OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
JIM VAN NOSTRAND, Managing Editor
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
The spotlight of
politics shines
everywhere
T
he past two weeks, President Donald Trump has shoved
the National Football League and its players into the spot-
light. That’s normally a place a private enterprise would
love to be, but this president’s spotlight is often too hot and too
harsh.
Trump’s comments about what should be done to any athlete
using the national anthem as a protest platform — they should
be out of a job, put decently — has been what many Americans
have been talking about. But we should all consider whether
sparking a futile debate was just what President Trump’s goal
was all along. Discussing kneeling, the anthem, Black Lives
Matter and the American military was a fake handoff — a
reverse, a flea flicker, a Statue of Liberty, if you will. It was faux
action on one part of the field meant to distract from the real
action happening on the other side.
Do you remember that just recently 21 states learned their
voting systems were hacked by Russians in the run-up to the
2016 election? That Republican attempts to repeal Obamacare
failed for a third time? That almost all of Puerto Rico’s 3.4 mil-
lion residents remain without power?
By and large, we don’t, and we’re instead writing about the
NFL and the American flag. Trump is a master media manipula-
tor, and he has us chasing the rabbit again.
But while we’re on the subject, we do think the concept of
patriotism is important, especially at a moment when many of
our democratic institutions and ideals are shifting radically and
our allegiances are under fire.
It is critical — now more than ever — to remember the ideals
that made this a nation to be proud of, and what we must defend.
The aspect of forced patriotism — you must stand, you must
sing, you must remove your hat and hold your hand over your
heart — are being vastly overlooked by the “patriot” crowd. It
should be an honor to stand for the flag, not a requirement. It
should not be a meaningless gesture, done without thought or
purpose.
The places in the world where it is a mandatory and empty
exercise are the very opposite of America.
The NFL has backed themselves into this tight spot. For
decades, the league has (often cynically) worked to equate itself
with America and the U.S. military. That includes flag-waving
before, during and after games, military salutes, fly-overs and
fatigue-clad military months.
Many other sporting events do it, too, from NASCAR races to
Major League Baseball games with not only the anthem before-
hand but “God Bless America” sung at many parks during the
seventh-inning stretch.
This is all good for busi-
Don’t be
ness: It helps ratings and helps
the NFL ingratiate football
surprised if
as a nationwide endeavor —
your industry,
America’s sport. But it does,
your union,
however, entangle a private
enterprise with patriotism. And
your ethnicity,
when an employee of the NFL
your religion,
wants to protest against police
brutality, it gets tied up as an
your family is
assault against America, our
soon labeled
symbols and our military.
negatively by
We love sports, and see
their usefulness as a safe
the president.
retreat from the complexities
and divisions of everyday life.
But the spotlight of politics is shining everywhere these days,
and don’t be surprised if your industry, your union, your ethnic-
ity, your religion, your family is soon labeled negatively by the
president.
What then, is the patriotic response?
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AP Photo/Chris Carlson
Flowers and candles are left at a makeshift memorial site on Las Vegas Boulevard on Tuesday in Las Vegas.
Why Las Vegas could
change gun control debate
By ROSS DOUTHAT
New York Times News Service
A
fter mass shootings like the
nightmare in Las Vegas,
there are always complaints
that we don’t talk
enough about
gun control in
America, that we
need to actually
have the debate
about guns and
mass murder that
the National Rifle Association and
the Republicans supposedly keep
shutting down.
I don’t think this is right. We
do keep having a debate over guns
in the United States; it’s just that
the side that’s convinced that new
regulations will prevent another
Newtown or Orlando or Las Vegas
keeps on losing the argument.
Twenty years ago, you could
argue that gun rights was a strictly
minority cause that thrived because
of its partisans’ intensity and its
lobby’s clout and money. But
that’s no longer true. Despite the
best efforts of Barack Obama,
Democratic politicians and a raft of
activists, celebrities and talk-show
hosts, despite a dramatic leftward
shift on many other social issues
and despite wall-to-wall media
coverage of mass shootings, gun
control is substantially less popular
than it was in the 1990s — and gun
rights is one of the few issues where
the Republican Party is actually in
touch with what many Americans
seem to want.
Why is gun control losing?
One answer is structural. Gun
ownership is a form of expressive
individualism no less than the
liberties beloved in blue America,
and it makes sense that a culture
that rejects erotic limits would
reject limits on self-defense as well.
Especially since the appeal of gun
ownership is also linked to indi-
vidualism’s dark side — to distrust
of your neighbor and your govern-
ment, to the decay of communities
and families, to a sense of being
unprotected and on your own.
But the gun control cause
also has a more specific political
problem. Anti-gun activists seize on
the most horrifying acts of killing,
understandably, and use them as
calls to legislative action. But
then the regulatory measures they
propose, even when they poll well,
often lack any direct connection to
the massacres themselves.
If you go back through the
list of recent mass atrocities, for
instance, you don’t see many killers
buying guns through the supposed
“gun show loophole” or without
a background check. Instead you
see examples of why, in a well-
armed country, legal barriers to gun
ownership don’t necessarily prevent
lunatics and fanatics from getting
them: Some of the killers passed
background checks with flying
colors, some passed them because
of human and bureaucratic errors,
and others simply used someone
else to acquire their weaponry,
circumventing legal and regulatory
obstacles entirely.
The diversity of weapons used
in the massacres, too, has made
it hard to claim that reviving the
Clinton-era assault weapons ban
(whose likely effect on murder rates
was nil) would make deadly sprees
much rarer. James Holmes and
Adam Lanza used high-powered
rifles, but Nidal Hasan, Jiverly
Wong and Dylann Roof were all
extremely deadly just with hand-
guns. Aaron Alexis was prevented
from buying an assault rifle; he
killed a dozen people at D.C.’s
Navy Yard with a shotgun. In a
free society, madmen and monsters
find a way to kill — as the killer
in Vegas, a man of means and no
significant criminal history, almost
certainly would have even with
tighter gun regulations and stiffer
background checks.
But there is one way in which
the latest massacre could be differ-
ent. If, as it seems right now, there
was a link between the sheer scale
of the Las Vegas killer’s spree and
his apparent use of a “bump stock”
that lets a semi-automatic weapon
fire at the rate of a machine gun,
then gun-control advocates could
make a more-direct-than-usual case
for making such stocks illegal in
response.
Right now tight regulations
on fully automatic weapons are a
settled part of our gun laws, and as
restrictions go they seem relatively
effective; no recent mass killer has
acquired or used a machine gun. A
new law banning “bump stocks”
could still be flouted, of course, but
it seems like a plausible extension
of the principle that our machine-
gun laws already enshrine. If you
can’t manufacture automatic weap-
onry and you can buy only an old
automatic under strict conditions,
you shouldn’t be able to make a
nonautomatic weapon fire like a
machine gun by simply adding on a
legal part.
Would this be a meaningless
gesture, given that no recent mass
killing before this one has involved
automatic fire? Not necessarily:
Remember that mass killings are
a form of social contagion, whose
perpetrators copy their predecessors
and seek to construct what Ari
Schulman, the editor of The New
Atlantis, has described as “a crafted
public spectacle, a theater of vio-
lence in which we are the unwitting
yet compliant audience.”
This reality has led Schulman to
urge media organizations to reduce
their coverage of the killers’ person-
alities, plans and alleged grievances.
But it also suggests that when a
mass murderer pioneers a new form
of satanic performance art, like the
hail of automatic-seeming fire that
fell on concertgoers in Las Vegas,
others will seek to imitate his meth-
ods. So moving pre-emptively to
block a specific means of imitation
isn’t necessarily fruitless; it might
be an entirely reasonable precaution
against some dark ambition that’s
just now taking shape.
Seeking a modest precaution
after such a monstrous bloodletting
will no doubt strike gun control
advocates as a hopelessly insuffi-
cient goal. But a cause that has been
losing ground for 20 years can’t be
picky in the victories that it seeks.
Las Vegas seems to offer a
clear case for a particular kind of
gun regulation. I’m provisionally
convinced. So let’s study the facts,
have the argument and see how it
turns out.