BRIAN CHILSON
OPINION
Gun nut club loses Dickey and Ross
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hen gun-industry vassals like Jay Dickey and Mike Ross throw in the towel, you start to think that Congress may finally be ready to try to stop the carnage in schools, churches and public spaces by passing effective controls on mass-murder weaponry. After a gunman killed 20 children, six faculty members and himself at a Connecticut grade school, the TV networks searched everywhere for one of the gun fanatics to defend the National Rifle Association’s absolute gun-rights stand. There were no takers until Fox News finally found the clownish Texas congressman, Louie Gohmert, who went on the air to declare that if principal Dawn Hochsprung had kept a military M-4 carbine behind her desk, as she should have, she could have blown away the crazy young man before he killed very many children and maybe even have saved herself. She was killed lunging for the man. Even the NRA shut down its propaganda for a time, but when the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre and his new herald, Asa
Hutchinson, finally found their voice and came out guns metaphorically blazing (the solution, they explained, ERNEST is to pack America’s DUMAS schools with guns), things got back close to normal. We have been here before, and nothing important is going to happen, although President Obama and Vice President Biden seem intent upon proposing sweeping reforms. There will be more killing spectacles before Congress gets around to the first votes on gun control, if it does in this decade, and if something eventually passes it will be token. Dickey and Ross, it must be remembered, no longer represent Arkansas in Congress. The men who represent their old constituency in Congress — Tom Cotton and Rick Crawford — follow the NRA’s commands just as slavishly. They’re joined by the Second District’s Tim Griffin, who laps up more NRA campaign money than
The Old South fades
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olitically speaking, we live by caricature. Particularly in the age of satellite TV news and Internet fulmination, the temptation is to melodrama. So I wasn’t terribly surprised to read a recent article in the online magazine Salon arguing that “even though it’s a truism of American public discourse that the Civil War never ended, it’s also literally true.” Never mind that author Andrew O’Hehir appears to be one of those overheated writers who use the adverb “literally” as an all-purpose intensifier meaning “figuratively.” Salon supposedly has editors. Elsewhere, O’Hehir concedes that the imagined conflict won’t “involve pitched battles in the meadows of Pennsylvania, or hundreds of thousands of dead.” So it won’t be a war at all then. As a Yankee long resident in the South, maybe I should be grateful for that. O’Hehir also acknowledges that while today’s “fights over abortion and gays and God and guns have a profound moral dimension,” they “don’t quite have the world-historical weight of the slavery question.” Um, not quite, no. But then as O’Hehir also categorizes Michigan as a “border state” for the sin of having a Republican governor, it’s hard to know what Democrats there should do. I suppose fleeing across the border into Ontario would be an option.
Is it possible to publish anything more half-baked and foolish? Oh, absolutely. Here in Arkansas, we had more than our share of cartoon-think before the 2012 election. Three would-be Republican state legislators GENE wrote manifestoes LYONS in favor of the old Confederacy. One Rep. Jon Hubbard of Jonesboro, delivered himself of a self-published book arguing that “the institution of slavery that the black race has long believed to be an abomination upon its people may actually have been a blessing in disguise.” Fellow GOP candidate Charles Fuqua of Batesville — like Jonesboro, a college town — self-produced an e-book entitled “God’s Law: The Only Political Solution.” In it, he not only called for expelling all Muslims from the United States, but returning to the Biblical practice of stoning disobedient children to death. Not many stonings, Fuqua thought, would be necessary to restore sexual morality and good table manners among American youth. Then there was Rep. Loy Mauch of Bismarck. An ardent secessionist, Mauch had written a series of letters to the Arkan-
nearly every congressman in America. Once LaPierre and Asa had spoken, Griffin dutifully let it be known last week that he was going to be found with the NRA. When the modern movement to control arms, supported then by the NRA, began in the 1960s in response to the threat of armed insurrection by the Black Panthers in California and the Kennedy and King political assassinations, Dickey and Ross were young men who weren’t studying politics. Dickey was a tennis player, not a hunter, but when he arrived in the House of Representatives in 1993 he became an immediate NRA subject. The spate of mass killings prompted the introduction of a ban on the sale of military assault weapons in 1987. But by the time Congress got around to acting on it in 1994 the NRA’s friends in Congress, including Dickey, had filled the legislation with so many loopholes that assault weapons actually multiplied rather than shrank during the 10 years the ban was in effect. The NRA could argue that the ban was ineffective, so the ban lapsed in 2004. Eleven years after his defeat by Ross, Dickey repented last summer. In an op-ed article in the Washington Post, Dickey said his amendment deleting $2.6 million for gun-violence research had sent a “chilling message.” Now, Dickey believes that research
should be resumed and that Congress should take bold steps to stop the staggering toll of gun violence. The government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars — $240 million since 1996 alone — researching automobile and traffic safety, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that it saved 366,000 lives from 1975 to 2009. Guns killed more people in the U.S. last year than vehicles, but nothing was spent on research to reduce that toll. Ross picked up the Dickey mantle and was an NRA point man, the head of the House gun caucus. Two years ago, he led 65 House Democrats in denouncing Attorney General Eric Holder for saying the assault-weapons ban should be reinstated. He introduced a bill to repeal the ban on semiautomatic guns in the District of Columbia. On his way out two weeks ago, Ross said the Connecticut slaughter had changed his mind and that he now thinks it is ridiculous that people should be able to get high-capacity assault weapons. More than that, he derided the old NRAencouraged notion that gun control was a foot in the door and that people needed big guns to overthrow a despotic government in Washington. “I think it is time we get beyond that,” he said.
sas Democrat-Gazette arguing that since Jesus never condemned slavery, it had biblical sanction. Mauch also condemned Abraham Lincoln as a “fake neurotic Northern war criminal,” frequently likened him to Hitler, and deemed the rebel flag “a symbol of Christian liberty vs. the new world order.” Comparing Hubbard’s views to those of Robert E. Lee and John C. Calhoun, New York Times columnist Charles Blow expressed alarm at “the tendency of some people to romanticize and empathize with the Confederacy.” Ah, but here’s the rest of the story, which Blow barely mentioned: All three “Arkansaw lunkheads,” as Huck Finn might have called them, were not only repudiated by the state Republican party but lost badly to Democratic opponents last November in what was otherwise a big year for the GOP here. Unimpeded by the burdens of office, they can now get back to self-publishing their neo-Confederate hearts out. The point’s simple: these fools certainly weren’t elected due to their crackpot fulminations, or even in spite of them. Their views were simply unknown. As soon as they became an issue, they became an embarrassment. Now they’re ex-state legislators. The end. This is not to deny that there’s a strong regional component to the nation’s current political impasse. The New Republic’s John R. Judis did the numbers on the recent “fiscal cliff” vote in the U.S. House
of Representatives. Altogether, 85 Republicans voted for the Senate’s resolution, 151 against. Broken down by region, however, the differences were stark. Republicans outside the South actually voted for the bipartisan compromise 62-36. GOP congressmen representing the old Confederacy voted against 83-10 — including unanimous opposition from Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee and South Carolina. But for Florida, opposition would have been nearly unanimous. For all the good it did them. Because the Old South is visibly shrinking. Florida and Virginia are already gone; given demographic trends, Texas is on its way. Even Arkansas, which voted for Bill Clinton something like eight times, seems unlikely to become a one-party state. As for the rest, Mike Tomasky correctly observes that “over time…the South will make itself less relevant and powerful if it keeps behaving this way. As it becomes more of a one-party state [sic] it becomes less of a factor.” From that perspective, few recent political events have been as telling as the outrage of northeastern Republicans Rep. Peter King and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at the House’s foot-dragging on Hurricane Sandy relief. A few more stunts like that, and the GOP could end up as fragmented and futile as Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s American Independent Party. No Civil War necessary. www.arktimes.com
JANUARY 9, 2013
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