Antonin Scalia’s White, Male Legacy

 Answering Kennedy's Call

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's passing is a shock to die-hard conservatives for good reason. He was the bastion and spokesperson of the originalist interpretation of the Constitution, which meant any law had to divine the original intentions of the founding white male fathers of our nation.

AK-47

The two students and two teachers at Appalachee High School were killed by a 14-year old student with an AR-15 assault rifle has brought back the debate on the causes of such gun violence than kills more than 30,000 Americans every year.

Wednesday’s mass shooting marked the 45th school shooting of 2024 and the deadliest US school shooting since the March 2023 massacre at The Covenant School in Nashville,” said CNN.

Military-style assault rifles had been banned for 10 years during the Clinton administration, but the Republican-led Bush administration didn’t renew the ban. Why? One man, SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia, was almost solely responsible for the Supreme Court ruling that legalized assault rifles for use by common citizens.

I wrote about it in Huffington Post at the time of Scalia’s death in 2016.

“Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's passing is a shock to die-hard conservatives for good reason. He was the bastion and spokesperson of the originalist interpretation of the Constitution, which meant any law had to divine the original intentions of the slave-owning, landowning, founding white male fathers of our nation, which excluded women and non-landowning males (and slaves, of course) from representation.”

So that meant turning the clock back at least one century to a time when the white male patriarchy still ruled, which was a much less democratic time. Scalia's most noted opinion was to expand Second Amendment gun owners' rights, which 'protected' every citizen's right to own a gun almost without restriction, because he convinced the majority of SCOTUS that the Second Amendment right to bear arms also protected an individual's right of self-defense.

The result has been record gun sales and gun deaths (30,000+ per year), as well as mass shootings, and no limit to the purchase of military-style assault rifles with unlimited magazines. Another little-noted result was the higher incidence of gun violence in households with guns, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

In fact, "Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that living in a home where guns are kept increased an individual's risk of death by homicide by between 40 and 170 percent," said the Law Center. "Another study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology similarly found that "persons with guns in the home were at greater risk of dying from a homicide in the home than those without guns in the home." This study determined that the presence of guns in the home increased an individual's risk of death by homicide by 90 percent.

Whereas other developed countries without that Second Amendment 'right', such as Australia, do not allow the purchase of a gun for self-defense to be a sufficient reason for owning such a weapon. And Australia has not had a single incidence of mass shootings since 1996 and the passing of its gun control legislation.

Does it make sense for anyone to own a military-style assault rifle for self-defense when it was manufactured for wartime? The definition of the word, assault, means just that. It was made to assault an enemy during wartime. What purpose could it have in a home, even as a semi-automatic—where children live?

Harlan Green © 2024

Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

"Australians Not Like U.S."

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

Huffington Post

We happened to be in Australia in 2015 when this Sydney journalist voiced his reaction to another mass killing in America. "The US is too immature a society to be allowed to play with guns."

And as I update this column today, there were four more mass shootings on the first weekend of summer, 2024—27 injured or killed this last weekend.

We are two countries with almost identical demographics, but where the Australian minimum wage for full-time, working adults is more than $16Aus per hour and Australian's have created a health care system that pays for all normal health care costs (as opposed to catastrophic events), though hospital care is free for every Australian citizen.

Yet we cannot control the gun violence that Australians have been able to. It is a startling contrast that I first wrote about during the Obama administration.

"Australia is not like the U.S." said commentator Michael Pascoe in the Sydney Morning Herald in response to President Obama's remarks on the Umpqua Community College killings by a deranged killer, whose mother kept at least 8 guns at home, in addition to the 6 guns plus ammunition carried by the shooter in the slaughter of college students and a teacher.

"We know that other countries in response to one mass shooting have managed to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings," said President Obama. "Friends of ours, allies of ours, Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours."

In fact, the US now has a gun homicide rate 370 times that of Australia's. "Unlike the US," said Pascoe, "we collectively decided to have a decent social safety net, the concept of a living wage and make good education freely available. Most of us are wary of those with extreme views of any kind."

Our gun problem of course extends beyond mass violence, says the LA Times. In 2014 alone, for example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 11,208 people shot to death, 33,636 injured by gunfire and 21,175 who killed themselves with a gun. That's a total of 66,019 people who were killed or injured by a gun, which comes out to 1,269 per week, 180 a day or 7.5 per hour.

Current Australian gun laws were passed after 35 were killed and 23 wounded in 1996. There hasn't been a mass shooting in Australia since. At the heart of the new laws was a massive buyback of more than 600,000 semi-automatic shotguns and rifles, or about one-fifth of all firearms in circulation in Australia. The country's new gun laws prohibited private sales, required that all weapons be individually registered to their owners, and required that gun buyers present a "genuine reason" for needing each weapon at the time of the purchase, as well as a 28-day waiting period while backgrounds were checked. (Self-defense did not count.) In the wake of the tragedy, polls showed public support for these measures at upwards of 90 percent.

"The US is too immature a society to be allowed to play with guns," said Pasco. "It has never shed its Wild West mythology. Americans still use their courts to kill people, which sends a message in its own way."

It has been known for years by those who research gun violence that more gun killings occur in households owning guns. A new survey in the Annals of Internal Medicine narrows down some of the causal relationship between guns and death by finding conclusively that having a gun in your home makes you more likely to successfully attempt suicide. The authors of the survey also found with a lesser degree of certainty that people with guns in their home are more likely to be the victims of a homicide.

According to data gleaned from State and Justice departments for the period between 2001-2011, there have, in fact, been many, many more Americans killed by gun violence than by terrorism. During that 10-year period, some 130,347 have lost their lives to gun violence, compared to the approximately 3,000 Americans killed in acts of terrorism.

"It's all fodder for the deranged fanatics of the American gun lobby, with a bible in one hand and an assault rifle in the other. It's fuel for the paranoid interpretation of a line in the constitution that is a blatant anachronism," said the study

We have to be a very sick society to have allowed this to happen. We are so good at preventing foreign terrorists from attacking us, but not protecting Americans from domestic terrorists. We should understand that gun violence itself is an act of terror. And those that support unrestricted use and purchase of guns are the sponsors of domestic terrorism.

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

'Armed and Ready'...for What?

Answering Kennedy’s Call

NYTimes.com

The NY Times front-page picture of a teacher “armed and ready” to wear a gun in her classroom shocked and disheartened me. I remember the fear I felt as a small child hunkering under classroom desks in civil defense drills during the cold war.

And the irony of teachers wanting to arm themselves to protect their schools shouldn’t be lost with the current celebration of the killing of Al Qaeda’s number two—Ayman al Zuwahiri. This is looking in the rear-view mirror of foreign terrorism now vanquished, when domestic terrorism holds the greatest threat to our national security.

How does that teacher think her children will feel seeing her arming herself, and other staff whose job it is to care for them?

“Today, after a seemingly endless series of mass shootings,’ said the NYTimes, “the strategy has become a leading solution promoted by Republicans and gun rights advocates, who say that allowing teachers, principals and superintendents to be ar.med gives schools a fighting chance in case of attack.”

Really? I fear children will learn that violence is the only answer to combat terrorists in schools, in a country that allows weapons of mass destruction to be owned by 18-year-olds as happened in Uvalde, Texas.

More guns have never been the solution to reducing gun violence, as Australia’s history has shown. Australian demographics are similar in many ways to America’s—similar age distribution, wealth distribution, etc.—yet Australia has only had three mass shootings since it banned military-style assault rifles.

That happened because of a 1996 massacre in Port Arthur, Tasmania. During that event, a gunman killed 35 people and wounded 28 others with a semi-automatic weapon he bought from an ad in the newspaper. Twenty of those people were killed in just a minute and 15 seconds.

Will we ever subdue gun violence in America, which means enforcing the real intent of the Second Amendment by disarming our unregulated militias?

A country such as ours that cannot protect its children from domestic violence is a country that does not care for the welfare of its future generations that once again will have its children cowering under desks because of the threat of legally acquired assault rifles, which are literally weapons of mass destruction.

Harlan Green © 2022

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Guns Kill People

Popular Economics Weekly

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” has been the credo of the NRA, gun lobby and most Republicans since the 1980s when gun manufacturers came up with automatic pistols, so that guns could kill more people.

But Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock had no discernable mental illness, criminal record—or anger problems, according to his brothers. The NRA will try in vain to find a reason this inhuman act was committed when there is no reason, other than the fact that semi-automatic military-style weapons are legal in much of America and easily obtainable.

Only guns can kill that many people—including women and children. His brothers didn’t even know he was a gun nut who owned more than 30 weapons, and was able to smuggle in 10 suitcases containing 23 of those weapons without any Mandalay Bay staff even noticing such an oddity. Who needs that many suitcases in a hotel room?

The odds are that nothing will be done about this massacre, as long as President Trump and Republicans are in power. President Trump called it an act of evil, yet he won’t look at the evil in his own soul; the countless times he has lied and cheated to build his real estate empire that have been documented in many of the 3,500 lawsuits he has been involved in.

Australia had a similar gun problem until 36 people were killed in Port Arthur, and Prime Minister John Howard was able to pass strict gun control laws in 1996, the same year of the Port Arthur massacre. There hasn’t been a mass killing since then in Australia.

Australians apparently don’t believe owning an assault rifle is the ticket to manhood. Their gun control laws are maintained by weapon buyback programs and the requirement that gun owners must belong to a certified gun club.

How did our gun laws become so lax that military-style weapons are easy to obtain? It was a little known Supreme Court decision authored by its most extreme ideologue, Justice Antonin Scalia in the 1980s, which said that gun owners no longer must heed the constitutional Second Amendment stricture that gun owners are members of a well-regulated militia in order to bear arms.

Our founding fathers must have thought it would help to curb the random gun violence we have today.

Harlan Green © 2017

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Stricter Gun Controls Now Inevitable

Financial FAQs

You know the tide has turned against gun violence when even the American Medical Association calls it a public health menace at the finish of its annual convention.

“CHICAGO – In the wake of the worst mass shooting in American history and with more than 6,000 deaths already in 2016 from gun violence, the American Medical Association (AMA) today adopted policy calling gun violence in the United States "a public health crisis" requiring a comprehensive public health response and solution,” said its press release.

Additionally, at the Annual Meeting of its House of Delegates, the AMA resolved to actively lobby Congress to overturn legislation that for 20 years has prohibited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from researching gun violence.

This is after the US Senate could not even agree on banning gun purchases for anyone on the terrorism watch list in the wake of the Pulse nightclub massacre. You know it’s a public health menace when such mass killings are the work of both domestic and foreign terrorists, whether at Aurora, Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, and Orlando.

You know more effective gun control measures are coming, including the banning of military assault weapons like the AR-15, when Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed stating that more Americans had died from gunfire since 1968 than in all the wars ever fought by the United States — a claim PolitiFact twice pronounced to be true.

“When 50 people were shot and killed early Sunday morning at a gay nightclub in Orlando,” wrote Kristof, “the toll from gun murders this year rose to somewhere around 6,000 deaths, which means if the trend continues, this year may end up with the highest gun homicide count since Barack Obama took office in 2009. Add to the homicide number the 550 or so victims of police shootings, roughly the same number of accidental gun deaths and the 21,000+ Americans who use a gun to end their own lives, and the total gun mortality number this year may go above 35,000.”

And now the women are getting together, as did those MADD women that enabled stricter drunk driving laws. (You would think the insurance companies would be behind this initiative as well, for all the money in lawsuits they would save.)

Recently, a powerful new gun control group has emerged, called Everytown for Gun Safety, a combining of several smaller gun control groups, including Women Against Gun Violence and Mom’s Demand Action.

This is while former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was getting ready to launch Everytown for Gun Safety with a pledge of $50 million, but it lacked foot soldiers. So today Bloomberg and the women’s groups have merged together with 3.5 million supporters.

And the nail in the coffin of unregulated gun violence may have been supplied by the now 8-member Supreme Court which allowed a lower court ruling banning assault weapons to stand, which in effect means that the Second Amendment right to own guns does have limits. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday left in place gun control laws in New York and Connecticut that ban military-style assault weapons like the one used in last week's massacre at an Orlando nightclub, rejecting a legal challenge by gun rights advocates.

The New York and Connecticut laws, among the strictest in the nation, were enacted after a gunman with a semiautomatic rifle killed 20 young children and six educators in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. In total, seven states and the District of Columbia ban semiautomatic rifles.

“"With approximately 30,000 men, women and children dying each year at the barrel of a gun in elementary schools, movie theaters, workplaces, houses of worship and on live television, the United States faces a public health crisis of gun violence," said AMA President Steven J. Stack, M.D. "Even as America faces a crisis unrivaled in any other developed country, the Congress prohibits the CDC from conducting the very research that would help us understand the problems associated with gun violence and determine how to reduce the high rate of firearm-related deaths and injuries."

So we can now have a discussion about the latest public safety menace, the epidemic of gun violence. It requires similar treatment as did the Ebola and Zika epidemics—eradication of the carriers of that violence; which means stricter licensing requirements for starters, and maybe the banning of military-style assault weapons.

Harlan Green © 2016

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Please Protect US, Mr. President!

Popular Economics Weekly

What has happened to our gun laws—especially the assault rifle ban that expired in 2004? Australians had the courage to pass tougher gun regulations—Australia’s Prime Minister in particular, at the time. It takes political courage, in other words, something U.S. politicians seem to lack.

Conservative Australian Prime Minister John Howard, a close ally of George W. Bush, faced political and public resistance to the laws. After just three months as the country's leader, Howard wore a bulletproof vest as he addressed a hostile 3,000-strong crowd opposed to the reforms.

How did he do it? The current Australian gun laws were passed after 35 were killed and 23 wounded in a 1996 mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania.  The shooter was able to buy his assault rifle, even though later he was later determined by authorities to have an IQ of 11. There hasn’t been a mass shooting in Australia since then.

Twelve days after the Port Arthur massacre, the Australian prime minister, John Howard, announced a sweeping package of gun reforms in a country where firearms had long been considered an essential prop in the national mythology of life in the bush.

“At that stage the gun lobby was the ruling lobby in Australia,” says Philip Alpers, associate professor at the University of Sydney. “What happened at Port Arthur is that they were outpaced, outflanked and outwitted by a man who had the power to move in 12 remarkable days.”

Tim Fischer was leader of the National party and Howard’s deputy prime minister in the Coalition government, charged with persuading skeptical country voters to support, or at least accept, reforms. “Port Arthur was our Sandy Hook,” he says. “Port Arthur we acted on. The USA is not prepared to act on their tragedies.”

It was called the National Firearms Agreement — legislation that outlawed automatic and semi-automatic rifles, as well as pump-action shotguns. At the heart of the new law was a massive buyback of about one-fifth—640,000—of all firearms in circulation in Australia. The country’s new gun laws prohibited private sales, required that all weapons be individually registered to their owners, and required that gun buyers present a “genuine reason” for needing each weapon at the time of the purchase, as well as a 28-day waiting period while backgrounds were checked. (Self-defense could not be a reason.) In the wake of the tragedy, polls showed public support for these measures at upwards of 90 percent.

"The laws had widespread public support but faced fierce opposition from some rural supporters … because they believed they were unfairly paying a price for the misdeeds of others," Howard told NBC News in a statement. "This resentment assisted the rise of a new political party which damaged the government at the following election."

Howard persisted with introducing the laws, and went on to win that election and lead the nation for more than a decade. He considers the reforms as a key part of his legacy. An article published online in July by the NRA claimed there was "growing consensus" that the laws hadn't made Australians safer.

Howard acknowledges that "major cultural and historical differences" make it difficult to draw comparisons between the gun cultures in the U.S. and Australia. "Although I had not anticipated the need to act on this matter so early in my term of government, I had always believed there was a clear link between the ready availability of guns and gun-related death," Howard said.

"The national gun control laws enacted after the Port Arthur massacre remain one of the major social reforms ... of [my] government," he added. "All the credible research both in Australia and elsewhere shows that the gun control laws have markedly reduced gun-related deaths."

Graph: The Guardian

Total intentional gun deaths fell by half in the decade after the 1996 restrictions were put in place, even as Australia’s population grew nearly 14 percent. The rate of gun suicides per 100,000 people dropped 65 percent from 1995 to 2006, and the rate of gun homicides fell 59 percent, according to a 2010 study by Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University.

“Australia is not like the U.S.” said commentator Michael Pascoe in the  Sydney Morning Herald in response to President Obama’s remarks on last year’s Umpqua Community College killings by a deranged killer, whose mother kept at least 7 guns at home, in addition to the  8 guns plus ammunition carried by the shooter in the slaughter of college students and a teacher.

"We know that other countries in response to one mass shooting have managed to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings," said President Obama. "Friends of ours, allies of ours, Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours.”

In fact, the US now has a gun homicide rate 370 times that of Australia's. “Unlike the US,” said Pascoe, “we collectively decided to have a decent social safety net, the concept of a living wage and make good education freely available. Most of us are wary of those with extreme views of any kind.”
Our gun problem of course extends beyond mass violence, says the LA Times. In 2014 alone, for example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 11,208 people shot to death, 33,636 injured by gunfire and 21,175 who killed themselves with a gun. That's a total of 66,019 people who were killed or injured by a gun, which comes out to 1,269 per week, 180 a day or 7.5 per hour.

“The US is too immature a society to be allowed to play with guns,” said the Sydney Morning Herald’s Pasco. “It has never shed its Wild West mythology. Americans still use their courts to kill people, which sends a message in its own way.”

We do not at present have a leader or leaders with enough courage to stand up to the gun lobby, as Australia’s John Howard was able to do. Their most important job should be to protect our citizens, regardless of creed or color.

Harlan Green © 2016

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen