Donald Trump double speak about gun safety in schools

The Gun-Control Debate After Parkland~ echo from Talk of the Town commentary.

This time feels different. Will things finally change?

Commentary published in The New Yorker by Margaret Talbot

Is this the moment when the politics of guns shifts? 

Tom Bachtell illustration in March 12, 2018, The New Yorker

Since the fatal shooting of seventeen students and staff members on February 14, 2018, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, advocates of stricter gun laws have been asking that question, with the wary hopefulness of people who, time and again, have seen such turning points lead nowhere. 

Perhaps, this moment does feel different, largely because the teen-age survivors of the Parkland shooting have commanded the national stage with their raw and righteous indignation.

Last week, they got a real response, though so far it has come more from businesses than from elected representatives. The nationwide sporting-goods chain Dick’s announced that it would no longer carry assault-style rifles or high-capacity magazines, and would not sell guns to people under the age of twenty-one, regardless of local laws. The company’s C.E.O., Edward Stack, told the Times, “We love these kids and their rallying cry ‘Enough is enough.’ It got to us.” By the end of the week, Kroger and Walmart had said that their stores, too, would no longer sell guns to customers younger than twenty-one.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump startled senators and representatives in a subsequent meeting at the White House, by telling them that he wanted to revive a bill mandating universal background checks for gun buyers, chiding them for being frightened of the N.R.A., and saying that, in some situations, he was in favor of taking people’s guns away first, and asking questions later. This was particularly outlandish, given his ties to the N.R.A. and his enthusiasm for arming schoolteachers, not to mention the fact that, a day later, he was back tweeting “Good (Great) meeting tonight at the Oval Office with the NRA!”

But his remarks matter, anyway. The primitive sensors by which Donald Trump divides the world into winners and losers were telling him that for now, at least, the proponents of unfettered gun rights smell like losers. 

According to a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted last week, eighty-eight per cent of Americans now support universal background checks, eighty-one per cent think that a person should be at least twenty-one in order to buy a gun, seventy per cent endorse a ban on high-capacity magazines, and sixty-eight per cent support a ban on assault-style weapons.

Still, gun-control advocates might not want to place too much hope in any single moment, even this one. They will have to play a long game, made up of many moments. That’s what their opponents have done. Matthew Lacombe, a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University, has been analyzing the N.R.A.’s rhetoric over the decades in editorials and letters to the editor that have appeared in its magazine, The American Rifleman. The organization’s leaders and members used a remarkably consistent series of words to describe their identity: “law-abiding,” “peaceable,” “patriotic,” “freedom-loving,” and “average citizens.” Their opponents were “un-American,” “tyrannical,” “Communist,” and “élitist.” Wayne LaPierre, the president of the N.R.A., echoed this language in a speech last week at the Conservative Political Action Committee, invoking a Democratic Party “infested with saboteurs who don’t believe in capitalism, don’t believe in the Constitution, don’t believe in our freedom, and don’t believe in America as we know it.”The N.R.A. has been honing its message since the nineteen-thirties, when it first became visible on the national scene, fighting federal legislation that mandated an early gun-registration and dealer-licensing system. “By the time the bill emerged from the lawmaking process,” the political scientist Carol Skalnik Leff and the historian Mark Leff write, it had been “gutted—stripped of its handgun clauses and revised in line with the objections of the National Rifle Association.”

The N.R.A.’s advantage isn’t only its ability to donate to candidates or to pay for expensive lobbyists and ads, though that is formidable. It spent four hundred and nineteen million dollars in the 2016 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which reports that “career NRA support for some members of the 115th Congress now reaches well into the seven-figure range.” It spent more than thirty million dollars supporting Trump’s campaign.

But the organization also benefits from its unequivocal rejection of virtually all gun regulations, and from the way that certainty resonates. Most gun owners are not N.R.A. members, but, according to Gallup, people who want lenient gun laws are significantly more likely to be single-issue voters than those who want stricter laws. Gun owners are also more likely than non-gun owners to have contacted a public official about gun policy.

All kinds of people own guns, for all kinds of reasons. Still, some demographic features of gun ownership tend to reinforce a particular political posture. A 2017 Pew Research Center study found that forty-eight per cent of white men own a gun, compared with twenty-five per cent of white women, twenty-five per cent of non-white men, and sixteen per cent of non-white women. Gun owners are far more likely to live in rural areas. Forty-one per cent of whites with a bachelor’s degree are gun owners, versus twenty-six per cent of whites with a more advanced degree. Half of all gun owners say that ownership is essential to their identity.

Fear is a factor: nearly half of male gun owners and almost a third of female owners say that they have a loaded gun “easily accessible to them at all times at home.” According to the Pew study, “There is a significant link between owning a gun for protection and perceptions of whether the world broadly speaking has become more dangerous.” Jennifer Carlson, a sociologist who interviewed male gun owners in Michigan, found that many of them considered firearms crucial to reclaiming a sense of purpose, especially if they were no longer breadwinners.

Security, nostalgia for an era of unchallenged privilege, a sense of beleaguered white masculinity: these are powerful forces. They helped get Donald Trump elected. Advocacy for gun-control laws may never provide the same single-minded identity that politicized gun ownership seems to exert. But this year, again thanks in part to the Parkland students, it’s beginning to take a stronger hold. People who want this moment to mean something should remember that they are the majority, and that they, too, can choose, for however long it takes, to be single-issue voters.

 ♦This article appears in the print edition of the March 12, 2018, issue, with the headline “Gun Shots.”

Hillary Clinton speaks truth to trumped up power

Congratulations are over due to Secretary Clinton. 

You Go Hillary! (illustration by Tom Bachell)

Following a polluted American election season infected with toxic primaries followed by a campaign of Trump's sex, lies and video tapes, it's refreshing to see Secretary Clinton still holding her own, graceful and professional under pressure. She's demonstrating leadership we can be proud of.

In October 24, 2016 The New Yorker, an opinion follow up to the second debate, describes Mrs. Clinton's ability to speak truth to power. Her professional demeanor is a sharp contrast to Donald Trump's personality flaws and draws out his bullying behavior.

2016’S MANIFEST MISOGYNY
At the second Presidential debate, Trump declared Clinton a fighter.

But what she’s had to fight all along is sexism like his. 

By Margaret Talbot

At the the end of the second Presidential debate, on October 9th, in St. Louis, when an audience member asked if each candidate could say something positive about the other, Donald Trump declared Hillary Clinton a fighter: “She doesn’t quit. She doesn’t give up.” It was a surprising admission—Trump had spent the previous several weeks castigating Clinton for her weakness, her lack of “stamina”—and one of the few unassailably true things he said all evening.

Plenty of the attacks levelled against Clinton over the years have been policy-oriented and substantive, stemming from her mishandling of health-care reform during her husband’s first Administration, or from her initial support for the war in Iraq, or from her use of a private e-mail server while she was Secretary of State—criticisms that could have been lobbed in the same terms at a male politician of similar ambition. But much of what Clinton has had to battle, for decades, is sexism. She has not, as Trump noted, given up, but the fight has been a wearying spectacle, and one that may explain, at least in part, why people complain of Hillary Clinton fatigue.

When Patricia Schroeder, the former Democratic U.S. representative from Colorado, was campaigning in the nineteen-eighties, she was asked whether she was “running as a woman.” She replied, “Do I have a choice?” Clinton has certainly never had a choice; she has been scrutinized and judged as a woman in every possible way from the moment she appeared on the national stage. She’s been criticized for using her maiden name, for her decision to continue working as a lawyer after her husband became governor of Arkansas, and for her lack of interest in cookie baking—not to mention for her hair, her ankles, her clothes, her smile, her laugh, and her voice. The conspiracy theories about the Clintons often partook of old fears and suspicions regarding women: that Hillary was a lesbian; that she was a Lady Macbeth, responsible for the murder of the deputy White House counsel Vince Foster. (Trump has revived that rumor, calling Foster’s death, a suicide, “very fishy.”) And some would not accept her as a genuine icon of female empowerment, because she had obtained her national standing as an adjunct to her husband, and stood by him after it became clear that he had been having sex with a twenty-two-year-old White House intern and lied about it.

It’s always been dispiriting to see the latent resentments that Clinton’s political ambitions brought forth—she’s like one of those chemical solutions which make invisible writing manifest, only to reveal a message that we’d rather had remained hidden. In 2007, during the Presidential-primary campaigns, when she was the presumptive Democratic nominee, a supporter of Senator John McCain, the eventual Republican nominee, asked him at a gathering in South Carolina, “How do we beat the bitch?” McCain looked fleetingly uncomfortable, then called it an “excellent question.” The terms “bitch” and “witch,” and the associations they stir up, are slurs that Clinton’s detractors have resorted to freely. The political commentator Tucker Carlson said of Clinton, “Something about her feels castrating.” Rush Limbaugh asked his listeners, “Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?” Bumper stickers appeared bearing slogans such as “KFC Hillary Meal Deal: Two Fat Thighs, Two Small Breasts and a Bunch of Left Wings” and “Even Bill Doesn’t Want Me.”

During Clinton’s lifetime, institutionalized discrimination against women has retreated markedly. So has the routine sexism that assumes that a woman can’t, by definition, do a given job as well as a man, or that she shouldn’t be working outside the home at all. 

But what lingers is misogyny—the kind of hate- and fear-filled objectification of women that flourishes in corners of the Internet, and in the rhetoric of Trump and some of his supporters. It turns out that what some of them seemed to have meant when they said they were tired of being politically correct was that they were tired of addressing others with a modicum of respect. Trump encourages people at his rallies to chant “Lock her up!”—in the second debate, he vowed to do just that if elected. Such rhetoric, in its vulgarity and its rawness, is a radical break from conservative norms. Mitt Romney and Ronald Reagan are not exactly celebrated as feminists, but it’s impossible to imagine either of them publicly invoking a newswoman’s menstrual period, or calling women “fat pigs,” or acquiescing to a request from Howard Stern to refer to his daughter as a “piece of ass.”

Trump has been defending the boasts he made on the leaked “Access Hollywood” tape—that, as a “star,” he could “do anything” to women—by saying they were just words. That does not seem to have been the case: in the past week, a number of women have come forward with allegations that Trump groped or kissed them without their consent. But, in any event, words do matter, and Trump’s words about women, immigrants, and Muslims incite bigotry and fear. As Michelle Obama told a Clinton rally in New Hampshire last week, this is a campaign characterized by “language that has been painful for so many of us, not just as women, but as parents trying to protect our children and raise them to be caring, respectful adults, and as citizens who think that our nation’s leaders should meet basic standards of human decency.”

Clinton’s reputation has also been prone to another unfortunate pattern: she was often more popular when she was seen to be suffering a traditionally feminine humiliation. As First Lady, her approval ratings rose after the Monica Lewinsky revelations and during Kenneth Starr’s investigation of them. In 2008, many people rallied to her after she was excoriated for seeming to tear up at a campaign event. Trump was clearly seeking to humiliate Clinton by inviting women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment or assault to be his guests at the second debate. But this time it felt like she was long past embarrassment of the sort he was trying to induce—the stakes were too high, and Trump’s insults to women too categorical.

There’s something both grotesque and bracing about the confrontation between Clinton, with her disciplined professionalism, and Trump, with his increasingly frenzied assertions of male prerogative. Like the female protagonist of a quest narrative—or, perhaps, of a dystopian fantasy—Clinton has made it through all her challenges to face the bull-headed Minotaur of sexism at the end of the maze. ♦

Congratulations Secretary Hillary Clinton!