Primary campaigns battle over guns -- pro and con -- May 3, 2018 column

By MARSHA MERCER

A Virginia man made news doing something utterly legal and routine.

Dan Helmer, an Army veteran, went to a gun show in Northern Virginia and bought a semiautomatic rifle similar to the one he carried in Iraq and Afghanistan in under 10 minutes -- without a background check.

He could have been someone with deadly intentions, but Helmer was making a point about lax gun laws.

He’s one of six Democrats competing in the June 12 primary for the prize of competing in November against Rep. Barbara Comstock, the Republican incumbent representing the 10^th District.

Helmer demonstrated how easy it is for someone showing only a Virginia ID to buy what he calls “an incredibly dangerous piece of weaponry that’s meant for war,” adding the gun show in Chantilly was less than two miles from a school.

It took him less time than buying a cup of coffee.

Federal law requires licensed gun dealers to conduct background checks, but the “gun show loophole” allows non-licensed sellers or private sellers to bypass background checks.

Helmer’s campaign surreptitiously recorded the transaction and posted the video online. It promptly went viral.

“Weapons of war don’t belong on our streets,” he says.

 Comstock was a top recipient in the House of National Rifle Association contributions in 2016. Election trackers say she’s vulnerable in a district where Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 10 points.

The primary campaigns of 2018 increasingly are a battle over guns. Democrats fight among themselves over who’s tougher on gun control while Republicans go after each other on who’s stronger on the 2^nd Amendment. 

Democrat Karen Powers Mallard, a reading teacher from Virginia Beach making her first bid for Congress, used a video to show her commitment to ridding the streets of assault weapons. 

She took a saw to her husband’s AR-15 – and videoed its destruction. Her husband dropped off the gun pieces at the police station -- but not before gun rights advocates blasted his wife online.

Mallard’s competitor in the 2^nd District Democratic primary is Elaine Luria, a Naval Academy graduate and retired Navy commander, who, like Mallard, favors tougher gun control.

But Rep. Scott Taylor, the Republican incumbent, is a former Navy SEAL who opposes stricter gun control laws. The race leans Republican, election trackers say.

Sometimes contests get nasty. Helmer criticized state Sen. Jennifer Wexton, the only Democratic candidate who has elected office experience, for supporting a legislative compromise that expanded the rights of people with concealed-carry handgun permits.

Wexton has an F rating from the NRA. She said Helmer doesn’t know what it’s like to be in the legislative trenches. She has raised more money than others in the race and has more endorsements from fellow lawmakers, including Gov. Ralph Northam.  

Primary season begins in earnest this month with contests in 11 states. Virginia is among 17 states with primaries in June, the busiest month. There are none in July, 14 in August and five in September, the National Conference of State Legislatures reports.

The gun issue cuts both ways, as Trump’s fourth appearance before the NRA in four years indicates. The NRA invested $30 million in Trump’s 2016 campaign, and despite his pledging to “do something” to stop gun violence, he hasn’t. His frequent campaign rallies keep his base motivated to vote in November and in 2020.

One of the more interesting gun-centric GOP races is the gubernatorial primary in Georgia. Secretary of State Brian Kemp just released an ad in which he sits surrounded by guns, rubbing a cloth over a shotgun, while he quizzes a teenager named Jake, “a young man interested in one of my daughters.”

Kemp then points the shotgun in Jake’s direction. It’s supposed to be funny.

Last month, another would-be governor, West Point grad and Army combat veteran Hunter Hill, aired an ad called “Liberals won’t like this” that showed him loading an assault rifle.   

He’s surely right, but will they vote?

In off-year elections, people tend to snooze through primaries and don’t bother to vote. This year could be different, with Democrats energized and Parkland students keeping the issue alive. But only those who actually cast ballots have a say in who wins.

©2018 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved. 30

Trump takes unexpected turn as gun control president -- March 1, 2018 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Call Ripley.

Even in this wildly unpredictable White House, President Donald Trump’s call for  “beautiful” and “comprehensive” gun control was a Believe It or Not! moment.

“I think it’s time that a president stepped up,” Trump declared Wednesday at a televised meeting on school safety with members of Congress at the White House.

“We want to pass something great, and to me the something great has to be where we prevent it from happening again,” he said.

It is the mass shooting of children in American schools.

The Feb. 14 massacre of 17 students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, could be a tipping point in the long-stalled gun control movement. Unless it isn’t.

Sadly, we’ve been here before. After 20 children and six adults were gunned down in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, President Barack Obama tried to expand background checks to all gun purchases, among other measures.

The National Rifle Association resisted, congressional Republicans and some Democrats balked, and nothing changed.

This time, though, while politicians talk, big business is taking action.    

Dick’s Sporting Goods and Walmart announced Wednesday they will no longer sell firearms to anyone under 21. Dick’s will no longer sell assault-style rifles, a move Walmart made in 2015.

“Thoughts and prayers are not enough,” Dick’s Sporting Goods Chairman and CEO Edward W. Stack said.

Amen.

Walmart said in a statement: “Our heritage as a company has always been in serving sportsmen and hunters, and we will continue to do so in a responsible way.”

Many familiar brands, including Avis, Hertz, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, have dropped NRA discount programs.

“The loss of a discount will neither scare nor distract one single NRA member,” the NRA said in a defiant statement.

The Florida shooter had bought a shotgun at Dick’s last November. The gun was not used in the school massacre; he used an AR-15, a semiautomatic. “But it could have been,” Stack wrote.

A troubled 18-year-old in Vermont bought a shotgun from Dick’s Feb. 13 and had plans for “shooting up” his high school. A17-year-old girl, concerned about his threatening texts, showed her phone to a high school guidance counselor who called authorities. The would-be mass murderer has been charged and is in jail.

Trump’s relationship with the NRA, which claims 5 million members, is conflicted. In his 2000 book “The America We Deserve,” Trump wrote: “I generally oppose gun control, but I support the ban on assault weapons and I support a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun.”

The NRA spent an unprecedented $30 million to elect him, and he reassured NRA members at their convention last year: “I will never, ever let you down.”

There’s “no bigger fan” of the NRA than he, but “That doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything,” he said Wednesday. And he chided lawmakers for bowing to the NRA.

“They do have great power. . . They have great power over you people. They have less power over me,” he said. “Some of you people are petrified of the NRA. You can’t be petrified.”

Trump said he wants expanded background checks and is open to raising the age for buying assault-style rifles to 21. He wants police to be able to confiscate guns from mentally ill people, although that would be constitutionally dubious.

"Take the guns first, go through due process second,” he said.

He promised an executive order to ban bump stocks, attachments that make a semi-automatic rifle act like a machine gun, and urged ending “gun free school zones” and arming school personnel.  

“I would rather have a comprehensive bill,” he said. “It would be really nice to create something that’s beautiful.”

If he actually follows through, Trump could go down in history as the president who led the nation in stopping gun violence. Or he could pivot.

In a White House meeting on immigration in January. Trump promised to sign whatever compromise Congress passed. Then the White House torpedoed bipartisan legislation.

It’s easy to imagine a repeat with guns.

The student-led #NeverAgain movement is changing the way Americans think about gun rights and the gun lobby. Corporations and consumers are finally saying “Enough” to mass killings. Bravo.

Now politicians in Washington need to conquer their fear of the NRA and act to save lives.

©2018 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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How many more American killing fields? -- Aug. 22, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

This time, it was Duncan, Okla. He was a college baseball player from Australia, out for a run on a summer afternoon. They were three bored teenagers, driving around town with a 22-caliber revolver.

Their worlds collided in an instant last Friday, when Christopher Lane, 22, jogged past, and the teens followed. The 16-year-old, sitting In the back seat, allegedly shot Lane in the back. The 17-year-old driver stomped on the accelerator and the 1993 black Ford Focus sped off, tires squealing. Lane fell to his knees on Country Club Road, mortally wounded.

“It could have been anybody – it was such a random act,” Capt. Jay Evans of the Duncan Police told Sky News, an Australian TV network.

There are 30 homicides with handguns every day in America. The cold-blooded murder of Chris Lane was particularly shocking because the boys said they killed “for the fun of it.” They didn’t know their victim or care. Remorse? What’s that?

They face charges and the wheels of the legal system are beginning to turn.  

No one would have thought that Duncan, population 24,000, would be America’s latest killing field.

“This is not Duncan, Okla.,” said district attorney Jason Hicks. And he’s right, in a way.

The people of Duncan responded as kind-hearted Americans always do in such tragedies. A passerby called 911; another woman performed CPR on Lane. Local restaurants and the United Way raised funds for Lane’s family in Melbourne, Australia, and that of his girlfriend Sarah Harper in Duncan. Lane, who had a baseball scholarship at East Central University in Ada, Okla., was visiting Sarah and her family when he went for the fateful jog.

But make no mistake, Duncan is America. Terrifying, gun-related events are all too common. Four days after Chris Lane was killed, a 20-year-old gunman toting an AK-47 slipped into a crowded elementary school in Atlanta and fired a few shots at the floor in the office.

A school clerk miraculously talked Michael Hill, who was described as mentally unstable, into giving himself up. Antoinette Tuff told the 911 dispatcher: “He said he don’t care if he dies. He don’t have nothing to live for.” That time, no one was hurt.

The glimmer of good news is that the homicide rate in the United States is on the decline. Still, gun violence has become sickeningly routine, especially among young males.

That’s why Congress prohibited licensed firearms dealers from selling handguns to people under 21. This hardly seems the time to make guns more available to minors, but the National Rifle Association wants to do just that. It has asked the Supreme Court to overturn the federal law that makes it illegal for licensed dealers to sell handguns or ammunition to those under 21.

People 18 to 20 may receive handguns as gifts from their parents or guardians and buy handguns through unlicensed, private sales. They can buy rifles and shotguns from licensed or unlicensed dealers.

The NRA claims that the handgun sales ban is unconstitutional because it infringes on the right of 18- to- 20-year-olds to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.

The 5^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas rejected the claim, noting that Congress had found that persons under 21 “tend to be relatively irresponsible and prone to violent crime, especially when they have easy access to handguns.”

“Congress’ purpose in preventing persons under 21—including 18-to-20-year-olds – from purchasing handguns…was to curb violent crime,” the court said.

The law didn’t stop the thugs in Duncan from getting a gun, but that doesn’t mean we make it even easier for young people to get handguns.

This latest case of gun violence should be a wake-up call for Americans to think about the forces in society that are leading young people to disregard human life. What, beyond talk, should the president, Congress, schools and the rest of us do to help boys and girls find meaning, purpose and dreams for their lives?

This time, it was Duncan. No one knows where the next American killing field will be. But we do know there will be one. 

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Gabby Giffords shines in gun control fight -- April 18, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

The National Rifle Association won round one, but don’t count gun control advocates out just yet. Not when Gabby Giffords is in the ring.   

She no longer has a vote in Congress, but if this courageous fighter has anything to do with it, reason will prevail. Eventually.

In all that was said and written in outrage after the Senate defeated several gun control measures Wednesday, the words of the former Arizona congresswoman were the most honest and inspirational. 

  

To recap, only 54 senators voted for a bipartisan compromise that would have required background checks at gun shows and for online purchases – not the 60 needed to pass the measure. 

No matter that national polls show 85 to 92 percent of Americans support expanding background checks. Senators are elected from individual states, not nationwide, and state politics trumps national sentiment. Even fewer senators voted for amendments to prohibit high-capacity magazines and to reinstate a ban on certain military-style rifles.

Gabrielle Giffords is still recovering from serious injuries after being shot in January 2011 outside a supermarket in Tucson while meeting with constituents. Last January, she testified haltingly before the Senate Judiciary Committee: “You must act.” The Senate didn’t.

President Obama had made preventing gun violence a key issue after the Newtown massacre, but he could not deliver the 60 votes needed to move gun control forward. The NRA insisted, wrongly, that the bill would criminalize private transfers of firearms between family members or friends. Senators fell in line.

 “Speaking is physically difficult for me. But my feelings are clear: I’m furious,” Giffords wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times on Thursday. 

  

“Some of the senators who voted against the background-check amendments have met with grieving parents whose children were murdered at Sandy Hook, in Newtown. Some of the senators who voted no looked into my eyes as I talked about my experience being shot in the head at point-blank range in suburban Tucson two years ago, and expressed sympathy for the 18 other people shot besides me, six of whom died,” she wrote.

“These senators have heard from their constituents – who polls show overwhelmingly favored expanding background checks. And still these senators decided to do nothing. Shame on them.”

There are glimmers of hope. The NRA is being challenged by several gun control advocates, including New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly started Americans for Responsible Solutions, an advocacy group with a separate political action committee to encourage elected officials to prevent gun violence and protect responsible gun owners.

Yes, they are gun owners, and even after what happened to her, Kelly and Giffords go target shooting. Kelly, a former Navy captain and astronaut who likely has a political career, did a video for the Americans for Responsible Solutions site that shows how easy it is to get a background check. He takes a pocket camera to a local gun shop, buys a .45 – the background check takes all of 5 minutes, 36 seconds -- and brings the gun home to show Giffords.

  

Giffords has harnessed her anger. In her Times piece, she writes: “I am asking every reasonable American to help me tell the truth about the cowardice these senators demonstrated. I am asking for mothers to stop these lawmakers in the grocery store and tell them: You’ve lost my vote.

“I am asking activists to unsubscribe from these senators’ e-mail lists and to stop giving them money. I am asking citizens to go to their offices and say: You’ve disappointed me, and there will be consequences.” 

Gun control legislation appears frozen for the foreseeable future, so the consequences may not be apparent until the 2014 election. Power can shift, however. Not that long ago, the NRA supported background checks as “reasonable.”

 “We think it’s reasonable to provide mandatory, instant criminal background checks for every sale at every gun show. No loopholes anywhere for anyone,” Wayne LaPierre of the NRA told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime a month after the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999. Twelve students and one teacher were murdered in that attack. A background check measure failed in the Senate that year anyway.

Gun control advocates know it will take time. Fortunately, Giffords and Kelly say they are in it for the long haul. Reason will rule. Eventually.  

©2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Why we need more than Obama to stop gun violence -- Dec. 20, 2012 column

By MARSHA MERCER

About 85 people every day are killed with guns in America, but we’ve become almost accustomed to the casualties.

  

Only after horrific, high-profile shooting sprees do we talk about tightening gun laws. Typically, politicians in the thrall of the powerful gun lobby simply stall action wait for the outrage to fade.

    

But perhaps the massacre of 20 innocent children and six adults on a December morning will do more than restart the gun control conversation one more time.

   

Opponents of gun control say the murder rate is actually going down and no law can stop someone bent on mass destruction. OK, fine, but assault weapons and large capacity magazines – those holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition – make it easier for monsters to carry out their unspeakable plans.

Laws can make it harder. We owe our fellow citizens that much safety.

“This time,” the president finally said, “the words have to lead to action.”

 

Obama appointed Vice President Joe Biden to bring a set of concrete proposals within a month.  

“I will use all the powers of this office to help advance efforts aimed at preventing more tragedies like this,” Obama told reporters. “It won’t be easy – but that can’t be an excuse not to try.”

Even those who wish Obama had stepped up earlier or that he’d given Biden less time should recognize this as a major step forward. We can hope Biden’s proposals will lead to meaningful legislation, not laws riddled with loopholes.

In the Senate, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., vows to introduce next month a ban on assault weapons. A military-style rifle was the weapon of choice for Adam Lanza in Connecticut and other mass murderers in shooting rampages.

And then there’s the House.

Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., incoming chairman of the House Judiciary committee, which has responsibility for gun laws, flatly said he won’t move any gun control legislation through his committee, despite what happened in Newtown, Conn.

“We’re going to take a look at what happened there and what can be done to help avoid it in the future, but gun control is not going to be something that I would support,” Goodlatte told CQ Roll Call newspaper. Goodlatte has an A rating from the National Rifle Association, which endorsed him for re-election.

Goodlatte later said in a written statement that he’ll “listen to and carefully review suggestions made by the president’s task force and other groups to see what we can do to prevent a terrible tragedy like this in the future.”

We’re accustomed to this same old standoff—the gun rights people in their corner and the gun control folks in theirs.

    

For the president to make good on his pledge, though, he needs to move Goodlatte and other House Republicans. The NRA says it wants to be part of the conversation and will offer “meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again.” We’ll see.

Now comes Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-NY, with the outline of a compromise. A 2008 Supreme Court ruling that disappointed gun control advocates could pave the way for gun control legislation.  

The Supreme Court in D.C. v. Heller struck down the District of Columbia’s handgun ban, saying the right to bear arms is constitutionally protected. But the court also said that reasonable limits can be imposed. The Supreme Court has upheld laws that prohibit possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill and that regulate gun sales.

Schumer, who grew up in Brooklyn and went on his first hunting trip only three years ago, says pro-gun groups should be more flexible, knowing that the court has affirmed the right to bear arms. Progressives, he says, should stop hoping a future court will overturn Heller and work within the ruling to enact gun control laws.

“The truth is, it was bad strategy to ever deny an individual right to bear arms and, similarly, the special place that guns hold in our culture,” Schumer wrote in an op-ed in Thursday’s Washington Post.

We’ll need more than the president and a senator from New York to change minds on this most polarizing issue, but Obama is onboard at last and Schumer has found a possible starting point. As Obama says, passing gun control won’t be easy, but that’s no excuse not to try. 

Nobody wants to see so many tiny white coffins ever again.

(c) 2012 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.