The article appears to be stretching and reaching quite a bit to substantiate this proposition that the NRA is not a civil rights group for all gun owners. For example, this is one of the examples they provided to support their proposition:
> DeJarion Echols was caught with forty-four grams of crack (along with $5,700 that was computed as another 450 grams) and an unloaded rifle under his bed, according to Families Against Mandatory Minimums. The resulting sentence, handed down in 2006, was twenty years in federal prison:
If we can agree that the federal government has no business wasting taxpayer dollars to lock people--who cause no harm to anyone else through recreational drug use--up in for-profit prisons, then that is the problem here.
Further, discrimination does exist: prescription drug use is an illegal-yet-ignored marketplace of predominately White, upper-middle-class-on-up users who are not targeted by DEA enforcement the way street drugs are. This is consistent with the the Nixon administration's goal of targeting Blacks with the War on Drugs.
Conclusions: discrimination and civil rights abuses do exist, but this particular article about the NRA is really desperately reaching for examples to support the idea here.
The central conceit of this article is that gun control as implemented in the US is racist (the NRA is discussed as an advocacy group that is hypocritical and ultimately supports many of these racist laws), which I agree with. That anecdote is not about the NRA, but there are others that are damning in my opinion.
> The NRA, funded (to a significant but unclear degree) by an industry that depends on a huge market for illegal guns to ensure profitability, has called for putting those very same black-market (and, not incidentally often black) customers in prison for extremely long periods of time.
> At the NRA’s May convention, Donald Trump, accepting the group’s endorsement, complained that “President Obama tried to take the guns from law-abiding Americans but has reduced prosecutions of violent criminals who use guns.” Trump, as usual, knew his audience well, and his speech was in line with a recent push by the NRA to double down on foreboding law-and-order talk, warning that liberals, in the name of reform, want to flood the streets with criminals and disarm the citizenry.
> But the NRA has a long history of agitating for harsh sentencing and prison construction. And it has relentlessly warned that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The notion is not only vigilante but profoundly carceral, grounding the right of certain people to own guns in the criminality of others.
> When a Minnesota police officer shot Philando Castile dead by in his car, he was carrying a legal gun that his girlfriend has said he told the officer he possessed. His bloodied body, viewed by millions online, called the gun rights movement’s bluff: is a black man carrying a gun that he was licensed to carry a “good guy” when he is shot dead by the police? The NRA was criticized, seemingly even by its own members, for, like the officer who shot him, failing to acknowledge Castile’s right to carry.
I think you're kidding yourself if you think the NRA exists to support anyone except for white gun owners and cops.
> But the NRA has a long history of agitating for harsh sentencing and prison construction
I don't mean to defend the NRA here -- as you'll see from my other comments while I recognize and appreciate the stated role they perform, I'm not their biggest fan. Regardless, that particular allegation doesn't carry much water for me.
Speaking in broad strokes, every time there is a shooting, it seems incumbent on every gun owner to bear the responsibility for the bad action. Because we support the right to keep and bear arms, we are often cast by the media as the very reason that whomever was able to effect whatever recent spate of gun violence occurred, and must all be held accountable. Whenever politicians hold session, they urge to DO SOMETHING, and rarely care what that something is so long as they can show that they have been responsive in passing legislation that may positively affect this situation in a future outcome, even when it's unlikely to have any effect.
If you're incapable or unwilling to cede to things like increased background checks, or unable to sign on to a blanket ban of muzzle shrouds (as our politicians so often request), there aren't a lot of politically viable options for "doing something", which casts the second amendment lot as obstructionist. What's left? Well, increased sentencing for gun felons. These increased sentences are regrettably more constitutional, because they at least are the result of due process, and do not infringe the rights of law abiding citizens.
Are they good policy? I would argue not, but if you're faced with the nefariously binary options of removing rights from the law abiding vs. removing rights from proven criminals, it is easy to see how they routinely choose the latter.
As others have pointed out, there are other 2A advocacy groups that are single issue focused. I have a hard time believing that the NRA has accidentally become involved in mass incarceration.
That being said, if the dilemma is gun violence, you've presented a false dichotomy for options. Harsher criminalization likely doesn't do anything, it may just make recidivism worse and temporarily relocate violence into prisons. Economic violence and inequality is the root cause for much of the gun violence in the US (along with some cultural psychological heritage related to frontier life and individualism, but this is a more difficult issue to solve). Deep poverty, racist and invasive police, lack of access to nutritious food, lack of access to childcare and quality education, etc. Not just for people of color (although they disproportionately suffer from inequality), but for white poor people as well. Economic violence is the backdrop for violent crime, and if the NRA actually cared about solving their image of being an advocacy group for middle income whites and cops, they would spend time lobbying to solve these issues, not locking up poor people.
I don't disagree with much that you've said at all. That said, when has "let's fix socio-economic disparity" been seriously considered by our legislature for anything? It doesn't fit into a soundbite, and is both too nuanced and locality-centric to be easily cottoned to in a federal bill. It's far too pragmatic to fit into the necessity of a 'do something' response.
Aside from the infeasibility of it in today's political climate, great points all around.
I just don't subscribe to that kind of realpolitik. There's nothing infeasible about presenting these kinds of solutions, there's only people unwilling to present them or those who do a bad job of it. Plus what's the proof that this is even the case?
Even aside from the ethical coherency of viewing civil rights as a comprehensive struggle for ordinary people, there are political advantages as well given you can widely expand your coalition across racial and income barriers. People of color own guns and enjoy using them, but will back a candidate supporting background checks, assault weapon bans, etc. if their alternative is pro-gun law & order racist.
Sure. There are plenty of white gun owners who do the same. The NRA doesn't have a lock on any particular demographic other than the obvious one, which is anyone who is willing to prioritize gun rights as their #1 issue. This includes people of all political and ethical stripe, and including minorities, though they aren't terribly well represented by the NRA.
That said, if the goal is to just get the NRA to do more outreach to minorities, they're making inroads (though slowly). They've got minority presenters, such as Colion Noir, who echoes many of your sentiments.
> "It's not a gun problem, it's not even a violence problem. It's a culture problem, it's a poverty problem, it's a history problem"
I don't disagree that they've been painfully bad at it, but as they get savvier with their shifting demographics and older, whiter board members get replaced with others, I have little doubt that they'll become more effective at representing a broader swath of the American populace.
That still doesn't make fixing socio-economic disparity fall particularly well under their single-issue umbrella (IMO).
Under the same general umbrella of "not for all gun owners", I think it's much less of a stretch to point out that the NRA has repeatedly thrown people with mental illness under the bus, unapologetically using terms like "monsters", "lunatics", and "homicidal maniacs", and advocating for such people to be tracked in a national registry [1] [2]. I don't consider that behavior becoming of a civil liberties organization.
NRA supported Jeff Sessions for the attorney general, on the grounds that he "has a proven track record of going after the real criminals". Jeff Sessions was involved in prosecution of civil rights activists in Alabama, and is known for his hard anti-drug stance. Both of those are pertinent to civil rights, yet NRA ignored it.
NRA also consistently pushes the "tough on crime" narrative, including outright false claims that crime is on the rise in US, to justify both RKBA (for self-defense against said non-existent rising crime), and to redirect any accusations regarding too lax gun control. They are literally saying that the government should be jailing more people and dishing out harder punishments.
(It should be noted that this last one isn't even a new thing - NRA explicitly endorsed "tough on crime" politics since early 90s.)
At the same time, while NRA is presumably pushing back against federal gun laws, there's one on which they're completely silent: the prohibition of gun ownership for any users of illegal substances (i.e. drugs). Note that this applies even to those in states that legalized marijuana, and even to medical marijuana users with prescriptions. This is a very real problem, especially given the feds have been raiding dispensaries for lists of patients, and demanding lists of medical card holders from the states that maintain registries. NRA's stance on it is literally non-existent - they simply don't talk about it, and refuse to answer any questions from members regarding it.
So, as far as I'm concerned, NRA is not in any meaningful way a civil rights organization. It's a "just let me keep my guns, and I don't care about others" organization.
> Jeff Sessions was involved in prosecution of civil rights activists in Alabama, and is known for his hard anti-drug stance. Both of those are pertinent to civil rights, yet NRA ignored it.
Those are good points. They also concern me. Is there a better organization which fights for second amendment rights that you recommend?
I would not recommend SAF anymore. The reason is that their (effectively) lobbying wing, CCRKBA, had also endorsed Sessions, using even stronger wording than NRA.
The non existence of other orgs fighting for second ammendment rights, even if it were true, is a pretty weak argument for supporting this particular one, especially given that you agree there are good reasons not too do so.
Don't forget the Mulford Act, where the NRA explicitly supported gun control in California to keep the Black Panthers from being allowed to carry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act
> discrimination does exist: prescription drug use is an illegal-yet-ignored marketplace of predominately White, upper-middle-class-on-up users who are not targeted by DEA enforcement the way street drugs are
Are you implying that the reason those drugs are not targeted, is because they are used by middle class whites? It's just as likely the other way round.
I don't agree with everything the NRA or it's members support... there isn't an alternative organization that is working to protect second amendment rights that I'm aware of. The ACLU specifically takes a back seat on the issue and points to the NRA.
Frankly, the NRA has plenty of money behind it.. but I feel that it's important to protect civil liberties spelled out by the constitution and implied under the 10th amendment.
> there isn't an alternative organization that is working to protect second amendment rights that I'm aware of
There are a few others: Gun Owners of America (GOA), Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA), etc., but perhaps the biggest and most effective (though not nearly as large as the NRA) is the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) - who effects most of the change they desire through lawsuit.
The two largest gun rights cases of our era (to date) are DC v Heller and Chicago v McDonald. Both of those cases were the result of a suit initiated by the Second Amendment Foundation. They're also better about keeping themselves single-issue than the NRA, which is good for me personally because outside of gun rights and safety, I disagree with the NRA on very little.
Slashdot manages a balance of it. Why can't HN do the same?
That's essentially one of the reasons I don't post a whole lot here. The 'community guidelines' are a real trainwreck to anyone who has experience running a community. I ran BBSes, half of these 'guidelines' were proven unworkable decades ago.
But then again, engineers are rarely known for hindsight or historical perspective.
Slashdot manages a balance of it. Why can't HN do the same?
While there may be similarities and overlap, Slashdot and HN are different communities and have different expectations and community standards. I don't think it's a matter of HN not managing the balance Slashdot has: it's more that HN's sense of where that balance should be is different. I'm sure there are plenty of members who frequent both sites, just as you do, and are aware and accepting of the differences.
Nobody bothers visiting Slashdot any more, just like nobody bothers with Soylent News. Note that any venerable name on either of those sites essentially doesn't post there any longer. Any accounts you see are either die-hard try-hards or bots/spammers.
I'm from the UK. The reason the British government can propose such outrageous laws is because a) we don't have a functioning opposition party capable of challenging or scrutinising the Government. The Labour party is completely spineless and ineffectual; and b) that lack of opposition has emboldened the Government to push through some of the most invasive surveillance laws in the Western World. The British Prime Minster, Theresa May, has a nasty authoritarian streak - she had it when she was Home Secretary responsible for domestic security, and she has it now with even more zeal as the Prime Minister.
If you picture in your minds eye the most dysfunctional, deceitful, lunatic-filled version of politics you could possibly imagine, you still won't come close to the giant sinkhole that is British politics right now. Utterly depressing.
Not sure if hyperbole, or if you missed the U.S. election cycle. However, I assure you, many people can imagine most dysfunctional, deceitful, lunatic-filled version of politics and are in fact watching it unfold in front of them...
The Labour party was, until pretty recently, overrun with exactly the same kinds of authoritarians (e.g. Yvette Cooper) and they're sabotaging the current leadership in a bid to get back power.
Honestly I hope they succeed, and from the ashes, we get a Labour/centre-left party with some actual integrity and credibility, because this current one has none and wouldn't get back into power anyway. Corbyn seems okay, but he seems to be stuck in the difficult position of leading a party of delusional Blairite idiots who think the people want the Labour party to go more to the right.
I would dare say that the other reason is that pesky "parliamentary sovereignty" doctrine, where the Parliament can legally do literally anything by a simple majority. People often say that UK has a constitution, and indeed it does - but what's forgotten is that it doesn't bind the Parliament in any legal way.
Of course, in practice, they are limited by what the public lets them get away with, same as any other government. But that is an extremely low bar.
This is nothing to do with the opposition. The political culture of the UK when it comes to security and civil liberties is completely authoritarian on both sides of the house (and in the media). 'Security' trumps all. This is a problem a long time in the making and will take either a) a great big negative shock or b) many years of education to correct.
What I would like to see more in this conversation (on HN) is the potentially harmful effects of whistleblowing. It's nice that Snowden/das Spiegel/guardian were meticulous in making sure people weren't endangered by the leaks, but we can't count on it in general.
State secrets are often nefarious. However, they are often well-meaning (nuclear weapons schematics, etc). It is highly non trivial to ascertain the long-term impact of intelligence leaks upon the state.
If the government would like to provide some examples of concrete harm caused by whistleblowers, I'd be happy to evaluate their claims and asses, on balance, whether the benefits were worth the costs. They never do, though. They always just say "it's classified" and that we have to take them at their word that the damage was grave.
Part of the problem is that some parts of the government treat everything as a secret by default. That in itself changes the way people there think about things and how they act. I'm sure it helps foster habits that you want in place when people handle real secret information and it make it easy - you don't need to think about how to handle anything. But it's really not appropriate outside of being a convenience.
If you're disclosing nuclear weapon plans you are not whistleblowing you are just a spy.
Whistleblowers expose an organization for doing something illicit. If your job is to make nuclear weapons than that's not really illicit in that context.
But if your job is to surveil enemies over seas and you are actually also surveilling people domestically (sorry, I mean collecting meta-data on) without warrants and doing it completely in the shadows, that is over the line.
Maybe you're unclear on exactly what a whistleblower means. Definition (by google): "a person who informs on a person or organization engaged in an illicit activity."
So by definition, you can only whistleblow if the government (or company) is doing ILLEGAL (and often IMMORAL) things. So you may not find many people on HN who are too interested in arguing about the downsides of whisteblowing; it'd almost be like asking what the upsides of spousal abuse are.
> it'd almost be like asking what the upsides of spousal abuse are.
Essentially, yes, but the difference is with the sad fact that a certain percentage of people, unfortunately, have a will to bow before power in certain ways, i.e. enter nationalism. In other words, it's more like arguing about the upsides of torture, or the upsides of unjustified wars--those are atrocities committed by your government, not your neighbour. These I have seen discussed with (unbelievable) earnest on cable news, such as CNN.(1)
The trouble is that in most of the recent prominent government "whistleblowing" cases (Snowden, Manning, the other one I forget) there's a great deal of disagreement on the legality of what has been exposed. The issue is that an individual sets himself up as judge and jury on the subject of complicated legal matters which he might not fully understand.
I will say that both Snowden and Manning went well into the territory of leaking stuff that wasn't illegal in addition to stuff that was at least debatable.
And how many judges were consulted on wether the spying was legal, let alone got to rule on it? How carefully chosen were they? And how legitimate are such secret trials? You accuse whistleblowers of playing judge and jury for merely revealing what the government is -doing-.
Finally, the entire appeal to 'legal matters' is misguided - whistleblowing is done when someone feels something is -morally- wrong, regardless of what the law, written by the government and interpreted in secret, says.
I'm not sure. For example, imagine a whistleblower uncovers government illicit activity - instead of deporting illegal immigrants, ICE gives them fake IDs and passports and moves them to a new area to restart their life. Considering the polarization around enforcing immigration limits, that kind of whistleblowing might be seen as a negative thing by a lot of people.
You could probably draw similar stories around any other currently illegal but largely accepted activity - e.g. imagine a whistleblower uncovering that a police department doesn't charge people with possession of marijuana.
It seems to me that whether you consider a particular whistleblower a "positive" depends on your political stance on the illicit activity they were uncovering.
I just watched zero days, a great documentary about stuxnet. It is important to realize-- and this seems to be the films thesis, that secrecy is extremely damaging. It took 20-30 years for bioweapons, nuclear weapons, and chemical weapons treaties to be enacted and this process hasn't been started with cyber.
Attacking whistleblowers is damaging because it is postponing inevitable discussions that need to happen and interfering with discourse nations need to have within themselves and with other counter-parties.
> "It is important to realize-- and this seems to be the films thesis, that secrecy is extremely damaging."
Wow, I guess we watched the same documentary, but I didn't pull that message from that movie at all.
Just seemed like kind of a two front warning to me:
1. Those type of cyber operations are extremely difficult to pull off effectively. Stuxnet did little to damper Iran's progress.
2. Those type of operations are extremely difficult to control. Stuxnet got into the wild, even though its original targets were airgapped networks and industrial machines.
Centralisation and trust in major players is whats damaging.
The UK security services Behavioural Sciences Unit http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38252470 is not just identifying terrorists, its monitoring everyone. Your school reports, your NHS medical records, everything that is centralised is scooped up and used to profile you. If you profile as a criminal then you will be targeted.
Don't watch this video and keep the spooks guessing.
Can you watch this video from another location?
Do you use a search engine to find surreptious ways to watch this video?
Can you find ways to exploit the IEEE standards drawn up for computer communication?
Do you have the curiosity?
Watching this video will give you an insight into the game where spooks provoke you to hack your mind whilst generating economic activity.
Who do you trust?
Purchasing so much online leaves your products vulnerable to interception. Can you obtain what you need offline anonymously with minimal digital traces?
Do you trust your anonymous source?
What benign everyday instruments can you use to wear down your opponent psychologically?
Can you mess with their washing machine, fit a device which washes their clothes at a higher temp randomly to shrink their clothes forcing them to spend money and deplete their funds? This is an example of whats called Resource Burn.
Can you alter your opponents car engine management system to make the vehicle break down?
Can you mess around with your opponents building heating controls if the users temperature setting interface communicates with the boiler using radio frequency?
Can you mess with their voice controlled systems?
Can you intercept and listen into their wireless telephone handsets that plug into landlines, like a fake mobile phone tower intercepts mobile phones?
Do you buy some food products like ground beef or hand made sausages from a local meat supplier? Is this made on the premises instead of being pre-packaged? If so can you drug the food products whilst co-opting the supplier into drugging the ground beef under the pretence of your opponents needs to take their meds? Can you obtain copies of relevant authorities and produce fake the letters to mess with your opponent?
What these examples show you above is that technology which has existed for years is liable to being hacked and can be used as a psychological tool to wear down your opponent. Likewise people can be tricked into believing anything someone in a position of authority including fake documentation can be coerced into working for you.
What makes your religious beliefs any more right or wrong than the empirical evidence of scientific or mathematical study, if the science and maths is only observing and functioning in one plane of an unknown dimension could be explained by quantum physics?
And all the time your online activity is tracked and monitored.
What do you do?
Do you like being spied on?
Do you feel safe because you think you have done nothing?
Or are you unknowingly helping to keep the criminals in power by engaging with their diverse mechanisms of human control?
Who or what do you trust?
Can you tell the difference between right and wrong?
Did your education brainwash in the same way religion brainwashes.
Are you addicted to technology and gadgets?
What would you do to keep your lifestyle, your possessions?
This is one of the atrocities involving civil and human rights abuses by government that has nothing to do with neither Trump nor Clinton. However, the media, even in the UK, is more concerned with Trump than the abuses of government, which are what really threatens human liberty and welfare.
Each president that expands the president's power manages to forget that he gives those powers to the next person. Which is how Trump now has quite the surveillance apparatus.
Presidents may not hold anywhere near as much power as we believe. Eisenhower seemed to be very concerned in his warning of this when he was leaving office half a century ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY
We got a dramatic demonstration of this in action, when the CIA performed a media hatchet job on Trump shortly after his election victory (the intelligence agencies are notorious for doing things like this, it happened numerous times during the Bush Administration). Which then prompted him to make the CIA his first stop after the inauguration, to show his belly and let them know he wasn't a threat to them. It's pretty clear where the power rests in the US.
Interesting... I'm now wondering, based on what I know about Trump, what he would do with the sudden access he has. Does he (potentially) have the full apparatus of the NSA/CIA/FBI at his disposal, or does it not quite work this way? If not, what would he need to do to get access to this kind of information, and would it be or become public information that this happened?
The title here is inaccurate (at time of posting: Government accused of 'full-frontal attack' on whistleblowers)
This is a proposal from the Law Commission, an independent body that advises the Government, and might or might not be taken up as a policy position. The title in the article makes the distinction clear.
When you roll in the whole 'handing over of social media passwords' thing (currently suggested in the US, but if mass adopted no doubt followed elsewhere) all this becomes even more scary. Dare to criticise a government? Don't even think about travelling there. Criticise your own government - expect that to be shared back.
Who's going to want to challenge anything any government says? No one that wants an easy life. Frightening.
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