the right: how can you blame the NRA? We need good guys to have guns, we have to stop the “haters” and “knockout gamers” and … I can't even bear to repeat the infantile and inane talking points coming from cynical and callous people like the NRA's Executive Vice President and foaming mouthpiece Wayne LaPierre.

We know how to stop these incidents, or at least greatly reduce them. We've seen other countries do it, such as Australia, which was averaging one of these massacres a year until their infamous Port Arthur Massacre in 1996. After which they completely overhauled their gun laws. Since then, a country with the same frontier history as the United States has not experienced one mass shooting. Not one. Their homicides and suicides have also precipitously dropped.

We, of course, could learn even more about how to stop these mass killings, as well as the everyday homicides, suicides and accidental killings that rob this nation of our youth, and everything they could have ever been. But this past week we've had numerous examples of how the NRA does their best to block this from happening, because they will gladly accept mass murder in Santa Barbara and Newtown, as well as an accidental bystander shooting in a neighborhood near you, if it keeps the dollars floating into their pockets from the ultimate blood-drenched 1%ers who own various staples of the gun industry

After attending the NRA's Convention in Indianapolis, I wrote recently in these pages about all the NRA does to encourage paranoia and hatred while selling the weaponry not of self protection or hunting, but war, to anyone with a stack of bills and a glint in their eye.

But this past week we've seen the other side of the coin. How the NRA works to suppress information that would lead to treating a public health catastrophe that claims over 30,000 lives per year and injures over 100,000 as that very thing, while fighting to ensure we have as little access to information as possible that might help save lives.

The simple fact is, much like with their friends on the right from the tobacco industry to the oil industry to the megachurch, science and information are the enemies of the NRA. They have proven they will do whatever it takes to make sure we have less of it, and more Santa Barbaras.

The clearest example, of course, is the NRA's labeling a bill sponsored by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) to allow the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to once again use its considerable expertise to research gun violence prevention, “unethical.” Yes, they actually said that.

Because anyone who does statistically significant research on a public health problem from the angle of helping people and not profiting from misery, and again and again finds obvious truths such as owning guns makes you more likely to get shot, is not someone the NRA and its allies will countenance without smearing. I debated one of these types from the Second Amendment Foundation on NPR recently regarding the CDC. It is amazing how tongue-tied they get when you present them with irrefutable information.

As for the “unethical” attack, mind you, this comes from an organization that promotes the “work” of well-traveled right-wing welfare recipient John Lott, a clown and a fraud who has created studies lacking any statistical validity, has “lost” his research when asked to produce it, and actually got busted for creating a fake online persona—Mary Rosh—to show up in comments sections where he wrote articles to say how swell and dreamy he was as a professor. Unethical (and embarrassing), indeed.

As Rep. Maloney rightly put it, “In America, gun violence kills twice as many children as cancer, and yet political grandstanding has halted funding for public health research to understand this crisis.”

The NRA's fight to suppress information couldn't be more apparent than it is in a rather pathetically titled column in Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller this past Friday. (Side note: As the NRA usually shuts up for at least 72 hours after a shooting, lest they remind people of their position as an accessory, having their views aired mere hours before this latest tragedy is enlightening).

The piece, written by chief NRA lobbyist and super-shill Chris Cox, was actually named, “We Love Our Moms and Trust Our Doctors, But We Still Don’t Want Gun Control.” Yes, we're at the point where one of the top officials in the NRA feels the need to point out he has warm feelings for those who give life and those who save lives.

The reason for this, as he points out in his piece, is that he and his fellow street-war profiteers are fighting to block President Obama's U.S. Surgeon General Nominee Dr. Vivek Hallegere Murthy, from being appointed. What was his crime? He has been honest about guns being a public health problem, and has made the common sense recommendation that civilians not be allowed to own military weaponry.

The NRA is worried that, like with smoking in the past, if we have a Surgeon General who tells the truth, they will see their profits plummet. In fact, they're not even trying to hide this fact (or doing a really, really bad job), as reported by Politico:

[Murthy's] strongly backed by several health constituencies, such as public health advocates, research organizations and physician groups. Yet the NRA, as well as some Republicans, say past Murthy statements in support of gun control indicate that he could use the surgeon general job to promote anti-gun policies. Murthy has stated that he would not focus on gun violence in the position.

Cox attacks Moms Demand Action in this piece too, because Shannon Watts and her group have also used available information in the age of social media—in this case photos of lunatics open-carrying long guns in family establishments and intimidating customers—to get Chipotle to tell the gun fondlers they don't want them bringing their weapons in their stores. And now Chili's and other eateries are considering taking similar action.

Also this past week, the House’s answer to untreated rabies, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), attempted to force more guns on military institutions that don't want them. Once again, we were forced to look at the NRA's enemy: actual information—some of it bravely provided by top military brass both active and retired, standing up to the lies of the NRA and its allies.

Retired Brigadier General Stephen N. Xenakis, M.D., even took the step of authoring a strongly worded letter to Congress, which laid out his thinking as follows:

As someone who has had to make the tough decisions about how best to manage service members under my command, I urge you to oppose Mr. Gohmert's Amendment. This amendment will only cause more stress, confusion, and danger on military bases.

Later that night, Gohmert went to the House floor, defeated, and pulled his amendment.

Sadly for the NRA, we are in the Information Age, and the truth is starting to regularly get past their efforts to thwart it. But sadly for the rest of us—and at this moment, most tragically, the victims at Santa Barbara—the NRA have been so successful at bullying, threatening and obfuscating for so long, that we likely have too many more UC Santa Barbaras to come.

SEE ALSO: Tearful Plea From Victim's Dad in Deadly Rampage

The Lawyer and the Kill-List Memo

By Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker

25 May 14

n July 16, 2010, David J. Barron, a lawyer at the Department of Justice, sent Eric Holder, the Attorney General, a lengthy memorandum. Barron, who had celebrated his forty-third birthday earlier that month, was a professor at Harvard Law School, on leave for a couple years to work for President Barack Obama. Barron, like many young lawyers who arrived in Washington with the new Administration in 2009, had impeccable liberal credentials. As a Harvard undergraduate on the Crimson, the campus newspaper, he wrote sympathetic pieces about Jesse Jackson’s 1988 Presidential campaign. During the summer of 1993, before his third year at Harvard Law School, he interned with the N.A.A.C.P. in Washington. After graduating, he clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, a leader of the court’s liberal wing, and then worked in the Clinton Justice Department. During the Bush years, he was a relatively prominent critic of the Administration’s national-security polices, especially its embrace of torture.

In 2006, while Bush’s Justice Department lawyers were tweaking a new legal regime allowing for bulk-collection surveillance and what they called “enhanced interrogation,” Barron helped review the bylaws of the Botanic Gardens Children’s Center. As a professor in Cambridge, he raised money for the campaign of Deval Patrick, who has been governor of Massachusetts since 2007. That same year, 2007, he even attended the YearlyKos convention, a sort of South by Southwest for left-leaning bloggers and activists trying to push the Democratic Party in a more unabashedly progressive direction. During his legal career, he has signed amicus-curiae briefs in several highly political cases, including one defending a living-wage ordinance in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and another defending a major campaign-finance reform law. In 2008, during an NPR interview, he mused that articles of impeachment could be justified against a President who purposely misled the country into war.

At the Justice Department, in his capacity as the lead attorney in the Office of Legal Counsel, Barron had sent many memoranda that, like the one he sent to Holder in July, 2010, touched on the most serious questions of national security and civil liberties. Early in his tenure, he drafted an opinion that withdrew the Bush-era legal guidance—the so-called torture memos—governing C.I.A. interrogations.

But, like any government lawyer, much of Barron’s work at OLC was pedestrian. One of his opinions concerned removing “the federal coordinator for Alaska natural gas transportation projects.” Another dealt with the “constitutionality of mandatory registration of credit rating agencies.”

His July, 2010, missive, which was one of the last that he wrote during his eighteen months running O.L.C., was historic and—to many—troubling: yes, Barron argued, the President of the United States could kill an American citizen named Anwar al-Awlaki. And, as a rule, the memo argued, the President could kill any American citizen abroad connected to Al Qaeda or an associated group—without a trial or other legal proceedings—if he deemed that person an imminent threat.

Awlaki, who was four years younger than Barron, was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1971. His father, a Yemeni, was a Fulbright scholar studying agriculture and, when Awlaki was eleven, his father moved the family back to Yemen, where he became a senior government official. Awlaki returned to the United States for college, in 1991, and studied at Colorado State University, where he was the president of the Muslim Student Association. For a brief period after 9/11, Awlaki, who was then a cleric preaching in Northern Virginia, was known as a voice of moderate Islam. He even attended a luncheon at the Pentagon in early 2002.

But, by the time Barron joined the Obama Administration, Awlaki had become radicalized and was hiding in Yemen, a key figure in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and a crucial link between AQAP and ambitious terrorists in increasingly lawless havens like Somalia. In December, 2009, after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a plane as it landed in Detroit, the Obama Administration accused Awlaki of helping to train Abdulmutallab. Obama added Awlaki to a list of terrorists targeted for death. According to “Kill or Capture,” Daniel Klaidman’s scrupulously reported 2012 book, Obama was personally consumed with getting Awlaki, telling “his counterterrorism advisers that Awlaki was his top priority, even over Ayman al-Zawahiri,” Osama bin Laden’s longtime deputy.

Barron’s memo providing the legal case for killing Awlaki was written seven months after Obama placed him on the kill list. In late September of 2011, Barron was back at Harvard, and Awlaki was on the run in Yemen, when a missile from a C.I.A. drone struck him as he returned to his vehicle after eating breakfast in the desert near the Saudi border.

For several years now, Barron’s classified memo justifying this extrajudicial execution has been the white whale of national-security reporters and civil libertarians. In January, Obama nominated Barron to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston, and those hunting the memo finally had the leverage they needed to extract it from the Justice Department. An odd coalition of Rand Paul, the politician most vigorously opposed to Obama’s assertion of the right to smite Americans abroad; several right-wing senators who oppose Barron on purely ideological grounds; and several Democrats who believe that, whatever one’s views on the legal underpinnings of Obama’s drone policy, at the very least the Barron opinion should be available for public inspection, united to force the Administration to release the document.

Holder and several other officials have made speeches about the legal case for putting an American on the President’s kill list, and an unclassified white paper describing in general terms that legal rationale has been leaked to the press. But last month, a court ruled that the Administration had to release a redacted version of the original legal opinion in order to satisfy a Freedom of Information request by the Times and the A.C.L.U. As the Justice Department contemplated appealing that ruling, Paul and his Senate allies threatened to hold Barron’s nomination hostage unless the Administration relented, which it did earlier this week. The White House now says that the infamous memo will be released in a matter of weeks. On Thursday, Barron was confirmed by a vote of 53-45.

Somewhat overlooked in the coverage of Awlaki is how much of a threat he was to the United States. Klaidman reports that, in addition to his links to Abdulmutallab, the so-called underwear bomber, and Al Shabaab, the Somalian terrorist group, and the killer at Fort Hood, intelligence linked Awlaki to “multiple plots to kill Americans and Europeans” that he was “deeply involved in at an operational level,” including “plans to poison Western water and food supplies with botulinum toxin, as well as attack Americans with ricin and cyanide.”

Whether or not one believes these alleged plots allowed the President to strip Awlaki of his constitutional rights as an American citizen, it is shameful that the White House has worked for several years to conceal the secret legal opinion making that case. The final outcome of the hunt for this document and Barron’s nomination did not please everyone. Paul believes that Barron’s legal opinion showed that Barron was unqualified to serve on the federal bench. But the end result is a decent compromise, the kind lacking in Washington these days: the President gets his nominee and the rest of us finally get to see the Barron memo.