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    South Dakota governor says her two-year-old grandchild has several guns

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    South Dakota’s governor told an audience of people that her two-year-old grandchild has several guns.While speaking on Friday at a National Rifle Association (NRA) lobbying leadership forum in Indiana, the Republican governor Kristi Noem told audience members her toddler grandchild has multiple guns, reported Mediaite.During her remarks, Noem spoke about her grandchildren: Addie, who is almost two, and Branch, who is a few months old. Noem then said that Addie already had a shotgun and a rifle.“Now Addie, who you know – soon will need them, I wanna reassure you, she already has a shotgun and she already has a rifle and she’s got a little pony named Sparkles too. So the girl is set up,” said Noem.Noem’s remarks on her grandchild have gone viral on social media, with many commenters decrying the governor promoting gun ownership among children.“Absolutely sickening. How the hell is this real life in America?” wrote the Tennessee Democrat Chris D Jackson on Twitter.Another user commented: “Call CPS”.Noem’s comments follow yet another recent mass shooting involving children. Last month, three children and three adults were killed by a shooter – a former student – at a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee.Noem also signed an executive order during her remarks that seeks to “further protect the second amendment rights of South Dakotans”, and was joined on stage by the NRA’s CEO, Wayne LaPierre.“South Dakota is setting the standard for the most second amendment friendly state in the nation,” said Noem when discussing the executive order.The executive order would prohibit state agencies from contracting with any business that discriminate against a “firearm-related entity”, KELO reported.Former vice-president Mike Pence also spoke at the conference, but was booed loudly by audience members as he made his way to speak in his home state – possibly because some of the Republican base turned on him after he certified the 2020 election results. More

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      ‘There’s an art to not alarming people’: the duo who pranked Trump, Cruz and the NRA

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      Interview‘There’s an art to not alarming people’: the duo who pranked Trump, Cruz and the NRAMatthew Cantor The Good Liars – AKA Jason Selvig and Davram Stiefler – have mined a rich seam by infiltrating rightwing events and satirizing them with a straight faceThey have told Donald Trump he’s boring, obtained Dr Ben Carson’s signature to authorize a weed prescription, and attempted an exorcism on Ted Cruz.Jason Selvig and Davram Stiefler, AKA the Good Liars, have been working together since the era of Occupy Wall Street. Interviewing rightwing activists and slipping undercover into political rallies, their brand of satire exists somewhere between The Daily Show’s correspondent segments and the character-driven comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen.Comedian infiltrates NRA event to mock Wayne LaPierre’s ‘thoughts and prayers’Read moreAt an event for Ted Cruz – a frequent target – Stiefler managed to get onstage next to the senator and ask the crowd: “What made everyone so weird and sad that they had to come out here?” During a moment of prayer with the then presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, Selvig asked God to “give the candidates the strength to know when to quit”. But you might know them best from a recent appearance at an NRA convention in Houston, days after the school shooting in Texas.Addressing attendees as well as the NRA’s executive vice-president himself, Selvig made an impassioned speech, condemning “the leftwing media” for “saying Wayne LaPierre isn’t doing enough to stop these mass shootings”.He reeled off a seemingly endless list of tragedies before reminding the crowd that “the NRA under Wayne LaPierre’s leadership has provided thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families. And maybe these mass shootings would stop happening if we all thought a little bit more and we prayed a little bit more.”Many in the audience appeared to miss the satire. But when a clip of the speech emerged online, the rest of the world certainly didn’t. As of Monday, the video had received nearly 10m views on Twitter alone.It was hardly planned in advance. “We didn’t know that I was going to have that opportunity to be on a microphone with Wayne LaPierre until I walked into the room,” Selvig tells the Guardian. He spent the moments before his speech trying to craft remarks that “matched the tone” of the others there – apparently successfully, given the applause afterward.Selvig and Stiefler – born in the 80s, though they found themselves temporarily unable to speak when asked their exact ages – met through friends on the comedy scene in New York City. They became friends playing basketball together before conducting their first joint project, during Occupy Wall Street. Selvig and Stiefler posed as bankers, telling the media they represented the “Occupy Occupy Wall Street” movement and were proud to be part of the 1%. Speaking to protesters while wearing “thrift store suits”, they would lament their plight: “‘We’re gonna have to stop doing so much cocaine if we can’t afford it any more because you guys are out here,’” Stiefler recalls saying. “Kind of, like, over-the-top stuff that ended up being taken seriously.”They were surprised when actual bankers fell for the joke and joined them. “We sold merch, like to be funny – we thought we would sell zero of them. But we sold a bunch of, like, $300 cufflinks that said ‘1%’ on them, you know, playing this part,” Stiefler says. “We were trying to be found out and we couldn’t.” Finally, Rachel Maddow caught on.The time we asked Ted Cruz why he is so sad and weird. pic.twitter.com/1tbIrypaar— The Good Liars (@TheGoodLiars) June 15, 2020
      “Ever since then, we’ve felt like there was comedy to be mined from real situations,” Stiefler says. “And it was almost like we back-doored our way into being kind of socially, politically aware, because if we’re gonna go to events, interact with real people, it’s much more satisfying if we’re able to stick it to the right people.”That led to a new project a few years later: a film in which the pair, playing the roles of undecided and not-so-bright voters, pranked the 2016 presidential candidates. “That was kind of the beginning of the way we’re doing things now,” Stiefler says.That film led to the Cruz exorcism attempt, as well as firing guns with Rick Santorum while in character as worshipful fans, calling him “Dad”, and a query to Marco Rubio about a girlfriend who had fallen for the candidate: “What can I do to win her back? You won her away from me.”The amount of preparation that goes into each encounter varies widely. For the film, much of the planning was an effort to find “the funniest interaction that hopefully has some social commentary woven into it”, Selvig says, but also fit with the fictional character’s motivations.But plenty of improvisation is involved. Selvig describes the moment when they stood at the front of a Trump rally, in suits and bright red Maga hats, and began loudly complaining that he was boring – derailing the speech before Trump instructed security to get rid of them.“We had kind of a plan going in for something to do,” Selvig says, but that changed when they arrived on the scene. “We didn’t realize that it was going to be so boring. He actually is very boring live, because he just repeats the same things you’ve heard over and over and over again.” It occurred to them that pointing that out would be “the most insulting thing” for Trump. “It would hurt his feelings the most. And that was important,” Selvig says.Both men have backgrounds in improvisation, particularly Stiefler, who was on several teams as part of New York’s Upright Citizens Brigade. Selvig has a degree in drama from Syracuse University. But theatrical work can only take you so far when your scene partners are America’s political leaders.“We’re not working necessarily with the people in the same way you do onstage at a UCB improv show. It’s just kind of a different beast,” Stiefler says.“Ted Cruz is a horrible improv,” Selvig adds.So what is it like performing with someone like that – how do Selvig and Stiefler maintain their remarkable composure?It can be frightening, Stiefler says, particularly given all the concerns leading up to the key moment – getting through campaign security, occupying spaces where they aren’t supposed to be. “So yeah, our hearts are kind of beating and everything,” he says.But “once you’ve started, it would be weirder to bail than it would be just to see it through. It would be stranger and more alarming to people, I think, if you give up halfway through,” he adds. “I’ve never found it hard to keep a straight face, because once you’re in, you’re in.”That certainly applied to Selvig’s NRA speech, which went on for two minutes without interruption. “I didn’t really have time to worry about it, because by the time I’d gotten the creative down, I was in front of the microphone speaking,” Selvig says.But there was a very different reason to be fearful: everyone in that room, as Stiefler puts it, was “decidedly armed”.“There’s definitely an art to not alarming people too much and not seeming threatening in any way. But [Jason] being able to get on the microphone like that, I think it was such a just a perfect way of getting a chance to say what 60% of the country would love to say to Wayne LaPierre,” Stiefler says. The speech took place at an event where NRA members were voicing their opinions on his leadership, so LaPierre “really had to sit there. Listen to it. Take it all in.”Last year, the two found themselves on the fringes of a particularly unsafe environment: they were near the Capitol on January 6, speaking to those in the area before the riot. “We were talking to people and it was like – it had a feeling like something bad was gonna happen,” Stiefler says. “And as bad as it was, I was kind of grateful that we were there to document some of it.” He recalled speaking to one man who gave a monologue about Trump’s greatness and how he would “die in his boots” for the country; others described “1776 2.0”.“It just gives you a window into what’s going on, how convinced people are of this,” Stiefler says. “Being there that day is something I will never, never forget.”They watched people break through a police line and saw people speaking in tongues. Their microphones made them a target and they were surrounded and threatened. “I didn’t sleep for a week afterwards,” Selvig says. “Cops were crying – military, these grown tough dudes are crying because they’d lost control and didn’t know if their friends were all being killed inside … nobody knew what was happening.”At a time like this, can comedy cut through the madness? Stiefler and Selvig see reason for at least a little hope.“We have fans that will reach out and say we have kept them caring at all about politics – they would have unplugged a long time ago if they didn’t have a way of interacting with it that wasn’t so depressing,” Stiefler says.At Trump rallies, younger supporters of the ex-president will approach them and say how much they love the videos. “That’s got to be a good thing, if these people are decidedly not identifying with the really out-there stuff that we’re making fun of,” Stiefler adds.“It’s not like we’re trying to make Democrats out of everybody. We just think these certain people, and these certain ideas, need to be called out.”TopicsComedyUS politicsNRAfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Only cultural change will free America from its gun problem | Andrew Gawthorpe

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      Only cultural change will free America from its gun problemAndrew GawthorpeThe movement to protect innocent lives from gun violence is a multi-generational struggle akin to that which won African Americans civil rights or gay Americans the right to marry Some days it feels like guns are such a foundational part of American identity that the country would have to cease to be itself before it would give them up. When a gunman murdered dozens of elementary-age schoolchildren, leaving their bodies in such a state that parents had to give up DNA samples for them to be identified, it was one such day. What cultural value, what material interest, could be worth this? It must be something that its defenders consider supremely important.Guns – that’s what. Critics of the sickness which is America’s obsession with guns often focus their fire on the second amendment, or the perverse political influence of the National Rifle Association. But neither of these things really get to the root of the pathology. It’s true that gun-rights advocates rely on a surely mistaken reading of the constitution to justify arming themselves to the teeth. And it’s also true that the NRA is a malign force in American politics. But the constitution can be changed or reinterpreted, and special interest groups can be vanquished. What is at issue here is something more foundational, and more difficult to change: American culture itself.The gun is the great symbol, and poisonous offshoot, of American individualism. The country has long valorized masculine heroes – the cowboy, the frontiersman, the patriotic soldier – who impose their will on the community’s enemies with violence. It’s no coincidence that whenever a horrific mass shooting occurs, those in favor of guns respond by claiming that the solution to the guns of the bad guys is more guns in the hands of the good guys. Such reasoning responds to a deep-seated American historical myth, and allows the speaker to imagine themselves as the hero.But they are not heroes – far from it. Mass shooters may be, as the writer John Ganz put it, the “nightmare obverse” of the ideal of the lone frontiersman. But everyone else who defends their own right to possess a gun, who lauds guns as the bringers of peace and order, is guilty too. Their choices make society less safe, not more. The pleasure derived from guns, the sense of participation in America’s deepest myths about itself which they might foster, come at the expense of tens of thousands of lives a year. Sometimes, they are the lives of small children, innocent to the ways of a world which has allowed them to die.Men own guns at nearly twice the rate of women, and within all of this there is something deeply pathetic about the state of American manhood. American gun culture treats ownership of weapons of war as a sign of masculinity and virility, something that makes you more of a man. Almost anywhere else in the western world, a man seeking to demonstrate his masculinity in this way would be treated as an absurd and tragic poser. No doubt many gun owners tell themselves that they are better equipped to protect the innocent. But they are wrong. Rather, gun culture reveals the centrality of violence to American conceptions of manhood – a violence which ultimately harms rather than protects.If the problem is cultural, then what is the solution? There is no easy one. By now, the grooves of the debate are well-worn, and even a shocking event like the Uvalde massacre will not shake us out of it for long. Proposals to change the law or the constitution will be bitterly criticized, and gun-rights proponents will present the shooter as an anomaly who holds no lessons for “responsible” gun-owners. The supreme court is expected soon to loosen rather than tighten the law around carrying guns in public. Republicans will angrily decry attempts to “politicize” the massacre, as if the fact that innocent children are being brutally murdered due to the policies those very same Republicans support was not already a political issue of the highest order.But cultural change is not impossible. It has happened in recent decades on very important issues. America also contains within itself the will to self-improvement, and citizens who will give their all to achieve it. Sometimes it comes before political or legal change, and sometimes it comes after it. The only way to avoid despair is to see the struggle to protect innocent lives against the ravages of gun violence as a multi-generational struggle akin to that which won African Americans the right to vote, or that which won the right to gay marriage. Each of these required Americans in the grip of myths and pathologies to relinquish them, and each at one time seemed impossible. But change did eventually come.The path ahead will not be easy – and, as the supreme court’s expected ruling on Roe v Wade has shown, there will be setbacks along the way. Those who embody a pathological understanding of what America should be are currently ascendant, and there will be no easy victory over them. But despair would be surrender. That’s why for now there is the need to mourn the tiny lives which were extinguished. Remember them, and in doing so remember something else: America’s genius is that it can be changed, never quickly enough, but always in the end. It’s a slim hope to grasp onto in this moment of rage and sorrow, but it may be all that we have left.
      Andrew Gawthorpe is a historian of the United States and the host of the podcast America Explained
      TopicsUS gun controlOpinionNRAUS politicsGun crimeUS constitution and civil libertiesRepublicanscommentReuse this content More

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      America, how long will you sacrifice your children on the altar of gun worship? | Jonathan Freedland

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      America, how long will you sacrifice your children on the altar of gun worship?Jonathan FreedlandThis devotion to the right to bear arms is horrifyingly outdated. It brought terror to Texas – and it will happen again and again America’s great appeal to the world was its promise of possibility. It presented itself as virgin territory, a tabula rasa where a society could form anew, free of the past, and where individuals might do the same, reinventing themselves, renewing themselves, starting over. It was a myth, of course: it took no account of those people who were already there, and whose lives and lands were taken, or of those who had been brought to America in shackles. But it was a powerful myth all the same, one whose grip on the global imagination lives on: witness the success of the stage show Hamilton in seducing yet another generation into the romance of a new world and its revolutionary creation.But now we see something else: a country uniquely burdened with the dead weight of its past, and therefore powerless either to deal with a danger in its present or to make a better future. The land of possibility stands paralysed, apparently unable to make even the smallest change that might save the lives of its young.The evidence came again this week in the Texan town of Uvalde, where an 18-year-old walked into an elementary school and killed 19 children, aged between eight and 10, and two of their teachers. It was the 27th school shooting in the US this year, and it’s not yet June.There are so many stats like that. In the US, 109 people die of gun violence every day. There have been more mass shootings in the US in 2022 than days of the year. There are more guns in America than there are people. It was Uvalde this week, but last week it was Buffalo, where another 18-year-old walked into a supermarket and killed 10: his animus was directed at black people rather than children, but his method was the same.Each time, the satirists at the Onion bring out the same headline: “‘No way to prevent this,’ says only nation where this regularly happens”. The joke gets at something critical and curiously un-American: a debilitating form of fatalism.After Uvalde, I spoke to several seasoned Washington hands, asking if the horror of this latest massacre might at last prompt action. No, was the reply. Of course, each side makes the same ritual moves. Democrats deliver stirring, even heartbreaking speeches. Republicans then accuse Democrats of “politicising” tragedy, preferring instead to offer “thoughts and prayers” to the victims, before suggesting every possible remedy except the obvious one: this week we had Republican senator Ted Cruz of Texas demand an end to the menace of unlocked back doors in schools. Not one of them will so much as entertain the idea of, you know, making it a tiny bit harder for a disturbed teenager to get hold of a military grade assault weapon.The easy explanation for this refusal to act is money, specifically the cash put in the hands of pro-gun politicians by the National Rifle Association (whose annual convention, addressed by Donald Trump, is going ahead this weekend in Houston, Texas, with the massacre in Uvalde deemed no reason to reschedule). But that is too pat. The NRA has been weakened by a slew of recent scandals, yet Republican politicians still refuse to pass even the mildest gun safety measures. The glum truth is that it’s not a lobby organisation that has a hold on them so much as pro-gun voters, who have concluded that if a politician dares suggest, say, the massively popular move of requiring universal background checks – looking for a record of instability or past violence – before selling someone an AR-15, they have taken the first step towards government confiscation of citizens’ guns.That, of course, is seen as an unconscionable violation of the constitution’s second amendment, which enshrines the right to bear arms. Never mind that no Democrat is advocating anything like the action Britain or Australia took after mass shootings, all but banning guns, and never mind that it’s hard to believe that the framers of the constitution were intent on allowing unhinged teenagers access to weapons that could kill en masse and in seconds. That slippery slope argument, combined with the sacred status accorded to the second amendment and the constitution itself, has immobilised Republican politicians.Their opposition matters because they have far more say than the number of votes that they win might suggest. Under the US system, every state gets two senators, no matter how many or how few people live in that state. It means mainly white, mainly rural states with few voters – but strong views on guns – exercise an effective veto on more populous, more diverse, more urban states, whose tens of millions of voters are desperate for gun safety measures. That’s why even the modest proposals that followed the Sandy Hook school massacre of 2012 died in the Senate. And that’s why so many feel fatalistic about the prospects of change, resigning themselves to another massacre and then another.Some try to keep the fatalism at bay, insisting that with the NRA weak, now is the time to strike. They propose a march on Washington of a million parents and their children. Or a consumer push to demand the Republicans’ corporate donors withhold their cash until the party acts on guns. Or maybe even international pressure, with foreign leaders raising gun violence with their US counterparts the way they’d raise human rights abuses when meeting representatives of China. The US Senate banned assault weapons back in 1994 (before allowing the ban to expire a decade later): if they did it once, they can do it again.But those defiant voices are in the minority. Most believe that the state of America’s politics has condemned the US to suffer a fate the rest of the democratic world has avoided. Beyond the mortal threat that represents to Americans, that despair, that sense that political effort is futile and that change is impossible, endangers US democracy and the country’s very sense of self.That it arises out of the constitution – its second amendment and its design of the Senate – is a bitter irony. The whole point of the American revolution enshrined in that document was to forge a society that could make the world anew, able to adapt to the present unbound by the strictures of the past. In the words of the great English-born revolutionary Thomas Paine, who argued that circumstances always changed from one generation to the next: “As government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it.” Today’s America is sacrificing the living in the name of the dead of two centuries ago. It is betraying its founding ideal. It is offering up its young to placate ghosts from a time long gone.
      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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      How lawmakers in thrall to the NRA stifle gun safety laws

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      How lawmakers in thrall to the NRA stifle gun safety laws The powerful lobbying groups spent nearly $5m million last year to expand gun rights while limiting restrictions on who can have a firearm and how they can carry itIn Texas, where guns are already a deeply ingrained part of the cultural landscape, a powerful political force is helping to stifle regulations aimed at limiting access to high-powered firearms.The National Rifle Association (NRA) is one of America’s most powerful lobbying groups, spending nearly $5m last year to expand gun rights while limiting restrictions on who can have a firearm and how they can carry it.Now, the NRA is again at the center of a heated American debate over guns after an 18-year-old with two rifles he purchased legally walked into an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, killing 19 children and two adults.That was Tuesday. Today, the NRA will welcome 55,000 members at its annual meeting in Houston, just a few hours from Uvalde. Attendees will browse exhibits of firearms paraphernalia and hear from Republican politicians like Texas senator Ted Cruz, Texas governor Greg Abbott and former US President Donald Trump.A majority of Americans – 54% according to a CBS News poll before the shooting in Uvlade this week – want stricter gun control laws, but that majority is highly partisan. Just 27% of Republicans say the same.Among Texans that margin is even slimmer. In a 2019 University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll after mass shootings in El Paso and Midland-Odessa, just 51% of registered voters in Texas said they wanted stricter gun control laws.The majority of gun owners are responsible with their weapons, says Nicole Golden, the executive director of the state’s only organization advocating for policies to reduce gun violence. Texas Gun Sense was founded in 2007 by survivors of a mass shooting at Virginia Tech, and expanded in 2013, after the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.Now, Golden’s bipartisan group focuses on finding common ground with gun owners to support initiatives at the state and local level. They work with the Texas Department of Public Safety, for example, on a campaign to promote safe gun storage to keep firearms locked up and away from others.“I don’t think the issue is hopeless,” Golden said. “You have to redefine what success looks like. You can’t give up because I don’t think giving up is an option.”She said that this week, like after other mass shootings, her organization has seen an influx in new interest from Texans. Many gun owners, she says, recognize that America’s epidemic of gun violence needs some kind of change. After a 2018 mass shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, that killed 10 churchgoers, Abbott suggested new regulations including “red flag” laws that would allow courts to take away someone’s guns if they pose a threat to themselves or others.Golden said she was excited to work with the governor on the issue, but it quickly failed to pick up any traction in the state capital.“We watched those things fail, and this time there’s been no interest at all of dealing with safe gun laws,” Golden said. “It can often feel like you’re just beating your head against the wall or shouting into the void.”There is little doubt that Texas has a historical obsession with fire arms dating back to it being a frontier state where white settlers used guns to take land from Indigenous groups and used them to fight the Mexican government, and then the US government when the state seceded during the American civil war.“We have this long tradition of firearms,” said Jerry Patterson, a former Texas land commissioner and NRA member who helped push for concealed carry in the state after a mass shooting at a Luby’s restaurant in 1991.But that tradition isn’t just a Texas-specific phenomenon, says Harel Shapira, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin who studies gun culture in America. He says that from a very young age, gun ownership becomes part of many people’s identity across the country. Families go hunting together. Fathers teach their children to shoot and how to be safe with firearms.“Guns are a source of death, but also a source of [cultural] life in America,” Shapira said. Regulations may address who can purchase or use guns, he said, “but the question of American gun culture is a larger issue.”He said that in recent decades, gun rights have become entrenched as a rightwing political issue. If you want to win as a Republican, he said, you have to embrace pro-gun rhetoric. Plus, that culture of firearms means that when mass shootings create a call to regulate guns, gun owners often have an emotional reaction.“It’s very personal, it’s very visceral, it’s very emotional,” Shapira said. “They see it as an assassination of their character.”That culture has helped build strong support for groups like the NRA in Texas. There are 5 million members nationwide, but the group says that 400,000 of them are in Texas. The NRA did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about its support in the state.Last year, the organization cited financial struggles in an effort to leave its headquarters in New York to reorganize in the more friendly political climate of Texas.That bid at reorganization was part of a bankruptcy suit tied to an effort by New York’s attorney general to put the group out of business, according to the Associated Press. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the NRA laid off dozens of employees while its leaders used the group’s funds as their own piggybank, including a $17m post-employment contract for NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre.Yet those problems, Patterson said, won’t change how the NRA or politicians think about access to firearms in America. He said that in Texas and across the US, primary electoral politics force candidates to take extreme positions on all kinds of issues, like gun rights. Not all gun owners may approve of extreme measures, he said, but the rhetoric that brings primary voters to the polls swings to the right in Republican races.“There are a lot of people on the gun control side that are not as excited about things as they appear to be,” Patterson said. “But they vote for it anyway because the elections are decided in the primary.”The NRA’s recent financial troubles didn’t stop the group from spending $786,052 in the 2020 election cycle. The group has already spent $217,596 in 2022 – paid exclusively to Republican candidates.Three of the five lawmakers that have benefited the most from gun rights groups like the NRA are Texans, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks US political spending. Cruz has received the most – $442,333 since joining the US Congress in 2012. Texas’s other senator, John Cornyn, has received $238,875 during his tenure in the US Senate. Pete Sessions, a congressman from Waco, Texas, has received $202,926 in donations from the NRA and similar groups.Those donations were smaller in 2020, as the organization began facing some of its mostly self-inflicted financial hurdles. Cornyn received $9,900 from the NRA in the last election cycle. Cruz was not up for re-election at that time and did not receive any donations, according to OpenSecrets.Uvalde’s representative in the US House is Tony Gonzales, who said earlier this week that he was not interested in discussing gun policy so soon after 19 children were killed in his district. The NRA donated $4,950 to his campaign in the 2020 election cycle.Abbott, Texas’s governor, is one of the most gun-friendly governors in the US. Even after mass tragedies like in Uvalde, he has signed laws making guns more and more accessible in the state. Last year, after signing a law allowing most Texans to carry a gun without a permit, he bragged that the measure “instilled freedom in the Lone Star State”.He is up for re-election this year. The NRA donated $2,500 to his campaign during his last race in 2018.Much of the rhetoric used by these and other conservatives after mass shootings like in Uvalde rely on a playbook partially developed by the NRA more than two decades ago. Soon after the shooting at Columbine high school in 1999, the NRA was scheduled to host its annual convention in nearby Denver.According to a secret tape released by NPR last year, the group’s leaders met to consider a response, focusing on de-politicizing the tragedy and convincing lawmakers to delay action until the immediate firestorm of bad press had passed. It’s a playbook the group has returned to again and again as more Americans have been killed by gun violence.After so many mass shootings – more than 200 in the US already this year – the responses on both sides of the issue have become predictable, Patterson said. He, like many political observers, doubt any real change will come from the aftermath of the horrors in Uvalde.“We should do that which makes a difference,” Patterson said. “I fear we’re going to do the same shit we did before. It’s the cliches, the bumper stickers, and that’s all that’s going to happen this time.”TopicsNRATexas school shootingUS gun controlUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Texas school shooting overshadows primaries: Politics Weekly America – podcast

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      The killing of at least 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in the town of Uvalde on Tuesday has reignited the gun control debate in the US. Jonathan Freedland speaks to the chief correspondent for the Washington Post, Dan Balz, about why, after yet another tragedy involving firearms, the Republican party is still unwilling to talk gun reform

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      Outrage as NRA to gather in Houston just days after Texas school massacre

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      Outrage as NRA to gather in Houston just days after Texas school massacreCounter-protests expected as about 55,000 NRA members to attend event, including Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott Just days after the deadliest mass school shooting in Texas history, the National Rifle Association (NRA) – America’s leading gun lobbyist group – will meet a few hours away in Houston on Friday.Ashton P Woods says they are not welcome in his hometown.“These people are coming into our community. The city of Houston needs to kick them out,” said Woods, an activist and founder of Black Lives Matter Houston. “We have to be just as tough about these things as they are.”Woods is helping organize one of several protests planned just outside the George R Brown Convention Center, where NRA members will browse through exhibits of firearms and gun paraphernalia and hear speeches from key Republican leaders.The goal of the Black Lives Matter protest, Woods said, is to “get loud” outside while powerful speakers – including Texas governor Greg Abbott, Texas senator Ted Cruz and former US president Donald Trump – take the podium inside. Woods said the issue of firearms is particularly important to the civil rights group that primarily tackles issues of police brutality in America.“Whether it be death by suicide, death by cop, death by mass shooter, we need to control the access people have to deadly weapons,” Woods said. “These things are interconnected.”The NRA is a powerful lobbying organization in American politics, spending nearly $5m in 2021 to pressure lawmakers to oppose measures like universal background checks for gun sales and bans on powerful assault weapons.About 55,000 NRA members are expected to attend the event in Houston. The annual meeting is often a draw for activists and counter-protests as members inside discuss firearms policy – often the need for expanding access to guns.Outside the convention center, multiple counter-demonstrations are expected in Houston – especially in light of a mass shooting that killed 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.Houston police are also expecting crowds at the convention center. Jodi Silva, a police spokeswoman, said the department does not share details of its policing strategies, but that there would be a visible presence of officers.“We always are aware of the demonstrations and-or counter-demonstrations and staff accordingly,” Silva said. “We staff accordingly to make sure that everyone can participate and be safe.”Megan Hansen and the Rev Teresa Kim Pecinovsky watched the news updates from Uvalde on Tuesday in shock. When they found out the NRA would be in Houston Friday, they decided they also needed to take action.“We live in a state full of people who love their guns more than they love the lives of the children in their community,” Pecinovsky said. “I had to do something with that amount of rage and lament.”Hansen and Pecinovsky have organized an interfaith gathering that will include a silent march and a moment of reflection when organizers will read the names of those who died in Uvalde.While Texas’s politics are staunchly conservative, the Houston area has become a bastion of progressivism. Harris county, which includes Houston, voted for President Joe Biden by 56% in 2020. Hansen said she wants others to know that the NRA’s message does not reflect that community.“Houston is the most diverse city in the United States and we have people from all over the world who do not agree with the rhetoric of the NRA,” Hansen said. “We want to just say, remember the people who we lost and how can we take this feeling and turn it into action?”That action – specifically legislative measures to restrict access to high-powered firearms – is unlikely to come from Republican lawmakers in the state. Yet activists in Houston want the shooting in Uvalde and protests this weekend to spark more pressure on political leaders to prevent the next tragedy.“I’m hopeful this will not just be something people attend and then leave,” Pecinovsky said. “It needs to be a catalyst for real and tangible change.”TopicsNRAUS politicsTexasTexas school shootingnewsReuse this content More

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      Misfire review: a bullseye from Tim Mak – but the NRA isn’t beaten yet

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      BooksMisfire review: a bullseye from Tim Mak – but the NRA isn’t beaten yet The NPR reporter has written an important book about the moral bankruptcy which put the powerful and merciless gun group on the back footCharles KaiserSat 6 Nov 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 6 Nov 2021 02.02 EDTTim Mak has written a sprawling tale of the greed, incompetence and narcissism which has dominated the National Rifle Association throughout Wayne LaPierre’s 30 years as its leader. Abetted by his wife, Susan, LaPierre has allegedly used his members’ dues to fund a billionaire’s lifestyle.‘We have to break through that wall’: inside America’s battle for gun controlRead moreThe LaPierres’ wedding in 1998 was a near miss: he almost ran from the altar, until she and the priest changed his mind. Mak calls this “emblematic” of “a man driven by fear and anxiety over all other forces … his reaction to these emotions is usually to flee and hide”.These qualities, Mak writes, have made LaPierre “prey” to an endless series of conmen, throughout his leadership of America’s most-feared lobbying group.“Pushed and prodded” by his wife to discover “money’s alluring glow”, Mak writes, LaPierre saw his salary balloon from $200,000 in the mid-1990s to $2.2m in 2018. According to the investigation of the New York attorney general, which has done the most to expose serial excesses at the NRA, between 2013 and 2017 the black cars, private jets and hundreds of thousands of dollars of expensive clothing led to $1.2m in reimbursed expenses.Between 2013 and 2018, companies used to book the LaPierres’ private planes received an astonishing $13.5m. There were trips to Lake Como, Budapest and the Bahamas. Just the hired cars for trips to Italy and Hungary cost $18,000. LaPierre spent $275,000 on suits at a single Beverly Hills emporium, including $39,000 on one day in 2015. To disguise such excesses, the bills were sent to an outside vendor which the NRA reimbursed.Mak also does a good job of describing how every mass shooting has pushed the NRA ever further right, transforming it from advocacy group for gun rights into a fully fledged player in the culture war, especially after the massacre of 20 young children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in December 2012.Mak offers a particularly depressing account of how the NRA chief lobbyist, Chris Cox, was personally involved in negotiations over the Manchin-Toomey bill, a Senate measure which would have modestly increased background checks if, as Mak points out, not enough to have prevented the Sandy Hook massacre, since that gunman used guns legally obtained by his mother.In any case, after months of negotiation the NRA double-crossed both sponsors, made sure the bill failed to get the 60 votes it needed to pass the Senate, then dropped its A-ratings for Manchin and Toomey to D and C respectively.The NRA’s role in the Trump-Russia scandal was substantial. Maria Butina, eventually convicted as a Russian spy, used “relationships within the NRA to build an informal channel of diplomatic relations with Russia”. Her efforts included a famous public exchange with Donald Trump during his first campaign, in which he expressed his affection for Vladimir Putin and promised to improve relations as president.The NRA spent $30m to help to elect Trump, more than his own fundraising super pac. Ironically, NRA membership dues fell after Trump entered the White House. The organization lost its most lucrative fundraiser when Barack Obama left office.Power struggles and a ‘personal piggy bank’: what the NRA lawsuit allegesRead moreThe great unravelling began on 6 August 2020, when the New York attorney general, Letitia James, filed a lawsuit to dissolve the NRA entirely. She accused LaPierre of using the organization for 30 years “for his financial benefit, and the benefit of a close circle of NRA staff, board members, and vendors”.Six months later, the NRA filed for bankruptcy. But despite endless infighting, Wayne LaPierre remains in charge. And because Trump was elected, with the NRA’s help, the supreme court now includes three justices appointed by him – at least two of whom seemed eager in arguments this week to demolish most of the remaining state restrictions on carrying concealed weapons, in New York and six other states.The passions of gun owners – and the fear they have instilled in a majority of public officials – remain dominant forces in American politics despite the greed and incompetence of their leaders chronicled so thoroughly in this important book.
      Misfire is published in the US by Dutton
      TopicsBooksNRAUS gun controlNewtown shootingUS crimeUS politicsUS CongressreviewsReuse this content More