January 15, 2013--Informed Consent
Later today Joe Biden will be submitting a report on ways in which to deal with gun violence.
After the slaughter of innocents at the Sandy Hook school in Newtown, CT, President Obama tasked Biden to assemble a representative group to come up with recommendations about what his administration and Congress can do to reduce the number of these kinds of heinous crimes.
The NRA was asked to participate and predictably recommended doing nothing about guns or ammunition. Rather they continued to assert that the best way to deal with shootings in schools, shopping centers, and movie theaters is by arming teachers and doing something about all the violent films and video games produced in "Hollywood."
It was reported that since the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives is opposed to any limitations on guns and ammunition of any sort, the Biden recommendations will not include new calls for meaningful reductions in the sale and use of assault weapons. His group may tepidly advocate, though, that some controls be placed on so-called "high-performance" ammunition magazines, ones that allow shooters to fire 30 or more rounds per clip and were "essential" to the Newtown murderer's ability to kill so many at Sandy Hook.
After the shape of the likely mealy-mouthed set of recommendation leaked out, it looks as if the White House changed course and at least will call for more extensive forms of weapons control, if only to score political points. The plan is to concede that the NRA will win and again have their way, but Democrats will come after intractable congressmen during the mid-term elections in 2014.
But there is one clear, if extremely difficult way to make progress.
Show the forensic photos of a few of the seven-year-old Newtown victims. Ones of those babies shot half a dozen or more times by Adam Lanza.
This is admittedly a painful, even hideous suggestion, but it would work to galvanize and mobilize people who are thinking only abstractly about what is at issue. What is missing from the debate is vivid knowledge of what these kinds of powerful weapons and ammunition clips enable evil people to do.
Just as public sentiment to mobilize to end the war in Vietnam was spurred by photos of a South Vietnamese general summarily shooting an opponent in the head and others of napalmed children running naked from their villages; sometimes, to know the truth of a situation, to be motivated to take action, we need to experience viscerally what is transpiring.
During the early years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, at a dinner party, I asked the New York Times photo editor why the paper was all right publishing pictures of the dead bodies of the enemy but not of American soldiers.
He said, "So as not to unduly upset people."
I claimed, "Upsetting people in such circumstances is just what is needed."
In a democracy, where informed consent is an essential guide to our elected representatives, we need to have access to the truth. Including, especially, when innocent lives are at stake or young people are asked to go to war. No matter how hard that truth.
Informed consent when it comes to weapons of war in the hands of citizens, even and especially when opponents of any kind of control in their ill-informed way wave the Second Amendment, includes, unfortunately but essentially, all of us being exposed to the full horror of what the consequences are of leaving things as they currently exist.
After the slaughter of innocents at the Sandy Hook school in Newtown, CT, President Obama tasked Biden to assemble a representative group to come up with recommendations about what his administration and Congress can do to reduce the number of these kinds of heinous crimes.
The NRA was asked to participate and predictably recommended doing nothing about guns or ammunition. Rather they continued to assert that the best way to deal with shootings in schools, shopping centers, and movie theaters is by arming teachers and doing something about all the violent films and video games produced in "Hollywood."
It was reported that since the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives is opposed to any limitations on guns and ammunition of any sort, the Biden recommendations will not include new calls for meaningful reductions in the sale and use of assault weapons. His group may tepidly advocate, though, that some controls be placed on so-called "high-performance" ammunition magazines, ones that allow shooters to fire 30 or more rounds per clip and were "essential" to the Newtown murderer's ability to kill so many at Sandy Hook.
After the shape of the likely mealy-mouthed set of recommendation leaked out, it looks as if the White House changed course and at least will call for more extensive forms of weapons control, if only to score political points. The plan is to concede that the NRA will win and again have their way, but Democrats will come after intractable congressmen during the mid-term elections in 2014.
But there is one clear, if extremely difficult way to make progress.
Show the forensic photos of a few of the seven-year-old Newtown victims. Ones of those babies shot half a dozen or more times by Adam Lanza.
This is admittedly a painful, even hideous suggestion, but it would work to galvanize and mobilize people who are thinking only abstractly about what is at issue. What is missing from the debate is vivid knowledge of what these kinds of powerful weapons and ammunition clips enable evil people to do.
Just as public sentiment to mobilize to end the war in Vietnam was spurred by photos of a South Vietnamese general summarily shooting an opponent in the head and others of napalmed children running naked from their villages; sometimes, to know the truth of a situation, to be motivated to take action, we need to experience viscerally what is transpiring.
During the early years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, at a dinner party, I asked the New York Times photo editor why the paper was all right publishing pictures of the dead bodies of the enemy but not of American soldiers.
He said, "So as not to unduly upset people."
I claimed, "Upsetting people in such circumstances is just what is needed."
In a democracy, where informed consent is an essential guide to our elected representatives, we need to have access to the truth. Including, especially, when innocent lives are at stake or young people are asked to go to war. No matter how hard that truth.
Informed consent when it comes to weapons of war in the hands of citizens, even and especially when opponents of any kind of control in their ill-informed way wave the Second Amendment, includes, unfortunately but essentially, all of us being exposed to the full horror of what the consequences are of leaving things as they currently exist.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
5:13 AM
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