OCTOBER 13, 2017, KEIZERTIMES, PAGE A5
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A moment of unity
By DEBRA J. SAUNDERS
After violence pierces U.S. cit-
ies and towns, Americans come to-
gether. Later politics can drive them
apart.
Or not, maybe just this once.
As a grim Monday morning
dawned in Las Vegas, Nevada repre-
sentatives in Congress issued state-
ments that eschewed gun politics.
They stuck to themes of sympathy
and shared useful informa-
tion for constituents, such
as where they could give
blood. President Donald
Trump delivered a somber,
unifying address to the na-
tion.
Outside Nevada, gun
control advocates urged a
more political approach, at the risk
of appearing opportunistic, or igno-
rant about guns.
Monday morning Sen. Chris
Murphy, D-Conn., jumped on Twit-
ter to say, “To my colleagues: your
cowardice to act cannot be white-
washed by thoughts and prayers.
None of this ends unless we do
something to stop it.”
Murphy also sent out a fund-
raising email that directed the in-
dignant to donate—with proceeds
going to anti-gun groups and his
2018 re-election campaign. The link
later excluded his campaign, but the
whiff of opportunism clung to his
effort.
Former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton tweeted, “The crowd fl ed at
the sound of gunshots. Imagine the
deaths if the shooter had a silencer,
which the NRA wants to make it
easier to get.” (House Republicans
were going to vote on a measure to
streamline the purchase of gun sup-
pressors last week, but delayed the
vote after the mass shooting.)
Thus Clinton displayed the other
common foible of gun control ad-
vocates—ignorance about fi rearms.
Gun advocates scoffed her sugges-
tion that silencers would have wors-
ened the carnage, a notion which
Politifact ruled as false, as silencers
reduce a fi red shot’s noise a mere 20
percent or less.
On Wednesday all four Ne-
vada Democrats in Congress—Sen.
Catherine Cortez-Masto and Reps.
Dina Titus, Ruben Kihuen and
Jacky Rosen—announced their
support of legislation to ban bump
stocks, devices designed to increase
the fi repower of semi-automatic ri-
fl es. Authorities found bump stocks
on a dozen of the fi rearms found in
shooter Stephen Paddock’s Manda-
lay Bay hotel suite.
UNLV political science professor
John Tuman noted that there’s deep
widespread support “in the political
culture of Nevada,” but also believes
the Democrats were responding to
constituents who believe Washing-
ton should tighten gun laws.
Nevada GOP Sen. Dean Heller
and Rep. Mark Amodei have reason
to urge the Trump administration to
ban bump stocks administratively.
Such an action would spare them
from having to cast a vote likely to
alienate some of their voters—and
to ban a device that the vast major-
ity of gun owners probably never
heard of until last week.
Many gun rights advocates be-
lieve that lawmakers like Sen. Di-
anne Feinstein, D-Calif., sponsor of
the Senate bump stock
ban, won’t stop with
bump stocks. She is af-
ter all the author behind
the 1994 federal assault
weapons ban that lasted
for 10 years.
It’s hard to argue
against the slippery slope
argument. When the NRA shocked
Washington with its support for reg-
ulations to restrict bump stocks, Sen.
Catherine Cortez-Masto said in
statement, “The NRA’s announce-
ment is a welcome opening for
conversation on additional measures
we can take to protect the lives of
Americans.”
On the other side of the issue,
there’s a general suspicion that broad
gun laws don’t work. The Washing-
ton Post ran a much-discussed opin-
ion piece last week in which statis-
tician Leah Libresco disclosed how
three months of team research on
gun deaths crushed her belief that
sweeping gun laws work.
“By the time we published our
project, I didn’t believe in many of
the interventions I’d heard politi-
cians tout,” Libresco wrote. “I was
still anti-gun, at least from the point
of view of most gun owners, and I
don’t want a gun in my home, as I
think the risk outweighs the ben-
efi ts. But I can’t endorse policies
whose only selling point is that gun
owners hate them.”
Measures which Libresco once
considered “common sense reforms”
didn’t really work. Good intentions
yielded “policies that often seem as
if they were drafted by people who
have encountered guns only as a fi g-
ure in a briefi ng book or an image
on the news.”
That is the hurdle supporters of
gun restrictions will have to over-
come: Would their prescription have
stopped shooter Stephen Paddock,
who bought his arsenal legally after
passing a background check?
Keep in mind the number of
guns that already exist in the United
States —in 2013 the Pew Founda-
tion cites estimates between 270
million and 320 million.
Asked on Fox News if he would
support a measure to ban bump
stocks, a frustrated Heller described
the Sunday night shooting and re-
sponded, “You show me that law
that would stop that, not only would
I support it, I would be an advocate
for that law.”
debra
j.
saunders
(Creators Syndicate)
America rises above its grievances
By MICHAEL GERSON
Who is left to defend the simple,
often admirable, sometimes disap-
pointing, American experience?
Our politics seems deeply divided
between those who think the coun-
try is going to hell in a handcart and
those who believe the country is
going to hell in a handbasket.
Some of the tenured class that
sets the intellectual tone of the left
concluded long ago that
America was built by op-
pression, is sustained by
white privilege and re-
quires the cleansing pu-
rity of social revolution
(however that is defi ned).
In this story, capitalism ac-
cumulates inequities that
will eventually lead the rich to eat
the poor. The American Dream is an
exploitative myth. Change will only
come through a coalition of the
aggrieved. And those who are not
permanently enraged are not paying
proper attention.
But, at least on the populist right,
the social critique is every bit as
harsh. In this story, America has fall-
en in a boneless heap from a great
height. It is unrecognizable to peo-
ple—mostly white people—who
regard mid-20th-century America
as a social and economic ideal. The
country has been fundamentally al-
tered by multiculturalism and po-
litical correctness. It has been ruined
by secularism and moral relativism.
America, says the Rev. Franklin
Graham, is “on the verge of total
moral and spiritual collapse.” And
those who are not permanently of-
fended are not paying proper atten-
tion.
A poll taken last year found that
72 percent of Donald Trump sup-
porters believe American society
and its way of life have changed for
the worse since the 1950s. And the
most pessimistic and discontent-
ed lot of all was white, evangelical
Protestants. Almost three-quarters
believed the last 70 years to be a pe-
riod of social decline.
Those of us who remember poli-
tics in the Reagan era have a mental
habit of regarding conservatism as
more optimistic about
the American experi-
ment and liberalism as
more discontented. But
representatives of both
ideologies—in
their
most potent and con-
fi dent
versions—are
now making fundamen-
tal critiques of American society.
They are united in their belief that
America is dominated by corrupt,
self-serving elites. They are united
in their call for radical rather than
incremental change. While disagree-
ing deeply about the cause, they see
America as careening off course.
Little wonder that Americans con-
sistently say their country in on the
wrong track by a margin of more
than 2-to-1. Disgruntlement is our
nation’s common ground.
What group believes that Ameri-
can society has gotten better since
the 1950s? About 60 percent of Af-
rican-Americans and Hispanics. On
a moment’s refl ection, this makes
perfect sense. Compared with 70
years ago, when much of the coun-
try was legally segregated, daily life
has improved for racial and ethnic
minorities. As it has for gays and
women seeking positions of social
and economic leadership.
Many conservatives have failed to
appreciate the mixed legacy of mo-
other
voices
dernity. In recent decades, America
has seen declining community and
family cohesion and what former
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H.
Murthy calls “a loneliness epidem-
ic.” “We live in the most technologi-
cally connected age in the history of
civilization,” he says, “yet rates of
loneliness have doubled since the
1980s.”
But the fl ip side of individual-
ism is greater social freedom. Who
would not prefer to be in a racially
mixed marriage today compared
with 70 years ago? Or to have bi-
racial children? When conservatives
express unreserved nostalgia for the
1950s, they are also expressing a
damning tolerance for oppression. It
does appear like a longing for lost
privilege.
The alternative to disdain for
American society on the left and
right is not to sanitize our country’s
history or excuse its manifold fail-
ures. It is to do what reforming pa-
triots from Abraham Lincoln to the
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. have
done: to elevate and praise American
ideals while courageously applying
them to our social inconsistencies
and hypocrisies. “What greater form
of patriotism is there,” asked Presi-
dent Obama in his admirable 2015
Selma speech, “than the belief that
America is not yet fi nished, that we
are strong enough to be self-critical,
that each successive generation can
look upon our imperfections and
decide that it is in our power to
remake this nation to more closely
align with our highest ideals?”
And this might be matched with
a spirit of gratitude—for a country
capable of shame and change, and
better than its grievances.
(Washington Post Writers Group)
The people can change our gun culture
By GENE H. McINTYRE
On Tuesday morning, October 3,
the second day after the massacre in
Las Vegas, media reported this and that
as it does every day. One piece of in-
formation, nevertheless, stood out for
me. It was among “story stocks” where
the U.S. company, Sturm Ruger, a
fi rearms maker, saw its shares trading
higher with investors ponder-
ing whether the violence in Las
Vegas will lead to greater gun
sales. This news about profi t-
making among fi rearm makers
is sadly repeated time and again
after every mass shooting in
America and subsequent to the
foreboding University of Texas
tower shooting in August 1966.
One can interpret this news how-
ever he likes; yet, to me, it notifi es
that more and more of my fellow
Americans are getting armed. And
that, statistically speaking, means
more and more among us, includ-
ing the mentally ill, those seeking to
settle a score, the very-angry-about-
something-crowd, will commit an act
of violence with use of a fi rearm. The
bottom line is that this violence prob-
lem is not shared to the same degree
around the world in democracies like
ours.
It is an old and tired story that re-
minds us that our legislators, in state
capitals and Washington, D.C., are
too often fi nancially and ideologi-
cally beholden to the National Rifl e
Association (NRA), Gun Owners of
America, fi rearms makers, gun clubs
and their personal interpretation of
the Second Amendment cannot put
their heads, hearts and, most impor-
tantly, the gray matter they possess, to
action suffi cient to bring this matter of
excessive fi rearms-use-violence un-
der control. Simple adjustments even,
like personalizing technology such as
fi ngerprint recognition, could make
a big difference.
An experimental psychologist, Ste-
ven Pinker of Harvard, argues that
people alive today are actually liv-
ing with less violence than in for-
mer times. He sees a world, as we
all do, with brutal wars, mindless kill-
ings, terrorism and even genocide yet
Pinker stands by his
position as one who
believes we actually
appreciate improve-
ment
nowadays.
One case study to
support his conten-
tion was World War
II, from September
1, 1939 to Septem-
ber 2, 1945, that resulted in the deaths
of an estimated 60 million people.
Meanwhile, events such as the one in
Las Vegas could persuade a modern
day observer to contend another point
of view.
Analysis by Pinker sees motives
in the human brain that attract us to
violence as well as those motives that
inhibit us from violence. He labels the
former motives as inner demons, refer-
ring to pure predation or exploitation,
drive for dominance, revenge and
sadism. The other side of this para-
dox he calls the better angels or those
motives that pull us away from vio-
lence, providing with empathy, self-
control, fairness, reason, and rational-
ity. In our lives, then, it depends on
which motives have the upper hand:
those inner demons or better angels
which govern our decisions and con-
sequent actions.
Why is violence so high in the
U.S.? America was a land of lawless-
ness for much of the years before the
20th century what with the Revolu-
tionary War, the Indian wars, the con-
fl icts with other nations vying to con-
guest
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trol North America and the state of
anarchy that prevailed just before and
for long after the Civil War. Ordinary
Americans often could not count on
any government to protect them—
such as when the nearest sheriff was
200 miles away—provide an insight
to those former times. Without laws
being enforced, Americans made up
their own “laws” and decided what
constituted justice. Deciding for one-
self what’s right and wrong deter-
mines the wild ways a whole lot of
Americans behave to this day and a
major reason why we have so many
lawless events.
Other democracies, such as Austra-
lia and New Zealand, with frontiers
to settle not entirely unlike our own,
have come together with a common
interest to establish and maintain a
civilized society. We could and should
do the same but have failed deplor-
ably to date in not doing so. The most
obscene and disgusting of violent acts,
such as that at Sandy Hook Elemen-
tary School in Newtown, Conn., did
not bring reform any more than the
more than the 30,000 Americans ev-
ery year who lose their lives to fi re-
arms along with day-in-day-out at
least 30 Americans being shot and
murdered.
Are we helpless? Have we not
proven our mettle so many times in
our history and thereby rise to wrestle
this issue to a successful win should
we set our minds to it. Most Amer-
ican-based surveys show that a clear
majority of us want controls on fi re-
arms with those controls enforced; so,
what’s stopping us from stepping up
in a ground swell to demand a safer
America where every American no
longer wonders whether he will be
the next to be shot.
(Gene H. McIntyre lives in Keizer.)