Assassination and the 2nd Amendment

In March, 1968, I turned 18 barely a month after the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. Within 3 days I reported to my draft board and registered, otherwise a deputy Sheriff would have come to my high school to escort me to the bus station and a free trip to Ft. Benning, Georgia, but I digress. At my recently desegregated high school, I enjoyed my deferment. The only times I remember thinking about such violence was after watching the nightly news.

By 1968, with no Internet, laptops or cell phones, television had become the dominant news medium, following from the live televised assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald five years earlier. Night after night at supper time, anchors Bob Young (ABC), Walter Cronkite (CBS) and the team of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley (NBC) reported the carnage of the Vietnam War and the outrage surrounding the Civil Rights movement. Sound on film replayed the gunfire and the violence.

I had seen Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on television. Of him I heard mostly vile things, since I lived in the rural South where the idea of “separate but equal” still held and the term “African-American” was unknown. I recall thinking at the time that he and other leaders of the civil rights movement were sure putting themselves in harm’s way by their exposure like targets, especially Dr. King who was all over television leading marches and being interviewed.

April 4, 1968, James Earl Ray shouldered a Remington.30-06-caliber rifle with a Redfield 2x7 scope and pulled the trigger.

My hero and presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy broke the news of Dr. King’s assassination to a crowd in Indianapolis. Kennedy spoke of King's dedication to "love and to justice between fellow human beings," adding that "he died in the cause of that effort." Rioting broke out in Memphis and 4,000 guardsmen were called out. Other cities burned, but Indianapolis did not. "I had a member of my family killed,” Kennedy said, “but he was killed by a white man."

June 5th, 1968, Sirhan Sirhan pulled out a .22 caliber revolver and fired eight shots.

I do not remember hearing calls for any kind of gun control, though, until after the failed Reagan assassination attempt, March 1981, when John Hinckley fired a .22 caliber Röhm RG-14 revolver six times and wounded both the President and his Press Secretary James Brady. It made the nightly news after it appeared within minutes on CNN. Subsequently, after a seven-year battle, President Clinton signed into law the Brady Bill, which requires a five-day waiting period and background checks on handgun purchases.

If you love data, and who doesn’t, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence has a graphic on its home page that updates how many people are shot in America so far this year and so far today. As I originally posted this article with Blogcritics, the numbers reported 5000 people shot to date, 175 today.

In the aftermath of the Giffords’ shooting, you may or may not know that Arizona has virtually no restrictions on guns and recently became the third state to allow people to carry concealed weapons in public places without a permit. The state also recently allowed concealed weapon carriers to take their guns into bars and just last year became the third state to make it legal for adults to carry a concealed weapon without getting training and a background check.

Arizona House Speaker Kirk Adams is one of 61 Republicans making up two-thirds of the 90-member Legislature. According to AP, Adams said last year's bill to legalize carrying concealed weapons without a permit wasn't a mistake. "Arizona remains a place that is respectful and adamant about our Second Amendment rights, and I think the people of Arizona support that," Adams said. The state ranks 5th in the nation in gun deaths, behind Wyoming, Louisiana, Alaska and the District of Columbia.

What a contrast exists between 5^th ranked Arizona and 1st ranked Washington, D.C. on so many levels. But I want to stick with gun possession and get to the 2^nd Amendment. The District of Columbia banned the possession of handguns, making it a crime to carry an unregistered firearm and the registration of handguns illegal. Ultimately, the D.C. handgun ban went to the Supreme Court in District Of Columbia v. Heller, which overturned the ban.

Justice Antonin Scalia is the longest-serving justice on the Supreme Court and wrote the Court’s opinion in Heller. “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.” He continued, “Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

Judge Scalia further wrote, “Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.”

Let me point out that the founders wrote the 2^nd Amendment to protect citizens from Congress, not from home invaders. The whole idea dates back to the 17^th century when the Catholic Stuart Kings, Charles II and James II, sought to protect themselves from overthrow by disarming insurgent Protestant militias. By the time of the founding, an English subjects’ right to have arms was understood to be an individual right protecting against both public and private violence.

By the way, how many shootings happen in home defense? I cannot find the data. But, again, I digress. As Justice Scalia wrote in Heller, “…we do not read the Second Amendment to protect the right of citizens to carry arms for any sort of confrontation, just as we do not read the First Amendment to protect the right of citizens to speak for any purpose.”

Assassins shot and killed both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F.Kennedy in 1968. An assassination attempt on Representative Gabriel Giffords killed Judge John Roll and 5 other people in 2011. Laws and public policy cannot prevent assassinations. Public figures, such as John Lennon, will always be vulnerable. The only things that have changed in this regard, since I was in high school, are how quickly we find out about such tragedies, how many more shooting deaths occur each year, and how public opinion on the 2^nd Amendment has become politicized.

Article originally published as Assassination and the 2^nd Amendment on Blogcritics.

No Viewer Left Behind

I objected when Monday Night Football moved from over-the-air broadcast television to cable/satellite ESPN after 35 years on ABC. Making fans have to pay to see televised football is nothing short of un-American, I argued to no avail. I objected last year when the NFL channel kept exclusive rights to broadcast a Thursday night game only available on satellite, which you cannot receive if you do not have a southern exposure for a dish. The once public airwaves ceased to be public. What next, I thought: the public will have to pay to watch public television? I hate being right.

Congress mandated the conversion from analogue to all-digital television broadcasting presumably because all-digital broadcasting would free up frequencies for public safety communications such as police, fire, and emergency rescue. The government says that DTV technology will allow broadcasters to offer “television with movie-quality picture and CD-quality sound.” In addition, the switch frees up valuable chunks of wireless spectrum for public safety and those airwaves can also be used for commercial wireless services, which are private interest.

When the legislation originally came up, television stations were supposed to broadcast analog and digital signal in parallel until 2017. The Bush administration dropped that stipulation and the FCC auctioned the airwave spectrum. The wireless biopoly of AT&T and Verizon Communications paid a collective $16 billion at the FCC auction. Back in 2005 when the Republican Congress passed the legislation requiring the conversion, they set February 19, 2009, as the conversion deadline.

However, a glitch occurred. According to the Nielsen Company more than 6.5 million homes are still unprepared to receive digital signals. The government said 1.4 million households are on a waiting list for an equipment subsidy that is financed by the FCC auction. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an arm of the Commerce Department, said it had hit its $1.34 billion funding limit set by Congress to pay for converter box coupons. In other words, the government subsidy for converter boxes ran out of money.

At that point the Obama administration decided to push for a delay because the government is not doing enough to help Americans prepare for and navigate the transition. The issue seemed to especially affect rural, poor or minority communities. The Senate GOP opposed the delay. Congressional lines in the sand began to appear.

Enter Senator John Rockefeller of West Virginia, the incoming chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.”Over 2 million Americans are waiting to receive a coupon to help them offset the cost of equipment that will help them manage the transition,” he said. “Millions more don't have the proper information they need." Rockefeller contended that delaying the transition by three months would give the federal government time to fill a backlog of consumer coupon requests and also to give the government and the FCC more time to prepare for the change. This week a unanimous Senate voted to postpone the upcoming transition from analog to digital television broadcasting.

The House had its own proposal but was expected to go along with the move that was proffered by the Obama administration. Enter Representative Henry Waxman of California, Chairman of the House Energy & Commerce. His bill sought to change the DTV Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005 to insert the new date. It would also move the expiration date of any DTV-to-analog coupons that have expired to Sept. 15, 2009.

The Consumers Union weighed in and wrote to Waxman’s Committee, “We are concerned that millions of at-risk consumers, including rural, low-income and elderly citizens across the country could be left with blank television screens.” In addition to consumers having “fewer resources than ever” to buy converter boxes, this is “not the right time to ask consumers to dig deeper into their own pockets to pay for the miscalculation by the federal government."

The House Bill failed by 26 votes and GOP members claimed victory, warning that postponing the transition would confuse consumers. The 258-168 vote did not clear the two-thirds threshold needed for passage. The February conversion stands, at least until the House Bill comes to the floor again. By regular majority vote, Democrats have sufficient votes to pass the legislation and send it to the President.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration had almost 3 million coupon requests on a waiting list last week and those people will not receive their coupons before February 17. The NTIA is sending out new coupons only as older, unredeemed ones reach a 90-day expiration date and free up more money. To date, more than half of coupons that have reached their 90 day cycle have been redeemed and more than 13 million coupons have expired.

Although a minority, many of our elderly folks for whom rabbit-ear-antenna television is their entertainment may be looking at black screens next month. The AARP’s advice is pragmatic – “get a special converter box that will make your analog set work” or “subscribe to a cable, satellite or other pay service for all the sets in your home, or buy a new TV that will receive digital signals.”

While I can buy into the public safety aspects of using analogue television frequencies for public safety, I cannot buy into making people pay for public airwaves. The same House legislators who defeated a three month delay also decide Public Television and the National Endowment for the Arts funding. The Obama administration may know who its friends are, but millions of viewers are now left behind.

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Originally published in Blogcritics Magazine, January 29, 2009

October Surprise Ball Booted

The October surprise ball was booted, unless a report that a distant Kenyan relative of Senator Obama is living in Boston “illegally” is the perfect mole hill upon which a political mountain may be built. A Senator McCain spokesman, Tucker Bounds, said his campaign had no comment. That is a shame since it is the perfect fodder upon which the Alaskan running mate likes to graze, but I digress. The real problem with the story is that it has limited television appeal, compared with the presidential debates which were all about television appeal.

The RNC has shown little interest in vetting anyone or anything. However, it sure thinks it knows the importance of television appeal. That is why the RNC booted the “hockey mom” ball with its concern about the Palin makeover. Television appeal is how the RNC booted the “Joe the Plumber” ball when they gave a real person a television name (I’m Joe Plumber, RNC News.) They would have been better off hiring an actor.

Television appeal is how the RNC booted the “Presidential debate” ball. Perhaps it would have better for their standard bearer had the debates been broadcast in black and white – McCain would have come across like Ike and Obama a skinny college kid. Following along that line, it would have better had the debates been broadcast on radio – the skinny kid would have come across like a crooner and Ike would still be Ike.

Twenty years ago ABC News claimed, “More people get their news from ABC than from any other source.” Although a frightening concept at the time, the network can no longer make such a claim. CNN put the debate solidly in the television appeal category, as opposed to a content substance category, with its goofy, color coded crawling graphic. In so doing CNN reduced the candidates to being the red guy and the blue guy with an imaginary green guy in between the two.
Television reduced the debates to an extended, three part infomercial, a ball booted by the vice presidential debate. There is more that television does than suck the substance out of things, it allows for the substance to reappear on the web, such as http://bravenewfilms.org/blog/39179-mccain-s-youtube-problem-just-became-a-nightmare . It also pays Tina Fey and Will Ferrell.

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Thanks to Dick Cavett in his NY Times column Talk Show for the link referenced above.