Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) must be wondering what else he needed to do to make his pandering to the gun lobby pay off politically. In a recent statement, the National Rifle Association has made it official. Despite Reid’s recent record of carrying the NRA’s water on Capitol Hill, the gun lobby will not endorse the Majority Leader for reelection against his Tea Party Republican challenger, Sharron Angle.

When it comes to advancing the NRA’s agenda from the Democratic side of the aisle, Harry Reid recently has had few peers. Time and again, Reid has supported Republican-sponsored amendments to weaken the nation’s gun laws – from the Coburn Amendment to allow loaded guns in national parks, to the Thune Amendment to undercut existing state law restrictions on concealed carry, to the Ensign Amendment to gut the District of Columbia’s gun laws. Reid has used every means at his disposal to block Senate consideration of bills sponsored by Democratic Senators to close the lethal loopholes in our gun laws – even legislation to bar gun purchases by persons on the terrorist watch list or to extend Brady background checks to private purchases at gun shows.

As distasteful as Reid’s record has been, it apparently was not good enough for the NRA. According to Chris Cox, Director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, Reid could not be forgiven his support of Supreme Court nominees Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, both strongly opposed by the gun lobby for failing to commit themselves to its absolutist vision of Second Amendment rights. The NRA is not satisfied with the power to dictate our nation’s gun policy. It also insists on the power to determine the composition of the Supreme Court.

Senator Reid just learned (the hard way) a few lessons about pandering to the gun lobby.

First, no matter how much you appease the NRA, it will always want more.

Second, because the NRA serves an extremist political ideology, you cannot successfully appease it without becoming extremist yourself.

Third, as a Democrat, you are always vulnerable to being “outgunned” by an even more extreme pro-gun Republican. Harry Reid, meet Sharron Angle.

Although Chris Cox’s statement about the NRA’s refusal to endorse Reid mentions only his support of President Obama’s two Supreme Court nominees, it may well be that Reid’s recent attack ad against Angle’s Second Amendment nuttiness also played a role. Angle has become infamous for her interpretation of the Second Amendment, which she has said is intended to ensure that the people have the means to engage in armed revolt “when our government becomes tyrannical,” suggesting that the time to employ such “Second Amendment remedies” may arrive if politicians like Harry Reid are not voted out of office. “[T]he nation is arming,” says Angle, because the people “are afraid they’ll have to fight for their liberty in more Second Amendment kinds of ways.”

Reid has responded with a powerful attack ad in which a police officer (and self-described Republican and NRA member) calls Angle’s rhetoric “way over the line” and “crazy” because “what she’s actually talking about is armed resistance.” Indeed, she is.

The irony here is that there is little daylight between Angle’s insurrectionist views and those of the NRA itself. Some years ago, an NRA official told the New York Times, “The Second Amendment is literally a loaded gun held to the heads of government.” Just last year, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre put it this way to the Conservative Political Action Conference, “Freedom is nothing but dust in the wind till it’s guarded by the blue steel and dry powder of a free and armed people . . . Our founding fathers understood that the guys with the guns make the rules.” Was Angle saying anything different? It may be that the NRA simply could not endorse Senator Reid once he had attacked its core belief that the Second Amendment really is about armed revolt against our government.

Senator Reid’s political advisors may still believe his record of weakening our gun laws will help him with gun owners, regardless of his being snubbed by the NRA. But it is a myth that politicians sacrifice the support of gun owners by supporting sensible gun laws. There is evidence that Reid himself once understood this. As recently as 2004, for example, he voted to close the “gun show loophole” by extending Brady Law background checks to private sales at gun shows.

A revealing survey taken last year by Republican messaging maven Frank Luntz shows that most gun owners – even most NRA members – support many of the gun control measures Reid has successfully blocked in recent years. For example, Luntz found that 69% of self-described NRA members, and 86% of gun owners who do not belong to the NRA, support closing the “gun show loophole.”

So, Senator Reid, what did you gain by pandering to the NRA? Only your pivotal place in the recent failure of our political leadership to address the continuing tragedy of 300 Americans killed and injured by gunshots every passing day.

For more information, see Dennis Henigan’s Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy (Potomac Books 2009)

When an NRA safety instructor accidentally shoots a student in one of his classes, is it a teachable moment about guns in America?

I am referring to an incident reported in the Orlando Sentinel in which a person attending a National Rifle Association class for applicants for concealed carry licenses was shot when his instructor’s gun accidentally discharged during the class. The bullet penetrated a table before hitting the victim, who fortunately recovered from his wound.

I think it’s safe to say that the NRA instructor in this case is unlikely to appear in future “I’m the NRA” promotional ads.

Here we have an individual, who the NRA itself has decided is such an expert in safe gun handling that he can teach a class in it, nevertheless accidentally discharging his weapon in a public place and wounding an innocent person. If this can happen to the instructor, what can we expect from his students, who presumably will be carrying their concealed guns on the streets?

This is hardly the first time that a highly trained gun user has accidentally shot someone. In fact the Sentinel article referred to another incident in Orlando a few years ago, in which a DEA agent shot himself in the thigh with a .40 caliber Glock pistol while talking to schoolchildren about the importance of staying away from guns. This bizarre shooting actually was captured on video. The image of all those kids in that room is chilling.

What lessons can be learned from these two disturbing incidents?

First, because of the nature of guns, accidental shootings remain a constant threat. Yes, individuals can be trained to be extremely careful around guns and most gun owners no doubt regard themselves as very safety conscious. But human beings are prone to mistakes – they can be clumsy, or distracted, or rushed, for example – and guns are sufficiently complicated mechanisms that even the slightest mistake can result in tragedy.

This is not true of other widely available products used as weapons. As the late columnist and humorist Molly Ivins once observed, “People are seldom killed while cleaning their knives.” In fact, the great paradox of gun design is that guns are complicated enough to invite accidents by adults, yet simple enough to be fired by a child.

The NRA is fond of pointing to data suggesting that the rate of accidental shootings has been declining, but this is largely due to the decline in hunting, as well as the falling percentage of American households with guns, from 54% in 1977 to 33% in 2009. Even so, between 1965 and 2006, over 64,000 Americans died in unintentional shootings, more Americans than were killed in battle during those decades. For every person killed in such shootings, about thirteen are seriously wounded. The collection of accidental shootings found at http://ohhshoot.blogspot.com/ makes a sobering statement.

The constant risk of an accidental shooting is not confined to the gun owner, those in his household, and those who may visit his household. Given the campaign of the “gun rights” ideologues to make it easier to carry guns in public, it is increasingly a threat to all of us. Most states that have made it easier to carry concealed weapons have no serious safety training requirements (and some states, like Arizona, have no requirement of even a license to carry a concealed weapon).

And now we have the spectacle of gun extremists carrying their handguns openly in places like Starbucks. In most states, there is no license or safety training requirement of any kind to engage in such “open carry”. Apart from the growing evidence that we are allowing very dangerous people to legally carry guns in public (at least 173 homicides by concealed carry license holders since May, 2007, including 16 mass shootings), there is the less visible, but more constant threat of tragedy from a law-abiding, well-intentioned gun owner who may simply make a mistake with a gun on the street, in a coffee shop or in a public park.

When it comes to cars, we tolerate the risk of accidents because we regard automobile transportation as essential to our daily lives (though, unlike guns, we have extensive safety regulations on cars and drivers to reduce the risk of death and injury). We are told that we must similarly tolerate the risk of gun accidents because of the overriding protective benefit of guns in enabling self-defense against criminal attack.

But as to guns in the home, we know that for every time they are used in a self-defense shooting, there are four unintentional shootings (as well as seven criminal assaults and eleven attempted or completed suicides). For those who carry guns in public, the benefits are demonstrably not worth the risk. A recent study shows that individuals in actual possession of a gun are over four times more likely to be shot in an assault than persons not in possession of a gun. The research also reveals no evidence that making it easier for people to carry concealed guns reduces crime; indeed, its effect has been to increase aggravated assault.

So, yes, the accidental shooting by the NRA safety instructor provides a teachable moment. It teaches us this: the gun in the home, or in a public place, owned and carried even by a law-abiding and well-trained adult, presents a persistent risk of death and injury to the innocent. That risk is far greater than the often-claimed protective benefits of guns.

For more information, see Dennis Henigan’s Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy (Potomac Books 2009)

Is the Obama Administration serious about enforcing our gun laws?

It is now beyond doubt that the Administration is determined to say as little as possible about the plague of gun violence that inflicts death and injury on 300 Americans every day. When forced to comment on proposals to strengthen our anemic federal gun laws, the President and his representatives typically fall back on the gun lobby’s canard, “We don’t need new gun laws. We need to enforce the laws on the books.”

Last year, for example, when President Obama was asked by Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation whether he plans to ask Congress to enact an assault weapon ban to address the torrent of guns flowing from American gun dealers to Mexican drug cartels, the President replied, “I think the main thing we need is better enforcement.”

There is no question that we need to devote far more resources to enforcing federal gun laws. But it is a transparent fallacy to argue that deficiencies in enforcing current laws justify inaction to strengthen those laws.

According to the “just enforce current laws” argument, we should, for instance, tolerate the “gun show loophole” in federal law that allows criminals to buy guns from private sellers at gun shows without background checks, because we can always hire more federal agents to track down the criminals after they get the guns. Doesn’t it make more sense to require background checks to block gun sales to criminals in the first place?

There also now is reason to doubt the sincerity of the Obama Administration’s asserted commitment to better enforcement. It is indefensible, for example, that the President has been in office for eighteen months without appointing a permanent Director for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the federal agency responsible for enforcement of our nation’s gun laws.

In June, Brady Center President Paul Helmke wrote to President Obama, urging him to nominate a Director for ATF. After the press began to notice the Administration’s inaction, rumors of an impending appointment began to circulate, with Al Kamen of the Washington Post reporting yesterday that the Administration may be on the verge of nominating the current Special Agent in Charge of ATF’s Chicago office. But the question remains: How could the Obama Administration allow such a vital position to be unfilled for so long?

Incredibly, ATF has not had a permanent Director since 2006. President George W. Bush at least sent a nominee to Congress, but a vote on his candidate, Michael Sullivan, was reportedly blocked by then-Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho), an NRA Board Member who apparently took issue with ATF’s treatment of gun dealers during Sullivan’s term as Acting ATF Director. The Bureau has had a succession of Interim and Acting Directors, with the last Acting Director occupying that position so long that he exhausted the statutory time limit on his tenure.

As the Brady Center points out in its new report, Leadership Vacuum, the ATF vacancy is particularly conspicuous, since 83% of the appointments that require Senate approval have been confirmed or nominated since President Obama took office. The Administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Administration has been nominated and confirmed, but no one has even been nominated for the job of running the agency responsible for fighting gun trafficking.

This is a serious matter. In the words of James Pasco, a former ATF Assistant Director, “I am absolutely confident that because of the lack of a confirmed director, crimes are being committed and innocent people are dying.” How can the Administration continue to maintain it has a policy to fight gun violence by improving enforcement of current law, when it has been willing to allow the federal gun enforcement agency to remain leaderless? How can it say that it is “doing all that we can” – as Secretary of State Clinton claimed – to curb the arming of Mexican cartels with guns trafficked from American gun shops?

A headless ATF is but the latest symptom of a paralyzing disease – the Obama Administration’s fear of the gun lobby. The National Rifle Association long has dedicated itself to the ATF’s destruction – even stooping, during the Clinton Administration, to calling ATF agents “jack-booted government thugs.” It is easy to imagine the express or implied threats being made by the gun lobby and its friends in Congress to oppose any nominee for Director who will aggressively pursue the corrupt gun dealers who aid and abet gun trafficking. As Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote about the Administraton’s ATF inaction, “it’s the kind of situation that makes you wonder if good governance has taken a holiday.”

The urgency of a strong ATF Director grows every day, as the gun lobby pushes its latest legislative abomination, a bill that would further weaken ATF’s existing enforcement powers, that carries the Orwellian name “ATF Reform and Firearms Modernization Act.” The bill (S.941/H.R. 2296) would make it virtually impossible for ATF to revoke the licenses of law-breaking gun dealers. If names attached to legislation had to pass a “truth-in-advertising” test, the bill would be called the “ATF Deform and Destruction Act.”

It is bad enough to witness President Obama resorting to the “enforcement fallacy” to justify his failure to support strengthening our gun laws. It is beyond the pale that his Administration would be so fearful of the gun lobby that it would leave ATF without a leader and stand silently as the gun lobby pushes legislation to emasculate the agency for decades to come.

For more information, see Dennis Henigan’s Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy (Potomac Books 2009)

We now know that the National Rifle Association will be joining Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin for Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial on the 47th Anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Is it possible to imagine a greater offense to the legacy of Dr. King?

The NRA, the leading purveyor of the noxious notion that guns are legitimate tools of political dissent, will be standing in the historic shadow of Dr. King, the apostle of non-violent protest. Dr. King resisted calls to violence from within the civil rights movement with these words: “There is more power in socially organized masses on the march than there is in guns in the hands of a few desperate men. Our enemies would prefer to deal with a small armed group rather than with a huge, unarmed but resolute mass of people….” As history shows, the civil rights movement touched the moral conscience of our Nation, and ended the Jim Crow era, by pursuing Dr. King’s path of peaceful sit-ins and marches, rather than resisting Bull Connor’s water hoses with bullets.

What would Dr. King have thought of the wild cheers that greeted the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, when he said this at last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference: “Freedom is nothing but dust in the wind till it’s guarded by the blue steel and dry powder of a free and armed people . . . Our founding fathers understood that the guys with the guns make the rules.” The noxious idea, long promoted by the NRA, that the Second Amendment is really about ensuring the threat of violence against the government as a legitimate strategy to achieve political change, is now an anthem of the Far Right. As Sharran Angle, the Tea Party candidate nominated by the Republicans to run for Harry Reid’s Nevada Senate seat, put it recently, “If Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.” In other words, if the Right cannot change the direction of the country through peaceful discussion and dissent, it will be time for the “guys with the guns” to “make the rules.” We have seen the words of political intimidation translate into action, as guns have been openly brandished at Tea Party events and town hall meetings.

What irony could be more cruel than the NRA’s presence on the steps of the Memorial to President Lincoln, on the Anniversary of Dr. King’s speech, a stark reminder that both these American icons were struck down by gunfire in acts of political violence? John Wilkes Booth and James Earl Ray were “guys with the guns” who sought to change the direction of our country through armed force. We need no more powerful demonstration of the horror that can be too easily justified by the insurrectionist ideas of the NRA and its Tea Party friends. And what could be uglier than the planned appearance of guitarist Ted Nugent, an NRA Board Member, who once said that “apartheid isn’t that cut and dry,” because “all men are not created equal”?

The “Restoring Honor” rally is being sold as an entirely “non-political” event that simply will pay tribute “to America’s service personnel and other upstanding citizens who embody our nation’s founding principles of integrity, truth and honor.” But the ideological agenda is barely concealed. “Help us restore the values that founded this great nation,” says Beck’s promotional material. What values have been lost that must be restored? Who lost them? How should we restore them? The theme of “lost values that must be restored” is indistinguishable from the Tea Party demand, “We want our country back!” The NRA’s presence is an implicit statement that if our values cannot be restored throughout peaceful dissent, the “guys with the guns” will be there to restore them through other means.

In his “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr. King said this: “We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.” The appearance of the NRA at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28 shows a shameful contempt for Dr. King’s memory and the principles of non-violent protest for which he lived, and died.

We must have faith that Dr. King’s legacy will remain strong enough to ensure that the guys with the guns do not make the rules.

For more information, see Dennis Henigan’s Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy (Potomac Books 2009)

The “gun rights” absolutists are continuing their campaign to ensure that guns are carried into every corner of American society, with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal signing legislation to allows guns in places of worship, Arizona allowing the carrying of concealed weapons without a permit, and Utah giving out concealed carry licenses like candy to folks who have never set foot in the state. The madness is driven by the “more guns=less crime” malarkey that has become the mantra of the gun lobby.

The “more guns” argument goes like this. The world is neatly divided into good guys and bad guys. The bad guys will always have guns and will attack the good guys who are unarmed, but not the good guys who may be able to shoot back. “Criminals still prefer to prey on the weak,” says former NRA President Sandy Froman, “and they don’t like armed victims.” According to this argument, the bad guys will be deterred from committing criminal acts by the fear that the good guys are carrying guns. In the fantasy world constructed by the “gun rights” crowd, this idea is taken as presumed truth. In the world we actually live in, it doesn’t work so well.

Proponents of the deterrence theory attempt to give it a quasi-scholarly veneer by citing the work of John Lott, who has made headline-grabbing claims that state laws making it easier to carry concealed weapons have caused sharp reductions in crime. Lott’s studies were long ago discredited by economists and public health scholars at a veritable Who’s Who of major research universities, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins and Carnegie-Mellon.

The most recent critique of Lott’s work, by Ian Ayres and John Donahue of Yale Law School, finds that the “right to carry” laws not only have not reduced crime, they actually are associated with an increase in aggravated assault. Lott continues to peddle his pseudo-science, as he did in his two recent appearances with me on John Stossel’s show on FoxBusiness and on C-Span’s Washington Journal.

And then there is the self-inflicted damage to Lott’s credibility from his admission that he posed on the internet as a fictional former student named “Mary Rosh.” Mary was a passionate defender of Lott’s work and gushing admirer of his teaching ability. The strange story of John Lott as “Mary Rosh” is set out in my book, Lethal Logic. Lott recently landed a job as a commentator on Fox News, which tells us as much as we need to know about his objectivity.

Apart from the statistics, the deterrence theory poses an interesting conundrum. If criminals are deterred by the prospect that their victim may be armed, how can we account for attacks by armed criminals against other armed criminals? Why do armed drug dealers have anything to fear from other armed drug dealers? Why do armed gangs have anything to fear from other armed gangs? Pro-gun researcher Gary Kleck of Florida State University reports that street gang members are over eight times more likely to own handguns than other youths, and nineteen times more likely to be homicide victims. Drug dealers are almost four times more likely to own a handgun and six times more likely to be homicide victims. Why doesn’t their gun possession deter attacks on these criminals? Surely it can’t be true that bad guys fear only armed good guys, but not other armed bad guys.

The real problem with the deterrence theory is that it little to do with the real world. It has a tough time explaining, for example, what happened last Saturday in Lake Sammamish State Park near Seattle. A fistfight broke out between two groups of people with apparent gang affiliations, and ended in a gun battle in which two were killed and three others were wounded. It seems safe to assume that when the fistfight began, those present had reason to believe that some in the two groups were armed with guns. Yet the likely presence of guns did nothing to deter violence. The guns simply made the violence more lethal. What started as a fistfight ended up with two dead and three wounded (with the attendant public cost of treating the wounded).

More guns means less crime only in the imaginary world of the “gun rights” movement as it tries to push us toward an America where there is nowhere to go to escape the guns – even into churches. The real world was last Saturday in that state park near Seattle.

For more information, see Dennis Henigan’s Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy (Potomac Books 2009).