The Gun Show Loophole Remains -- And You Should be Angry About That

Reading through the reactions to yesterday's successful obstruction of an expanded background checks bill, there's one thing you notice right away. Normally, stories like this are peppered with words like "saddened," disappointed," or "discouraged." That's not the case today. Today, people are opening their papers or visiting their favorite online news source and reading words like "angry," "disgusted," and "furious."

The pro-crime lobby may think they've beaten us, but all they really managed to do is make us mad.

For her part, Gabrielle Giffords has spent her time cultivating the image of a happy warrior, a friendly hero overcoming tremendous adversity and senseless tragedy. While the hero part of that persona remains, "happy" doesn't describe her op-ed on the issue in the New York Times:

Speaking is physically difficult for me. But my feelings are clear: I’m furious. I will not rest until we have righted the wrong these senators have done, and until we have changed our laws so we can look parents in the face and say: We are trying to keep your children safe. We cannot allow the status quo — desperately protected by the gun lobby so that they can make more money by spreading fear and misinformation — to go on.

I am asking every reasonable American to help me tell the truth about the cowardice these senators demonstrated. I am asking for mothers to stop these lawmakers at the grocery store and tell them: You’ve lost my vote. I am asking activists to unsubscribe from these senators’ e-mail lists and to stop giving them money. I’m asking citizens to go to their offices and say: You’ve disappointed me, and there will be consequences.

Giffords writes that "if we cannot make our communities safer with the Congress we have now, we will use every means available to make sure we have a different Congress, one that puts communities’ interests ahead of the gun lobby’s." The issue of partisanship does not come up. Democrat, Republican, or Independent, if you sided with the pro-criminal gun lobby, we want your head.

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The Pointlessness of Spinning an Event Like the Boston Bombings

I saw the article yesterday, but I kind of set it aside. In it, the Boston Globe reported that the Boston Marathon bombing has all the earmarks of a domestic terror attack.  I bookmarked it and tagged it for later, thinking that maybe it would be better reference from a historical standpoint than from a predictive one. After all, rightwing bloggers have been using baseless speculation to cover themselves in clown paint and I wasn't eager to emulate their failures. I thought the article would better serve as a "clues were there" reference (or "clues were misleading," as the case might be). The article describes the bombs as "crudely made" and suggest that the death toll indicates they weren't as effective as the bomber would've hoped, "making it unlikely that they were the work of a foreign government or global terrorist group, such as Al ­Qaeda." Besides, Islamic terrorist organizations always claim credit for bombings -- that is, after all, the point: to spread terror -- and we're now approaching the end of the 72 hour window in which those claims usually are issued. In incidents of attacks by lone domestic terrorists, it's generally the case that no one takes credit, because the perpetrator doesn't want to risk providing more evidence. In these cases, the purpose of the attack isn't to spread terror, but to "strike a blow" against a perceived enemy from the perspective of their own lives (i.e., the DC Sniper, the Olympic Park bombing, or Oklahoma City). Sophisticated terrorists try to perceive their attacks from the eyes of the media and the populace. From the Globe article:

Juliette N. Kayyem, a Globe columnist and lecturer at ­Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who has spent years working on counter­terrorism and homeland security, said she thought the bombing was probably the work of a terrorist in the ­Boston area who would appreciate the race’s importance to the local culture.

“It is probably home-grown, someone with a political cause from the right or the left,” said Kayyem, “someone who knows how appealing the Boston ­Marathon is to citizens here.”

“Even though it’s an international event, it is still a local event,” she said.

Of course, none of this is to say it isn't an Islamic terror attack -- which was why I approached the piece with a healthy amount of caution and a grain of salt. What people surmise and what people know are two entirely different things.

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Tea Party Bloggers, the Boston Bombing, and the Cult of Perpetual Victimhood

It's a shocking and terrible crime. A blast that was almost certainly terrorism (run of the mill mass murder can't be ruled out yet) rocked the finish line at the Boston Marathon, followed quickly by another. The brutal carnage has resulted in the death of three, with the real possibility of that number rising still -- many of the injuries were horrific.

The smoke had barely cleared before the speculation began -- and with it, the idiocy. Reports were confused, unclear, sometimes contradictory. But one group of Americans felt they had a firm grasp one the true story in Boston. And that story was that they -- the rightwing, Tea Party, wingnut bloggers -- were the real victims in the day's tragedy.

Leading the charge was the blog "Fire Andrea Mitchell," claiming that CNN's Wolf Blitzer had blamed the Tea Party for the bombing. The right went insane on Twitter, which is where the right goes to go insane these days, and the story spread like widlfire. "CNN's Wolf Blitzer just speculated if anti-tax groups were behind the bombing WITH ZERO EVIDENCE," one tweeted -- which turned out to be a massively hypocritical statement.

Blitzer's supposed "blaming" of the Tea Party right consisted of one sentence, "It is a state holiday in Massachusetts today called Patriots' Day and, uh, who knows if that had anything at all to do with these explosions." The only way you to take that as an attack on the right is if you wanted so badly to wear the mantle of victimhood that you'd twist anything anyone said in order to take offense. If you were so self-absorbed as to be able to do that, then the victims weren't those people bleeding on the streets of Boston, the real victims were the wingnut bloggers and their audience.

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War on Women May Be More Wide-Ranging Than the GOP Realizes

I'm not a big fan of the headline Mother Jones chose for Kate Sheppard's piece on the GOP's ongoing attacks on reproductive freedom. "Progressives Advise GOP: Back Off On the War on Women" has the distinct flavor of concern trolling. But it turns out to be accurate; two progressive groups have advised the Republican Party to knock off the War on Women, because it's losing them elections.

It was clear in both the lead up to and the aftermath of the November 2012 election that Republican candidates are not faring well among women voters. From Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin to Mitt Romney's 11-point loss among women voters, it became painfully clear that the GOP has a lady problem. A new memo from a pair of liberal groups that pulls together some of the polling figures makes a strong case for paying more attention to this divide.

The memo, from Stephanie Schriock of EMILY’s List and Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, notes that even the Republican National Committee's own post-election report found that, "[Women] represent more than half the voting population in the country, and our inability to win their votes is losing us elections." But while Republicans have made some effort to soften the party's positioning on issues like immigration and LGBT rights, the party has not moderated its stance on reproductive rights or other issues of interest to many women voters.

The memo points to the unprecedented attack on access to abortion underway in states like North Dakota and Arkansas, the 160 Republicans that voted against the Violence Against Women Act at the federal level, and the ongoing fights over both contraception coverage and cuts to the federal family planning budget.

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