Please note that I am not ‘repeating tripe’ as one poster has charged that is all I do. This is from a recently released report that I have not mentioned prior to this:
Here’s one report of how much money we are talking about:
And in Rand Paul’s case, he and his father have shown clever ways to channel ‘money’ in support of their politics.
IF interested read more of the ‘open secrets’ link. This is real interesting. insight into how money works in Washington and Senators like Rand Paul can claim no connection to it.
There is a Political Playbook and the professionals on all sides use it. Partisans somehow believe that a play is fair when executed by their team and cheating when employed by the opposition. Whatever the specific issue, to me, whole business looks like no more than a bitter college rivalry in which the fans are invested equally in their own righteousness and their rival’s nefariousness - regardless of the fact that both institutions and their tactics are essentially identical.
Ironically, the institutions have far more in common as “Institutions” than separates them in philosophy. And the Institution is really the thing because that’s where the payoff is for the practioners of politics - elected or otherwise. Consequently the payoff for the pros anymore is merely feeding the rivalry.
If he was outraged, outraged by Rand Paul accusing Barack Obama for using the Sandy Hook families as “props” to advance his agenda and felt that in doing so Paul was insulting the parents of the Sandy Hook children, then NFBW should have also been equally offended by people like me criticizing George Bush for using 911 families to advance the Patriot Act and to justify the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as Bush did throughout his Presidency, regularly having them appear in photo-ops and even campaign commercials.
Well put.
Of course, I made no such comparison. I merely pointed out that people like myself criticized George Bush for using 911 families in photo-ops and ceremonies to advance support for the Patriot Act and the Iraq War.
He even used 911 families as props in campaign commercials like this one entitled “Ashley’s story”.
Now, presumably, unless you’re massively intellectually inconsistent, you’ll think my referring to Ashley and her dad as “props” was both reprehensible, proved I’m an asshole, and was grossly insulting to her and her father.
I certainly invite everyone to watch the ad and see for yourself that both Republicans and Democrats use the same tactics when it comes to the use of families.
So 40 senators have each received an average of $20,000 over the last 22 years? That is less that $7,000 per (six year term) election.
And you think that with campaigns running well over $4,000,000 each, you can buy a senator for $7,000?
I think that the NRA wields disproportionate influence in this country, but the quoted text is certainly not evidence of any such thing.
You need to go back and read my comments. I have been saying the use of people such for props is absolutely ok unless they are forced to be props against their will.
I have challenged any of you to find a Sandy Hook Parent ‘prop’ that was with the President or petitioned Congress Members against their will or because of some other form of insidious coercion.
So then yes, you do think it was obnoxious for people, such as Michael Moore, to attack George W. Bush for using 911 families as “props” in his re-election campaign against John Kerry?
Stop beating around the Bush, putting up massive walls of text and just say so.
Like-minded people? Probably not. The NRA magazine is for NRA members; it’s not intended to serve the general debate. Similarly, I highly doubt many people have a problem with the Newtown families writing books or blogs, contributing to a Brady Campaign magazine, or what-have-you, or desiring to use Presidential or Congressional access as a platform.
However, it is quite reasonable to hold the President and Congress to a standard that precludes such purely emotional appeals. As our elected representatives, they have a duty to weigh facts, seek compromises, and lead without passion or prejudice, rather than serve as cheerleaders for one or another “side” in a highly contentious public debate.
Furthermore, it’s not exactly scandalous that the NRA contributes to the re-election of pro-gun Congressmen. Whom else should they try to keep in office, if not people who agree with their basic views?
Paul can’t win here (unless he adopts all of your views); if he works closely with the NRA, he’s a paid stooge. If he supports (perhaps, your cite was hardly conclusive) an independent gun-rights group, he’s some sort of shadowy, monied power broker.
So you can’t find a Sandy Hook parent who has accused President Obama of ‘using’ them can you.
If Bush used willing props then Michael Moore is wrong. I don’t think he’s an asshole for being wrong. Again where did you get that I would hold such a viewpoint?
If Bush used human props either against their will then that is not what we are discussing in the present moment.
If Bush used props who wanted to be props more power to him and them. I have no problem with it.
The NRA has success because it appeals to raw emotion from gun owners. I have been making the point that both sides are operation on high emotions. The NRA’s favorite emotion is engendering ‘fear’ Fear that those who want 'reasonable gun regualations of any kind are hell bent ultimately on taking every last firearem out of every single gun owner in the country’s dead cold hand.
The NRA and other anti-regulation Groups have assaulted the airwaves with that scare tactic and all we hear is that its the Sandy Hook Parents and people like Gabby Giffords are operation purely on emotion.
I never said NRA contributions to politicians is scandalous. It is not. I merely pointed out the fact of how much they have paid the 40 Senators that, ‘as a minority’ in the Senate, blocked a law that had a majority of Senators vote for it.
The NRA gets good results for the money they spend.
And then launched the following personal attack and mischaracteraization of what I have been writing on this topic:
I had asked prior to this attack that Ibn Warraq cite the source that I have committed a 180 on victims of tragedies as ‘props’ and or being used as props by the President.
I have made no 180 on this. If Ibn Warraq has an example of me heading south in one post and then north on another, it would be credible of him/her to produce it.
I’ll post some of my comments on ‘props’ just to get the process rolling:
If we shouldn’t discuss gun control in the wake of a tragedy involving guns, then when should we discuss it? We’re always in the wake of a tragedy involving guns-- They’re just too common. Which is, after all, the problem we’re trying to solve. So, the bigger the problem, the more taboo discussion of it is?
I’ve lost track of your point; you started out bashing Rand Paul for being cold and heartless and all that, now you’re saying that both the NRA and Obama used emotional appeals, which has little or nothing to do with Rand Paul, and doesn’t preclude criticizing anyone who uses such tactics. Can you show where Rand Paul has done something similar to what he criticized Obama for?
The issue isn’t whether to discuss gun control on the wage of a tragedy, it’s how.
You exaggerate how often notable gun related violence occurs. For instance, what can you think of between Colombine and Virginia tech? These incidents stand out in your mind but there are actually remarkably few of them, they kill at most a dozen or two people a year. They’re statistical blips.
If you were talking about random background gun violence, your point would have merit - but our society doesn’t seem to care about that. People don’t get worked up into hysterics because some gangs shot each other up or some random dude did a murder/suicide on his wife or the thousands of other random incidents of gun violence.
Which is actually the point, in response to your question. If society doesn’t give a shit about the 10,000 people a year killed by guns, but suddenly cares deeply about sensational incidents here and there which are the tiniest minority of gun related deaths, then they aren’t evaluating risk and safety rationally, and their responses will not be rational. You can see a microcosm of this in the constant hardon the gun control advocates have for assault weapons bans - anyone with even the tiniest bit of perspective can see that “assault weapons” are an almost irrelevant part of gun crime, and that the actual things the laws do are childishly stupid, but they sure do stir up the emotions.
So any attempt to ram through legislation in the wake of a sensational tragedy that has gripped the public is very likely to be an entirely irrational response. So “this isn’t the time to discuss this” is more like “you’re all getting hysterical and screaming that We Must Do Something and proposing all sorts of stupid laws that will not significantly impact public safety and/or will hurt law abiding citizens, when come back bring rational thought”
If gun control laws were being proposed that were a rational response to address the significant public safety issues we have while trying to minimize impact on people who are not a threat to public safety, they’d get a much better reception. But what we actually have is gun control advocates lying in wait for some sensational horrible crime to be committed, pouncing on the subsequent hysteria, and then proposing completely stupid laws.
For another take on the sentiment expressed by Rand Paul, a talk radio host in Minnesota suggests that the families of Sandy Hook victims should “go to hell.”
Well, using fairly restrictive criteria, meaning that a minimum of four deaths occurred (other than the shooter) and that the incident was in public, Mother Jones documents 14 mass shootings in the 8 years in between those two events, with a total of 159 injured or killed. (I think this is unduly restrictive, since a requirement of four deaths would mean that the bombing in Boston would be excluded from such a list, in terms of the outcome rather than the mechanism of injury.)
The fact that gun advocates want to dismiss these people as “statistical blips” is one of the reasons why they react so strongly (as in this thread) when those “statistical blips” have real live people speaking for them posthumously.
Is it really a restrictive criteria? Would 3 people strike you as a big, splashy mass shooting? Furthermore, we only seem to care about the crazies that kill random innocent people. How many of those incidents were gang turf fights that resulted in the deaths of 4+ career criminals?
Even so, 159 injured or killed over 8 years comes out to 20 a year. Yes, a statistical blip. Roughly one fifth of one percent of gun deaths in that period. Do you consider that a significant number that we should tailor our laws around?
Edit: I reread that you said injured or killed. So the fatalties are an even smaller percentage of the total gun related fatalities.
Who’s reacting strongly? Someone called the weeping people making emotional please props. That’s a reaction that can be generated entirely dispassionately.
You yourself are essentially again making an appeal to emotions. Yes, they are statistical blips. Well under 1% of the issue of gun violence. I will even go further and say that in a country awash in guns, with limited access to health care and mental health care especially, a country so diverse, the fact that we only see a dozen or two deaths a year from people snapping and going on mass killings is fucking miraculous. We are actually well behaved as a society in this way beyond any reasonable projections I would ever make.
I mean, really, look at your link. In a country of 300m+ people with hundreds of millions of guns and for that matter other weapons and the materials to make bombs, we’ve got a dozen. Many years only have one incident. This is utterly remarkable for how minor and insignificant it is. The world should marvel at just how not prone americans are to snapping and killing each other, given the circumstances. I know the intent of the article was supposed to be some sort of walk of shame, but in a weird way - and I know this won’t go over well because it’s something that works rationally but not emotionally - it could actually be a badge of pride.
To expand upon that, I don’t think people truly understand how big the world is in an intuitive way. Not even close, not even within several orders of magnitude. They can only evaluate things on a more personal level.
By most standards, the world is as good as its ever been. Crime in the US is way down from 30 years ago, we’re all fabulously rich and well fed. But if you ask people, the majority of people will tell you that things are bad and only getting worse, the sick shit you see in the world today is a sign of the end times, etc.
I think that this is a result of sensationalist media. They pick stories about horrible shit and then dwell on them for weeks, gleefully recounting and probing the gorey details, trying to make people afraid and disgusted because people seem to want that.
The problem is - if you don’t really understand just how big the world is, and you only understand things on a more personal, small scale level - then all of the stories of these horrible things happening in the world strike you a lot harder than they should. It’s as if all the horrible things that can happen in the world are happening in your own little town because you can’t properly put them in perspective, you can’t realize that while thousands of people committed horrible crimes yesterday, billions of people did not.
Which is why these sensationalist stories affect people far more than they should, far more than they’d affect a rational person who tries to keep perspective on the world. A spree shooting or two a year makes people think that our country is unsafe and we’re awash in violence when in reality almost no one is in danger from such a thing and it’s remarkable how little of it we have.
It’s also how you end up with people who engage in this grief cycle for the victims of some random event but not for others. We think the 3 deaths in boston are a big deal or the 20 deaths at Sandy Hook, but we’re unaware of all the horrible suffering in the world that’s happened at the same time. Why? Because if we only relate to the story on a personal level, then the media gets to shape our worldview and pick our emotions by choosing which of these stories to show us.
Public policy should be made by people who have this perspective, not people who react hysterically to whatever the media tells them to.