reflectivepundit

Anti-Gun-Control Hardliners are Accomplices in Gun Violence

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Gun violence in the United States is as American as apple pie. The same is true for mass shootings in schools and other public places. As the growing number of mass shootings in elementary and secondary schools attests to, young children and teenagers are increasingly victims of this sort of violence. According to the Gun Violence Archive, so far this year 59 children (up to 11-years old) and 344 teenagers (12- to 17-years old) were killed in such incidents this year; the number of injured was 130 for children and 827 for teenagers. The latest mass shooting in an elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, was merely another of the frequent mass shootings across the country.

In the Nashville case, the shooter was a 28-year-old woman armed with an AR-15-style rifle, an AR-style pistol and another handgun. The military style assault weapons could have killed far more children and adults in record time, if law enforcement officers had not responded as quickly as they did.

The fact that anyone in this country can acquire weapons designed for soldiers fighting in wars is scandalous and only possible in the United States. Leaving all other gun-control issues aside, those politicians in Congress and in Republican-controlled state governments who refuse to outlaw military style assault weapons are in my book accomplices in all incidents in which Americans are killed by assault weapons in the hands of perpetrators.

Even when the victims are their neighbors, these Second Amendment fanatics in the political class will not vote for life-saving measures that a strong majority of the American public approves.

Last year, after the mass shootings in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty (R-Tennessee) noted,  

To be clear: using this horror to infringe upon the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens—before we even know what might have prevented this tragedy—and accusing anyone who disagrees of being complicit in this abhorrent crime is not a solution that will make us safer.

Senator Marsha Blackburn (R. Tennessee) said at the same time,

Schools should have secured, limited entry points, and increased funding for school resource officers. School officials with prior military or law enforcement experience should be allowed to carry firearms. Finally, mental health must be taken seriously.

Well, the Nashville perpetrator shot the glass out of doors and climbed easily through a seemingly secure entrance.

 Senator Blackburn reacted with a tweet: “Chuck & I are heartbroken to hear about the shooting at Covenant School in Nashville…” Her colleague Senator Hagerty wrote, “Devastated and heartbroken about the tragic news at Covenant School

Always the same, unhelpful phrases.

                                                                       

Congressman Andy Ogles (R-Tennessee), who represents the district that includes Nashville and the Covenant School, posted last year a Christmas card on Facebook depicting his family posing with guns. That’s how deeply ingrained the gun culture is in the United States of America and why it still seems impossible to defeat it.  

2020 and 2024: Trump, his MAGA Crowd, and FOX News

By Brigitte L. Nacos

In 2015, before and after Donald J. Trump declared his presidential candidacy, there were few, if any, so-called experts who gave the New York entrepreneur and TV reality show star a chance.

Like them, I, too, considered his candidacy not more than a public relations stunt to strengthen the Trump brand.

This time around, eight years later, nobody should underestimate the disgraced ex-president’s chances next year. To begin with, he has an excellent chance to become the GOP’s presidential nominee once again, especially, if he has a bunch of primary competitors. Like in 2016, Trump will not need the support of a majority of Republican primary voters in 2024. A plurality will do. And the core MAGA crowd will deliver that.

Even if Ron DeSantis, who as governor of Florida makes great efforts to show Americans his illiberal qualities, and some other presidential hopefuls do not enter the race, Trump remains the favorite to become once again the Republican nominee.

To be sure, much can change in the political climate before and during the primary season. But in spite of a recent burst of news articles and opinion pieces about the alleged fading of Trump’s support among Republican leaders and followers, there are equally compelling signs for his staying power.

I was taken aback by a recent Emerson College poll that found Trump leading DeSantis by 41 percentage points in a hypothetical primary race in New Hampshire with Trump winning 58 percent of the vote and DeSantis merely 17 percent. More surprising was that Chris Sununu, the highly popular governor of New Hampshire, received only 7 percent of the vote—even though he, unlike Maryland’s ex-governor Larry Hogan, has not excluded a presidential run. I found equally stunning that Trump was the preferred candidate of two-thirds of respondents under 35-years old. That was certainly doing away with the assumption that Trump’s support comes primarily from the older generations.  

And then there is the question of what role FOX News might be playing during the primary season and the general campaign.

Based on released documents from the Dominion Voting Systems vs. FOX News defamation lawsuit, Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan along with the network’s management and prime time stars were all along in bed with Trump and acted as the president’s propaganda arm.

In exchange, they raked in record advertising profits because they were the media of record for the Trumpian MAGA movement that guaranteed day-in and day-out the highest audience ratings, especially during prime time.

When everyone at FOX knew that Biden won the 2020 election and that there was no man-made or machine-made voting fraud, the network echoed Trump’s and his clique’s BIG LIE relentlessly and gave ample air time to the wacko line-up of Trump’s conspiratorial advisers.

While the old Murdoch claimed last year that his media would not support another Trump campaign, I, for one, do not believe that. Murdoch and his crew will not risk to lose their most lucrative audience: the hard-core MAGA and QAnon members along with other reactionary groupings. And do not forget the removal of all Twitter boundaries since Elon Musk took over that social media platform.

While not writing off the likelihood of President Biden’s reelection in 2024 (or, unlikely, another Democrat’s election), I believe that Donald Trump has by far the best chance to become the GOP nominee and a chance to win the presidency for the second time--contrary to what certain politicians, pundits, and election experts tell us.

GOP House Members Mock America’s Shooting Epidemic

By Brigitte L. Nacos

The first act of the new, albeit slim GOP majority in the US House of Representatives was a telling one: The leadership ordered the removal of metal detectors outside the House chamber that had been put up following the violent breach of Capitol Hill to protect members and staffers from copy-cat violence.

Just as many GOPer were and remain Covid-pandemic deniers, they seem equally untouched by the mass-shooting epidemic that kills increasing numbers of Americans, their own constituents among them.

In a macabre scene, Republican members of the House Natural Resources Committee repealed this week a rule adopted in 2021 by the same committee that prohibited lawmakers from carrying guns in the hearing room. But that was when the Democrats were in control. Several GOP members insisted on their need to defend themselves—and nobody stronger than gun-happy Loren Boebert of Colorado who declared, "With threats against members of Congress at an all-time high, now is not the time to be stripping members of our constitutional right to defend ourselves.”

It seems that guns are not potent enough for Second Amendment fanatics on the Hill.

Why else would several House members, among them disgraced Congressman George Santos, wear AR-15 assault rifle pins at their lapels along with their congressional pins—as they did the other day? This awful pin was a freebee distributed by Georgia Congressman Andrew Clyde who owns a gun store, where he sells those pins.

A sad, promotional coup at a time, when mass shootings in the country occur all too often and many times involve AR-15s or similar assault weapons.

And then there are the grenades that GOP freshman Representative Cory Mills of Florida presented to his new colleagues in what he called the “mission-oriented congress.” In a letter that accompanied the gift, he assured that the grenades were inert and added,  

“I am honored to be a part of the Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committee. In that spirit, it is my pleasure to give you a 40mm grenade, made for a MK19 grenade launcher. These are manufactured in the Sunshine State and first developed in the Vietnam War.”

What kind of “mission” do GOP members have in mind?

Are the removed metal detectors, the vote against banning guns from hearing rooms, the display of AK-15 rifle pins and the handing out of grenades metaphors for the GOP House majority’s agenda?

If so, 2024 may not bode well for these political performance artists.  

The Different Meanings of “We the People…”

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Violent and peaceful protesters at the right and left often use the slogan “We the People” to link their demands to their understanding of the U.S. Constitution’s promise. Both sides refer to the U.S. Constitution which was written and signed by the Founding Fathers in 1787 and begins with the words “We the People of the United State, in Order to form a more perfect Union….”

On January 6, 2021, many in the violent MAGA crowd considered themselves “We the People” fighting to keep Donald Trump in the White House. “We The People need to be in that building,” screamed a preacher from Ohio into the direction of Capitol police officer who stood behind metal barricades.

Four years earlier, anti-Trump activists organized a “We the People” protest on January 20, 2017, when Donald Trump was sworn in as U.S. President. A poster for the event, created by Shephard Fairey, showed the images of African-American, Latina, und Muslim Women as “a pointed reference to people who have felt attacked” by the president-elect as the artist explained.

While Conservatives tend to insist on the original words and meanings of the Constitution, Liberals tend to insist on interpreting the living Constitution in the context of the more than 200 years since the document was framed.  

So, what did “We the People” mean for the Founding Fathers? Whom did they consider the citizens of the republican form of government?

Since the framers were all White male elitists or, as the political scientist James MacGregor Burns put it, “the well-bred, the well-fed, the well-read, and the well-wed,” they restricted “We the People” to their own kind. Excluded from citizenship with voting rights were

• Slaves,
• Indentured slaves,
• Males without property,

No wonder that contemporary Americans, who resent the multicultural nature of modern America’s population and call for “taking our country back” consider the Framers’ meaning of “We the People” as justifying White Supremacy. And, yes, some of the Far-Right extremists would also like to repeal the voting rights for women. While they embrace and misinterpret the Bill of Rights (especially the First and Second Amendments) that the first U.S. Congress adopted, they reject the bulk of later Amendments that expand the franchise and other rights for formerly excluded groups.

In contrast, Liberals appeal to an inclusionary “We the People” concept achieved by the progress made in the 19^th and 20^th centuries for the benefit of groups excluded by the Framer’s view on citizenship.  

Now, in the 21^st century, hard fought-for rights of women and minorities are under attack from constitutional originalists—among them the majority of Supreme Court Justices.

To be sure, the Founding Fathers did not mention abortion rights in the document they framed. Thus, a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court overturned last year in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization the Roe v. Wade decision that established the constitutional right to abortion.

Among the major cases to be heard by the highest court during the current session are others with issues not mentioned by the Framers and thus other opportunities for reactionary rulings.   

On the Second Anniversary of January 6th: GOP Anarchists at the Gate

By Brigitte L. Nacos

This day, to years ago, a violent crowd of organized terrorist groups and fanatic MAGA and QAnon supporters of Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s clear and fair election victory. Among those who sympathize to this day with the violent mob and the White House cabal behind the failed coup to keep Trump in office are many of the current GOP Representatives-elect—those who refuse to vote for Kevin McCarthy to become Speaker of the House and others who support McCarthy.

While most mainstream media reporters and commentators call the anti-McCarthy GOPers “conservative” or “hard-line” Republicans, the truth is that they along with others in the pro-McCarthy crowd are anarchists or, as former GOP Speaker John Boehner once called them, “legislative terrorists.”

Indeed, like all terrorists, these nihilistic anarchists want to destroy the existing order—not improve or reform the political, economic, and social systems.

They do not want sit at the legitimate table of decision-makers. They want to destroy the table without an idea of how to build a better future for the vast majority of the people they claim to represent.

Interestingly, some of the most extreme congressional GOPers who share the disruptive ideas and actions of their anti-McCarthy colleagues chose another path to realize their power-hungry objectives: They opted to support McCarthy in exchange for influential positions in the GOP House majority in form of their desired committee assignments and influence on the leadership strata.

The most visible examples are Jim Jordan, Ohio, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia, who have been close to Kevin McCarthy since he has struggled to become Speaker.

Jordan, a founding member and first chair of the far-right congressional Freedom Caucus, has been for long a rhetorical bomb thrower and was, according to the Jan. 6^th select committee, a supporter of the coup attempt.

Last year, Taylor Greene was stripped of her committee seats because of her toxic rhetorical attacks and endorsement of violence against Democrats. More recently, she claimed that under her leadership the January 6^th attackers would have won and been armed. But whenever the new congress has a speaker, she will get the committee assignments of her choice.

Add to this McCarthy’s surrender to his GOP opponents by agreeing to all their demands that limits his power drastically and you see that the script for the next two years is written:

Whether the 21 or so members of the anti-McCarthy gang will prevail or not, the anarchist wing of the GOP will hold the balance of power for the next two years in the U.S. House of Representatives and inflict great harm to the legislative imperatives of the lower chamber.

The forces that drove the events before, during, and after January 6, 2021 are still at work and, yes, at the gate of congressional decision-making.