An officially filed request to the Virginia Department of Health to amend existing Regulations for Licensure of Hospitals – which is essentially a legal challenge to force all hospitals to make the same architectural changes being forced on abortion providers – has received over 125 public comments in the first two weeks. This is the latest chapter in a long, controversial battle over the regulation of women’s health clinics that is heading into its third year.
Surprisingly, the legal petition appears to be directly supported by a legal opinion from Ken Cuccinelli’s office at the June 2012 State Board of Health meeting, where his Senior Assistant Attorney General, Allyson Tysinger suggested that the same regulation amendments be made. If applied, this would put Cuccinelli in the difficult position of explaining to almost every hospital (of all types) in the state that they must make extremely costly architectural upgrades or close their doors.
Fortunately for the Attorney General’s Office, the official transcription notes from the June meeting have mysteriously disappeared. Pro-choice policy group Oppose TRAP discovered that the notes had gone missing after filing a Freedom of Information Act request. The minutes – which are a public, summarized version of the missing notes – do state that “Ms. Tysinger also advised the Board that the hospital licensure regulation will have to be amended because of inconsistencies with 32.12-127.001,” reflecting Oppose TRAP’s legal challenge almost verbatim.
After the Board of Health voted to grandfather existing abortion clinics into regulations for “designing and constructing new health care facility projects”, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli threatened to withhold legal counsel and representation from the board, claiming they had no authority to do so. When it was pointed out that these are not new facilities, and in some cases have been in safe operation for decades, the Attorney General’s Office declared that they were new hospitals because the 2011 legislation newly defined them as hospitals.
Since that time, a researcher with Oppose TRAP discovered the first Rules and Regulations Governing Licensure of General Hospitals in an unprocessed box of files at an off-site archive of the Library of Virginia; these regulations did grandfather in newly defined hospitals without requiring them to meet the same standards as newly constructed facilities.
Comments by medical professionals on the petition filed by Oppose TRAP (and seemingly supported by the Attorney General’s office) range from concern over credibility of the State to concern over selective application of the law:
“At the present time, the integrity of the Board of Health , the Attorney General , the Governor and the legislature is being called into question… Unless we revisit this issue in an independent way where the BOH can makes it’s decisions free from political pressure, then the BOH as well as the AG’s office will lose all credibility.” – Kenneth Olshansky, M.D. Physician
“There is no legitimate reason to impose a different interpretation of the law, mandating onerous new construction standards on health care facilities that have been shown to safely provide first trimester abortion care to Virginia women for 40 years, especially when no other existing entity is required to meet those standards.” – Wendy Klein, MD, FACP
“No other health care facility has been forced to rebuild its existing structure to comply with these Guidelines, even though Virginia Code § 32.1-127.001 applies to hospitals, nursing homes, hospice centers, and outpatient surgical facilities… Our Governor and Attorney General think that a double standard is okay when it comes to women’s health. Women and the Commonwealth deserve better.” – Ike Koziol, MD
In a move that is provoking concern among some abortion rights advocates, an activist working with Oppose TRAP has submitted a petition calling into question the legality of the current regulations of most Virginia hospitals. Taking Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli at his word, the petition points out the unintended consequences of his position on grandfathering for all other Virginia hospitals.
In 2011 the Virginia General Assembly passed SB924, defining health care facilities that perform first-trimester abortions as hospitals, requiring they be regulated by the Board of Health. Despite a panel of medical experts’ recommendation to grandfather in existing facilities, the regulations as written by Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s office required clinics to undergo extremely costly structural upgrades to parking spaces, hallways widths, awnings, etc. These regulations were expected to permanently close the doors of at least 75% of the abortion clinics in the state. After public protest and outspoken opposition from the medical community made clear the dire consequences of Ken Cuccinelli’s position, the Board passed an amendment that would exempt existing clinics from having to meet the new building codes.
In response, Cuccinelli opined that the Board of Health did not have the authority to grandfather existing clinics. He threatened to withhold future legal counsel from the Board, directing it to pass the legislation as originally written.
The Board of Health capitulated, effectively sentencing the closure of most abortion clinics in the state.
The facility guidelines for hospital construction clearly state they are “intended as minimum standards for designing and constructing new health care facility projects.” When it was pointed out that these are not new facilities, and in some cases have been in safe operation for decades, the Attorney General’s Office declared that they were new hospitals because the 2011 legislation newly defined them as hospitals.
Since that time, reproductive rights activist Molly Taylor Vick researched the legislation which originally defined general hospitals in 1947, just as SB924 defined abortion clinics as hospitals in 2011. After further investigation she discovered the first Rules and Regulations Governing Licensure of General Hospitals in an unprocessed box of files at an off-site archive of the Library of Virginia; these regulations did grandfather in existing hospitals without requiring them to meet the same standards as newly constructed facilities.
Now, with clinics already closing and only a year remaining until some must come into compliance, Molly Taylor Vick has filed a petition that challenges Ken Cuccinelli to defend the legality of his position. This has proven controversial among some reproductive rights advocates, who feel uncomfortable being associated with a legal process that has the potential to shut down health care facilities. They also worry that it will alienate their allies in the medical community.
Oppose TRAP appreciates their concern. “Access to health care is something we all value very highly, but this is really about whether people believe in equal application of the law. One argument of pro-choice activists has been that abortion clinics cannot be regulated differently than other facilities; that the law must be applied equally. That is exactly what we’re saying. We are merely pointing out the implications of a decision made by Cuccinelli.” Oppose TRAP continues to explain that after due diligence, they also feel confident that the economic, political and social consequences are so severe that there is not a real threat to general hospitals. “That is the whole point. It is absurd. Cuccinelli needs to explain how it isn’t or own up to what he has done.”
Molly Taylor Vick notes that participation in the public comment period does not equal support for the petition. “People are encouraged to use their voices to express their individual concerns, whether they are in support of or strong opposition to the petitions.”
She further contends that this is taking the fight to where Ken Cuccinelli pretends it is – in the legal interpretation and application of law. “He must own this.”
Cuccinelli can not selectively apply the law:
If existing hospitals CANNOT be grandfathered in under new regulations, this brings into question the legal status of every facility built prior to 2005, many of which will now be forced to undergo the same costly architectural renovations as abortion clinics. This could result in hospitals across the state closing their doors.
If existing hospitals CAN be legally grandfathered as they always have been, then they CAN be legally grandfathered today, and Cuccinelli overstepped his legal and professional authority by refusing to certify those approved regulations. He also overstepped ethical boundaries by threatening to withhold representation if the Board of Health was sued.
VDH must either act to amend hospital regulations to require current construction code of existing facilities or readdress the issue of grandfathering as applied to abortion clinic facilities.
It’s been less than a week since national gun control in America died. No “assault weapons” ban. No “high-capacity” magazine ban. Not even the Manchin-Toomey background check compromise that, according to Senator Mark Kirk, was reached by getting drunk on a 54-foot mega-yacht named Black Tie, which is part-owned by Manchin.
Over the last several days, I’ve watched Democratic politicians, lobbyists and Facebook meme-sharers calling down shame on the senators who voted against every single gun control measure proposed in the Senate. Yes, it’s true that none of the measures would have passed the Republican-controlled House anyway, but to have lost in the Democrat-controlled senate was to truly be trounced. I have seen the Democratic pundits all over the nation looking across their podiums and well-lit television studio desks with stunned expressions. “How could this have happened,” they all ask? Only four months after Newtown?
I write this letter as someone who is politically far left of center. You and I have a lot in common, though you may not want to admit it by the end of this article. I think it’s time we had a talk.
I live in the state of Virginia, a place where it’s not easy to be a leftist. Just last week, our State Board of Health voted to approve TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) regulations that would close most abortion clinics in the state. It was a devastating loss for myself and other organizers, and it will be even more devastating to the women of Virginia, most of whom will not have access to safe, legal abortions for years to come. I mention this not only so that you have context for the sort of political work I’m involved in, but because I want you to know that *I do know*, from very recent experience, what it’s like to feel powerless as you watch a group of people vote for social policy that you think is absolutely insane.
But I’ll be honest with you: I watched the Senate votes live on Wednesday, and when these gun-related bills were defeated, I literally celebrated. Obviously, you and I have a lot in common, but plenty to differ on. And that’s kind of what I want to talk to you about.
I’ve owned guns since childhood, and it’s an issue that I’ve thought and written a lot about. It’s very difficult for me to communicate with the mainstream Democratic establishment about guns. But because I know how painful it sometimes is to listen to Republican and other Right-leaning people talk about things that we on the Left care strongly about, I thought I would try to help you out.
There are are a few things that you can do to improve your game in the gun control debate, and I thought it would only be fair to point out what they are. So here’s my best shot. Here are the things that you MUST keep in mind if you wish to further the dialogue on gun policy in America.
1. Stop Sending Mixed Messages
I wish I had a dollar for every Democratic politician and commentator that has looked into a television camera over the past few months and said, “No one is trying to take your guns away!”
Allow me this humble suggestion: The best way to convince the American public that you’re not interested in taking guns away is to stop talking about taking guns away.
Firstly, when your politicians are asked, “Do you support state legislation to ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns?” as Obama was in his 1996 Senate campaign, you should never answer “Yes,” as Obama did. Publicly advocating a ban on all handguns is not the way to convince people that you’re not interested in banning guns. Furthermore, when you are campaigning for president, never say the phrase “I continue to support a [federal] ban on concealed carry,” as Obama did in 2004. This gives people the impression that your intention is to prevent the states from setting reasonable guidlelines on who can defend themselves outside of their home.
If you then win the election, do not go on to fully support gun bans in two US cities – Chicago and D.C. – in which law-abiding citizens are disarmed, citing them as models for gun policy while trying to convince the rest of the country that you really aren’t interested in banning their guns. (Guess which two US cities you’re most likely to be killed by a gun in.)
It has become almost cliché for smirking Democrats to attempt to ridicule people like myself by crooning, “Obama wants to take our guns!” in a stereotyped hillbilly drawl – something particularly offensive to some folks here in the south – when in fact, Obama has said exactly that.
Some of you will argue that regardless of the President’s conflicted/dishonest assertions, the legislation that died in Senate earlier this week had nothing to do with taking anything. But let us not forget the “assault weapons” ban, which enacted slow confiscation over a generation. I wouldn’t have to immediately surrender any firearms, but because of the angle of the grip on the shotgun I own, it would be a felony offense to pass it on to a family member (or anyone else) upon my death. It would instead be confiscated by the government and presumably destroyed.
The same would happen to tens of millions of firearms all over the country, including more than 3 million of just one single model, the AR-15. In this case, gun control advocates literally want to pry the most popular rifle in the country from every owner’s cold dead hands. “We’re not taking any guns away from you, just all future generations.” Needless to say, this is not the way to convince people that no one is interested in taking guns away.
This sort of message and legislation has come not just from the president, but on down the chain of command. We have known that the ideal scenario (and presumably ultimate goal) for Dianne Feinstein – sponsor of the assault weapons ban and most outspoken advocate for all of the defeated legislation – has always been a total, door-to-door confiscation of firearms. She told us so in a 60 Minutes interview.
”If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them – ‘Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ‘em all in!’ – I would have done it. I could not do that.”
But it’s not just the Democratic leadership. Cultural icons of the Left have also joined the fray. On Real Time with Bill Maher, the host wanted to know why Democratic leaders are pretending that they believe in the second amendment, when they ought to just come out and say what they mean:
“Everyone on the left is so afraid to say what should be said, which is the Second Amendment is bullshit. Why doesn’t anyone go at the core of it?”
Every episode of the show is watched by 1 – 1.5 million (almost entirely Democratic) viewers, and the studio audience cheered his comment. Chilling. The followup comment is that the ballot box is our guarantee of liberty. Ask Germany (and countless others) how that worked out for them.
It is important to note that according to the Supreme Court (and most Americans), the views espoused by Obama, Feinstein, Maher, et all are unconstitutional. Is it really so difficult to understand why some folks might think that Democrats are just being politicians by giving lip-service to the second amendment while pushing new legislation? Taken collectively, these and many other open confessions by party members are more than probable cause for suspicion of intent. Constitutional voters don’t have to be ignorant or fearful to sound the alarm about these people. They just have to take them at their word and actions.
You can either tell people that you’re not interested in taking guns and stop thinking of ways to take them, or try to abolish the second amendment (good luck). But you cannot do both.
2. You Have To Understand What You’re Regulating
This is common sense for any sort of regulation, but especially when you’re dealing with something specifically protected in the Bill of Rights. Unfortunately, it has not been the case.
New rule: If you don’t know how guns work, you don’t get to craft legislation about them. There is nothing so embarrassing as watching a Democratic politician who has never held a gun in their life attempt to talk about why and how they should be regulated.
This is not a new problem. I included this classic video in my article on the assault weapons ban, which shows how a senator doesn't even understand what's in her own legislation.
Added to the list over the past several months has been die-hard gun control advocate New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg not understanding the difference between automatic and semi-automatic firearms.
”Pistols are different. You have to pull the trigger each time. With an assault weapon you basically hold it down and it goes ::machine gun noise::”
This is a man that has built a cornerstone of his career on gun control legislation. He has headed and commissioned panels on guns. He runs a whole group of pro-gun-control mayors. This is an issue he has supposedly been devoted to for a long time.
He doesn’t know how guns operate. He doesn’t understand basic terminology. He doesn’t know what an “assault weapon” is, even though he supposedly was involved in drafting legislation. How is this possible? And how is it possible that we who actually understand the topic are supposed to cede to his judgment on it?
He’s not alone in his utter baffledness about this. Obama recently told donors at a Democratic Congressional Campaign committee meeting that students at Sandy Hook were gunned down by a “fully automatic weapon”. From the White House transcript:
”I just came from Denver, where the issue of gun violence is something that has haunted families for way too long, and it is possible for us to create common-sense gun safety measures that respect the traditions of gun ownership in this country and hunters and sportsmen, but also make sure that we don’t have another 20 children in a classroom gunned down by a semiautomatic weapon – by a fully automatic weapon in that case, sadly.”
This is the President of the United States, who has been personally touring the country pretending to understand the issue of how guns function in society. This person has had entire panels and committees at his disposal specifically to educate him on this topic (so we’re told). There is no excuse for ignorance of this magnitude to be centered around conversations involving civil rights specifically enshrined in the constitution. (It is either astounding ignorance or dishonesty. I’m being generous and assuming the former.)
But the award for atomic facepalm goes squarely to Democratic representative Dianne DeGette of Colorado. During one of the many public forums on gun control that took place across the country recently, Dianne explained to the panel and a stunned audience that magazines and ammunition were the same thing, and therefore all the “high-capacity” magazines would soon be used up.
This person is making laws about the very thing she is completely ignorant of. How can people who actually understand the issue be brought to the table and expect to have productive, meaningful conversation when the people sitting across from them are this clueless?
These are a few selected, higher-profile incidents that represent a vast culture of ignorance in the mainstream Democratic left when it comes to even the basics of gun use and policy. I shouldn’t have to say it, but: Until people know what they’re talking about, none of us should care what they have to say.
3. Stop Using Children
It was the dead children of Newtown that were intoned as the push for gun control legislation began. As I have just evidenced, it was the dead children intoned during the drumming up of support. And it was the dead children intoned in Obama’s “concession” speech as every gun control measure in the Senate failed.
And let’s not forget ads like this one:
Fortunately for America, the FBI says that citizens of all ages are literally more likely to be struck by lightning than to be killed with a rifle of any kind – not just “assault” rifles. In fact, you are more than twice as likely to be killed be hands and feet than rifles of any kind, and about 5 times more likely to be killed by a knife.
What about unintentional firearms deaths? Fortunately for children, the National Safety Council says that they are less likely to be accidentally killed by any firearm than most other causes of death. Children ages 0-19 (which technically includes two years of life that aren’t childhood) are about 8 times more likely to drown or be poisoned, 4 times as likely to be killed by smoke or fire and almost 50 times more likely to be killed in a car accident.
Aside from the fact that a statistically insignificant number of children die from firearms, not a single person who advocated these gun control measures has suggested a way in which any of the proposed legislation could possibly have prevented the massacre in Newtown. (None of it would have.) Which could make someone wonder, “What’s with all the talk about kids?”
Children are no longer just pawns in the gun control story. They are now integral players. Sometimes the stories play out like Obama’s photo-op above. Sometimes they were never supposed to be stories in the first place.
A father in Florida was furious recently when his fourth grade son brought home this colorful page:
The teacher seemed to gotten the idea of this little gem from Democratic Attorney General Eric Holder, who asked for all schools nationwide to advocate an “anti-gun message” every single day. “Every day, every school at every level… We need to do this every day of the week and really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way.”
As I’m writing this, news has broken of a middle school student suspended and arrested for wearing an NRA t-shirt to school.
Recently a man’s house was raided after he posted a photo of his 11-year-old son – who had a hunting license – safely handling a .22 rifle. The father was a certified firearms instructor, an NRA range safety officer, and a New Jersey hunter education instructor. His house was raided without a warrant and the state threatened to take his children away.
04/23/13 Edit: I have been asked – reasonably, I think – not to refer what happened as a raid. A whole group of police and Dept. Children and Families officials showed up at Moore’s house, demanded to be let in to see his gun safe, threatened to take his child away, but did not enter without a warrant. Moore was told that by asking for a warrant he was acting suspiciously (specifically counter to a ruling by the Supreme Court – exercising rights is never cause for suspicion), and they threatened to find a way to get one. He told them they were welcome to do so. They ended up leaving.
How far we have come.
In some areas of the country, children are not props in a game of political football, but are giving testimony before their state legislatures about why new gun control measures are a terrible idea, like this 15-year-old who shoots those evil AR-15s every day.
In some areas of the country, children are given proper handling and safety training the way I was as a child, and are capable of safely handling rifles and “assault weapons” to defend their homes and family.
Most Americans know when they’re being emotionally played for political gain, and so do the senators who voted against the barrage of legislation that went down in flames this week. Until you can stop marching children around as your cause celeb for no apparent logical reason, and until you propose legislation that at least has something to do with protecting them, no one is going to listen.
Yes, it’s true that 90% of Americans like background checks for firearms purchases. Well it’s a good thing we have them!
04/21/13 Edit: Four months after the shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School, USA TODAY Poll finds backing for any new gun control legislation has slipped below 50%. The “90% approval for new background check legislation” has turned out to be very false indeed.
If you go to a sporting goods store and buy any firearm, you have to get a background check done. If you buy a gun from almost any table at a gun show, you have to have a background check. If you buy a gun across state lines on the internet, it has to go through a licensed FFL dealer who runs a background check. The same goes for Wal-Mart, flea market dealers, and everywhere else.
The “gun show loophole” you’ve heard so much about simply means that private individuals can sell a gun to each other without asking the federal government for permission. Which is to say that I don’t have to pay $150 (the cost for a check in D.C.) to ask the FBI whether a family member or friend to whom I would like to lend my shotgun for a hunting trip is a convicted felon.
Background checks are a relatively new priority for Obama’s Justice Department, which only prosecuted 44 of the 48,000 felons and fugitives that submitted background checks to purchase a firearm (and were denied because of the functioning system) in 2012. When the NRA pointed out this out to Biden, the Vice President explained that they “simply don’t have the time or manpower to prosecute everybody who lies on a form”.
Then how, pray tell, is adding to that number thousands of private transaction between individuals (who are already inherently law-abiding by filing the paperwork) going to help?
Aside from practicality and enforceability concerns, there are the ever-present privacy concerns. The Democratic left got a rude awakening from allies on this topic when the ACLU came out against universal background checks, citing the record keeping on law-abiding citizens as a “significant” privacy concern:
“We think that that kind of record-keeping requirement could result in keeping long-term detailed records of purchases and creation of a new government database.”
“And they come to use databases for all sorts of different purposes. For example, the National Counterterrorism Center recently gave itself the authority to collect all kinds of existing federal databases and performed terrorism related searches regarding those databases. They essentially exempted themselves from a lot of existing Privacy Act protections.”
The Deputy Director of the National Institute of Justice noted in a recent internal memo that the effectiveness of universal background checks would “require gun registration”. (It also went on to note that “gun buybacks are ineffective”, that a high-capacity magazine ban wouldn’t have any discernible effect, that “assault weapons are not a major contributor to gun crime”, and that even a complete elimination of all “assault” weapons “would not have a large impact on gun homicides”.)
When your own Department of Justice thinks your ideas are bad ones, it’s time to move on.
But the ACLU and Department of Justice are not alone in their rejection of universal background checks. Recently, the most comprehensive survey ever conducted on the views of 15,000 law enforcement professionals asked about the relationship between recently-dead legislation proposals and violent crime. 79.6% of them said that expanded background checks would do nothing to reduce violent crime. Here are three other questions and their responses:
These figures speak for themselves. When the nation’s police force, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Justice Department aren’t on board, you might want to rethink your strategy.
5. Treat the NRA As What They Are: Other American Citizens
The story from the media – and certainly from your Democratic leadership – is that the “powerful corporate lobby” of the NRA is so indomitable that they single-handedly bought and scared off politicians from supporting legislation that they actually believed was going to do some good. But aside from the questionable legislation, this narrative still falls short.
After gun control legislation was defeated this week, I opened a friend’s Facebook link to an unrelated article on thinkprogress.org, a popular leftist news and opinion site. The full screen poll that popped up before I could read the article asked: “DOES THE NRA CONTROL CONGRESS?” along with an urgent call to sign up for their mailing list to email-shame politicians.
The problem here is the complete dissociation of the NRA as an entity and its membership base. As someone who participated wholeheartedly in the Occupy movement and in the national campaign to expose ALEC – the group of Right-wing politicians and corporate lobbyists who write laws together – I have no love for the influence of money on politics. But by making this narrative the dominant one, the Democratic left has missed a very, very important fact: the power of the NRA lies not in corporations, but in its membership.
The NRA definitely receives some contributions from the firearms manufacturers whose interests are tied up with their own. Of course they do. That’s how lobbying works: you pay people to take the time to represent your interests well to lawmakers, whether you’re a gunmaker contributing to the NRA or a high school teacher’s union paying The American Federation of Teachers lobbyists.
What you’re missing is that the vast portion of the NRA’s funds come not through corporate donors, but through contributions from average Americans. It was not a coincidence that between December 2012 and January 2013 the NRA grew 10,000 members every day, adding a full quarter-million new contributors to their roster since gun control reappeared in the national discussion last year. That’s just what happens when a populace that cares a lot about something gets mobilized. But the NRA – by which the Democratic party should mean “the American citizens who comprise the NRA because they believe in gun rights” – has consistently been characterized as the heartless, monolithic boogeyman.
I have already mentioned the young man who was just this week suspended and arrested for wearing an NRA t-shirt to school. How is this possible? How can the demonization of 5 million Americans engaged in strictly legal activity literally put a child in jail in 2013?
I hope that one thing this latest loss has taught you is that you cannot advance the discussion on gun policy by treating the NRA as if they were something other than the citizens who intentionally pay for them to do exactly what they do. (Even if members do have to grit their teeth at brash methods sometimes.) Your opponent is not the corporate profits of Ruger or Beretta, it is the beliefs and ideas and the resulting money of other citizens just like yourself. Speaking of which…
6. Don’t Forget About Us!
Gun policy is not really as partisan a debate as mainstream media would suggest. There are plenty of left-leaning citizens and Democratic voters who love our guns. Some of us are in the south, some of us are out in Colorado, and some of us are right in the middle of New York City. Some of us not only like the process of shooting guns, but actually think that it’s important to know how. Some of us hunt to supplement food/income. Some of us believe that the safety of our selves, families, communities and yes, even our nation are our own responsibility as citizens. It’s not such a radical thought.
And don’t forget that we are the swing voices in this debate. After the mass shooting in Aurora, I posted an article on why the “assault weapons” ban should not be renewed. Much to my surprise, it garnered a half million reads. This was not because I’m a great writer. This was because it spoke to other leftist people with gun-interests in a way that an NRA newsletter was not going to. And those people shared it with their leftist friends, and so on.
You cannot pretend that we don’t exist, and you cannot be surprised when we let our representatives know that we do not support gun control legislation.
Layer 1: A Table That’s Round?
I heard about Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond only two days before he showed up. He is currently on a whirlwind national tour with some other members of the administration to drum up support for their gun control policies, and Virginia was hardly a state he could afford to pass up. The press billed it as a “roundtable discussion”, but everyone in attendance had been preselected for their agreement on all the issues in question, and there were no meaningful policy discussions or disagreements to be had.
The public had no way of voicing input, and were mostly barred from the event. In fact, the media were only allowed to be present during a small portion of the short meeting – just long enough for the video cameras to catch a few staged sound bytes. The importance of the event for the administration was not what actually happened there, but to continue a directive that has been (successfully) implemented since Newtown: Keep gun control in the news, both nationally and locally.
Which is to say that Biden’s visit was, for all intents and purposes, a PR campaign.
Strangely enough (or perhaps not strangely at all), the federal officials surrounding Vice President Biden in that room would have had some disagreements with the Obama administration’s push for gun control… during their campaign seasons.
During her 2002 run for governor of Kansas, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius stated that she strongly supported “every Kansan’s second amendment right to bear arms. And, more than that… the Kansas Constitution which provides even greater rights for gun owners.”
Almost immediately after being elected, she would – twice – veto a basic concealed carry law that would have allowed citizens to carry concealed weapons after obtaining a state permit and passing an FBI background check, leaving Kansas one of only four states without any form of a conceal-carry law. (Only four days after the second veto, it was overturned in the Kansas Senate by a 30-10 vote, and in the House of Representatives by vote of 91-33.)
Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano had an even more noteworthy flip-flop on gun control policy. In her 2002 gubernatorial run in Arizona, she had a textbook gun-rights approach:
“My position on the 2nd Amendment is simple: existing laws related to firearms and their possession are a sufficient framework by which to ensure the safety of all Arizonans. Rather than focusing on new legislation, we must first be vigilant in our enforcement of the laws that are on the books.”
In a recent statement about the many, broad legislation changes proposed by the Obama administration – including bans on firearms with particular aesthetic styles and capacities – she affirmed her total support of them all. Which is why she got to accompany Biden.
The first layer of hypocrisy was what this event represented: a group of politicians who had claimed opposition to gun control legislation now spending taxpayer dollars to travel around talking (almost entirely to each other) about the importance of gun control legislation.
So when the news of this shindig reached me, I decided to drop in with my own message.
Layer 2: Walking the Circle
The frigid wind chill froze my fingers stiff around the sign as I began to circle the building where Biden and his entourage were talking about how much they agreed with each other. As expected, the number of state police, unmarked and federal vehicles was nearly impossible to count. I was turned away from the Commons building at one entrance, but was able to walk in the other, displaying my sign for the throngs of police, students who wanted to get in but couldn’t, and students who couldn’t have cared less. I continued in this cycle – walking around the building, then inside, around the building, then inside.
One person stopped me to snap a photo with their iPhone. A girl in a passing car playfully shaped her fingers into a gun and pointed it at me, winking. A couple of students read the sign and looked terribly confused, as if the idea of leftists appreciating the second amendment took some time to wrap their minds around.
But the most interesting reactions came from the working folks. I passed a multi-racial group of electricians working near the compass. They nodded at me and one said, “Amen, brother.” I smiled and nodded back.
A block away I passed a line of police/fed vehicles a quarter mile long. One large van was filled with state police, with another female officer standing outside, leaning against the open side door. As I came closer, a voice shouted from the dimly lit vehicle, “Amen, brother!” The female officer turned and smiled at me as I passed, and I again returned the gesture.
I have talked to a number of police officers about gun control legislation. While some have been supportive of changes to laws involving procedural matters such as the sharing of background check info and other similar aspects, I have yet to meet one who supports a ban on any weapon or magazine capacity. While being interrogated after my arrest at a protest in Washington D.C., one officer ended up venting to me about the District’s gun ban, infuriated after having seen the effects of a populace left without a way to defend itself.
Police in the state of New York have even more reason to be upset. Governor Cuomo, who has called for the outright forcible confiscation of weapons, recently wrote the most restrictive gun control policy in the nation, limiting the round capacity of all firearms to 7 rounds. (For those who are not familiar, that is less than half of the standard capacity of most 9mm handguns.) The legislation was written in only two days of hasty, secret meetings without any disclosure or debate. So hastily was the legislation composed that it does not provide any exemptions for police.
Which is to say that every police officer in New York state is now a felon.
In response to the NRA’s suggestion that the presence of a police officer in schools might deter would-be shooters, the New York legislation also included restrictions on any firearms on school property. Assemblyman Al Graf has since relayed a story of a school security guard that threatened to arrest a police officer who was picking up his child while wearing his holstered service pistol.
The second layer of hypocrisy inherent to Biden’s visit was so obvious that you could almost miss it: Every person sitting in that room to talk about the ways that guns make us less safe was surrounded, mobbed, fortified by more than a hundred guns. On school property. Meanwhile, the very armed people guarding those who were attempting to limit gun rights were openly showing their disapproval of that very limitation. The irony is almost too complex to state succinctly.
Layer 3: Selective Perception
It was my second time circling inside the Commons building that my eye caught the latest issue of Commonwealth Times, VCU’s school paper. The cover story: Praise and recognition for VCU’s Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Research Lab, which is developing the next generation of drone warfare.
Not even Fox News could miss the third layer of hypocrisy.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtEzNWP8chU]
As a president stands ready to enact legislation to ban weapons, as he parades schoolchildren in front of the cameras to talk about their safety, he kills almost 200 of them overseas, two of whom were American. What is left to say about this? How can we even conquer a cognitive dissonance this profound?
On the property of a school that bans firearms while developing weapons that kill children, hundreds of firearms guard people talking about the importance of banning firearms… while those very armed guards openly reject the banning of firearms. Another day in America.
A vignette of what happened inside and outside the September 14th Virginia Board of Health meeting as they were directed by Ken Cuccinelli to rule that new, unnecessary regulations could be used to shut down existing abortion facilities.
[EDIT: Since this article was published, the Democratic party has officially added support of the assault weapon ban renewal to their party platform and Senator Feinstein has vowed to introduce it again in the upcoming session, hoping the Newtown massacre will help it push through. This bill WILL be debated and voted on, and I hope you can learn something about it here.]
Between Two Worlds
It’s not easy being a leftist who loves guns. It’s like being a Republican who listens to NPR or supports single payer health care. But being a leftist, I get exposed to all the liberal publications and media that invariably call for gun control every time someone does something stupid with one. Being a gun enthusiast, I also get exposed to the political Right’s oversimplification of those liberals as somehow lacking moral fiber or true appreciation of freedom. Rather than agreeing with both, I tend to end up arguing with both. It’s exhausting to always feel like I’m apologizing for the other “side”.
This article takes a point of view, but aims to do so in a way that members of both sides of the political spectrum can understand. I’ll try to give some idea as to why we on the political left roll our eyes at the rhetoric of the NRA, and how we in the “gun culture” can possibly defend something called “assault weapons”.
We all know the cycle by now: Tragic incident occurs, both sides attempt to use it for their political gain, both sides act shocked that the other would attempt to use it for political gain, insults are flung, statistics are cherry-picked, rinse, repeat.
I began writing this some time after the Aurora massacre, but it was just this morning that news started coming in of the mass shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. I knew the wave of cries for a renewal of the “assault weapon” and “high capacity” magazine bans hadn’t yet faded from Aurora, and that they would be reinforced by this next event, regardless of how relevant either of the topics were to the incident.
So in order to get around to why the assault weapons ban was an utter and absolute failure in its attempt to deter violent crime, I have to start with mass shootings.
Misleading Vividness
I’m just going to submit this uncomfortable truth to both camps up front, with the vain hope that it will not sound callous:
Mass shootings are a tiny, tiny problem. Which isn’t to say that they aren’t utterly horrifying in more than one way. People’s lives are destroyed, both literally and figuratively. What I mean to say is that if we were to prioritize our political attention to topics according to how many lives were at stake, mass shootings wouldn’t even be on the radar.
Factoring in the rate of death caused by mass shootings from Columbine to the present (about 210 people in 13 years), it will be more than 300 years until we reach the number of casualties that occur from accidental drownings every single year in this country. In a little more than 150 years from now, we’ll approach the number of people who are poisoned to death every single year in this country. Sometime in 2014 we might surpass the number of people struck by lightning every single year in this country.
Which is to say that mass shootings are incredibly rare and don’t kill a lot of people when they do happen.
It is tempting to ask why accidental drowning is not 340 times more important a social issue than gun control. Or why poisoning isn’t 150 times as pressing a political issue. (If the number of people dying is truly what’s important, almost anything would be more pressing.) The problem is not hard to understand though, and rests in a psychological concept known as the “logical fallacy of misleading vividness”.
The fallacy of misleading vividness is when the thought, imagery or reality of something is so emotionally potent – positively or negatively – that you begin to overestimate the likelihood and frequency of its occurrence. This is why many people are afraid to fly. They can understand intellectually that crashes almost never happen, and that airplanes are statistically the safest way to travel, but the idea of being torn apart mid-air, or knowing that they’re about to die for a full two minutes in freefall, or being dragged under the ocean while stuck inside the cabin is so vivid and disturbing, that they actually experience intense fear about a process that is safer than their drive to the airport.
This is what happens to us collectively as a nation when mass shootings occur. Yes, it is terrible, for both the person who was so disturbed and all the people they harmed. It puts on graphic display the absolute worst aspects of our culture, which is painful to watch.
However, it is also an incredible statistical deviation from the norm, objectively inflicting far less suffering and death than many other ways that people are far more likely to die. This is an important point. When our policy becomes based on emotional content rather than facts, we are heading in the wrong direction.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at how things are in the world of guns and how they got to be that way.
Obama & the NRA: Frenemies of the State
It is a running joke in gun-interest circles that Obama is the “gun salesman of the year”[1]. From the moment he won the Democratic nomination, gun sales in the US surged dramatically. If the joke were more honest, he might be called “gun salesman of the decade”. According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the economic impact of the firearm industry grew more than 50% (from $19 billion to $31 billion) between 2008 and 2011[2] In 2010, a record was set for the number of background checks filed for firearm purchases. That record was broken again in 2011.
All of this was largely the result of a campaign by gun rights advocates like the NRA to convince the country that Obama would be a gun control activist. To be sure, their concerns weren’t entirely baseless. In a 2004 NPR interview, then-senator Obama clearly stated that he not only supported the Federal Assault Weapons ban, but that he would “continue to support a ban on concealed carry laws” altogether.[3] The administration reaffirmed its support of the assault weapons ban in 2009.[4]
But, lacking political capital, Obama made no such push for gun control legislation. In fact, quite the opposite. During his first term he signed laws making it legal for people to carry concealed weapons in National Parks and in their checked luggage on Amtrak trains, provided they met their state’s requirements to do so. As a result, the Brady Campaign, the leading gun control lobbying group, gave Obama an “F” rating. When the administration was asked about how it would respond to the Aurora shooting, the first words out of spokesman Jay Carney’s mouth were, “We plan to uphold the second amendment.” When the Sikh shooting happened, his press conference informed people that the President “will continue to instruct his administration to take action towards 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”.
Despite this conspicuously moderate viewpoint, the NRA continues to stoke the flames of fear, promising that once Obama is reelected to a second term, he’ll have no reason to hold back on the gun control legislation he’s been wanting to implement since 2004. In fact, at a recent CPAC conference in Florida, NRA vice president Wayne LaPierre went so far as to suggest, without offering any evidence, that Obama’s failure to act on gun control has been a “massive Obama conspiracy” to postpone his attack on the second amendment until his second term.[5] While I appreciate the NRA’s vigilance on an issue I feel strongly about, I can’t help but think that it is rants like this that make much of the populace totally unable to identify with the organization.
Meanwhile, the Aurora shooting, like all shootings, has revived the cries for gun control from the political Left. At a loss for somewhere to direct their grief, outrage and sense of justice after such a senseless tragedy, they are again calling for renewal of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994. If a second Obama administration will have the political capital to promote any gun control legislation at all, it will be the renewal of this ban. It will therefore benefit anyone interested in gun politics to review what the assault weapons ban was, what it was not, and how it affected (or failed to affect) the nation.
Creating the Category
or How Do I Look?
The most important question, of course, is: “What exactly is an assault weapon?”
The term was specifically designed to conjure images of military machine guns, but for those totally unfamiliar with firearms, it should be made clear that automatic weapons (those that fire more than one bullet with each pull of the trigger) are already illegal for the average citizen to own. They are heavily regulated by the federal government, registered with the ATF and very difficult to obtain licenses for. Almost no crime is ever committed with them.
So in 1994, legislators were forced to ask themselves, “What exactly will this ban do away with?” The category of “assault weapon” didn’t actually exist, and this was an opportunity for gun control advocates to create it, to say exactly what they wanted off the streets.
As it turns out, they were mostly opposed to things they saw in movies. Which is to say that most of the features that now defined “assault weapons” had to do with form and not function, totally sidestepping the issue of violent crime altogether. Three quick examples:
1) Stock Manipulation
This is the Ruger 10/22. It has been in production since 1964 and is one of the most popular rifles in the country.
It is an ideal first rifle, small and manageable, which is why my parents bought one for me in my mid teens. It is well-made, inexpensive and easy to maintain. Its small caliber (.22) means that it is cheap to shoot and has almost no recoil. It can be used for very small game hunting (foxes, rabbits, etc) or varmint control, but is generally a sport (target shooting) gun.
What you see is also an assault weapon.
Not because of anything it actually does, but because of the stock. You might be able to tell that it is hinged, allowing it to fold up against the rest of the gun. This was one feature of an “assault weapon”, according to the new law. Another was the grip, which is vertical like a pistol rather than horizontal. A non-”assault” Ruger 10/22 looks like this:
There is not a single difference in the functioning of these two firearms. All the moving parts that make up the actual firing mechanisms are identical. The diminutive size of the ammunition means that it isn’t even recommended for self defense purposes. But the ban was far more concerned with the way guns looked than their ability to actually assault anything.
2) Suppressing
Can you tell the difference between these two guns?
The gun on the bottom has a slightly longer barrel, which is threaded to allow a suppressor or other accessory to screw on. This too was now illegal. Suppressors are usually called “silencers” by the general public, though they do no such thing. (That little *ptew* sound you hear in the movies whenever a gun with a “silencer” is fired? It was dreamed up entirely by the film industry.)
As an acquaintance of mine wrote:
In the early 20th century, before guns lost social acceptability and marksmanship was publicly encouraged, people with enough space were known to practice in their back yards. No one wants to annoy their neighbor with fussilades of afternoon gunfire, so the Maxim Silencer found success being marketed as a relatively inoffensive and civilized way to increase shooting proficiency.
In addition to being polite, home defense uses also prevent the temporary and permanent loss of hearing that is sure to occur when firing a pistol indoors, while also reducing recoil and eliminating muzzle flash, which can be temporarily blinding or disorienting.
Modern criminals have never really used suppressors, and its hard to understand where the gun control crowd were getting their ideas about the world if not from bad movies. Did they really think that assassins were creeping around executing people with suppressed pistols? Surely not. Nonetheless, one of the pistols you see above is an “assault weapon”, while the other is not.
3) Shrouds
As it turns out, even the most vociferous and high-ranking gun control advocates didn’t actually know what was being legislated. After the Virginia Tech massacre, Democratic House representative Carolyn McCarthy went on MSNBC to explain why she had introduced legislation even more extensive than the elapsed Federal Assault Weapons Ban. After some discussion, Tucker Carlson picked a banned feature from the list – a barrel shroud – and asked her to explain what it was and why it should be regulated.
After some hemming and hawing she admitted that she had no idea what her own legislation was referring to, but made a wild guess anyway, and thus another gun-culture joke was born:
For those interested, a barrel shroud is simply a metal cover that prevents the operator of a firearm from burning their hands on a hot barrel.
It would have been interesting to me if Carlson had explained the barrel shroud, and then asked again how cooler barrels contributed to violent crime. It is hard to imagine what her response could possibly have been. But it looks mean, and this was apparently what mattered to whoever actually wrote the legislation.
These are some examples of what the ban in question covered. Perhaps most tellingly, semi-automatic (legal) versions of automatic firearms were banned just because they looked like illegal guns.
When the category of “assault weapon” had finally been conjured into being, all of its included firearms together accounted for less than 2% of violent crime.[6] None of them had any more functionality than a hunting rifle. It couldn’t have been clearer that this was a war founded on image rather than reality.
The foreshadowing of just how much it wouldn’t accomplish was clear. Years later, a study of the ban’s effectiveness by the National Institute of Justice seemed to scratch its head out loud that “[a]lthough the weapons banned by this legislation were used only rarely in gun crimes before the ban, supporters felt that these weapons posed a threat to public safety…”
There was only one banned feature that had anything to do with practical function.
“High Capacity” Magazines
The ban on “large capacity ammunition feeding devices” was the most far reaching aspect of the legislation, as it applied to magazines for all guns, not just guns that were illegal due to other cosmetic features. Again, the question became: “What exactly is a high capacity magazine?” No such thing had been defined, and an arbitrary number of rounds would have to be selected.
Legislators settled on the number 10 for rifles and pistols, while 5 shells would be the maximum for a shotgun.
The strongest focus by gun control advocates in the wake of various shootings has been a return to these limits on magazine size.[7] (During Carol McCarthy’s question-avoidance in the above video, notice that her stump speech is an assertion of the importance of banning high capacity magazines. This has been duplicated on countless news and talk programs, blogs and websites, especially those that lean politically to the Left[8].) The idea is that if mass shooters have larger magazines, they will be able to kill more people before police or an armed citizen can intervene.
Keeping in mind the statistical rarity and relatively tiny death toll of mass shootings to begin with, is this true? Will high capacity bans lower the number of people killed in mass shootings? All we have to do is look at one of the deadliest shootings in the world: the Virginia Tech massacre.
With one pistol of 10-round capacity and one pistol of 15-round capacity, Cho killed more people than anyone has ever killed in a single U.S. shooting incident. He didn’t need any massive magazines or custom weapons. The embarrassingly simple reason that magazine size restrictions can’t lessen the lethality of mass shooters is that it doesn’t matter how many rounds fit in a magazine if a shooter has multiple magazines. When one runs out, they can simply drop it and pop another in, a process which takes five seconds at most. (Less than half a second, if you happen to be this guy.) Cho was able to carry out this massacre because he carried a backpack containing 19 magazines, a fact not well-publicized.
Of course, most semiautomatic pistols hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. In preparation for this article I asked a gun dealer to guess what percentage of new pistols came standard with magazines of more than 10 round capacity. His estimate was 70-75%, and he took model after model out of the display case to illustrate. The most popular (best selling) handgun in the world, the Glock 17, holds 17 rounds of 9mm ammunition. In fact, after looking at all available Glock models, I found that less than half them even had magazines smaller than 10 rounds available at all.
This is the model I own, a Ruger P95. It’s a standard sized pistol, small enough for me to regularly carry concealed. It was made to hold 16 rounds, more than either of the standard-sized magazines used by Cho.
My point here is that “high capacity” magazines are not some specialty aftermarket part that criminals obtain shadily over the internet. They were defined arbitrarily into existence, and before the ban were considered standard production to give consumers a decent product. (If you’ve made the decision to be an armed citizen to defend your self, home or family to begin with, why would you want less capacity than you could practically fit into one mag?)
Bottom line: Whether you have two magazines that hold 15 rounds or three mags that hold 10 rounds, you’ll be able to shoot all 30 bullets in less than 45 seconds. This fact, combined with the statistical rarity and low death rate of mass shootings and the statistical prominence of guns used in self defense (2 million times every year) make it difficult for me to justify the criminalization of what has, throughout American history, been considered a perfectly normal capacity – that is, however many rounds fit comfortably inside the firearm.
Remember, the only sensible reason for a capacity ban of any kind is the specific class of crime whose degree of success depends on the 5-10 second difference between having to reload and not having to reload. Mass shootings, it turns out, are the only time this is the case, and only to an incredibly slight degree, as demonstrated by Cho. I have already discussed why I do not believe that mass shootings should guide our policy to begin with.
And yet, I can almost hear the voices I have heard before, asking whether it is realistic to think that people actually defend their homes with “assault rifles” that have “high capacity” magazines…
(The gun used to defend both of these homes was an AR-15, the same gun Holmes used in Auarora, banned for production because there existed models of it elsewhere that were automatic.)
Grandfathering
This ban presented gun control legislators with another huge problem, which can’t be overstated.
There were about 1.5 million of these “assault weapons” already owned by Americans, and far more high-capacity magazines. In order to actually ban them, the government had to do one of two things:
1) Turn many thousands of law-abiding citizens into felons overnight, even though the guns were legal at the time of purchase or receipt.
2) Demand that the whole country surrender 1.5 million guns and millions of magazines.
Both options were practically and politically impossible, especially the latter. Images of the federal government confiscating and destroying the firearms of veterans, families and law-abiding Americans would not sell to most of the nation, and in some areas, might result in open revolt or civil unrest. It would also ignore a fundamental flaw with gun control legislation in general – that people willing to abide by laws aren’t the ones we should be concerned about.
The predicament resulted in what is generally referred to as the “grandfather clause”. It essentially meant that all “assault weapons” and “high capacity” magazines manufactured before the ban remained legal to own, sell and use.
To reiterate, millions of these banned firearms and high capacity magazines were legal to own and sell during the ban.
This meant that prices for these firearms and magazines shot up along with demand. Manufacturers had churned out as many soon-to-be-banned items as they could before it went into effect, then sold them at nearly twice what they had originally cost. Individual dealers who had already stocked up made small fortunes. You might even say that the Federal Assault Weapons Ban was the gun salesman of that particular decade.
10 Years Later
When the ban expired in 2004, everyone was anxious to study the results. Had it reduced crime?
How could it have?
The National Institute of Justice found that the ban hadn’t reduced gun crime or crime involving “high capacity” magazines, and that the effects of renewing the ban were “likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.” It then added: “Assault weapons were rarely used in gun crimes even before the ban.”[9]
The Center for Disease Control released a study of gun control legislation, including the assault weapons ban and found “insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws reviewed for preventing violence.”[10]
The National Research Council noted that all of the studies they had looked at “did not reveal any clear impacts on gun violence” and noted “due to the fact that the relative rarity with which the banned guns were used in crime before the ban … the maximum potential effect of the ban on gun violence outcomes would be very small…”[11]
Slippery Slope
If there was ever a single quotation that summarized the fears of the gun rights crowd surrounding the “assault weapon” ban, it is this one:
“No one should have any illusions about what was accomplished [by the ban]. Assault weapons play a part in only a small percentage of crime. The provision is mainly symbolic; its virtue will be if it turns out to be, as hoped, a stepping stone to broader gun control.”
– Washington Post editorial, September 15, 1994
As we have seen, the battles of gun control have been fought, won and lost with definitions. Categories are created, connotations ascribed with the stroke of a pen. The Brady Campaign, the strongest advocate for these bans, has taken this particular work one step farther since Aurora. They have now redefined “mass shootings” to include all drive-bys involving a shot fired toward three or more people, regardless of whether anyone was even actually hurt, leading them to assert that there are “20 mass shootings every year”. People who follow the news with some regularity may sense that there is something wrong with this statement, but this sort of redefinition does influence many people who don’t have the time or will to investigate such a claim.
It is intentional deceptions like this that have peaceful, gun-loving folks like myself looking over our political shoulders all the time. Add to this the fact that the Brady Campaign strategically changed its name from the more honest designation of “Handgun Control, Inc”, and perhaps it’s easier for the Left to understand why those of us who believe in the importance of ALL of the items in the Bill of Rights (including firearm ownership) are worried about the progressive nature of these bills.
With intentionally dishonest lobbying groups pushing already-failed legislation while calling it a “stepping stone”, we can see the slippery slope right in front of our feet.
Summary
If gun control advocates want to actually have meaningful discussion and debate about the “assault weapon” and “high capacity” ban, they MUST address these questions:
- Why ban cosmetic features?
- Why ban guns used in a mere 2% of crime?
- Why base gun control legislation on rare and statistically insignificant mass shootings to begin with?
- Why ban magazines that have been consistently sized since their invention?
- How would banning these magazines have saved lives, given that all a shooter needs is multiple magazines and 3 seconds of time (i.e. Cho)?
- How will a ban on either these weapons or magazines reduce crime, since there are many millions of them legal and available anyway, especially since production has ramped up after the ban’s expiration?
And most importantly:
After a decade of failure, why assume that the bans will reduce violent crime THIS time around?
An officially filed request to the Virginia Department of Health to amend existing Regulations for Licensure of Hospitals – which is essentially a legal challenge to force all hospitals to make the same architectural changes being forced on abortion providers – has received over 125 public comments in the first two weeks. This is the latest chapter in a long, controversial battle over the regulation of women’s health clinics that is heading into its third year.
Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano had an even more noteworthy flip-flop on gun control policy. In her 2002 gubernatorial run in Arizona, she had a textbook gun-rights approach:
This is the model I own, a Ruger P95. It’s a standard sized pistol, small enough for me to regularly carry concealed. It was made to hold 16 rounds, more than either of the standard-sized magazines used by Cho.
