In discussing gun rights and gun control, let’s begin with a clarification: While gun bans can be elements of gun control policy, the reverse isn't necessarily true. Gun control is, by definition, a set of policies intended to manage the ownership and use of firearms. Inconveniently, perhaps, for gun rights ideologues, the very idea of gun control begins the moment we distinguish groups of firearms users: The responsible gun owners in one camp, and criminals/the mentally ill in another. Even declarative statements such as the kind found in the NRA’s post-Newtown press conference, with references to a “more lethal criminal class” and a media that demonizes “lawful gun owners,” distinguish between people who should be allowed to have guns and people who shouldn’t. The problem, of course, is that the NRA isn’t interested in measures that will enforce that distinction. Their solution to bad guys with guns is not to prevent bad guys from getting guns in the first place, but having more good guys with guns – which means more guns all around, despite the mathematical certainty that more guns in existence means a higher probability of guns ending up in the wrong hands. Ironically, in its pre-1977 guise as an advocacy group for hunters, sportsmen, and safe marksmanship, the NRA was an instrumental force in promoting gun control legislation. Specifically, the NRA supported the 1934 gun control act that regulated machine guns and short barreled shotguns, popular amongst the era’s gangsters, and the 1968 Gun Control Act. Then something went splat in the NRA’s leadership, and the organization became what it is today: An irrational organization with far too much influence on the political process and an obsession with saturating American culture with guns, beginning with children. To put it the bluntly, the NRA became the crime profiteering industry’s lobbying arm.

NRA’s Most Reliable Partner: Trouble

The new NRA, indeed, has been instrumental in weakening existing gun control legislation, sabotaging efforts at enacting new legislation, and otherwise just muddying the debate to the point of political paralysis. Among their greatest hits: No background checks for private gun sales, opposition to prohibiting the sale of guns to individuals on the federal terrorist watch list, support for stand-your-ground laws of the kind that led to the tragic death of Trayvon Marvin by Captain Vigilante, support for right-to-carry concealed weapons in places such as schools, bars, etc.. Worse is their collusion with gun manufacturers to market guns, tobacco-style, to children. Considering results from a recent Frank Lutz poll suggesting a disconnect between the GOP, the NRA’s leadership, and NRA members, it is astonishing that this organization retains any credibility.

• “87 percent of NRA members agree that support for Second Amendment rights goes hand-in-hand with keeping guns out of the hands of criminals.
• 74 percent support requiring criminal background checks of anyone purchasing a gun.
• 79 percent support requiring gun retailers to perform background checks on all employees.
• 75 percent believe concealed carry permits should only be granted to applicants who have not committed any violent misdemeanors, including assault.
• 74 percent believe permits should only be granted to applicants who have completed gun safety training.
• 71 percent believe people on terror watch lists should be prevented from purchasing guns (actually, this is kind of surprising in how low it ranks). “

No wonder hunters and sportspeople such as Andrew Rotherman are calling for an alternative to the NRA:

“A moderate sporting organization could oppose knee-jerk proposals like banning “semi-automatic” guns (a class that includes many legitimate sporting arms) while supporting common-sense steps to improve public safety, including the strict regulation of — or even prohibition of — the sale of large-magazine firearms that have no legitimate sporting use. At the same time, such an organization could take on all the issues of more immediate concern to sportsmen than the Second Amendment, in particular the loss of wildlife habitat.”

The NRA can’t even represent the interests of its own members, let alone be an insightful and considerate advisors on matters related to firearms.

Alas, it’s worse than that.

The Fox Guards the Henhouse

Creeping beneath the debate has been the most disturbing impact of the new NRA’s mission: the undermining of firearms research, particularly when that research suggests such things as “having a gun in the house, rather than conferring protection, significantly increased the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance”. Claiming bias and politicization of the research, the NRA and their Congressional mouthpieces successfully defunded the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s gun research efforts, leaving little for those few researchers who might still toil away in obscurity on the subject. Conveniently, the NRA has set itself up as the arbiter of what constitutes legitimate research, having hijacked the CDC’s independence: “The centers also ask researchers it finances to give it a heads-up anytime they are publishing studies that have anything to do with firearms. The agency, in turn, relays this information to the NRA as a courtesy, said Thomas Skinner, a spokesman for the centers. Invariably, researchers said, whenever their work touches upon firearms, the CDC becomes squeamish. In the end, they said, it is often simply easier to avoid the topic if they want to continue to be in the agency’s good graces.”

Proving that the one-eyed man never has long to live in the kingdom of the bling, the NRA successfully has gouged the academic study of gun violence. Without fully understanding what is happening, we can’t discuss practical solutions. Instead, we can dwell in the NRA’s rhetoric of fantasy and wishful thinking.

The suppression of firearms research through claims of bias is an all-too-common symptom of the peculiarly reactionary right-wing rhetoric that is so effective at dominating the media in an effort at denying inconvenient reality – the same kind deployed against climate change science. Regrettably, lost in this rhetoric is the nuance of understandable fear expressed by gun rights advocates such as 71-year-old Mr. Dickey, who was quoted by The New York Times as saying “It’s really simple with me. We have the right to bear arms because of the threat of government taking over the freedoms that we have.” Ironically for those who advocate for gun rights on this basis, the fear that the U.S. government is exhibiting authoritarian tendencies is one shared by people across the political spectrum. The signs are there, especially in the government response to terrorism: Indefinite imprisonment without trial, less restricted and considerably more pervasive surveillance (phone calls, emails, internet use), invasive searches (e.g. airports). If the fear really is that the government might suddenly turn on its citizens, why are people so comfortable with the way terror suspects and foreigners are currently being treated? In the name of security, the United States has developed and deployed the tools of a security state that can, in principle if not yet in practice, be turned from terror suspects to everyone else. Police forces have become increasingly para-militarized. The government creates for itself the right to assassinate even U.S. citizens deemed a threat. Question: What constitutes a threat? With both the Bush and Obama administrations eroding civil liberties in the name of post-Sept. 11 “security,” there is certainly reason to be wary.

Clean Gun, Dirty Politics

Yet where, except perhaps in the pages of The American Conservative, is the reasonable right wing? At home cleaning their guns? However much I share the right’s concern in regards to the threat posed to individual liberty by government, ultimately the issue is tangential to the problem of gun violence, as tragically illustrated by Newtown or by recent gun-related incidents. Fear of government is not a reason to knowingly allow deranged individuals, or criminals, to obtain guns through, for example, an absence of background checks. Nor is it a reason to explicitly allow legal scenarios, such as concealed weapons in bars, which are just asking to go wrong while failing to give law enforcement legal recourse to act.

If the issue really is government overreach in regards to civil liberties, then let’s talk about the political solutions we can use right now – and should have already used! – to safeguard the people’s freedom. Let’s also talk about how Republican-backed initiatives such as Voter ID laws work against liberty and towards authoritarian identity management. But in regards to the flaring gun control debate, the issue is preventing massacres such as Newtown and figuring out ways to keep guns out of the hands of people who use them for evil purposes. Proposals such as armed teachers and armed security on school campus, generally antithetical to the spirit of civilization and education we expect from our academic environments, offer a superficial appeal. Deeper is another of those slippery slopes the NRA is so fond of, albeit one it won’t admit to: An armed state must, logically, lead to a surveillance state regardless of who it is that’s armed (i.e. police, military, corporations, citizen militias, or private individuals). Foreknowledge of a threat makes it all the easier to confront it. Shouldn’t we then install elaborate surveillance systems in schools so that those armed teachers and guards know where the shooter is? Surely we won’t let these armed responders figure it out by following the screams. It almost sounds as it, afraid of the police and their potential complicity in confiscating guns, the NRA is pushing for policing without police, a solution that will encounter the same set of problems that in the past led to the creation of police forces in the first place. (And make money for gun manufacturers, of course.) It seems like another fit of irony, then, that the “more guns for everyone” approach can conceivably lead to the authoritarian security apparatus the gun rights lobby fears will arise out of gun control.

(To be continued…)

Assistant Editor Frédérik Sisa is the Page's resident art critic as well as editor of The Fashionoclast. His personal blog is inkandashes.net, and he can be reached at fsisa@thefrontpageonline.com.