Even the murder of 19 elementary-school children in Texas could not deter the US gun industry from enjoying its annual celebration of the weapons that slaughtered them.
Ahead of its three-day convention in Houston, Texas, last weekend, the National Rifle Association (NRA) offered its “deepest sympathies” to the families of students, aged eight to 11, and two of their teachers, killed in a “horrific and evil crime” in the small town of Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday last week.
In the next sentence, the NRA absolved the gunmakers and their US$20 billion-per-year industry, which claims the lives of more than 100 people in the US each day, by dismissing the massacre as “the act of a lone, deranged criminal.”
Illustration: June Hsu
With that out of the way, one of the most powerful political lobbies in the US moved swiftly on to heralding the conference as a “a freedom-filled weekend for the entire family as we celebrate freedom, firearms, and the Second Amendment.”
Central to the fun was “over 14 acres [5.7 hectares] of the latest guns and gear” on display.
The NRA’s defiance and swagger were not misplaced.
Some of its supporters were shamed into pulling out of the conference, including Daniel Defense, the manufacturer of the semi-automatic rifle used by 18-year-old Salvador Ramos to kill the children.
However, they were not missed as former US president Donald Trump spoke at the opening event on Friday last week, less than 500km from Uvalde. Trump attempted to bring a degree of solemnity to the proceedings by reading the names of the 21 dead as a recording of a bell sounded.
Then he launched into a defiant defense of guns by accusing the Democratic Party of “virtue-cycling” over the massacre while claiming that gun reform would have done nothing to stop it. Instead he ticked off a list of NRA talking points as solutions, from better mental healthcare to arming teachers.
The NRA rank and file at the conference was not discouraged from the argument that more guns were the answer to gun massacres by the infuriating and heartrending revelation that 20 well-armed police officers waited outside the Uvalde classroom for nearly an hour before acting against Ramos, during which time at least some of the children were still alive.
After a series of conflicting versions of events over several days, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said that the onsite police commander held back his officers while a hunt was under way for a key to unlock the classroom door in the false belief that there was not a serious threat to the students, even after a barrage of shots was heard when Ramos first entered the room and then sporadic firing thereafter.
Even with teachers and children repeatedly calling the emergency services — including a girl who pleaded: “Please send the police now” — and parents begging the police to move in, the commander held off.
“Of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision,” McCraw said.
The murder of elementary-school children in Texas came just days after a white supremacist allegedly shot dead 10 people in a Buffalo, New York, supermarket. Yet Uvalde is likely to hold a special place in the nation’s collective memory of murdered schoolchildren, alongside the slaughter of 20 young children and six adults, at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut in 2012, and the murder of 14 high-school students and three staff in Parkland, Florida, six years later.
REFORM STIFLED
Ryan Busse, author of Gunfight, a book about his time as gun industry executive who became disillusioned with the industry’s contempt for life, wants to believe that each mass killing shifts the US closer to addressing its gun crisis.
However, he is cautious.
“I was in the firearms industry during Sandy Hook. At the beginning, everybody in the industry was 100 percent convinced that groundbreaking legislation was coming after that,” Busse said. “Two weeks later, they were less sure, and four weeks after, they were thinking it wouldn’t happen. So I’m just hoping we’re not headed down that path again.”
“I do think that there are a group of moderate Republicans in the Senate who believe that something should be done now, probably for political reasons, but it won’t happen out of any altruism,” he said. “The only way that will happen is if the industry senses that there is enough political pressure to cost them votes. In other words, it will be purely out of self-preservation if it does happen.”
There were flickers of that late last week as a bipartisan group of senators began informal talks on gun-safety legislation, but it is likely to be a long path even to restoring a federal ban on assault weapons, modeled on the guns the country’s soldiers use in war, that the Republican Party let expire in 2004.
For a start, any new restrictions are going to have to get past the gunmakers and the NRA. Between them, they have created an industry whose power has left it largely unregulated and unaccountable, to a degree others can only wish for.
People in the US bought nearly 20 million guns last year, the firearms industry’s second-best year on record. Gun deaths were also up, with 45,000 people in the US killed by firearms last year, the Gun Violence Archive showed.
More than 1,500 were children or teenagers. Among the dead were the victims of 692 mass shootings, defined as resulting in four or more people killed or wounded, in the US last year.
The worst of the massacres drive up gun sales. Daniel Defense reported a surge in demand for its semi-automatics after the Sandy Hook murders.
Busse said that gunmakers were well aware of the cost of their business in lives, but there was money to be made.
“I think they realize that bad things had very positive consequences for gun sales, and so they were OK with looking away from the bad things,” he said. “When the American capitalist publicly traded system gets involved in this, and you have those sorts of immense quarterly pressures, the forces of big money encourage really irresponsible actions.”
Opinion polls consistently show that a slim majority of people in the US want tighter gun laws, while about one-third said they should stay as they are.
Only about 10 percent want to see these laws relaxed further, but support for more restrictions has fallen over the past three decades from nearly 80 percent backing more gun control.
That is largely the result of politicization of the issue, as the NRA turned unswerving support for access to guns into cultural and political litmus tests in parts of the country, alongside anti-abortion campaigns.
Meanwhile, profits of gunmakers surged.
NRA COERCION
Many members of the US Congress are afraid of the NRA, in the same way they avoid the ire of the oil lobby and American Israel Public Affairs Committee, because of their ability to mobilize hostile money and votes.
“The NRA has learned a very effective lesson,” Violence Policy Center director Josh Sugarmann said. “They only need to activate a relatively small percentage of supporters to hold the federal policymakers in check.”
“Their advocates are just incessant. They embrace to the highest possible degree any opportunity to make sure that their policymakers know their position,” he said. “They go to the district meetings, they call, they write, and they don’t just write once, they don’t just call once, they do it consistently, and they don’t do it just in the context of some horrific event. They do it all the time.”
Gun rights advocates are also frequently single-issue voters in Republican primary elections. Accusations of anything less than unswerving commitment to the US Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment — as largely unfettered gun ownership as a constitutional right — can be political suicide. Many Republican and some Democratic candidates pledge their support of the NRA and sport its endorsement large in their advertising.
With that power, gun manufacturers have captured policymaking. Its goal is not so much to create new laws — although it has some notable successes — as to foster silence and inaction on gun control. When legislation does pass, it is more likely to be designed to shield the gun industry from accountability than to regulate it.
At the behest of the NRA, the US Congress has tied the hands of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as the federal agency responsible for overseeing gun regulation, on the grounds that intervention threatens constitutional rights.
The firearms bureau is limited in its ability to monitor gun shops, which is one reason Mexican drug cartels arm themselves with weapons bought in Texas. Congress also barred the bureau or any other federal agency from keeping centralized records of gun ownership or sales.
The firearms industry has also worked to prevent Americans from understanding the true cost of largely unregulated firearms ownership. The manufacturers were so alarmed by a groundbreaking 1993 study, which showed that the dangers of having a gun in the house far outweighed whatever protection it might offer, that the NRA pressured Congress to put a halt to such research.
Three years later, Republicans pushed through a law cutting virtually all federal funding for studies about gun deaths. As pressure grew from the victims of gun crimes to hold weapons manufacturers to account, gunmakers and their lobbyists engineered a 2005 law limiting liability claims against gun manufacturers who were facing lawsuits from cities seeking compensation for healthcare and law enforcement costs resulting from gun violence.
Mike Fifer, then CEO of Sturm Ruger, one of the country’s leading handgun manufacturers, told the NRA that the law had probably saved the gun industry.
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