Native Communities are Fighting for a More Inclusive Farm Bill

Civil Eats

Native Communities are Fighting for a More Inclusive Farm Bill

Farm policy has long ignored tribal governments and communities. A coalition of tribes aims to change that.

By Kim Baca February 26, 2018

About 10 miles west from the Missouri border in the wooded, lush-green northeastern corner of Oklahoma sits the first tribally owned meat-processing plant in the country.

In addition to processing its own beef and bison, the 4,800-member Quapaw Tribe manages four greenhouses that grow fresh herbs and vegetables and a bee operation that both pollinates its plants and produces honey. The Quapaw people also roast their own coffee, which they package and sell, and earlier this year, they opened a craft brewery.

While participating in greater America’s enterprise system, the Quapaw also use some of what they produce to feed their own people and surrounding non-Native communities. In addition to supplying the steakhouse and restaurants at its casinos with freshly grown food, the tribe distributes bison to senior citizens and at the reservation’s daycare center.

The Quapaw tribe dedicating their meat-processing facility. (Photo courtesy of the Quapaw tribe)

“Our contention is tribes are not sovereign unless they can feed themselves,” said Ross Racine, executive director of the Intertribal Agriculture Council. “But today, $3.3 billion of Native American agricultural products go into the commodity market. [By contrast,] Quapaw is eating what they are growing.”

Although agriculture continues to play a big role in Native life today, the Quapaw’s ability to feed themselves is nearly unique. While the overwhelming majority of farm operators in the U.S. are white, among farmers of color an estimated 30 percent are Native American or Alaska Native, and together they generate $3.3 billion in sales each year. But Native producers have little access to critically important resources such as credit, insurance, or loan programs, and that fact limits their ability to be fully autonomous.

Hoping to ensure that the voices of the nation’s original caretakers are heard, Native American groups have come together to advocate for more inclusion, greater funding, and extensive revisions in the upcoming farm bill, which will replace the soon-to-expire Agricultural Act of 2014. For nearly a year, the Native Farm Bill Coalition—made up of more than 22 tribes, tribal organizations, and nonprofits across the country—has been meeting to craft policy for the $489 billion omnibus bill, which oversees food assistance for more than 46 million low-income Americans, as well as food safety, agriculture insurance and losses, agricultural research, and rural housing and economic development.

“The farm bill holds the potential for tribal governments and producers to feed their own people in their own tribal food systems,” said Colby Duren, co-author of a report commissioned by the Native Farm Bill Coalition, during a recent webinar. “All of this will help spur economic development [and] build critical infrastructure, which is lacking in a lot of communities. [It will] be able to support traditional foods and … improve health, nutrition, food access and food security.”

Designing a Bill to Support Native Communities

Native communities’ lack of access to resources is due partly to the status of Native lands, which are held in trust by the U.S. government, making traditional landowner financing difficult to obtain. Without access to capital, much of the food produced on those lands is processed and consumed outside the community. Additionally, while non-Native communities have had access to various U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs since the 1940s, only in 1990 were the first Native producers eligible for these programs, Racine said.

“We’re in a phase of catch-up,” he said.

The disadvantages Native Americans face when it comes to land and food access have roots that stretch back centuries. Starting in the late 1800s, the federal government used treaties to force many to convert to a western model of agrarianism and land management. The U.S. government assisted tribes in the transition—offering education, health care, and the right to self-govern, among other provisions—as a way to assimilate and settle Native people, who were seen as culturally inferior, in exchange for their land. Yet tribes already had their own traditional foraging and agricultural systems, and tribal land reduction and relocation destroyed many of those those foodways.

Eldrige Hoy, Choctaw Fresh Produce Farm Market Enterprise, Philadelphia, MS and Bryson Sam a member of the Choctaw Nation seed a high tunnel with Iron Clay peas as a cover crop to improve soil quality. (Photo courtesy of the USDA.

The effects were extremely detrimental to Native American wellbeing. With limits imposed on fishing, foraging, and hunting—and pushed out to rural areas with limited access to a commercial market—many tribal people became dependent on food distribution programs, which often contained processed food. As a result, Native Americans suffer some of the highest rates of diabetes and obesity in the country.

Those new SNAP boxes the Trump Administration proposed to near-universal outrage earlier this month? They’ve been regularly supplied to Native American reservations for 40 years.

Last summer, the Native Farm Bill Coalition published Regaining Our Future, a report detailing their recommendations to better support Native people in each of the bill’s 12 titles, or sections. Their suggestions include extending credit and conservation programs, allocating research dollars to land grant tribal colleges, and providing access to international markets for certified Native American products, among others.

The coalition also calls for tribes to issue their own Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, formerly called food stamps, which makes up 80 percent of the overall farm bill. (Currently, a majority of states manage the SNAP programs on Native American reservations.) Tribes would also like traditional and locally grown foods included in food distribution programs to help curb diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and other diet-related illnesses that Native Americans experience at higher rates. In some Native communities, one-quarter of members are participating in a federal food program.

Making Room at the Table

Photo courtesy of The Seeds of Native Health.

As Congress begins the process of reviewing the mammoth bill this spring, staffers with the office of Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) said bipartisan discussions on tribal recommendations that could be incorporated in the omnibus legislation or through supplemental bills are now taking place.

Already, Udall—who serves as vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs—and three other Democratic senators have introduced the Tribal Nutrition Improvement Act, which provides funding and adds federally recognized tribes to the list of governments authorized to administer federal food programs including the National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs, the Summer Food Service Program, and the Child and Adult Care Food Program. The legislation would allow tribes to directly administer school food programs without having to go through state agencies.

Though President Trump’s proposed 2019 budget calls for large cuts to American Indian programs, tribes are still hopeful that their voices may be heard, citing several gains in the last farm bill and support from congressional leaders familiar with tribal issues.

“For too long, Indian Country has been knocking at the door of each new farm bill negotiation, asking for a seat at the table as sovereign governments alongside states and counties,” Udall said. “This year, there is bipartisan support for including Indian Country in the farm bill negotiations and adding provisions to support Indian Country through sections like those on nutrition and economic development to name a few,” he continued, adding that he and Sen. John Hoeven (R-ND) have started discussions with tribes, the USDA, and Congress.

“I’m optimistic that we can continue to make progress,” Udall said. “We all need to come together to push the door open and make room at the table.”

Making progress on food sovereignty is of paramount importance to Racine and other Native leaders. “There has never been a society in the history of the world that has survived without the ability to feed itself,” said Racine during a recent Senate Committee on Indian Affairs hearing on agribusiness in Indian Country. “Agriculture is a tradition on our reservations, not the product.”

Students at Circle of Nations School in Wahpeton, ND gather vegetables that they grew in the school’s garden. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)

This article is part of a series published by Civil Eats in partnership with GATHER, a documentary chronicling the movement for Native American Food Sovereignty.

Top photo courtesy of Seeds of Native Health.

Catholic faith leaders pressure Congress to protect DREAMers from deportation

NowThis Politics is live now.Follow

February 27, 2018

Catholic faith leaders are gathering to pray, sing, and commit acts of civil disobedience at the Capitol today to put pressure on Congress to protect DREAMers from deportation. #Catholics4DREAMers

Catholic faith leaders are gathering to pray, sing, and commit acts of civil disobedience at the Capitol today to put pressure on Congress to protect DREAMers from deportation. #Catholics4DREAMers

Posted by NowThis Politics on Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Trump’s hero fantasy is shared by many — and that’s the problem, not the answer

Chicago Sun Times

Trump’s hero fantasy is shared by many — and that’s the problem, not the answer

Neil Steinberg February 27, 2018

Bruce Willis stars as Paul Kersey in a new version of “Death Wish,” a movie originally made with Charles Bronson in the starring role. | MGM photo

Mockery is easy. And kinda cheap. Well, not all mockery. Mocking government officials for political cowardice, for instance, is both important and not that easy, if done well.

I mean mockery over petty stuff. Particularly physical traits. Whenever someone goes on about Donald Trump’s strange hairdo, or tiny hands, or bulging weight, I wince and think, “Really? The man is a liar and a bully and a fraud, not to mention rolling like a puppy at the feet of the Russians and you’re bothered because his necktie is too long?”

Yes, mockery has a purpose. It comforts. The scary thing isn’t so scary. Hitler becomes a little man with a funny mustache.

Though sometimes mockery causes us to miss the larger point.

Such as Monday, when the president strutted his own imaginary courage before a group of governors at the White House, sparking a firestorm of ridicule. Twitter erupted like the Hindenburg exploding when Trump said he would have reacted to the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School with reflexive bravery.

“I really believe I’d run in there, even if I didn’t have a weapon,” the president said.

I’m sure he does really believe that.

Trump’s five draft deferments, when ducking military service in Vietnam, began pinballing around social media. Nothing more need be said. We are already familiar with his comic braggadocio. Just jump in with the #TrumpCoward hashtag, savoring clips of the Cowardly Lion and Trump cringing away from an American eagle. My favorite: an audio clip of Trump yucking it up with Howard Stern in 2008 about an 80-year-old man who fell off the stage during a ball at Mar-a-Lago.

“You know what I did? I said ‘Oh my God, that’s disgusting’ and I turned away,” Trump laughed. “He was right in front of me. I didn’t want to touch him.”

But focusing on Trump’s callousness and lack of personal courage, the glaring contrast between the real man and the bloviating fantasy he actually expects us to believe, ignores something vital. Trump dreaming up heroics for himself also articulates the basis of the gun problem in this country, and it’s worth pausing to consider. This isn’t Trump’s failing. It’s everybody’s failing. If he’s a joke, there’s a lot of that going around.

Too many Americans — fairness means I have to ritualistically exclude millions of responsible gun owners, please God the majority, the cops and hunters and target shooters and collectors and such — own guns out of an unspoken “Death Wish” fantasy of blowing away bad guys. They, like the president, not only know how they would react in a life-or-death situation, but are armed and ready, itching for the chance, eager to enlist others — at the moment, teachers.

Fantasy is easy. Too easy. The truth is difficult, so people shrug it off. Trump turned on the sheriff’s deputy who was outside the school during the shooting but did not enter, calling him a “coward” and “disgusting.”

Yet the president pretends to be a friend of law enforcement.

I don’t know what the deputy should have done. I wasn’t there. The assumption that he should have stormed in as the music swelled and shot the first person who looked like a shooter works in the movies. In real life, he might have never found the killer — guards at schools in past slaughters have failed to be in the right spot at the right time — or shot some innocent kid carrying a cell phone that the deputy thought looked like a pistol.

We have a problem in our country that’s killing our fellow citizens, particularly the young. Instead of considering real world solutions, we’re talking dreams of grandeur.

We know sane gun policy works because it works in every country in the world but ours. The reason it doesn’t work in ours is that gun companies have sold a Hollywood fantasy of heroism to a terrified minority. We are in thrall to a bad dream.

Speaking of “Death Wish,” a remake of the 1974 Charles Bronson movie about a wronged man gunning down bad guys, this one with Bruce Willis, hits theaters Friday.

I’m sure it’ll do very well. Nobody ever went broke catering to the revenge fantasies of the American public.

President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with the members of the National Governors Association at the White House on Monday. | AP Photo

Trump’s Parade

Trump’s parade…..

Editorial & Political Cartoons

February 25, 2018

Kevin Kallaugher, The Baltimore Sun

Gun owner turns in his AR-15

MoveOn.org and Stand Up America shared Mic‘s video.

Gun owner turns in his AR-15

Learn More

MIC.COM

Gun owner turns in his AR-15

After the tragic events in Parkland, FL, this gun owner is turning over his AR-15.Chris Shields, an 18-year member of the military and owner of 10 guns, explains why no one needs this weapon — and is calling on fellow gun owners to give theirs up too.

Posted by Mic on Saturday, February 24, 2018

How could we have gotten to this point in our Democracy where a small minority rules?

A minority party the Republicans stolen control by gerrymandering and voter suppression and enlisting the aide of a foreign party. The minority Oil and Gas Cartel controls us and the NRA dictates And those who are elected to represent the people completely ignore their will and votes the minority lobbyists will.

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Guns will not save you from tyranny

The Week

Guns will not save you from tyranny

By Ryan Cooper February 26, 2018

Do guns preserve freedom?

Many conservatives believe they do. In one representative example, National Review‘s David French argued that we need a heavily armed citizenry in case the government turns tyrannical and America’s private gun owners need to wield the threat of gunning down police and soldiers to preserve their liberty.

[F]or the Second Amendment to remain a meaningful check on state power, citizens must be able to possess the kinds and categories of weapons that can at least deter state overreach, that would make true authoritarianism too costly to attempt. [National Review]

Liberals typically wave such arguments away as a nonsense hypothetical. Are small arms — and even AR-15s — really going to be useful against armored cavalry, heavy artillery, and drone strikes? (For his part, French concedes this point: “The argument is not that a collection of random citizens should be able to go head-to-head with the Third Cavalry Regiment. That’s absurd.”) And as Ed Kilgore notes, this conservative interpretation of the Second Amendment is extremely recent — not to mention that it’s a bit rich to hear coming from people who typically scream themselves hoarse about supporting the troops.

But let’s actually engage with this conservative argument on its merits. Indeed, history provides us many examples of times when people might have had an opportunity to use small arms against a tyrannical state. Did it work?

The results are not encouraging for Second Amendment absolutists.

Consider the American South, which was a brutal tyranny for most of its existence. First there was 250 years of chattel slavery, followed by about 12 years of genuine multi-racial democracy, followed by 90 years of Jim Crow tyranny — a racial caste system whose political foundation was white supremacist terrorism.

Those 12 years constitute Reconstruction, when the Republican Party under men like Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and Ulysses S. Grant used federal government power to enforce democratic institutions on the defeated Confederate states. President Grant directed occupying troops to preserve order and supervise fair elections, and used the newly established Department of Justice and the Enforcement Acts to suppress the KKK, which at the time was basically coextensive with the Democratic Party in the South. Where local juries would not convict due to threats and acts of terrorism, Grant’s Attorneys General Ebenezer Hoar and Amos T. Akerman brought in federal ones, and even temporarily suspended habeas corpus on occasion. These were harsh tactics indeed — but it was a brilliant success.

However, eventually Northern Republicans grew tired of democracy, and fell under the sway of quisling Liberal Republican racists like Sen. Carl Shurz and The Nation‘s E.L. Godkin. When an economic collapse could not be fixed with orthodox hard money policy, Republicans lost their House majority and Grant’s political strength was severely sapped. In 1876, the party effectively agreed to give up their most loyal voting block — black Southerners — in return for the presidency.

Throughout this time black Americans faced constant terrorism from whites. Many quite understandably armed themselves, especially the hundreds of thousands of black Union veterans. This did serve as some moderate protection while Reconstruction lasted. But when no-holds-barred confrontation broke out, blacks almost always lost horribly against wealthier and hence better-armed whites. As but one example: In Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873, black Republicans and state militia members were defeated by white paramilitaries (including many ex-Confederates) armed with a cannon. Some 150 were massacred, including many after they surrendered.

After Northern Republicans abandoned their black voters to the KKK in 1876, though, blacks stood no chance of resisting what was essentially state-endorsed white terrorism by force. Those paramilitaries and terrorists became the state government, “elected” through violence and fraud. What arms blacks had were mostly taken easily, and a racial caste system was reimposed. They faced not just the threat of overwhelming violence for any perceived slight, but the reality that any uprising would create a psychotic, murderous backlash against the entire black community. Indeed, completely innocent random black men were routinely butchered alive in front of picnicking white crowds, a gruesome ritual that (as intended) instilled bone-deep fear in the Southern black community.

The Civil Rights Movement used nonviolent tactics to break Jim Crow not through guerrilla war, but by demonstrating the reality of white tyranny, and (among other things) thus inviting superior federal government power to forcibly reimpose democracy on the South, again up to and including occupying troops.

Guns had nothing to do with warding off tyranny. Armed blacks who tried rising up against a tyrannical government failed. Guns were not the answer.

Something very similar played out in apartheid South Africa. Despite the fact that black South Africans have always been a gigantic majority in the country, Umkhonto we Sizwe (the armed wing of the African National Congress) had little success breaking apartheid through guerrilla tactics. On the contrary, the white minority apartheid government was largely successful in suppressing the movement — including the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, who was convicted of sabotage in 1964.

How did black South Africans eventually prevail? Not through armed resistance, but instead clever diplomacy, international solidarity in the form of boycott, divestment, and sanctions.

All this is not to say that use of guns against state power cannot achieve political ends. It can. In rare cases, those ends might even be worth achieving — like the Civil War. But one has to connect means and ends. And the fact of overwhelming federal military power means that if a real tyranny does get going in the United States, no number of light arms is going to preserve your freedom. You may have reasons for wanting to keep your guns — but suggesting that your firearms provide some sort of bulwark against state tyranny is just ludicrous.

trump Wants to Task Armed Teachers and School Coaches With Protecting Students From Mass Murderers

John Hanno February 25, 2018

trump Wants to Task Armed Teachers and School Coaches With Protecting Students From Mass Murderers

As usual, trump repeated the National Rifle Association’s tired talking points (a good guy with a gun…yada yada) , without thinking through the consequences of arming as many as 20% of America’s teachers and coaches, which amounts to introducing 700,000 loaded weapons into what should be sanctuaries of peaceful enlightenment, not armed encampments.

trump’s proposed solution “If you had a teacher who was adept at firearms, that could very well end the attack very quickly,” “We’re going to be looking at that very strongly. And I think a lot of people are going to be opposed to it. I think a lot of people are going to like it.”

The Hill reported: both Republican Florida Governor Rick Scott and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) broke with trump and are not in favor of arming teachers.

“Let law enforcement do the keeping us safe, and let teachers focus on teaching,” Scott reportedly said Friday, the same day Trump endorsed the idea of putting guns in teachers’ hands at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

“The notion that my kids are going to school with teachers that are armed with a weapon is not something that, quite frankly, I’m comfortable with,” Rubio said at a CNN town hall event in the aftermath of last week’s Florida high school shooting.

Ex Florida Governor Rep. Charlie Crist, also thinks its a bad idea and sides with most Florida residents (more than 70%) who now believe in strict gun laws, and also believes assault weapons should be banned.

And from Marc Caputo and Rebecca Morin, in Politico: During a Broward County CNN town hall, “Facing jeers and boos, Rubio shifts on guns during tense forum…

“It was a striking turnabout for Rubio, who never met a gun-rights bill he didn’t vote for in the Florida Legislature and in Congress.” The mass shootings in Newtown, Orlando, Las Vegas and even Fort Lauderdale didn’t get Sen. Marco Rubio to seriously reconsider his position on guns.”

“But Rubio shifted on firearms Wednesday night as he weathered the righteous anger of a parent and of the students who survived the Valentine’s Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and then faced him onstage in purple Florida’s liberal bastion of Broward County. Jeered and booed by the crowd, buffeted by tough questions, Rubio stood alone as the only Republican onstage. He said he would favor raising the minimum age to purchase an assault rifle from 18 to 21. And he said he would consider restricting the size of magazines for firearms. Rubio said he wanted to prevent another massacre and that it was time for everyone to start rethinking their positions.”

“It may not prevent an attack, but it may save lives in an attack,” he said, suggesting that three or four lives might have been saved in Parkland had there been some restriction on magazine size. Rubio said he would leave it to law enforcement to suggest what the right magazine size would be.”

“That wasn’t enough for the audience, even as Rubio chided them that politicians should be allowed to change their minds. And it wasn’t enough for the other people on stage.”

“The time for talking in Washington about to do about guns is over. It’s over. We know what to do,” said Democratic Rep. Ted Deutch , who represents the district where the school is located, in the city of Parkland.”

“But Rubio steadfastly refused to consider banning semiautomatic rifles outright. And he said he would not refuse money from the National Rifle Association, which has steered $3.3 million in contributions to him over the course of his career and given him an A+ rating — support he might not be able to count on after Wednesday night.”

“In June 2016, Rubio cited the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando as a major reason he leapt back into his Senate race, which he’d been weighing doing for months after failing in the presidential primaries. Rubio said that massacre had “impacted” him and made him feel he had to return to the Senate. He won, with NRA support. But in the nearly two years since, he has not championed any new gun legislation in Congress.”

“The subject of Rubio’s NRA contributions was the low part of his night and the highlight for the crowd when CNN’s Jake Tapper gave high school junior Cameron Kasky the opportunity to confront Rubio.”

“Sen. Rubio, can you tell me right now that you will not accept a single donation from the NRA in the future?” Kasky asked. The room erupted with cheers and applause.

Rubio didn’t immediately answer.” Kasky then mused about confronting a spokeswoman for the NRA.

“So No. 1,” Rubio responded, “the positions I hold on these issues of the Second Amendment — I’ve held since the day I entered office in the city of West Miami as an elected official. No. 2 — no. The answer to the question is that people buy into my agenda. And I do support the Second Amendment. And I also support the right of you and everyone here to be able to go to school and be safe.”

Kasky cut him off and re-asked his question: “No more — no more NRA money?”

Rubio: “This is the wrong way to look — first of all, the answer is, people buy into my agenda.”

Kasky: “You can say no.”

Rubio said that the influence of the NRA was not its money as much as “the influence … from the millions of people that agree with the agenda.”

Kasky: “In the name of 17 people, you cannot ask the NRA to keep their money out of your campaign?”

Rubio: “I think in the name of 17 people, I can pledge to you that I will support any law that will prevent a killer like this from getting a gun.”

“No,” Kasky responded, “but I’m talking about NRA money.”

“The evening didn’t start particularly well for Rubio, either, when he was questioned by Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was killed last week in school.”

“Were guns the factor in the hunting of our kids?” Guttenberg asked.

“Of course they were,” Rubio replied. “No. 1, Fred, I absolutely believe that in this country if you are 18 years of age you should not be able to buy a rifle, and I will support a law that takes that right away.”

“Rubio was met with applause and went on to say he supports banning “bump stocks,” which can make a semiautomatic weapon fire like a machine gun. He also voiced his support for better background checks and mental health funding.”

“But when Rubio said an “assault weapons ban” would not have prevented last week’s murders, the boos rained down.”

“It is too easy to get,” Guttenburg said. “It is a weapon of war. The fact that you can’t stand with everybody in this building and say that, I’m sorry.”

Its been reported that one, and as many as three, Broward County police officers, who first responded to the active school shooter call and may have arrived while the shooting was still in progress, remained outside until the swat team arrived. The incident is under investigation so we shouldn’t speculate on what transpired. But we know that most if not all local police are routinely armed with a hand gun and possibly a tazer and some sort of pepper spray. We also know from the past dozen or more mass shootings, the perpetrators are almost always armed with high powered assault weapons, mostly AR-15’s. and buckets of high velocity ammunition.

Should we expect grossly out gunned local police first responders to charge headlong into active shooting situations with their handguns, pitted against mass murders who are armed with high velocity assault weapons, high capacity magazines, possible even armor piercing bullets and bent on killing as many people as possible? I’m sure the best body armor is no match for that kind of fire power. I’m also sure those police officers are hoping to get home to their families at the end of their shift.

So, trained police officers are not surprisingly reluctant to confront some crazy shooter pumping out anywhere from 80 to as many as hundreds of high velocity bullets per minute (if the perp has a bump stock), traveling at 3,200 ft per second.

And trump and his son Don Jr., NRA officials and spokespersons and probably most of the cowardly Republi-cons in congress think untrained teachers and gym coaches would jump at the chance to arm themselves and take the place of highly trained swat teams. Nonsence! News Flash, teachers don’t get paid to put their lives on the line every day.

First of all, any shooter who’s planned their attack for probably months, would no doubt aim for the armed teachers first. The average shooting spree lasts from 3 to 6 minutes. So by the time any of these armed teachers were able to unlock, unholster and aim their weapon, most of their class would probably have already been mowed down.

But if trump and the NRA panderers still think its a good idea, they should arm themselves and show America how its done. trump and his sons could take the first shift.

NRA spokesperson extraordinaire Dana Loesch and NRA Florida Lobbyist for the last four decades, Marion Hammer, called the most influential gun lobbyist in the United States, would certainly volunteer for a few shifts a month, considering the financial benefits they’ve received from the NRA.

And I’m sure, “good guy with a gun,” NRA Chief Executive Officer Wayne LaPierre would certainly stand behind his unflinching gun rights advocacy of assault weapons and munitions of any kind and would be the first to volunteer to protect defenseless children.

All of these gung-ho, gun rights politicians, and assault weapon supporters should volunteer to protect children in their districts for at least a few days each month. Problem solved. But I’m guessing you probably won’t find many volunteers if any.

The students, teachers, parents and police officials from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have a better idea. They know what has to be done. And all of the students and parents and teachers and police officials from all of the 170 or so schools who’ve experienced school shootings know what has to be done and are standing firm with the Parkland community. And most of critical thinking America and the civilized world knows what has to be done and stands with Parkland.

Stand with Parkland and tell your representatives to ban these weapons of mass human carnage. These victims, students, parents and teachers won’t be silenced this time. the trump administration and legislators in the U.S. Congress and in Florida must respond with sensible gun control laws or be damned. If they won’t, vote them out in November.

Jefferson’s ‘tree of liberty’ and the blood of schoolchildren

Yahoo News

Jerry Adler February 25, 2018

On the second day of the Republican National Convention, Ohio Minutemen gather in downtown Cleveland to express their feeling on the Second Amendment in Cleveland, July 18, 2016. (Photo: Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Like all Americans, I have a Second Amendment right to own a firearm. I may not choose to exercise it, but the Supreme Court, in the 2008 case of District of Columbia v. Heller, is pretty clear on the subject. I don’t even need to be part of a militia, which is good, because I wouldn’t know how to join one. So I accept gun ownership, in principle, as part of my birthright, and acknowledge that the same rights accrue to people who might, for one reason or another, hate me. As journalist Mickey Kaus once wrote, if liberals interpreted the Second Amendment the way they interpret the rest of the Bill of Rights, there would be law professors arguing that gun ownership is mandatory.

Why would I need one, though, except to commit a crime? Why does anyone?

For hunting, obviously. Although I do not hunt, I recognize it as essentially harmless, except to the animals who are killed, and to people who get shot by mistake, including occasionally the hunters themselves. But shotguns and single-shot rifles are rarely used in crimes and I know of no serious proposals to ban them.

For target shooting, as a sport. I have done this, and I enjoyed it. Encouraging better marksmanship is a worthy national goal, and if we keep it up, the U.S. Olympic team might hope to someday win a medal in biathlon.

For personal defense. I consider myself an expert in this field, having lived in New York City my whole life, including some years in the 1970s when I would go home on the subway after leaving work at 1 a.m. There were occasions when I wished I had a handgun, but with the benefit of reflection, it’s obviously a million times better that I didn’t, for me as well as for all the obnoxious drunks who nearly threw up on my shoes. Having survived to this point, I am content to entrust my safety to the very excellent protection of the NYPD, but I also recognize that other Americans, in different circumstances, might come to a different conclusion. If — hopefully, after weighing the dangers of a handgun being found by a child, or fired by accident, or used to commit suicide or murder a family member during an argument — a competent adult decides he or she needs one, then by a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court, they have that right.

But the subject on everyone’s mind now is not handguns but rifles, in particular assault-style rifles such as the AR-15, which are the weapon of choice in random mass shootings such as the recent ones in Parkland, Fla., Sutherland Springs, Texas, and Las Vegas. Why would a law-abiding American citizen want to own one of those?

To wage war against the government. There are many contenders for the worst ideas to emerge in the wake of the Parkland massacre, but I’d like to nominate this column by National Review writer David French — the same guy whose name was briefly floated as a sane conservative third-party alternative to Donald Trump in 2016. French argued against banning semiautomatic assault-style rifles on the grounds that we might need them to fight a reprise of the American Revolution. After all, you can’t take on the United States military with guns meant to shoot ducks and paper targets. French acknowledges that ordinary citizens wouldn’t stand much of a chance against the 101st Airborne, but, he writes: “For the Second Amendment to remain a meaningful check on state power, citizens must be able to possess the kinds and categories of weapons that can at least deter state overreach, that would make true authoritarianism too costly to attempt.”

And: “To properly defend life and liberty, access to assault weapons and high-capacity magazines isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity.”

The idea that Americans should arm themselves to fight “state overreach” is a staple of gun-rights groups and politicians occupying the political terrain that runs rightward roughly from the NRA to the edge of the earth. It goes back at least to Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with blood of patriots and tyrants.” In 2010, Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle notoriously floated the idea of “Second Amendment remedies” against Congress. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz invoked it in a 2015 fundraising email, which prompted Sen. Lindsey Graham to respond tartly that “we tried that once in South Carolina.” In view of how the Civil War turned out for the Confederacy, “I wouldn’t go down that road again.”

Indeed. If Cruz is seriously concerned about having to fight “governmental tyranny,” he might want to reconsider his support of President Trump’s military buildup, which could only make it harder. As long ago as the 1950s, when there were mutterings in the South about renewing the hostilities that were suspended at Appomattox, Louisiana Gov. Earl K. Long taunted the arch-segregationist political boss Leander Perez: “What are you going to do now, Leander? The Feds have got the atom bomb.”

Well, one solution would be to get your own atom bomb. As far as I can tell, no one is seriously asserting that the Second Amendment conveys a private right to own nuclear weapons — not even the National Rifle Association, probably not even Gun Owners of America, a group composed of people who consider the NRA insufficiently zealous and which claims 1.5 million members. The group does, however, seek to legalize machine guns, which would at least slightly improve the odds of going up against the Marine Corps.

A lot of this is just posturing, of course: The NRA’s key stakeholders are gun companies, and it serves their interests to hype the threat that “jack-booted government thugs” are coming to arrest grandma and confiscate her derringer. The NRA’s Dana Loesch made news last week with a claim that the mass media “loves” mass shootings because of the ratings they bring. Leaving the despicable nature of the charge aside, it is a fact that publicized incidents of gun violence have benefited the firearms industry by spurring sales to patriots scared that this time Nancy Pelosi really is coming to take away their guns. Remington filed for bankruptcy this month amid a general slump in gun sales that set in right after the 2016 election, when gun owners could relax in the knowledge that Hillary Clinton’s evil designs on the Second Amendment had been thwarted.

But quite a few Americans apparently agree with French on the danger that Washington might someday decide to pick up where George III left off and reimpose the Stamp Act or force Americans to quarter troops in their homes. Banding together in militias like the so-called Three Percenter movement, they are preparing to meet that threat with AR-15’s.

Members of self-described patriot groups and militias run through close-quarter combat shooting drills during a Three Percenter United Patriots’ field training exercise, which they describe as the largest patriot event in the country, outside Fountain, Colo., July 29, 2017. (Photo: Jim Urquhart/Reuters)

Of course, the same qualities that make assault-style rifles so precious to self-appointed defenders of American freedom also make them the weapon of choice for those who want to kill as many schoolchildren as possible. A ban on the sale of these weapons took effect in 1994, with a 10-year sunset provision. After it expired in 2004, it was not renewed. There is little evidence that the ban did much to reduce gun violence, or even reduce sales of the weapons it was meant to control. With minor modifications in design, functionally equivalent variants of the AR-15 slipped through the cracks. The chances of the same ban being reinstated now are probably nil, in a political climate in which Donald Trump’s first instinct after the Parkland shooting was to call for arming schoolteachers so they could shoot back. In a Saturday interview, Trump went further and suggested raising the minimum age to buy a rifle from 18 to 21. Trump confidently predicted that the NRA would go along with the new age requirement, which the group has long opposed.

The NRA has informed Trump that he’s mistaken.

One way to achieve at least some of the benefits of banning assault weapons would be to limit the number of bullets they can hold. The gun-control organization Sandy Hook Promise is circulating a petition for a law to ban rifle magazines holding more than 10 rounds, forcing shooters to stop to reload more often. The young man who shot up Sandy Hook elementary school carried 30-round magazines, but even so, according to Nicole Hockley, whose son Dylan died in the attack, 11 children managed to escape in the seconds it took him to swap in a new one. If Trump seriously believes in arming teachers, limiting magazine size should be a change he supports, because even if they managed to draw their handguns, their only hope of standing up to a gunman firing off an AR-15 is to wait for him to reload.

I predict that assault-style rifles will be around for the foreseeable future, and I suspect one will be used again, sooner or later, to slaughter Americans in a church or office or school. And — call me naïve — but I would much sooner entrust my freedom to America’s justice system, which is also part of the Constitution, than to a bunch of middle-aged guys running around the woods in camo pants, no matter what kinds of guns they have.

I hope I am never forced to put my life on the line to defend liberty, and if it should happen, I hope I have the courage to do so. But that’s not a risk I would take with the life of someone else’s child.

NRA spokeswoman confronted with the facts on the assault weapons ban. She had no answers.

ThinkProgress

NRA spokeswoman confronted with the facts on the assault weapons ban. She had no answers.

Rather than face the facts, NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch ducks, dodges, and distracts.

Casey Michel February 25, 2018

Deaths from assault weapons spiked after the assault weapons ban was lifted - a fact NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch has tried to ignore. (CREDIT: GETTY / ALEX WONG) — Deaths from Assault weapons spiked after the assault weapons ban was lifted – a fact NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch has tried to ignore. (Credit: Getty / Alex Wong)

The latest round of obfuscation came Sunday, when NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch tangled with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

In her appearance, Loesch repeatedly danced around Stephanopoulos’s point that, during the U.S.’s decade-long ban on assault weapons, both incidents and deaths due to the weapons dropped dramatically. As Stephanopoulos pointed out, research from the University of Massachusetts’ Louis Klarevas found that, from 1994-2004, there were only 12 incidents – about one per year – due to assault weapons, totaling some 89 deaths.

“Look at that right there,” Stephanopoulos said, pointing to the numbers. “We see the casualties go way up.”

But Loesch ignored the numbers, instead claiming that the ban “did not have much of an effect on the crime rate.”

At no point in the appearance did Loesch address the fact that the repeal of the weapons assault ban coincided with a tripling in the rate of both incidents and deaths from assault weapons. And Stephanopoulos, to his credit, wouldn’t let Loesch skate free.

“Excuse me for a second,” he said. “No one’s saying this is going to eliminate every single killing. But we do know that we’re the only country that has wide access to these kind of weapons, and no one else has the frequency or the intensity of these mass shootings than we do.”

Loesch, as it is, pointed out that France has seen a higher casualty rate from mass shootings than the U.S. over the past decade – due almost exclusively to the Bataclan terrorist attack.

However, she failed to address the rate of mass shootings overall. (Or the fact that the U.S. has a far, far higher rate of deaths from firearms than other developed countries.) In one study, a pair of researchers from Texas State University and State University of New York in Oswego found that, from 2000-2014, the U.S. had more mass shootings than 10 other developed nations combined – a list that included France. Even when adjusted for population, the U.S. is still higher than France.

More numbers also show just how much the tide of public opinion is turning against the NRA’s message. A CNN poll released Sunday showed a striking surge in support for increased gun control, with some 70 percent of those surveyed saying they favor increasing restrictions — the highest rate in 25 years. Perhaps most impressively, a majority of those in gun-owning households now support increasing restrictions for gun purchases — as do, at 49 percent, a plurality of Republicans. The rate of support is also nearly 30 points higher than it was in 2014, when only 44 percent of Americans backed increasing restrictions.

The poll found “57% who back a ban on the manufacture, sale and possession of rifles capable of semi-automatic fire, such as the AR-15,” up 8 points since October.