Can an Anti-Gun Youth Voting Surge Save Us in 2020?

To drive a car, one needs to take both a written test and a test behind the wheel.  Once licensed, at varies periods one has to renew the license and your car must be registered every year.  To practice law or many other professions, one needs to be licensed annually and typically must take a minimum amount of continuing education. Yet, in most states, one can buy a military style assault weapon capable of rapidly killing significant numbers of people without any license or even a background check. Why?  Because of (i) a twisted reading of the 2nd Amendment, and (ii) the lobbying influence of the NRA, a front organization funded by gun manufacturers - and as we learned in 2016, even foreign interests. Meanwhile, mass shootings are on the rise and one literally cannot feel fully safe anywhere. Now, the survivors of the Parkland, Florida mass shooting are pushing for both common sense gun control and a voter registration effort that could wreak havoc on Republicans who prostitute themselves to the NRA and perhaps end the misrule of Donald Trump.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at their effort.  Here are article highlights:

The student activists who crashed the political arena after the mass shooting last year at their high school in Parkland, Fla., are throwing their weight behind a new and ambitious gun-control program that they hope will set the tone for the debate following the most recent mass shootings and headed into the 2020 elections.

The students are speaking out for the first time since 31 people were killed in one weekend in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio. They hope their plan — unveiled Wednesday morning — will be considered by President Trump as well as his Democratic presidential rivals and will serve as a catalyst for a surge of youth voters next year.

“You see these shootings on TV every day and very little happening around it. It’s painful to watch. And I think it’s been really hard for me and many of the other students and people that we work with to find hope in this time. . . . “But I think that this plan is something that we can truly — as a country and as Americans united against violence and fighting for peace — can get behind.”

March for Our Lives has been focused on voter registration and outreach across the country over the past year and a half, building a national infrastructure with more than 100 chapters centered on grass-roots organizing. They hope to turn that into droves of voters at the polls next year.

Called “A Peace Plan for a Safer America,” the ambitious platform, which was obtained by The Washington Post, goes much further than the current debate over universal background checks and “red flag” laws, which would apply to people who could be a danger to themselves and others.
 The Peace Plan would create a national licensing and gun registry, long a nonstarter with gun rights advocates; ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines; implement a mandatory gun buyback program; and install a “national director of gun violence prevention” who would report directly to the president and coordinate the federal response to what advocates call a national public health emergency.
 It calls for a “multi-step” gun licensing system, overseen by a federal agency, that would include in-person interviews and a 10-day wait before gun purchases are approved. The license would be renewed annually.
 The Peace Plan takes a holistic approach to gun violence by also calling for automatic voter registration when those eligible turn 18, along with the creation of a “Safety Corps,” which the authors compare to a Peace Corps for gun violence prevention. The plan also proposes community-based solutions like mental health services, as well as programs to address and prevent suicide, domestic violence and urban violence.
 The issue of gun violence has recently become a much more dominant concern for the 2020 presidential candidates. Raw emotions have hit many of them as they have met advocates from Moms Demand Action and other groups whose members have been affected by gun violence.
 “My hope is that they focus like a laser on youth turnout,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said of March for Our Lives’s 2020 efforts, after reviewing the proposal. “The election is over the minute young people decide to turn out. The only reason that Trump would get reelected is if young people stay home. The issue of gun violence is one of the only issues that truly motivate young people to shake off their indifference and aversion to voting.”

Democrats, who in the past would at least nod toward gun owners and do photo ops while hunting, are embracing gun control with greater urgency than they have in any election in recent memory, a sign that they are sensing movement among voters. . . . . nearly 70 percent of registered voters said gun policy was “very important” to them, ranking the issue ahead of taxes and immigration, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center.

March for Our Lives is calling for a mandatory buyback of all assault weapons and a voluntary buyback of handguns and other firearms.

NRA spokeswoman Amy Hunter, commenting on the plan, said: “The gun-control community is finally being marginally honest about their true wish list. The simple fact remains their proposals and ideas are out of the mainstream, and most people will understand their real intent goes beyond what they publicly state.”

Hogg called the NRA “the big tobacco of violence in the U.S.” and claimed that “they don’t care about gun owners, like my father.” “The NRA cares as much about gun owners’ safety as the tobacco industry cared about smokers not getting cancer,” Hogg said.

Hogg is 100% correct in his assessment of the NRA.

Parkland Survivors Launch Voter Registration Tour

One of the ironies is that younger voters have the most to lose long term from the Republican Party's toxic reverse Robin Hood, racist, trash the environment agenda, yet historically they fail to register to vote and to vote against candidates that are most harmful to their futures.  A piece in NPR looks at how the student survivors of the Parkland High School massacre hope to change this pattern by getting younger citizens to not only register to vote, but to also remain energized and show up at the polls.  While not endorsing candidates, their anti-gun message by default will boost Democrats and threaten Republicans in the pocket of the NRA and gun manufacturers.  Here are article highlights:

Three months ago the students from South Florida established themselves as a potent force in the gun debate with the March For Our Lives rally. This summer they're hitting the road with a new mission: turn the wave of young activism they helped spark into an energized voting bloc for the November mid-term elections.

At the annual end-of-year peace march in Chicago, organized by St. Sabina Catholic Church, Grammy-winners Chance the Rapper and Jennifer Hudson, along with former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, joined the Parkland survivors to launch a bus tour called Road to Change.

It's a voter mobilization effort aimed at getting young people registered and keeping them energized through the summer.

A nationwide tour will make 50-plus stops in more than 20 states, including Iowa, Texas, South Carolina and Connecticut. The will also be a Florida tour stopping in all 27 of the state's Congressional districts.

"The main purpose of this tour is not just to educate people on gun violence and what we can do to prevent gun violence, but is also to register more people to vote," says Matt Deitsch, chief strategist for March For Our Lives.

Andy Bernstein heads the national non-profit HeadCount which partners with recording artists like Jay-Z, Pearl Jam and the Dave Matthews Band to register voters at music concerts.

"I really think that the Parkland students have done something remarkable. They have made voter registration cool," Bernstein says.  [B]y in large, young voters do not tend to show up to the polls in mid-term elections.

According to the Census Bureau in the last midterm cycle in 2014, only 23 percent of 18 to 34-year-olds voted. When narrowed to 18 to 24, that fell to just under 16 percent.

There are signs the anti-gun violence movement is having an impact on potential young voters, according to Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg who is the Director of Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University.  Crunching available voter registration numbers through June 13, she and fellow researchers discovered there is evidence of young registrants getting more engaged in the political process.

"What we did find was that in a lot of states the youth registration numbers actually exceeded the numbers from the November of 2016," Kawashima-Ginsberg says. "And that's really significant because young people mostly register to vote in September and October of the election year."

A Harvard University poll released in April showed that 77 percent of 18 to 29-year-old likely voters said that gun control is an important issue for them in the 2018 elections.   The test, he says, is whether these young activists can exceed the voting intensity of second amendment right supporters.

"If you are a single issue voter and guns is the issue, what we've seen in the past is that it's the pro-second amendment, pro-gun voter that is almost guaranteed to show up at the polls."  Matt Deitsch, the March For Our Lives chief strategist, says he is up for the challenge.

"We're making voting something that is not just checking a box. It's literally you being a hero and you saving lives," Deitsch says. "That's why we have to do this."

Insurance Companies Say "No" to Arming Teachers

In the wake of school mass shootings, the NRA - a front organization for gun manufacturers - and its political prostitutes within the Republican Party insanely say the solution is more guns.  Indeed, they propose arming teachers and school staff embers, most of whom want nothing to do with the idiotic proposal. Nonetheless, Republicans in a number of states have passed laws allowing the arming of teachers; however, they are hitting a roadblock: insurance carriers who are refusing to offer insurance coverage -  something we need to see start happening to gun owners in the home insurance realm as intimated in a prior post.  As is their norm insurance carriers typically eagerly accept premium payments, but want to minimize as much as possible the risk that they might actually have to pay out on claims.  The analysis of these companies is that more guns in schools is a very bad idea.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at insurance carrier's refusal in most cases to issue policies to school districts arming teachers and staff.  Here are highlights:

Kansas has a problem: It has a law allowing teachers to carry guns in the classroom, but almost no schools are using it because insurance companies refuse to provide coverage if they do. As EMC Insurance, the largest insurer of schools in Kansas, explained in a letter to its agents, the company “has concluded that concealed handguns on school premises poses a heightened liability risk.”

Then came the Parkland, Fla., school shooting in February, leading frustrated Republican legislators in Kansas to try forcing the issue with a bill banning “unfair, discriminatory” rates for schools that arm staff. The insurance industry held firm. Last month, the bill failed.

As proposals to arm teachers sweep across the nation, insurance companies are being forced to weigh the risks of these controversial plans. Some insurers are balking. Some are agreeing to provide policies but lamenting the lack of evidence about whether it makes schools safer — or increases the chances of people getting shot. Others are raising rates.  The reaction of insurance companies is notable because they are supposed to evaluate dangers through the dry eye of actuarial science, largely avoiding the heated emotions of the nation’s gun debate, in which one side condemns guns and the other side claims, as Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) did last week, that the best way to stop a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun.  Insurance companies are not so certain, worried more guns in schools might not only fail to stop mass shootings but lead to more accidents. The epidemic of mass shootings in schools and other public venues has put new pressure on the insurance industry to take a stand. They face huge potential liabilities from these tragedies. The 2017 Las Vegas shooting, where a gunman fatally shot 58 people, could cost insurers more than $1 billion, including potential lawsuits and covering lost business income from the incident and its fallout, according to the International Risk Management Institute. Adding trained police officers to schools is generally viewed favorably, industry officials say. But giving guns to school janitors or history teachers — even with some training — raises concerns. More guns make insurers nervous in other situations, too, said Scott Kennedy, president of CCIG, an insurance company in Colorado. He pointed to the common preference among insurers that nightclub bouncers remain unarmed, while off-duty police officers working security are usually allowed to carry firearms. Joe Carter, a vice president of United Educators, which specializes in insuring schools, said he frequently hears from insurance executives at industry events worried about whether they will be asked to cover armed teachers and school staff.  “I don’t know anyone out there who is ready to offer liability coverage for schools when they’re arming their teachers,” Carter said.

Kansas passed its law arming teachers in 2013, after the mass shooting the previous year in Newtown, Conn., where a gunman killed 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. That immediately led EMC Insurance to announce it would rather exit the school insurance market than cover armed teachers and staff. Republican lawmakers were upset but couldn’t find another insurer willing to take on the policies.

Let's hope this common sense spreads to the residential insurance market and to homeowners having to discard their guns or lose insurance mandated by their mortgage companies.  With luck, it could also lead to landlords to ban guns in their rental properties. 

Time to Target Pro-NRA Politicians for Defeat

Poll after poll shows that the vast majority of Americans support gun control reform, including but not limited to universal background checks, longer waiting periods, ending the gus show exceptions, and stricter licensing.  In Florida, slight movement for change happened after the Parkland massacre, but in Congress, Republicans have blocked all efforts at reform, fearful of offending the NRA and gun manufacturers who give generously to their campaigns.  Rather that any real change, this politicians mutter bullshit comments of "thoughts and prayers' and obfuscate the real issue  by citing mental illness and every other imaginable excuse other than the obvious one: Americans have too many guns and little is done to seriously impose liability on gun owners and gun manufacturers.  While I do not advocate single issue voting, a politicians stance on gun control needs to be much more important if common sense change is to occur.  A column in the New York Times looks at the issue.  Here are highlights:

The school shooting has become an American motif, a previously unthinkable option for the odd, the alienated and the spurned, a way to find voice through violence.

We had yet another one last week in Santa Fe, Texas, where a student killed 10 people and injured 13 others. After the shooting, Paige Curry, a student at the school, offered a chilling assessment of our current predication.

A television news reporter asked: “Was there a part of you that was like, ‘This isn’t real, this would not happen at my school?’ ” Paige responded, shaking her head, an uncomfortable, reflexive smile on her face that mocked the naïveté of the question: “No, there wasn’t.” The reporter pressed: “Why so?” Paige continued: “It’s been happening everywhere. I’ve always kind of felt like eventually it was going to happen here, too.”

Schools across the country are preparing for this morbid eventuality. According to a 2015-16 Crime and Safety Survey by the National Center for Education Statistics, 92 percent of public schools have a written plan describing procedures to be performed in the event of an active shooter . . . 

These preparations — sheltering in place, ducking for cover, running for your life — have become a routine part of our children’s educational experience. This is not normal and must never be accepted as such. Neither are these shootings normal. This is all insanity.

We have too many guns in this country, including too many based on combat weapons, and as a result we have too many shootings and deaths.

Many of us know this. We also know that legislators in Washington, as well as Donald Trump himself, are so beholden to the National Rifle Association that little to nothing will be done to stem the real problem: Guns and their availability.

Instead, politicians talk about tangential issues like the mentally ill, the “hardening” of soft targets like schools, and putting even more guns in people’s hands, like the lunacy of arming teachers.

Trump promised in his inauguration speech to end this “American carnage,” but “gun deaths are up over 12 percent year-over-year. Firearm injuries are up nearly 8 percent. The number of children under the age of 12 shot by a gun has increased by 16 percent . . . . Yes, gun violence is actually on the rise.

But as politicians in Washington have made clear that they have no desire to address this issue, no desire to stand up to the N.R.A., no desire to stop treating these deaths as collateral damage, those seeking change must change tactics.

People seeking common sense gun control must become single-issue voters on gun control. Support for more restrictions may not be the only reason to vote for a candidate, but it must be sufficient to vote against one.

We have to stop waiting for politicians to display courage and instead start to instill fear in them.

As an individual voter, you don’t need to have a slate of reforms in mind, you only have to vote consistently for candidates who are committed to reviewing the issue and advancing smart, effective policy.

This is now about the long game. The N.R.A. didn’t amass its clout overnight, and the building of a contingent of politicians committed to gun control also won’t come overnight. But it can, and indeed must, be done.

Students like Paige shouldn’t simply assume that one day a fellow student will show up with a gun and an appetite for death, and that there is nothing Washington is willing to do to prevent it.

Most candidates have websites that will state their positions.  Check them out.  Any candidate that says they are states they are strong advocates of the 2nd Amendment needs to be targeted for defeat. It is really that simple. Oh, and let them know why you will vote for their opponent.  

After Parkland, Many More Millennials Are Registering to Vote

In the wake of one mass shooting after another the Republicans in Congress have blocked any meaningful effort to pass common sense gun control measures - an even better move would to remove gun manufacturer immunity from lawsuits by those harmed by their deadly products - many Millennials seemingly are waking to the reality that the only way to create change is to register to vote and "vote the bastards out."  Data reveals that the young are registering at an accelerated rate and, if they actually get to the polls, could achieve the goal of sending politicians bought and paid for the gun lobby into forced retirement.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

The pace of new voter registrations among young people in crucial states is accelerating, a signal that school shootings this year — and the anger and political organizing in their wake — may prove to be more than ephemeral displays of activism.

They could even help shape the outcome of the midterm elections. If voters in their teens and 20s vote in greater numbers than usual, as many promised during nationwide marches for gun control this spring, the groundswell could affect close races in key states like Arizona and Florida, where there will be competitive races for governor, the Senate and a number of House districts in November.

The deadly shooting on Friday at Santa Fe High School in Texas will probably add urgency to the efforts. Hours after the carnage, young organizers mobilized by the February mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., were vowing a political response.

“Santa Fe High, you didn’t deserve this,” Emma González, an organizer from Parkland, posted on Twitter. “You deserve peace all your lives, not just after a tombstone saying that is put over you. You deserve more than Thoughts and Prayers, and after supporting us by walking out we will be there to support you by raising up your voices.”

The question is whether they will vote. Even some Republicans are beginning to believe they will.

“The shooting at Parkland high school was the tipping point for these kids,” said Christine Matthews, a Republican pollster. “The bravery and activism of the Parkland kids ignited their peers across the country, and these newly minted 18-year-old voters are already motivated. The school shooting in Texas surely adds to their resolve but, honestly, they didn’t need any more motivation.”

Voter data for March and April show that young registrants represented a higher portion of new voters in Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, among other states. In Florida, voters under 26 jumped from less than 20 percent of new registrants in January and February to nearly 30 percent by March, the month of the gun control rallies.

In North Carolina, voters under 25 represented around 30 percent of new registrations in January and February; in March and April, they were around 40 percent.

In Pennsylvania, voter registrations across age groups increased sharply in March and April before the primary last week, but registrations of young voters increased the fastest, jumping to 45 percent in March and more than half in April, from fewer than 40 percent of voters in January and February.

And those new registrants lean Democratic. Of the new voters ages 25 and under in the state, a third registered as Democrats; 21 percent signed up as Republicans; and 46 percent registered as either unaffiliated or with another political party.

In addition to the registration figures, new polling of younger voters from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics found a significant jump from two years ago in those who say their involvement will make a difference. Such optimism indicates a voter is more likely to actually turn out.

“What I have seen is what I am calling a once in a generation attitudinal shift about the efficacy of participating in the political process,” said John Della Volpe, the director of the institute, who has specialized in polling younger voters for nearly two decades. “I am optimistic that the increasing interest we have tracked in politics will likely lead to increased participation in the midterms.”

So far, the Harvard polling indicates that Democrats are the more likely beneficiary of the increased commitment to voting, with half of voters 18 to 29 saying they will vote Democratic. The remainder are divided between Republicans and independents.

“Also, just the sheer number of individuals who say they will definitely vote, 37 percent, is as high as it’s ever been,” Mr. Della Volpe said. “That’s likely to only grow stronger. The number among Democrats is 51 percent saying they will definitely vote.”

Younger voters were not moved by either President Trump or Hillary Clinton, but Mr. Trump’s election reawakened them “only to be brought to life in more powerful ways in the last two months, post-Parkland shooting,” Mr. Della Volpe said. “This now has the potential to turbocharge that.”

The deaths in Texas may only add more fuel.

Several groups are working to help that happen. NextGen America, a group funded by the activist billionaire Tom Steyer, is targeting voters ages 18 to 35 in 10 traditional battleground states, in addition to Arizona. The group reported on Monday that it had registered 36,789 voters, including 8,459 in Florida, its top state.

Another group, Inspire U.S., has been concentrating on registering high school students in their classrooms. They have registration drives in 10 states and more than 200 high schools and have registered more than 41,000 students since the group started three years ago. Inspire also uses a texting app to remind users to vote.

Many governors are promoting voter registration drives in their state’s high schools, including Virginia in recent weeks.

Let's hope the registrations continue, that these newly registered voters actually vote, and that the midterms turn out to be a bloodbath for Republicans.

Laura Ingraham Faces Backlash Over Attacks on Parkland Students

If one listens to the spokesmen and pundits of the far right, they would have you believe that they are the protectors of morality, decency and civic virtue even as they behave as little better than cyber bullies and support and occupant of the White House who boasts of sexual assaults, cavorts with porn stars and is utterly devoid of even a shred of basic morality.  The true ugliness of these people and the far right and Christofascists has revealed itself in many ways, not the least of which has been merciless attacks on the student activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, as previously noted on this blog.   Earlier this week, right wing nut, Laura Ingraham joined the list of attackers and singled out David Hogg for special bullying.  To his credit, Hogg hit back and called for advertisers to dump Ingraham's show.  Amazingly, advertisers began to do just that in a hopeful sign that the majority of Americans and the business world have decided they are down with the ugliness of Fox News and similar propaganda sites.  Now, as CBS News reports, Ingraham has suddenly announce a vacation as the much deserved shitstorm she started swirls around her.  Here are highlights:

Fox News' Laura Ingraham announced Friday she would be taking a vacation the next week to celebrate Easter with her family as advertisers have dropped her show after she criticized a Parkland school shooting survivor. Her supporters have launched the hashtag #IStandWithLaura. 

In April 2017, embroiled in an advertiser boycott, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly announced he would be taking vacation for Easter. He was later fired by the network. 

Eleven companies so far have withdrawn their ads from Ingraham's Fox News program after she feuded with a survivor of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting over Twitter. The Atlantis, Paradise Island resort; Office Depot, Jenny Craig, Hulu, Nutrish, TripAdvisor, Expedia, Wayfair, StitchFix, Nestlé and Johnson & Johnson said they would pull ads from the show. 

Ingraham on Wednesday posted a mocking tweet of high school senior David Hogg, taunting him for not getting into some colleges he had applied to. In response, Hogg tweeted a list of advertisers on Ingraham's show and called on followers to contact them.
Nutrish was the first to say it would stop advertising on Ingraham's program, and other brands followed. 

Ingraham apologized in a tweet the following day, citing "the spirit of Holy Week," and invited Hogg to appear on her show.  Hogg dismissed her statement. "She only apologized after we went after her advertisers," he told the New York Times. Ingraham has stayed silent since her tweet on Thursday. 

It's unclear how much of an impact the advertiser exodus will have on Ingraham's program. The 11 who have left are a small portion of the 129 companies that have run ads on her program in the last 10 days, reports Media Matters,  . . . . . On Thursday night, Ingraham's show ran a "filler" ad, indicating it could be having trouble selling.

Remember, if you want to see true moral decency, you will NOT find it on Fox News or in the pews of evangelical Christian churches. 

Conservatives' Disgusting Attacks on the Parkland Students

I find it very revealing to watch the behavior of so-called conservatives as they attack the student activists from Parkland, Florida as they work to spearhead pressure for the enactment of common sense gun control laws.   Much like the Christofascist who disseminate deliberate lies against LGBT individuals, we are now seeing fabricated photos and sound bites attacking Parkland students, especially Emma Gonzales and David Hogg.  The subtitle of a piece in The Guardian described the phenomenon well:

This is a fight between a young, diverse, feminist generation against an old, white, male minority desperate to hang on to power. 

Yes, there is a strong racial component to the attacks on the Parkland students given that many have argued that  America's insane gun laws are really about maintaining white power, and white male power in particular.   A column in the Washington Post looks at the false and immoral attacks as does the piece in The Guardian referenced above.  First highlights from the Post column which notes that the usual haters on the right are furious that their usual tactics of personal destruction against their opponents are not having their usual effectiveness:

As an entirely new movement for gun reform is being driven by a group of smart, passionate and media-savvy Florida teenagers who survived one of America’s frequent mass shootings, many on the right are more than a little put out. The problem, as conservatives see it, is that the mainstream media have given these young people more attention and more credulous coverage than they deserve

But what really ticks conservatives off is that they themselves are feeling constrained from criticizing the Parkland students, because they are worried they will be criticized for attacking such sympathetic spokespeople. Not that some aren’t trying. Just in the last couple of days, we have seen two genuinely fake news stories about Parkland students go viral on the right, one in which involved a doctored photo of a student supposedly tearing up a copy of the Constitution, and another which falsely alleged that one of the students wasn’t on campus on the day of the shooting and had been lying about it. But even in the nonloony corners, the Parkland students are making people frustrated. Head over to the National Review’s website today, and you can find a bunch of articles about guns.  . . . . [one] the magazine’s editor Rich Lowry, is entitled “The Teenage Demagogues.” Lowry, after listing what he sees as rhetorical excesses from some of the students, gets to the heart of the matter: Maybe all of this can be written off as the work of overenthusiastic, under informed 17-year-olds. But the student activists aren’t acting alone. They are promoted and praised by adults who should know better. Since the kids serve a useful purpose in promoting gun control, though, it is practically forbidden in much of the media to dissent from anything they say.

“It is practically forbidden in much of the media to dissent from anything they say,” Lowry says, claiming for the right the status of noble victims, brutally silenced by a system that forbids them to speak their opinions out loud.

But is that true? Tell me: What opinion on the subject of guns has been declared verboten in the current American debate, never to pass the lips of a conservative lest he be banished from the media forever? The idea that we should be arming teachers, or the ludicrously false claim that more guns leads to less crime, or the belief that military-style rifles are awesome, or the notion that we have no gun problem that can’t be solved by bringing more guns into more places? Which of the policy changes advocated by the Parkland students — a ban on those military-style weapons, raising the age to purchase a rifle from 18 to 21, expanded background checks — may no one “dissent” from? Because I hear conservatives making all of these arguments on TV, on the radio, and online every single day.

Here’s the real difficulty the Parkland students present. It’s not that they’re passionate and surprisingly articulate for their age, though they are. It’s not that they’ve widened the conversation on guns by refusing to accept things the adults have taken as given for years, such as the idea that the NRA is simply too powerful to bother opposing, though they have. It’s that they’re too sympathetic. And when a spokesperson is sympathetic, when you attack them personally, you look like a jerk.

[W]hat conservatives are really mad about is that the tactic of demonizing those they disagree with — which is so common in contemporary political rhetoric  . . . .  has, in this case, been taken away from them.

You can say the Parkland kids are wrong, but calling them names, trying to dig into their personal lives to find something embarrassing, encouraging your audience to not simply think they’re mistaken but to hate them with all the venomous fire they can muster — that’s what some on the right wish they could do, but can’t, at least without looking like soulless ghouls. 

The piece in The Guardian gets to the underlying motives of those on the right.  Here are excerpts:

We know that the gun debate is a culture war. But Haider and her sign reminded me that it’s more than an abstract debate over ideology or constitutional principles. It’s a fight between a young, diverse, feminist generation representing an emerging majority and an old, white, male minority desperate to hang on to power. And guns are their security blanket of choice. Just 3% of Americans own half of the guns in America. And that 3% isn’t just anyone. According to a Harvard study flagged by Scientific American this month, the person most likely to stockpile guns in this country is an older, white man from a rural conservative area. And an alarming body of research shows that they’re motivated by racial anxiety and a fear of emasculation. A 2017 Baylor University study, for example, found that men’s attachment to guns often stemmed from economic woes and fear of losing traditional “breadwinner” status. The researchers wrote that “engaging in fantasies about being an NRA ‘good guy’ who uses his gun to protect his family and community from the ‘bad guys’ was one way for men to reclaim that threatened masculinity.” And in 2015, researchers from the University of Chicago reported that racial resentment was a strong predictor of opposition to gun control; and that the more racist respondents were, the more steadfast that opposition was. There’s a long history of white male support for gun rights being connected to anger and fear over gains for women and people of color. That’s part of the reason that many of the most irate responses to recent young activists have skewed racist or misogynist. But while issues of race and gender confound and alarm those on the right, young activists are doing nuanced thinking to bolster their work on gun violence. This generation is calling out the hypocrisy of conservatives who abhor government interference unless it’s over women’s bodies, talking about how arming teachers would endanger students of color, and recognizing how white students are getting the support that young Black Lives Matter activists never did. The new America is made up of communication-savvy, digital natives. They’re not cowed easily, and they see through the arguments that may have stumped their forebears. . . . . A lot of us adults watching the march and the walkout felt hope for the first time in a long time, and not just because of the incredible signs. We saw a generation who is succeeding where we failed, an emerging new force that thinks differently and who is willing to take the power they democratically deserve.

Nothing frightens the far right more than smart, media savvy non-whites and whites who do not feel threatened by the skin color of others. and who embrace modernity rather than tribalism and Bronze Age beliefs. 

NRA is Threatening Parkland Shooting Survivors

With the Federal Elections Commission launching a probe into whether the National Rifle Association ("NRA") conspired with Russian agents to funnel monies to the Trump/Pence campaign, additional evidence that the NRA is a repulsive organization comes from survivors of the Parkland mass shooting who say the NRA is threatening them because of their efforts to push common sense gun control measures.  Already Florida has enacted new gun control laws over NRA opposition.  Next weekend will see a mass march in Washington, D.C., and cities across the country - a march is occurring even in Newport News, Virginia - and the NRA seems to be ratcheting up its attacks.  As is the norm with the far right's approach to those who oppose their agenda, the students say they have received death threats (something I have received from "godly Christians" for writing this blog and telling the truth about them).  A piece at CBS News looks at the situation.  Here are highlights:

Since the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, last month, survivors have mobilized the #NeverAgain movement to push for school safety and stronger gun legislation.

Two vocal leaders, David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez, spoke with CBSN Monday to discuss the movement and why they believe they can navigate through the partisan divide on gun control and drive real change in policy.

Both Hogg and Gonzalez, who refer to themselves as members of the "mass shooting generation," say they've received death threats in response to their efforts in launching the movement. But they aren't letting threats deter them from making progress.

"There's always been people who are going to want to harm us," Gonzalez said. "I'm not going to pretend that this like opened my eyes to a cruel and harmful world ... When it comes right down to it, we already knew that this world was going to be tough. So getting death threats like that doesn't really faze us."

Asked about the NRA's response to their movement, Hogg responded: "I think it just goes to prove what exactly they are. I don't think NRA members are bad people at all. I think they're responsible gun owners that want to become politically active and make their voices heard in this democracy, and I think that's an excellent thing.

"I think the problem comes in when it's people at the top of this organization that don't listen to their constituents and continue to scare people into buying more guns, creating more violence, so they can scare more people and sell more guns," he continued. "The people at the top of the NRA are no longer working for the people that are in their organization. They're working on behalf of the gun lobby."

Both Hogg and Gonzalez say the NRA has reached out to them, but not in a positive way.  "The way that they've been reaching out to us is basically threatening us," Hogg said.  "They've been instigating things," Gonzalez added. "And then, when we reply, they like shy back away. They can dish it out but they can't take it."

Meanwhile, nearly 500,000 people are preparing to march on the nation's capital this weekend in support of gun control and school safety measures. Many of those marching will be students. The event follows last week's nationwide walkout, when students from nearly 3,000 schools walked out of their classrooms for 17 minutes in memory of the 17 victims.

During a conversation on "CBS This Morning," Hogg said his message to other high school students is: "Make sure you get out and vote, that you're registered to vote so you can vote in the primaries and stay educated for the rest of your life because the seeds of corruption are always being showed."

The students are correct: the NRA is the minion of gun manufacturers and it cares NOTHING about the lives and safety of citizens.  They are about one thing and one thing only: maximizing revenues for gun manufacturers.  It's really that simple.

GOP Candidate Attacks Parkland Teen Emma Gonzalez

GOP igot Leslie Gibson

Sadly, nowadays if one hears foul and disgusting (not to mention often totally untrue) attacks on minorities, LGBT individuals or non-Christians, it is a safe bet that the individual or individuals launching the attacks are either (i) a Christofascist, or (ii) a Republican.  Demonstrating the veracity of such assumption is Leslie Gibson, a Republican candidate for the Maine House of Representatives, who has attacked Emma Gonzalez, one of the student activists from the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on February 14, 2018.  Gibson attacked Gonzales and called her a "skinhead lesbian."  As an "out" bisexual, a Hispanic, and an opponent to unrestricted gun ownership, Gonzales is a trifecta of those hated by today's Republican Party.  NBC News looks at Gibson's rank bigotry.  Here are excerpts:

A Republican candidate for the Maine House of Representatives has used Twitter to attack two students who survived a mass shooting at a Florida high school, calling one of them, who is openly bisexual, a "skinhead lesbian" and the other a "bald-faced liar." Gibson is the only declared candidate for the 57th District . . . Pat Fogg, a Democratic organizer in the town of Greene, Maine, said, "That sort of stupidity really turns people off." Fogg added that she hopes someone will jump into the race to challenge Gibson.

Gibson has since deactivated his Twitter account, but multiple news outlets have taken screen shots of his offending remarks.

Meanwhile, furor over Gibson's comments has erupted on social media, with some, like Fogg, calling for another candidate to join the race just to oppose him.  Gonzalez has not yet responded to Gibson's remarks.

And yes, the everyday bigotry of Republicans is being noticed internationally.  The London Daily Mail reports om Gibson's foul 

Gun Control Advocates May Want to Boycott Wells Fargo

While numerous national corporations have ended relationships with the NRA - a front organization for gun manufacturers - there has been far less publicity of those who are in the pockets of the NRA's puppet masters. As case in point, according to a piece in Bloomberg, is Wells Fargo, the financier of choice of many gun manufactures which hide behind the visage of the NRA. The Bloomberg piece also identifies other leading lenders who have, by default in the eyes of many,  blood on their hands.  Some of these lenders include Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JP Morgan, US Bancorp, BB&T, and PNC Bank.    If readers who do business with these banks find these relationships distasteful at best, call them and voice your displeasure.  Better yet, close you accounts and move them elsewhere and let the offending bank know why they have lost your business.  Here are highlights from the Bloomberg piece:

Wells Fargo & Co. has emerged as the preferred financier for the U.S. gun industry.

The bank has helped two of the biggest U.S. firearm and ammunition companies access $431.1 million in loans and bonds since December 2012, when the gun control debate gained steam after the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That puts it on the top of the list of banks arranging funding for gunmakers.

Wells Fargo also has a long relationship with the National Rifle Association, inherited from banks that Wells took over. The San Francisco-based Wells Fargo created a $28 million line of credit for the NRA and operates the primary accounts for the pro-Second Amendment group, financial documents show.

Following the Feb. 14 shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high-school that left 17 dead, retailers such as Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc. have implemented stricter gun rules, such as increasing the age necessary to buy one, and some companies, like Delta Air Lines Inc., have cut ties with the NRA’s member-benefits program. Those changes were largely driven by boycott movements on social media. Banks, which have made millions financing the NRA and firearms manufacturers, haven’t been a focus in the same way.

Other banks are active as bookrunners for gunmakers, sometimes jointly. Morgan Stanley helped arrange $350 million in debt and TD Securities $332.5 million, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. and two other banks each arranged $273.6 million. That’s counting loans and bonds to gun and ammunition manufacturers American Outdoor Brands Corp. and Vista Outdoor Inc. since the day of the Sandy Hook bloodshed. Another gunmaker, Sturm Ruger & Co., currently has no public debt. Remington Outdoor Inc. has debt outstanding, but it was issued before December 2012. The NRA paid $9.9 million in banking fees in 2015 and 2016, according to annual reports filed with the Internal Revenue Service. The NRA didn’t respond to requests for comment. The [Wells Fargo] bank’s involvement with the NRA stemmed from its 2008 purchase of Wachovia Corp. Wachovia’s relationship with the NRA, in turn, came from its takeover of First Union National Bank.

The NRA and Wells Fargo amended its longstanding financial arrangement in 2014, according to public records, when the lobbying group agreed to borrow $22.6 million in exchange for pledging its Fairfax, Virginia, headquarters as collateral. The building was assessed at $40.4 million last year, according to Fairfax County records, down from $57.9 million a decade ago.

It’s been a profitable relationship for Wells Fargo. The variable-rate loan of as much as $28 million carries an interest rate of 6.08 percent, according to the NRA’s most recent financial statement. That’s higher than typical commercial-mortgage rates. Based on year-end 2016 figures, Wells Fargo would make an estimated $1.2 million annually from the loan. The NRA owed Wells Fargo $19.8 million as of Dec. 31, 2016. 
The NRA and its Freedom Action Foundation bank only with Wells Fargo, according to documents filed with state regulators. The group’s Civil Rights Defense Fund had bank and investment accounts at Wells Fargo and an investment account at Morgan Stanley. The NRA Foundation also had bank and investment accounts at Wells Fargo, and a separate investment account at Charles Schwab.

The NRA’s political action committee, the Political Victory Fund, also banks with Wells Fargo, Federal Election Commission records show. Over the last three years, the political action committee has paid Wells Fargo nearly $71,000 in various banking fees.

Will Millennials Finally Destroy the Political Status Quo?

The majority of the bad decisions and policies of older Americans - especial so-called conservatives and Republicans - will disproportionately harm Millennials and other younger generations.  They are being saddled with the now likely $2.5 trillion increase in the national debt flowing from Trump/GOP tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, they see wages remaining stagnating while their counterparts in Europe have better chances of upward social mobility, and they far too many older voters clinging to their guns and bibles as they push an agenda that is the antithesis to the gospel message. Indeed, one-third of those under 30 are now "Nones" who have walked away from organized religion and one truly cannot blame them.  Now, in the wake of the Parkland school massacre, just maybe Millenials are on the point of saying "no more!"   An op-ed in the New York Times looks at how, if the nation is lucky, the Millenials will rise up and over turn the current corrupt political scene.  Here are highlights:

As with all historic tipping points, it seems inevitable in retrospect: Of course it was the young people, the actual victims of the slaughter, who have finally begun to turn the tide against guns in this country. Kids don’t have money and can’t vote, and until now burying a few dozen a year has apparently been a price that lots of Americans were willing to pay to hold onto the props of their pathetic role-playing fantasies. But they forgot what adults always forget: that our children grow up, and remember everything, and forgive nothing.

Those kids have suddenly understood how little their lives were ever worth to the people in power. And they’ll soon begin to realize how efficient and endless are the mechanisms of governance intended to deflect their appeals, exhaust their energy, deplete their passion and defeat them. But anyone who has ever tried to argue with adolescents knows that in the end they will have a thousand times more energy for that fight than you and a bottomless reservoir of moral rage that you burned out long ago.

The young — and the young at mind — tend to be uncompromising absolutists. They haven’t yet faced life’s heartless compromises and forfeitures, its countless trials by boredom and ethical Kobayashi Marus, or glumly watched themselves do everything they ever disapproved of. Yet this uprising of the young against the ossified, monolithic power of the National Rifle Association has reminded me that the flaws of youth — its ignorance, naïveté and passionate, Manichaean idealism — are also its strengths. Young people have only just learned that the world is an unfair hierarchy of cruelty and greed, and it still shocks and outrages them. They don’t understand how vast and intractable the forces that have shaped this world really are and still think they can change it. Revolutions have always been driven by the young. To those of us who have lived with certain grim realities our whole adult lives — the widening moat between the rich and the rest of us, the sclerotic influence of money on politics, the N.R.A.’s unassailable coalition of greed and fear — they seem like facts of life as unalterable as death itself. . . . We spend $60 billion a year on pets but won’t go to any inconvenience to keep second graders from getting slaughtered. Despite all our competitive parenting and mommy machismo and trophy kids, we don’t really give a damn about our children — by which I mean, about one another’s. When a race stops caring for its young, its extinction is not only imminent but well deserved. But maybe my bitter complacence about our civilization’s irreversible decline is just a projection of my feelings about my own. Harvey Weinstein ultimately wasn’t the one enforcing the code of silence around his predations: It was all the agents and managers and friends and colleagues who warned actresses that he was too powerful to accuse.  Once people stopped believing in his invulnerability, his destruction was as instantaneous as the middle school queen being made a pariah. Watch: As soon as the first N.R.A. A-rated congressman loses an election, other politicians’ deeply held convictions about Second Amendment rights will start rapidly evolving.

The students of Parkland are like veterans coming home from the bloody front of the N.R.A.’s de facto war on children. They’ve seen their friends, teachers and coaches gunned down in the halls. To them, powerful Washington lobbyists and United States senators suddenly look like what they are: cheesy TV spokesmodels for murder weapons. It has been inspiring and thrilling to watch furious, cleareyed teenagers shame and vilify gutless politicians and soul-dead lobbyists for their complicity in the murders of their friends.

One of my students once asked me, when I was teaching the writing of political op-ed essays, why adults should listen to anything young people had to say about the world. My answer: because they’re afraid of you. They don’t understand you. And they know you’re going to replace them.

My message, as an aging Gen X-er to millennials and those coming after them, is: Go get us. Take us down — all those cringing provincials who still think climate change is a hoax, that being transgender is a fad or that “socialism” means purges and re-education camps. Rid the world of all our outmoded opinions, vestigial prejudices and rotten institutions. . . . — rip it all to the ground.

Perhaps I've always been an idealist, but one with a large dose of pragmatism.  Between our children and our large circle of friends that includes many of younger generations, I like to think I have not become ossified and willing to settle for the status quo.  All Millennial need to do to make a true political revolution happen is get out in mass and vote.  They are now the largest generation.  They can start by voting against every politician (generally Republicans) who continues to cower before the NRA and/or take its money.