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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Bringing a Pen to a Gunfight

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Ted Rall

Gun Control Advocates Look Foolish, Dishonest and Weak

You know the ritual: gunman goes berserk, liberals call for gun control, regulation eventually ensues. The modern gun control movement began in 1981 after the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. Press secretary James Brady, shot and paralyzed in the same incident, successfully lobbied for the passage of the Brady Law, which imposed a background check and waiting period of up to three days for gun buyers. The 1999 shooting spree at Columbine High School resulted in new laws making it illegal to buy a gun on behalf of a criminal or a child seeking to evade the Brady Law requirements. Congress funded state-run databases of the mentally ill, also prohibited under Brady, after the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech.

Two weeks ago, a man used multiple weapons, including a semi-automatic rifle with a 100-round magazine, to murder 12 filmgoers in Aurora, Colorado. (The clip jammed after he fired 30.) This week, a white supremacist and washed-up U.S. soldier mowed down six people attending services at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. Every day, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg reminded us, 34 Americans are shot to death.

So what new gun control laws can we expect?

None.

Neither White House nor Congressional Democrats has any appetite for taking on the powerful NRA during a close election year. Polls show the public sharply split on the issue. After the shooting at the Sikh temple President Obama offered nothing more than pabulum: “terrible, tragic events are happening with too much regularity for us not to do some soul-searching to examine additional ways that we can reduce violence.”

Soul-searching. Right.

Either you’re serious about eliminating gun violence, or you’re not. “Soul-searching” isn’t going to block the next bullet fired by a madman—but the law, coupled with rigorous enforcement, can.

I am a pro-gun leftie. Here’s why: 60 million Americans own 200 million firearms.

Who are they? Right-wingers, mostly. There are about 25 percent more gun-owning Republicans than gun-owning Democrats. Some of these conservatives send me death threats. As long as they’re are allowed to buy and possess guns, I’ll be damned if I let the government pass a law that stops me—from defending myself if one of them comes after me.

I trust me. You, not so much.

This is an arms race. The only way I’ll turn against the Second Amendment is if the cops go door-to-door, confiscate and destroy everybody’s guns. All of them. Even the tiny little lady pistols.

Even then, I’d still be nervous. Because state security apparatus would then have a monopoly on firepower. We’re not there yet, but given the relentless rightward drift of our politics from democracy into police state authoritarianism toward neofascism, and given what we’re already seeing—legalized torture, concentration camps, police department drone planes, a president who says he has the right to assassinate U.S. citizens without trial—one can easily foresee the day when we might be forced to fend off the jack-booted thugs of a future rogue American state.

But that’s my personal, possibly paranoid, take about a possible dystopian future. As a nation, here and now, there’s a valid argument to made that we’ve outgrown the right to bear arms. We’re no longer a frontier society. We’re urban and suburban, not rural; less than two percent of Americans still live on farms. 95 percent of us don’t hunt; those who still hunt do it for fun, not food. We haven’t had to repel a land invasion by foreign troops since 1812. Why do we need guns?

The NRA may sound hysterical—they’re certainly opportunistic, having called for donations three days after Aurora—but they’re right about gun control advocates. Anti-gun liberals say they favor “common-sense measures that protect the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens but make it harder and harder for those who should not have weapons under existing law to obtain them, ” as Press Secretary Jay Carney says Obama want.

Proposals to tighten controls on automatic “assault rifles” and reduce the number of bullets per clip merely nibble around the edges of a serious issue.

There are too many guns already out there (200 million!), too many legally purchased weapons that can be sold privately without being subjected to the Brady Law, for such half-measures to have any effect beyond possibly—theoretically—slightly—reducing the body count of the next group killing.

If you’re serious about putting an end to America’s bloody love affair with guns, you’re going to have to repeal the Second Amendment. Everyone, including Democrats, knows that. But it’s hard to get behind a gun ban that’s only supported by 26 percent of the public. (That’s a record low, down from 60 percent in 1959.) Liberal gun opponents must either embrace such a radical and unpopular measure—the only one that might stand a chance of having the desired effect—or keep proposing wimpy little changes that make them look foolish, half-assed, and intellectually dishonest.

(Ted Rall’s new book is “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt.” His website is tedrall.com. This column originally appeared at NBCNews.com’s Lean Forward blog.)

COPYRIGHT 2012 TED RALL

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Iran – Because Two Wars Aren’t Enough

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Ted Rall

Why Doesn’t Anyone Call Out Romney for Warmongering?

Mitt Romney had a barnburner of a weekend in Israel. The GOP nominee apparent shared his unique combination of economic and anthropological wisdom, attributing the fact that Israel’s GDP and average income is many times higher than those of the Palestinian Occupied Territories to Israelis’ superior “culture.”

As if spewing one of the most overtly racist lines in recent presidential campaign history wasn’t enough, eschewing “containment” (read: “diplomacy”), Romney also endorsed a preemptive Israeli military strike against Iran in order to prevent the latter’s nuclear program—Israel’s own, illegal nuclear weapons stockpile is OK since it’s a U.S. ally—from moving forward.

“We have a solemn duty and a moral imperative to deny Iran’s leaders the means to follow through on their malevolent intentions,” Romney said, stating that “no option should be excluded.”

He didn’t say how he knew the intentions of Iran’s leaders. Clairvoyance? Bush had it too.

Though Mitt slightly walked back his campaign’s sabre rattling, the message was clear. If he is elected, Israel will receive a blank check to begin a war against Iran, one of the most well-equipped military powers in the Middle East—a conflagration in which the United States could easily wind up getting dragged into. (In a subsequent interview he reiterated that “we have all options on the table. Those include military options.”)

Most criticism focused on Romney’s flouting of the traditional proscription against candidates questioning a sitting president’s foreign policy while visiting foreign soil. Though, to be fair, the differences between his and President Obama’s approach to Israel and Iran are tonal and minor.

As usual with the U.S. media, what is remarkable is what is going unsaid. Here we are, with the economy in shambles and the public worried sick about it, the electorate tired of 12 years of war against Afghanistan and nine against Iraq, yet Romney—who could be president six months from now—is out ramping up tensions and increasing the odds of a brand-new, bigger-than-ever military misadventure.

Warmongering has gone mainstream. It’s a given.

In a way, Romney’s willingness to risk war against Iran is merely another example, like the car garage and dressage, of how clueless and out of touch he is. Most Americans oppose war with Iran. For that matter, so do the citizens of the country on whose behalf we’d be killing and dying, Israel. But even Romney’s Democratic opponents give him a pass for Romney’s tough-guy act on Iran.

The reason for the somnolent non-response is obvious: it’s nothing new. Year after year, on one foreign crisis after another, American presidents repeatedly state some variation on the theme that war is always an option, that the military option is always on the table. You’ve heard that line so often that you take it for granted.

But did you know that “keeping the military option on the table” is a serious violation of international law?

The United States is an original signatory of the United Nations Charter, which has the full force of U.S. law since it was ratified by the Senate in 1945. Article 51 allows military force only in self-defense, in response to an “armed attack.” As Yale law and political science professor Bruce Ackerman wrote in The Los Angeles Times in March, international law generally allows preemptive strikes only in the case of “imminent threat.” In 1842 Secretary of State Daniel Webster wrote what remains the standard definition of “imminent,” which is that the threat must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and no moment for deliberation.” The enemy’s troops have massed on your border. They have superior force. What must be done to stop them is evident. There’s no time for diplomacy.

Iran’s nuclear program doesn’t come close to this definition, even from Israel’s standpoint. Bruce Fein, deputy attorney general under Reagan, told Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’s Extra! Magazine: “It is nothing short of bizarre to claim, as the Obama Administration is doing, that the mere capability to make a bomb is justification for a preemptive attack. That’s a recipe for perpetual war. Almost any country could have the capability to make a bomb. They are torturing the word ‘imminent’ to the point that it has no meaning.”

By endorsing an Israeli attack against Iran at a time when there is no proof that Iran has nuclear weapons, intends to develop them, or use them if it does, Romney is going farther than Obama, who has engaged in back-channel diplomacy.

The Allies’ main brief against the Nazi leaders tried at Nuremberg was not genocide, but that they had violated international law by waging aggressive war. Yet every American president has deployed troops in aggressive military actions.

Aggressive war hasn’t been good for America’s international image, the environment, our economy or the millions who have died, mostly for causes that are now forgotten or regretted. But unless we draw the line against reckless, irresponsible rhetoric like Romney’s, it will go on forever.

(Ted Rall’s new book is “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt.” His website is tedrall.com. This column originally appeared at NBCNews.com)

(C) 2012 TED RALL, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: A California Town Gets The Runaround

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Ted Rall

I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).

This week:

I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).

This week: The city of Newport Beach ran up a $35,000 bill providing additional security for an Obama fundraiser. Now the city says it is getting the runaround and that the Obama campaign, the U.S. Secret Service, and the Democratic National Committee keep passing the buck.

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