I devoted part of my column last week to fact-averse or prejudice-motivated legislation being pushed by some modern conservatives. Then the Democrats pulled a stunt this week that is forcing me to admit that high-profile liberals do it too.
I’m referring to a “sit in” that Democrats held in the House of Representatives to disrupt business there and ostensibly protest gun control.
America does, in fact, have far more firearm related deaths than other nations with similar incomes. Some gun control measures would probably help with that. But the specific bills being considered in Congress now would either do next to nothing to fix the problem, are sold on fear or hatred of minority groups or both.
The measure most likely to pass in the Senate, where it enjoys some Republican support, is a bill to restrict firearm sales to those on terrorism watchlists, and possibly to expand those lists or make it harder to get off of them. The idea is a reaction to the Orlando shooter. He professed ties to the Islamic State and had been investigated by the FBI in the past. While banning gun sales to suspected terrorists sounds like common sense, it’s not that simple.
To start with, most terrorism in the United States is committed by white, male, right-wing extremists born in this country. Our watchlists don’t reflect that. Instead, they are mostly comprised of foreign nationals. They’re probably mostly Muslims. This is in spite of the fact that Islamic terrorism is almost negligible in the United States compared to Christian extremism, hate crimes or other terrorist activities.
So the lists pander to the idea that Muslims, and immigrants in general, are far more likely to be terrorists than they really are. This reinforces stereotypes that hurt real people. The Democrats freely embracing an anti-terror policy that distorts reality in a way that stokes fear against a minority group is saddening. If we’re going to have the lists, and especially if we’re going to make them more meaningful, we should probably pay more attention to the Christian fundamentalists or white supremacists more likely to kill innocent Americans than Islamic terrorism. But the voices on the left and right calling for the expansion of the FBI terror watch list and the no fly list have a very different idea in mind.
There has been outrage in recent days and weeks that the government hadn’t been able to identify and monitor the Orlando shooter to stop him from committing terrorism. It’s worth noting that the man had no known ties to any terrorist network. So for the government to be actively tracking him, they would have to make a policy of monitoring everyone who had ever expressed sympathy for a group designated as a terrorist organization and then continue to monitor them and restrict access to weaponry. In practice, this could theoretically cover anyone who has ever expressed support for the Syrian rebels or the Palestinian government, curtailing their freedoms and giving the government free reign to invade their privacy. I arguably meet those standards. John McCain, Hillary Clinton and President Obama arguably meet those standards.
It would then require the FBI or some other agency to gather enough data on every single one of those Americans to determine which ones are violent. All of them would then need to be watched constantly to make sure none went rogue. And these measures would only be able to cut down on the tiny number of terror attacks committed by Muslims each year, in exchange for a massive drain of resources and an unprecedented breach of privacy.
The calls to expand the watchlists to cover so-called “lone wolfs” make no sense and are based primarily on irrational fears of Muslims. The terror watchlists are similarly quite racist in their ignorance of the real threats in America. And the Democrats are playing right along with endorsing both and calling it “gun control.”
The second major law Democrats want is an expansion of background checks to all gun sales. As it currently stands, if you buy a gun online or at a gun show, you don’t necessarily need to get a background check that would reveal whether or not you were a felon. This makes many of our gun laws fairly useless in practice. Democrats like to bring up the broad public support the measure enjoys, and I’m inclined to agree. It makes sense to enforce the laws on the books and keep people with a history of violent crime or domestic abuse from getting guns.
But sometimes politicians of both parties like to go a bit further and suggest that we need to prevent the mentally ill from buying weapons. Democrats often suggest we do this with background checks. This is nonsensical. There are a lot of people with a mental illness in America. They are more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators. Most of them are entirely fine in their daily lives. Many are probably close, personal friends of yours. Even people with more severe mental health issues are not likely to be violent. So the idea that we need background checks to protect you from people with mental illnesses is untrue and designed to stir up fear towards already marginalized people.
Which brings me to another point. Our mental health care system is so bad that even if we wanted to ban people with mental illnesses from owning weapons, we wouldn’t be able to. More people with severe mental health problems are in our prisons than in treatment, and a large number are homeless. But let’s say we fix our mental health care system so a horrific number of people didn’t slip through the cracks. Even then there would be serious ethical issues with requiring diagnoses to be reported to the government.
However, there actually are some reasons to talk about mental illness in relation to gun control. Having access to a firearm makes suicide attempts much deadlier. There are more suicides than homicides committed with a gun in America. So, yes, our abundance of and easy access to firearms makes people with some mental illnesses less safe. Mandatory waiting periods might help with that. Background checks and increasing the stigma around them really wouldn’t.
The final measure that Democrats want passed is a ban on assault weapons. I guess I support it, but rifles, including assault weapons, account for less than three percent of gun deaths in the United States. If the best the Democrats have got are two measures rooted in fear of minority groups and a tiny dent in the overall death rate, I’m severely disappointed.
And this is their ideal. They know that none of this (barring the watchlist measures) are likely to pass. They know that a full-out ban on handguns, more funding to crack down on organized crime, a ban on 3D printing, drug legalization, better mental health care, requiring guns be made with fingerprint reading technology and other potential bills are every bit as likely to pass as the ones they chose. Yet in the end they’re backing a nearly insignificant measure, bills rooted in anti-Muslim fears and a good idea sold with discriminatory language.
So, fine, let the Democrats have their protests and filibusters. But they can’t expect us to believe they care about gun deaths when these are the best ideas they’ve got.