More guns
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gunman opened fire in a small Texas church during Sunday service, killing 26, wounding many more and ultimately shooting himself. The event didn’t even make the top news position in the Monday morning Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. That upper right-hand Page 1 space went to Donald Trump’s trip to Japan, where he offered the familiar thoughts and prayers for the latest massacre victims, only marginally more valuable than the ritual moment of silence by the U.S. House. As ever, a call for action on gun safety was met first by those who said it was no time to politicize tragedy. The attorney general of Texas also said it was time to get MORE guns in churches. The U.S. has the most guns of any country in the world, 88.8 for every 100 people. That’s twice the rate of the nearest competitor, Yemen. We record almost four times the gun homicides of our next closest competitor in the developed world.
OPINION
Still, people like Rep. Charlie ColMAX lins (R-Fayetteville) BRANTLEY maxbrantley@arktimes.com think the answer is more guns. In 2017, he finally achieved by forcing state colleges to allow concealed weapons on campus. Some think this won’t improve safety. The University of Arkansas recently recorded a suicide by gun on UA property. The UA police are refusing to provide details on account of the victim’s age. But it would be interesting to know how the gun was acquired and where the gun was kept. We know that ready availability of guns increases the likelihood of accidents and other ill outcomes. Says the Harvard School of Public Health: “Every study that has examined the issue to date has found that within the U.S., access to firearms is associated with increased suicide risk.” Donald Trump says the mass shooting wasn’t a gun issue, but a mental health issue. Matt DeCample, former press aide
Putin wannabe
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resident Trump’s regard for authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin and their techniques gives some people the willies. Achieving that kind of power may not be outside his dreams, but it is beyond his reach. Still, it must give you the creeps when he publicly longs for the power to run the Justice Department and the FBI, as he did occasionally during the campaign and again, often, when legal developments around the campaign and the White House have not gone his way. When Robert Mueller, special counsel for the Russian investigation, lodged charges against three of Trump’s campaign associates for their foreign connections, Trump tweeted again about taking charge of the Justice Department and the FBI. He demanded they start investigating “Crooked Hillary” and the Democrats instead of Russian infiltration of the presidential election. Since taking office, he has grieved that his own attorney general and the FBI director would not follow his wishes by undertaking criminal investigations of his political enemies and critics and halting the Russian investigation. He repeatedly expressed his dismay at learning that the FBI and the criminal division of the
Justice Department do not take direction from the president. After the FBI director last year ERNEST concluded the DUMAS investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state and announced that it had found no convincing evidence that she had violated the law or jeopardized national security, Trump promised that as soon as he became president he would appoint a special prosecutor and get her locked up. We do not have to recall the abuses of the national police in authoritarian countries — the various incarnations of the KGB in Russia, the SS and the Gestapo, or the police forces under contemporary tyrants like Saddam Hussein, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad or Turkey’s Recep Erdogan — to know the dangers. It is not in the Constitution but longstanding protocol that the Justice Department and its police force, the FBI, operate independently of the president. The heads of both are appointed by the president but are expected to strive for justice, not to pursue the political whims
to Gov. Mike Beebe, used series of tweets to illustrate the emptiness of Trump’s words. Trump and the Republican Congress are determined to make severe cuts in Medicaid, the country’s biggest provider of mental health care. At risk currently, too, is the Children’s Health Insurance Program, another source of treatment for childhood mental, emotional and behavioral disorders. Treatment of young people can prevent adult problems. Commented DeCample, “Making it harder to obtain mental health care when it is costing us innocent American lives is, pun intended, just crazy.” New spending on mental health seems unlikely from this Congress. So what about modest gun safety legislation? FBI analysis of mass shootings shows that almost 6 in 10 involve a family member among victims and 16 percent of attackers have a record of domestic violence. The latest killer got a bad conduct discharge from the Air Force for abuse of his wife and child, and his mother-in-law was among the members of the church he targeted with his semi-automatic rifle. A universal background check — wellenforced, unlike the Air Force’s failure to
report the Texas killer’s domestic conviction — makes it harder for people to obtain and own weapons. Why not close the gun show loophole? And why not tighten prohibitions for gun ownership and purchase by domestic abusers. Shouldn’t the federal law apply to domestic partners, not just legal spouses? And why shouldn’t Arkansas tighten up its law on domestic abuse? In 2017, Rep. Clarke Tucker (D-Little Rock) got a quick veto from the gun lobby for his bill to extend the prohibition on gun ownership for those convicted of misdemeanor domestic battery. Rep. Bob Ballinger objected to a gun prohibition for something that might be a “relatively minor” matter. Lose gun rights over beating your wife? It’s unacceptable in Arkansas under the “natural law” that Ballinger claims to preach. I know gun control legislation isn’t going anywhere, in Arkansas for sure. If slaughters in elementary schools and churches and a mass shooting of 600 people in a matter of a few hundred seconds can’t weaken the gun lobby’s hold on politicians, nothing will. I remain sure of this much: More guns and ammo aren’t the answer.
of the president. The FBI director serves 10-year terms that do not overlap with the president’s. He is not supposed to start, supervise or stop investigations. Congress made those reforms after the Watergate scandal, which followed presidential meddling in the affairs of the Justice Department to pursue political reprisals. Nixon started the White House “plumbers,” in fact, when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover proved squeamish about using his sleuths to find out how Democrats were getting leaks from his administration. Trump was demanding the same thing last spring, when the media kept reporting leaks from intelligence agencies and the White House staff. He wanted the leakers exposed and the press punished. The Watergate reforms in Justice and the FBI were a reaction to the occasional police-state incursions during the long tenure of J. Edgar Hoover, who, starting with Franklin Roosevelt, supplied presidents with inside knowledge of their political enemies. If you were around in the ’60s you remember the dossiers he prepared on civil rights leaders, including Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. One president, Harry Truman, hated the FBI director because he thought he sought to build a “citizen spy system.” Hoover didn’t like the Kennedys and supplied them secret intelligence only upon request while col-
lecting information about the president’s amorous affairs. But he had a friend in Lyndon Johnson, for whom he supplied dirt and intelligence on his opponents, inside and outside the party. President George W. Bush’s nastiest scandal was his attorney general’s knuckling to the White House political office’s request to fire nine Republican district attorneys, including Arkansas’s Bud Cummins, for insufficient dedication to the party. A few had refused to announce investigations of Democrats for their election activity in the run-up to the 2006 election. The Justice Department’s inspector general said the attorney general had undermined the independence and integrity of the department. Trump has said that he would not fire Mueller as long as he did not delve into his financial dealings or his income tax records. The retiring director of the Internal Revenue Service, a longtime friend of Trump, said last week that all of Trump’s income tax records are held in a special safe so they cannot be hacked or accessed by anyone inside or outside the IRS except him. Trump’s dark secrets are safe with him and presumably the successor that Trump will name. But what if Mueller subpoenas them? Then we will know if his bravado matches Putin’s. I don’t think it does.
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arktimes.com NOVEMBER 09, 2017
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