Do you know what the hottest item was on Black Friday?
Was it a ‘Frozen’ toy? Elmo Live?
No. It was guns. In fact, guns have been hot sellers ever since a black man was elected president.
“Americans Rushed To Purchase Guns This Black Friday,” Igor Volsky reported at ThinkProgress.org.
The FBI processed three background checks for gun purchases every second on Friday, as more than 144,000 shoppers were expected to buy firearms on one of the busiest shopping days of the year.
As of 2 p.m. Friday, an FBI spokesperson told CNN that the agency had already processed ‘more than 94,000 transactions, on pace to surpass last year’s 144,758.’ Approximately 3,000 checks or 2 percent will not be completed as a result of insufficient information, 71 receive instant approvals, and approximately 1.1 percent of purchasers fail the check.
The huge amount of checks, about three times the daily average, must be processed by 600 FBI and contract call center employees are frantically working 17-hour days to clear the background checks – three times the daily average – in three business days as required by law, because if the government cannot complete the background check in three business days, the buyer is allowed to purchase the gun anyway.
Society had better hope that all the crazies and the abusers and veterans with PTSD were at the top of the list.
“The challenge is to have staff keep up with this volume. We do that by limiting personal leave, asking employees to work extra shifts and reutilizing former employees to serve in NICS during this busy period,” spokesman Stephen Fischer told CNN. Since 1999, the pace of background checks has doubled and the FBI has completed 21 million background checks.
But the problem is that background checks are not universal and it is woefully, tragically easy for people who would not qualify to obtain guns.
Though current U.S. law prohibits individuals with “felony conviction, arrest warrant, documented drug problem, mental illness, undocumented immigration status, dishonorable military discharge, renunciation of U.S. citizenship, restraining order, history of domestic violence or indictment for any crime punishable by longer than one year of prison” from purchasing weapons at licensed dealers, there are flaws in the system, Volsky noted.
This is because some states don’t feed enough real-time information into the criminal background check system, allowing individuals with troubled mental health histories or criminal records to pass checks and purchase weapons.
Gun sales on the internet or at gun shows are also unregulated and do not require an FBI background examination. There is no limit on one person selling to another, whether a family member or not.
And of course, there is little to discourage straw-purchases – that is, purchases made by someone who would pass the background check who then turns around and sells the guns to someone who wouldn’t qualify.
This is why it is estimated 40 percent of guns are purchased without a background check by individuals who would otherwise not qualify (the National Rifle Association’s answer to this is that criminals will always find a way to break a law, and yet, the vast majority of NRA members and more than 80 percent of Americans favor universal background checks).
The Associated Press estimates that in the U.S., “there are already nine guns for every 10 people, and someone is killed with a firearm every 16 minutes.”
In Ferguson, guns were flying off the shelves in the reaction to the failure to indict Officer Darren Wilson for killing unarmed teen Michael Brown.
Could you imagine if blacks carried guns as openly as whites?
Like 22-year old John Crawford, 22, who, just four days before Michael Brown was shot dead by police in Ferguson, was carrying a toy gun he picked up at Wal-Mart, alarming two other shoppers, who was shot dead by police, and the 12-year old black fellow, killed by police when he held a toy gun. That’s in stark contrast to how federal law enforcement reacted to the yahoos who came to support lawbreaker Cliven Bundy on his ranch. They retreated and have yet to prosecute the lawbreaker, who has cheated taxpayers out of over a million dollars in fees – compare that to the “capital” crime of stealing a box of cigarellos.
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/cops-shoot-and-kill-man-holding-toy-gun-walmart
Or the open-carry activists who intentionally provoke families by coming to a typically relaxed part of
Fort Worth, Texas, displaying intimidating firearms just three days after a major gun massacre in southern California.
Could you imagine what would happen if it were a group of “big black” men (BBM) wearing berets instead of cowboy hats?
In an article, “John Crawford Case: It’s Open Carry for Whites and Open Season on Blacks,” Albert L. Butler writes, “So what if police thought the toy gun he was holding was a rifle when they shot and killed him? Ohio is an open-carry state. Except, it seems, for African-Americans.
“The difference is simple, and it’s the difference in almost every case of police violence perpetrated on innocent citizens. He was black.
Many African-Americans and Latinos alike see these open-carry folks like the ones above and think, ‘Hey, if white people are walking around with guns like that, maybe I need to … ‘ I know I have.
But as soon as we think it, we scoff, laugh or smirk to ourselves because we know what the outcome would be if we expected the same “
“This isn’t just a what-if scenario. This is not conjecture. Consider this 2012 incident at an Ohio gas station: A white man entered a store openly carrying his weapon. Police confronted him. No weapons were drawn, and there were no commands to give up the gun, just a stern conversation. He was asked to provide identification, but he refused and was then arrested … and then released. Alive. The charges were eventually dropped, and he is now suing the police department for $3.6 million. I wish John Crawford could file a suit.”
What if Michael Brown did have a gun, for his own Second Amendment right? (Missouri has no state licensing requirements for the possession of a rifle, shotgun or handgun, and no permit requirement to purchase a gun, though the limits carrying a concealed weapon to those with a permit.)
What would you bet, if blacks and Latinos started openly carrying guns, instead of the 1,500 laws introduced since Sandy Hook (over 100 enacted with two-thirds expanding gun rights (to schools, churches, bars, open carry), there would be a rush to enact gun control laws, just as there were in 1968, in the midst of Civil Rights and anti-war protests, when modern gun control efforts began with the Gun Control Act?
But gun control efforts have lagged as the weapons have become more sophisticated, more lethal and Congress has refused to re-authorized the ban on assault weapons which expired in 2004.
During this holiday season – this season of joy and good will toward men, of family gatherings, childlike innocence and charity – when guns having been flying off shelves, let’s review the state of our well-being:
On Nov. 23, just four days before Thanksgiving, a Tallahassee man who had made previous threats against police set his house on fire and ambushed the first sheriff’s deputy who responded, fatally shooting the deputy and wounding another before he was killed by a police officer who happened to live nearby.
This tragedy was reminiscent of the Christmas Eve massacre in Webster, New York, when four fighters were lured to a burning building and then two were murdered and two others seriously wounded by a man who never should have had access to a gun, wielding a Bushmaster AR-15, the same gun as used in the Sandy Hook school massacre. (This massacre helped put New York State’s SAFE Act over the finish line, despite years of opposition to gun violence prevention measures.)
The Tallahassee murder happened just two days after a police shootout at Florida State University left a gunman dead after he wounded two students and an employee as hundreds studying inside the library fled or took cover in panic. I imagine that the three wounded people’s lives have been changed forever.
Since the December 2012 shooting in Newtown, Conn., there have been at least 92 school shootings in America – including the horrific shooting in October by a 14-year old Jaylen Ray Fryberg, “a popular freshman at Marysville-Pilchuck High School,” who without warning opened fire in the cafeteria, immediately killing two students and critically wounding three others before turning the gun on himself. Ultimately, four of his victims died.
In a matter of seconds, Fryberg fatally shot four people. That’s the difference with guns. They are lethal. It only takes an instant to be overcome with rage or irrationality to snuff out multiple lives, even one’s own.
Where did this child get the Beretta .40-caliber handgun?
The reporting obsessed over his cryptic postings to find some excuse (bullying? racism? a crush gone unrequited?) but no one asked where he got the gun. It was finally mentioned that the gun, a “high-capacity” weapon, was traced to Fryberg’s father.
“Fryberg was an avid outdoorsman who liked to go hunting and had guns,” CNN wrote in a profile of how the teenager went from “Home Coming Prince to School Killer:: “Just three months ago, he posted a picture to Instagram of himself holding a rifle, along with the words: ‘Probably the best BirthDay present ever! I just love my parents!!!’”
Whoever enabled Fryberg – or any minor – to obtain the gun used in such heinous crimes should be held accountable, even as associates in a crime where a police officer is murdered are prosecuted for murder as if they pulled the trigger – even as – and especially because – the NRA blocks any kind of safety enhancements that would prevent a gun from being operated by anyone other than the authorized owner (you now have fingerprint locks on smart phones and bank accounts, why not ‘smart’ guns?).
How many of these school shootings, with unbearably tragic deaths of young people, are the result of a kid getting access to a gun from their home? Columbine. Sandy Hook. Marysville-Pilchuck High School, Berrendo Middle School in Roswell, NM.
“A 12-year-old boy who wounded two students when he opened fire with a shotgun at a New Mexico middle school took the firearm from his home, modified it and planned the attack in advance, police said,” reported Alex Dobuzinskis of Reuters (Jan. 15, 2014).
The list goes on and on of middle school and high school students who obtain guns and commit mayhem.
Now add the tragic shootings at college campuses – places where young people are supposed to feel safe but instead are sitting ducks, snuffed out for no reason.
In June, “A man armed with a shotgun opens fire at Seattle Pacific University, killing one student and wounding two others. The suspect, Aaron Ybarra, 26, is not a student at the college. He was subdued by a student security guard and taken into custody.”
Just days before Thanksgiving, “Three Florida State University students were shot and wounded inside the school’s Strozier Library early Thursday morning by a gunman who was an alumni of the school and a lawyer, according to a law enforcement official,” foxnews.com reported on Nov. 20.
Google “school shootings & student shooter & gun from home” and 341,000 results come up.
Not to mention the needless deaths of children because of criminal neglect by their parents or guardians:
“9-Month Old Shot By Father Cleaning Illegal Gun In Brooklyn,” Andrew Hart of The Huffington Post posted on Nov. 22.
Just a couple of months earlier, on Oct. 24, fox59.com reported, “Baby dies after being shot in head during gun-cleaning accident in Kokomo” (Indiana).
“Today in America, unsecured guns in the home kill hundreds of children a year through unintentional shootings, suicides and tragic school shootings.
But legislation alone is not enough to address the nearly 1.7 million children who live in a home with a loaded, unlocked gun. What we need is a cultural shift in the country, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence declared.
I think we need more than that. We need to hold parents and guardians responsible when they do not secure their weapons, or are so cavalier in allowing young children use lethal weapons, like that 9-year old girl who accidentally killed Charlie Vacca, a gun instructor, at a firing range in Arizona in August, when she was given an Uzi, a submachine gun, to shoot.
“Our dad would want you to know that you should move forward with your life,” Elizabeth, one of his daughters, says in a video. “You should not let this define you.”
How charitable. How sweet.
So far this year, there have been more than 47,000 incidents of gun violence (http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/) – out of these, 1,428 were for “self-defense”. Now compare this fractional number to 1210 children killed, 48 police officers killed; 626 murder/suicide (make that 627 including the Black Friday murder-suicide at a Nordstrom’s store in Chicago); 1837 home invasions. three have been 11,442 deaths by gun violence – more than the number of soldiers killed in more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Gun violence prevention advocates put the number of gun deaths at 33,000 a year, probably because they also include suicides, so easily, instantly and efficiently accomplished by gun, while other methods have a reasonable chance of survival).
I’m sick to death of the fraudulent excuse of a Second Amendment “right” to possess a gun, especially since the Second Amendment, written in 1791 when single-ball muskets were the most lethal weapon, states “well-regulated” (so regulation is implied) and applies only to guns for a militia “necessary to the security of a free State” – to protect the government, not to overthrow it.
What is more, none of the 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights are absolute (think about Fourth amendment protection against illegal search and how women are subjected to medically unnecessary vaginal probes before they can obtain an abortion or the first amendment right to free speech when Florida doctors are prohibited from discussing gun safety with parents of their patients).
All of this is evidence of the reality of the charge by Dr. Vivek Murthy, Obama’s nominee for Surgeon General, that gun violence is in fact a matter of public health – and for that reason, the NRA, with its control over lawmakers, has blocked his confirmation for more than a year, just as the NRA has blocked any steps toward universal background checks (keep in mind that the agency has so little funding, it only has 600 officials to do the checks anyway), limits on the ammo clip capacity (100 rounds, no problem) or assault weapons, or even smart guns.
And gun registration? They have rebuffed any national database, any ability of the federal government to share information or even keep the applications beyond a few days, or even the collection of statistics on gun violence.
Dr. Murthy’s confirmation is something that Harry Reid, while he is still Majority Leader, should push through, now that the Senate Blue Dog Democrats no longer have to fear losing their seats (they already have).
Call Sen. Schumer at 202-224-6542 and Sen. Gillibrand at 202-224-4451 and demand a vote.
But the gun violence prevention advocates (Pro-Life, you might say), should take clues from the Pro-Life people who have incrementally whittled away at women’s Constitutional right to choose (Constitution, shmastitution and isn’t it ironic that the same who would claim “pro-life” in making abortion unavailable, if not illegal, defend rampant gun violence and put impediments to voting rights by requiring the expense of acquiring the documentation to get the voter ID?
They should seek laws that require fun-holders have insurance against liability for accidents (you are required to have insurance if you have an automobile), raise taxes on gun purchases that pay for background checks and go into a victims fund, require that guns have “smart” technology so they can only be used by the permit-holder.
And impose criminal penalties for those whose negligence results in gun violence – just as bartenders are now liable if a drunk driver kills someone – including parents whose guns are used in violent acts and gun dealers whose inventory manages to “disappear”.
Something has to be done. And of course, it won’t happen federally in the Republican “We Love Guns” Congress – that is, unless blacks and Latinos start exercising their Second Amendment rights as openly as whites – then you might see a rush to passing universal background checks.
In the meanwhile, does Obama dare to do anything further by executive action – as he did after the Senate failed to pass universal background checks, despite the fact over 90% of Americans wanted it – perhaps using the Federal Commerce Commission?
How many holiday dinner tables in this season of joy, good will toward men and Thanksgiving will have an empty chair?
