NRA – Page 3 – Engaging Peace

We Let Them Pull the Trigger

Posted on January 25, 2018 by kathiemm

Note from Kathie MM: Abby Zimet, from Common Dreams (an online real news site to which you should subscribe only if you want more honesty, more courage, more speaking of truth to power in your news stories), tells it like it is. School shootings, mass murders, are becoming so common in our society that they barely make a ripple in the news. So, you have to ask yourselves–are you going to continue to vote for politicians owned by the NRA? Are you going to let the NRA scare you into thinking that violence stops violence rather than begetting violence?

Please read this article by Abby Zimet and act to end gun violence.

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Abby Zimet, staff writer, Common DreamsMail

From sea to grieving sea. Reuters photo.

Another one. This time on Tuesday in Benton, Kentucky. Two teenagers killed, 18 injured – three shot in the head, and in critical condition. So much ghastly same old same old: Small close-knit town, people shocked and grieving, good kids and “sweet souls” who will be missed, police still searching for a reason for a 15-year-old to open fire, residents coming together in their pain to plan prayer vigils, politicians sending – yes, really – more thoughts and prayers. It was the 11th school shooting of the year, and it’s still January. It was barely a blip in the heedless news.

Maybe because the day before the Benton shooting at Marshall County High School, there was a shooting at Italy High School in Texas. Or because, the same day, someone in a pickup shot at a group of students in New Orleans. Or because, also on Tuesday, there were at least 81 other shootings around the country; they killed 28 more people and wounded 40 more. Or because, in the gruesome new normal, a quarter of U.S. parents fear for their children’s safety while they’re at school, which, by all grim accounts, they should. Or because, in the bloody wake of Benton, local pols could only talk up armed guards, not gun control, which would “politicize” the horror, and the NRA-backed Enabler-In-Chief had to be shamed before he even offered his own crappy bogus thoughts and prayers.

Moms and other gun control advocates are still demanding action. What, we wonder, will it take, besides Preston Cope and Bailey Holt? We need to say their names. “In our time,” writes Sandy Solomon in her “Little Letter to the Future”, published in Vox Populi, “we reckoned our dead in firearms” and “grew ill/from (our) excuses for poor, innocent guns.” In the end, she writes, “About death,/ you know. We knew too much.”

Little letter from the future

In our time we reckoned our dead in firearms—
handguns, rifles, automatic weapons;
in much-parsed constitutional clauses;
in politicians bought by lobbyists
and salesmen. In our time, we objected
most of us, but we couldn’t stop those guns.
They squatted beside the desperate, the guy
who craved suicide; they incited
wild-eyed murder, mass murder.
In our time, we just hoped we wouldn’t
be unlucky, that a sick boy toting
what we called an AR-15-style
Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle,
wouldn’t burst into another first-grade
classroom where our kids studied addition,
subtraction; or into another night club
where we celebrated Saturday night;
we just hoped that a stray bullet wouldn’t
cross Central Park to reach the shady
bench on which we sat talking with a friend,
that no cop would imagine our hand reaching
for a pistol instead of a wallet or a phone.
We had to calibrate for guns. And those
with darker skin had to calibrate
more (no talking back, no attitude,
no running away, no looking tough or strange
or hard, no looking like yourself most days).
We knew the slogans: people, not guns,
kill people, a gun in the hands of a good
guy trumps a gun in the hands of a bad
guy, and on and on. We grew ill
from those excuses for poor, innocent guns.
They were everywhere—inside the jacket
of a man at the next table, in the glove compartment
of the car beside us at the light. Ubiquitous
and lethal, they entered our wild logic
awake or asleep. In those days, we let
our toddlers discover a parent’s gun, safety
off, badly hidden under a pillow
or jammed, for our own protection, inside a bag
under a restaurant table, and when our sweet,
curious children wrapped their little fingers
around the gun’s shape so they could gaze
into its empty maw, while we looked
away or dozed, we let them pull the trigger,
we let them kill themselves. About death,
you know. We knew too much.

Sandy Solomon

American still life

Republished from Common Dreams 1/25/2018

Had enough massacres yet?

Posted on July 25, 2016 by kathiemm

People at the Pearly Gates, noting NRA doesn’t allow for gun violence research. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Jmaaks.

First of all, perhaps we should stop harping on “gun control.” The hard-core right-wing NRA devotees will never stop fighting all kinds of control. That’s a dirty word to millions. It’s in their bible: “Don’t you dare try to control me you weak-kneed, government-pandering, lily-livered mother-lovers.”

It just doesn’t matter to them how many children are accidentally shot by their parents or each other or wives by their husbands, or even …. men and women by their dogs.

Accidents happen, they pontificate.

What is important to these don’t-try-to-control-me-my-gun-is-my-life devotees is their freedom—their freedom to bully, to threaten, and to “defend” themselves against all the threats, known and unknown, that seem to lurk everywhere. You know, the freedom they are sacrificing every time they let some smooth-talking, race-baiting, fear-promoting tyrant tell them whom to fear and whom to hate, and what to do to feel better.

If we want to get real freedom from fear and danger, maybe we can start with an alternative term for “gun control.”

“Gun reform” probably appeals to a lot of progressives, but “reform” is sure to sound leftish to the hard-lined be-ready-to-kill-anybody-if-they-look-at-you-wrong advocates. Not to mention its association with schools for delinquents.

Maybe we should talk about “gun sanity.” Maybe a gun sanity movement can remind people that nobody is perfect, that even gun-lovers who advocate gun-safety can end up accidentally shooting themselves.

Better yet, how about “gun sense”? or “gunsense”? Sounds like a no-nonsense expression, linked to commonsense, which should appeal to everyone.

And, actually, there is a grassroots gun sense movement emerging within several states, including Texas , Georgia , and Vermont , a movement that may succeed in promoting sanity at local levels while the U.S. government waffles under the control of the NRA.

Plus there are a whole lot of moms around the country demanding action against gun violence and who can argue against the power of moms?

For those who believe the nay-sayers claiming that you can’t legislate morality or even do anything to reduce violence, check out this study And this one

and think about what you can do to promote sanity, commonsense, and gunsense.

Shooting down morality: a picnic for the gun industry. Part 2.

Posted on February 15, 2016February 14, 2016 by kathiemm

In our last post , focusing on Albert Bandura’s analysis of moral disengagement as a manipulative tool in the hands of the NRA leadership, we discussed how the NRA uses “moral” (i.e., pseudo-moral) justifications, euphemistic labeling, advantageous comparison, and diffusion of responsibility to manipulate people’s thinking about deadly weapons.

Bandura also describes the way the NRA minimizes and misrepresents the adverse effects of today’s deadly semiautomatic weapons. Charlton Heston, former NRA president, proclaimed “I want to save the Second Amendment from the nitpicking little wars of attrition, fights over alleged ‘Saturday Night Specials,’ plastic guns, cop-killer bullets and so many made-for-prime-time non-issues….”

The NRA is also skilled at attributing the blame for the growing deadliness of guns to agents other than themselves. Remember their mantra: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”

Bandura suggests that the gun industry has also developed their own novel way of promoting moral disengagement regarding guns—i.e., by claiming that gun regulations are futile. After the fatal shooting in the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, the state governor argued against stricter gun controls, saying that if the shooter had been unable to buy weapons, he would have made a bomb.

There is considerable evidence that gun control legislation can reduce gun deaths. How can we morally engage people in nonviolent resistance to the NRA?

In an earlier blog, I identified mechanisms of moral engagement that are parallel to and can counteract reliance on processes of moral disengagement. Let’s consider how these mechanisms might work in response to the NRA propaganda machine.

The NRA’s pseudo-moral justifications for unlimited access to arms can be countered by the use of principled moral arguments both against reliance on deadly weapons to combat fears of harm fueled in the media but also against NRA arguments such as their claim that arming the German citizens in the 1930s would have prevented the Holocaust. (Did he never learn that the armaments of many countries were insufficient to stop the Nazi machine for several years into the war?)

Euphemistic labeling can be countered by realistic descriptive language—telling it like it is, which is essential to speaking truth to power (and corruption). Guns are not, as the NRA claims just a means of protection from violence and an assertion of independence in the face of autocratic governments; they are deadly instruments of violence that can kill oneself, one’s family, and other innocent people–and do so every day.

The reciprocal of advantageous comparison is identifying better alternatives; as Gandhi said, “an eye for an eye” leaves the whole world blind. There are better–more moral and more enduring–ways of securing the future.

Rather than diffusing and displacing responsibility, a morally engaged person is a moral agent who accepts responsibility, recognizing, for example, that refusing to stand up to the NRA endangers the safety of all Americans—in their homes, in the streets, in movie theaters, in elementary schools, on college campuses.

Rather than blaming the victims of violent crimes for not having guns to protect themselves, as the NRA does, we should recognize that those victims deserve exoneration—and shift the attribution of responsibility to those who profit obscenely from gun sales. (You know who they are.)

Finally, instead of dehumanizing and denigrating supporters of gun control, as Charlton Heston did when he called them “loony leftists,” isn’t it better both to humanize the victims of gun violence and respect those who have the courage to take on the NRA?

To learn more about the Brady campaign to end gun violence, click here.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

When will They Ever Learn?

Posted on July 24, 2015 by kathiemm

“American Square” by Soymonk¹.
Image licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.**

The latest rampage, as of this writing (I expect there will have been more by the time this is posted), was the work of a semi-automatic pistol in the hands of a “drifter” who should not have had a gun. This latest by-product of a money-and-unbridled-liberty-at-all-costs club took the lives of two people and injured 8 more in a Louisiana movie theater Thursday night. You can be sure that the corporate media are in a frenzy, looking for some “terrorism” connection. If they can’t find that revered link, I imagine they will settle for cloaking the accused, 59-year-old John Russell Houser from Phenix, Ala, in the label “mental illness.”

I think the time has come to bestow the term “psychologically deranged,” along with “morally corrupt” on the arms industry and particularly its vicious handmaiden, the NRA. How many times do we have to hear about the murdering of innocent adults and children in their schools, their local theaters, their homes, before enough ordinary people commit themselves to doing something about it, nonviolently.

In sports, setting and breaking records may be great, but do we want to maintain records like the following:

The U.S. firearm homicide rate is 20 times higher than the combined rates of 22 countries that are our peers in wealth and population.

American children are sixteen times more likely to be killed in unintentional shootings than their peers in other high-income countries.

Already, in 2015, at least 146 children have been shot.

There are some very fine organizations working to reduce and/or end this insanity.

Learn more about and from them, including information on the ways you can be involved:

Americans for Responsible Solutions

The Brady Campaign

Moms Demand Action

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

^**The artist was motivated to paint “American Square” when he learned that sales of guns, particularly of semi-automatic rifles, have sky-rocketed and saw the maniacal manner of NRA’s president suggesting having a gunman posted in every school in the country. The incident struck the artist as a phenomenon totally opposite to what he anticipated after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on Dec. 14, 2012. America seems to face not only a racial division, but also a ‘pro-gun vs. anti-gun’ division, just as deep an issue. Needless to say, the artist stands clearly as an anti-gun proponent. Why? The artist spent many years and raised his family in Morton Grove, IL, north suburb of Chicago, which became the first city in the U.S. to legally prohibit possessing handguns. Owing the unprecedented outcome to a resolved resident of the town, the ordinance was put in effect in 1981. For the artist, the enforcement of the ordinance was a natural cause by the residents who only wish for the safety of their families in their daily lives. Now as a resident of Manhattan, NY, he has succumbed to the fact that the idea of handgun control is facing headwinds everyday and everywhere. In movies and dramas, guns play major roles and are too often used as the final solution. The viewers are desensitized to the actual impact these weapons could have. The real danger, that the artist feels, however, is that the fear of guns drives people to purchase guns. The more they purchase, the more they need.
Where does it all end or will it ever?