Posted by John Cassidy, New Yorker
A little confession: I’ve never been a big fan of Mayor Bloomberg. Perhaps my views are out of date, but I don’t like billionaires buying public offices. I don’t like the way he continues to control a big media business while in City Hall. (Sure, he gave up the C.E.O.’s job, but everybody at Bloomberg L.P. knows that, ultimately, he still makes the big strategic decisions.) I don’t like the pretense that he’s just a businessman with no ideology. (The cult of business efficiency is innately ideological.) And I don’t like the way he’s used his generous donations to the arts to seduce the city’s liberal and artistic elite.
But when it comes to gun control, and particularly his
response to the Newtown massacre, I’m here to say, Good on you, Mr. Mayor! More
than anybody else on the political scene, Bloomberg has been saying what is
crying out to be said: The U.S. gun laws, bought and paid for by the N.R.A.,
are a disgrace to the nation, an affront to the values it claims to represent,
and a travesty of the Democratic process.
To be sure, some Democrats, the President included, have,
in the past forty-eight hours, moved beyond the cynical political calculation
that confronting the gun lobby is pointless and self-defeating. On Sunday,
Senator Dianne Feinstein, of California, said that once Congress resumes she
would introduce a bill to ban on assault weapons. (The
previous ban expired in 2004.) And Dan Malloy, the governor of Connecticut,
seconded the call for such a ban, pointing out that the lack of a federal law
prevented states such as Connecticut from effectively enforcing their own
restrictive gun laws.
But Bloomberg has gone further than anybody, both in pointing
out what should be the obvious, and in calling on President Obama to step up to
the challenge. “It only happens in America,” he said today on “Meet the Press.”
“And it happens again and again. There was another shooting yesterday. Three
people killed I think in a hospital. We kill people in schools. We kill them in
hospitals. We kill them in religious organizations. We kill them when they’re
young. We kill them when they’re old. And we’ve just got to stop this.”
David Gregory tried to pin Bloomberg down, asking him
precisely what action he thought should be taken. Here, courtesy of the Guardian’s live blog, was the mayor’s
reply:
BLOOMBERG: Well, number one, I think the President should
console the country. But he’s the Commander-in-Chief as well as the
consoler-in-chief. And he calls for action, but he called for action two years
ago. And every time there is a disaster like this, a tragedy like this,
everybody says, “Well, now is not the time.” Or, “If you had fixed the problem,
you can’t guarantee that this particular event would have been prevented.”
All of that
is true. It’s time for the President, I think, to stand up and lead. And tell
this country what we should do. Not go to Congress and say what you guys want
to do. This should be his number-one agenda. He is the President of the United
States. And if he does nothing during his second term, something like
forty-eight thousand Americans will be killed with illegal guns. That is
roughly the number of Americans killed in the whole of the Vietnam War.
GREGORY: So
what do you do?
BLOOMBERG:
Well, there’s a number of things that the President can do and a number of
things that Congress can do. And there are a number of things that you and I
can do as voters. What the President can do is number one through executive
action, he can order his agencies to enforce the laws more aggressively. I
think there’s something like seventy-seven thousand people who have been
accused of lying when they have applied for a gun permit. We’ve only prosecuted
seventy-seven of them.
The
President can introduce legislation even if it doesn’t get passed. The
President campaigned back in 2008 on a bill that would prohibit assault
weapons. We’ve got to really question whether military-style weapons with big
magazines belong in the streets of America in this day and age. Nobody
questions the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. But I don’t think the founding
fathers had the idea that every man, woman, and child could carry an assault
weapon.
And I think
the President, through his leadership, could get a bill like that through
Congress. But at least he’s got to try. And that’s his job.
Indeed, it is. To be fair to Obama, nobody should
underestimate the hatred, ignorance, baloney, mendacity, and borderline lunacy
that would confront him if he were to follow Bloomberg’s advice and take on the
gun lobby. For a taste of what it would be in store, look no further than Louis
Gohmert, a Republican Congressman from Texas, who told “Fox News Sunday” that the best way to
avoid a repeat of Newtown was to arm elementary-school principals, such as Dawn
Hochsprung, the late principal of Sandy Hook, with assault rifles of the sort
carried by Adam Lanza:
I wish to God she had had an M4 in her office, locked up so
when she heard gunfire, she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge
heroically with nothing in her hands but she takes him out, takes his head off
before he can kill those precious kids.
There is no point trying to reason with Republican gun nuts
like Gohmert, just as there is no point trying to reason with Republican
anti-tax nuts about income-tax rates, or with Republican nativists about
immigration. The task at hand is to defeat the extremists by rallying the
public and appealing to moderate Republicans in Congress, those that still
exist. Obama is doing this successfully on the question of taxing the rich.
Surely, it shouldn’t be beyond his ability to do it, too, with keeping
military-assault weapons off the streets. When Feinstein’s Sandy Hook bill
reaches the floor of Congress, even some N.R.A.-approved Republicans will
surely blanche at trampling on the memory of Principal Hochsprung and her
pupils.
Bloomberg’s timing is good, and his intervention carries an
implicit threat. If the President once again tries to weasel out of taking on
this challenge, he’ll face the prospect of a well-financed ad blitz pointing
out his failure. It isn’t Hizzoner’s eloquence that makes his views more
consequential than those of other elected officials: It’s his capacity to
launch a national campaign on any issue he chooses. That’s hardly a shining
example of democracy in action, and I’m not saying I’ve been transformed into a
Bloomberg supporter. But on this tragic occasion, I’m more than happy to line
up behind him and shout, “Go Mike! Give ‘em hell.”
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