PLANK JULY 13, 2012
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Among the more curious aspects of Eric Holder’s standoff with Congress over Fast and Furious, a gun-walking operation conducted between 2009 and 2011, is the air of conspiracy theorizing that hangs about it. Especially curious is that some of the most paranoid theorizing finds its source not in far-off Internet chat rooms, but in a well-appointed office building in northern Virginia—the headquarters of the National Rifle Association, the country’s biggest firearm lobbying organization.
In June, the NRA’s Executive Vice President, Wayne LaPierre, posted a letter on the organization’s website accusing Obama of crafting a “grand strategy to use Mexican drug cartel crime as an excuse to advance their gun control agenda, shut down law-abiding gun stores and rip the Second Amendment right out of our Bill of Rights.” LaPierre even implied that the death of Brian Terry, the Border Patrol agent killed along the border in Dec. 2010, was a byproduct of Obama’s hidden anti-gun agenda, telling The New York Times, “There is a belief among a lot of people—and I believe it too—…that the Justice Department facilitated a crime to further their gun control political agenda.”
However feverish the NRA’s stance, it’s clear that it has made an impact—not least, on the 17 Democrats who voted in favor of holding Holder in criminal contempt of Congress on June 28. Each of those Congressmen faces competitive reelections in conservative districts, and none of them could afford to tempt the ire of the NRA. After all, the executive director of the NRA had warned in a June 20 letter to the House of Representatives that it was planning on “consider[ing] this vote in our future candidate evaluations.” I asked Andrew Arulanandam, the NRA’s Director of Public Affairs, what motivated this decision. “Two very good reasons,” Arulanandam replied. “Truth and justice.”
Arulanandam’s avowed idealism aside, there’s little to commend the NRA’s theory that Operation Fast and Furious was part of a grand “gun control agenda” directed from the White House. A January 2012 House Oversight report debunked any allegations that the Obama administration attempted a cover-up of a “politically motivated operation.”
And in point of fact, the Obama administration has actually loosened gun laws, even garnering criticism from anti-gun groups for legislation allowing people to carry concealed weapons in national parks and checked luggage on Amtrak trains.
When I asked Arulanandam regarding Obama’s gun control record, he responded: “It’s a misconception that this administration is gun-neutral. The gun/parks legislation was attached to bills this administration desperately wanted.” But it’s hard to see why evidence of political compromise is sufficient for existence of a criminal conspiracy.
But here lies the greatest flaw in the entire accusation: The gun-walking (a tactic in which ATF permitted the sale of firearms to known criminals in hopes that they would lead them to powerful cartels) that is the most controversial aspect of Operation Fast and Furious started under the Bush administration, during an operation dubbed Wide Receiver. Arulanandam distinguished between these two operations by asserting that unlike Fast and Furious, the firearms under Wide Receiver were installed with transmitters (allowing them to be traced).
According to Adam Winkler, professor of constitutional law at UCLA and author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America, however, the closest existing claim is that some, but certainly not all, of the guns in Wide Receiver had tracking devices. In an emailed response, Winkler wrote, “Apparently, the tracking devices had to be manipulated to fit into or onto the weapons, which often resulted in breakage or the devices otherwise rendered ineffective. They also revealed that the sources of the weapons couldn't be trusted.”
Robert J. Spitzer, Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at SUNY-Cortland and the author of four books on gun policy, also could not verify the existence of these transmitters. “I cannot find any confirmation that there were actual transmitters [in Wide Receiver],” Spitzer says. Instead, according to Spitzer, the closest evidence suggests that some firearms were tracked using serial numbers, erroneously labeled as electronic transmitters by right-wing websites.
Regardless, even if some firearms did contain electronic transmitters, a considerable number of weapons were still lost in Mexico during Wide Receiver. As Winkler added, “It only makes sense that law enforcement would stop using tracking devices that had proven ineffective.” Yet the NRA has made no suggestion that the Bush administration’s Justice Department set a grand anti-gun conspiracy into motion.
So why has the NRA argued so strongly, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the Obama administration is involved in a massive anti-gun conspiracy? The simplest answer would be that the NRA is desperate for an election-year issue, and they saw Holder’s contretemps with Congress as their best chance. “They need to pin the gun control conspiracy on something,” says Winkler. “The NRA thinks gun rights will be safer under Romney. So they use this claim that Obama’s refusal to push gun control is actually representative of a greater conspiracy to push gun control.”
In short, the NRA is accusing Obama, a remarkably gun-neutral president, of concealing a conspiracy using a gun walking strategy he didn’t even start. But what is most alarming is not that the NRA is engaging in such baseless conspiracy theories. It’s the fact that the organization’s flawed logic holds such powerful sway in Washington’s halls of power.
10 comments
I don't know that it's as cynical as all that--or at least, that's only one motivation. The 2nd amendment folks are, in my experience, one of the more paranoid segments of the American right, with all its 'paranoid style.' In a civic republican effort to find out what these folks were about, about ten years ago, I came across NRA websites arguing vociferously that gun control was the first step toward genocide along the lines of the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide (which was apparently prefigured by efforts at gun control among Turkey's Armenian population). Simply put, these guys seem not to be completely in touch with reality or their political opponents' motives and concerns.
- Curran1
July 13, 2012 at 8:33pm
"So why has the NRA argued so strongly, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the Obama administration is involved in a massive anti-gun conspiracy? The simplest answer would be that the NRA is desperate for an election-year issue, and they saw Holder’s contretemps with Congress as their best chance." Also, they're religious-type fanatics. That's the way fanatics think and act. I grew up in lower Michigan, where people, my father included, liked guns, but they weren't obsessed with them. I totally agree with the Second Amendment, but it's not as important as the First Amendment. NRA fanatics would say that free speech rests with the right to pull a trigger. Gun sales have increased dramatically under Obama, as has the NRA's power. But ideology kills brain cells, and these gun freaks have become so stupid that they think that only Romney can save them from the tyrant Obama. I knew a guy living in Wyoming in 2008 who, along with many of his family and friends, was convinced that Obama was going to confiscate every gun in America within 6 months of becoming president. And all Obama has done is expand the right to bear arms. If we ever have a police state in America (and anything's possible), many NRA members will volunteer to become its executioners. They will be happily shooting anyone who disagrees with them and the state. That's the nature of fanatics. Their loyalties can change, depending on who's in power. They only fight the state when they disagree with it. And a police state in America will never ever be a leftist one.
- magboy47.
July 13, 2012 at 8:39pm
Between these guys and Grover (whoever he is Norquist) one has to wonder what on earth they're holding over our legislators and local governments/representatives. Reading a simple factual account like this, it makes no sense that they're able to wield so much power. What gives?
- Sophia
July 14, 2012 at 5:10pm
No, the simplest answer would be that the NRA is nuts.
- ekeizer
July 14, 2012 at 5:57pm
By golly, I thought the NRA was so fanatic that it couldn't change its tune, ever. How wrong could I be? In the interests of rationality and reality the NRA has now tacitly admitted that Obama hasn't confiscated a single gun belonging to a law-abiding American citizen since he was elected president. Now the NRA says that, if he is RE-elected, he will "start confiscating guns with no fear of retribution from voters." So Obama's expansion of gun rights in his first term is a cover for his plan to disarm American citizens in his second term. It gives me faith in democracy to know that a group with as much power as the NRA (Republicans and Southern Democrats cower before it in Congress) is elastic enough to adapt to changing realities. From here on out it's all reason and roses. Hallelujah!
- magboy47.
July 14, 2012 at 6:45pm
But here lies the greatest flaw in the entire accusation: The gun-walking (a tactic in which ATF permitted the sale of firearms to known criminals in hopes that they would lead them to powerful cartels) that is the most controversial aspect of Operation Fast and Furious started under the Bush administration, during an operation dubbed Wide Receiver. That is entirely based on the premise that Operation Fast and Furious actually was purposely designed to allow the guns to walk. Fortune magazine had a six month investigation which uncovered the true nature of F&F, and it was not ATF choosing to allow intermediaries to purchase weapons and then sell them to Mexican drug lords. Instead, it was about the ATF trying to interdict those sales and being stymied at every stage by the US Attorney's office in Phoenix in every attempt to do so because of Arizona statutes permitting virtually every gun purchase ATF wanted to interdict, including that of a Food Stamp recipient purchasing hundreds of guns for a total of $300,000. You can read it here. There again, this might be the real reason the NRA has such a high priority on the issue: the NRA was among those who pushed the laws liberalizing gun sales in Arizona. Without those laws, there would have been no presumed legality on the part of those purchasing the guns and thus the ATF would have been free to interdict and thus prevent the Mexican cartels from acquiring the weapons. In other words, NRA's advocacy resulted in Border Agent's Terry's death. That is something the NRA most strenuously wants to keep under wraps.
- sighthnd
July 15, 2012 at 11:28am
But what is most alarming is not that the NRA is engaging in such baseless conspiracy theories. It’s the fact that the organization’s flawed logic holds such powerful sway in Washington’s halls of power. The question is not, why does the NRA have so much sway over the politicians? The question is, why does the NRA have so much sway over the people. The problem is not that whatever Obama does, the NRA will portray him as the greatest threat to gun liberties. The problem is that there are so many myrmidons of the NRA, that whenever they put out a newsletter saying so, it has the potential to swing elections. Any ideas how to change that?
- sighthnd
July 15, 2012 at 11:46am
The NRA has so much power over politicians because a critical number of their constituents have a sexual love of guns. The NRA has mentally ill leaders. The fact that it has so much power with politicians and voters is a sign that America is becoming or already has become mentally ill.
- magboy47.
July 15, 2012 at 2:38pm
Wayne LaPierre, just another in a long, long list of tough as nails conservatives who avoided military service. Fromthe national chickenhawk database: "Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association - did not serve (apparently pulled lottery #97 in 1969 as a campus radical at SUNY-Albany, but weaseled out by getting a family doctor to claim he had a nervous disorder)" Do they have no shame at all?
- dubyadoubte
July 16, 2012 at 8:11am
This is another sad illustration of how the Right's venomous contempt for Obama and the office he holds that they would and do concoct every conceivable conspiracy theory imaginable to garner support to "overthrow" the shackles that Obama has put us in. Since Obama has become the democratically elected POTUS, I have suffered mightily at the hands of his regime. Why, I've managed to buy a house, voice my opinion, had my taxes lowered, maintained my personal choice in doctors, bought a gun with an out-of-state license, bought boxes of bullets, joined a gun-forum, read whatever I want, make more money now than I did 4 years ago, voted in the last election without an ID, and eat fried shrimp po'boys with reckless abandon. When will the freedom-loving, patriotic chicken-hawks of America save us from this so called nemesis of America and destroyer of Constitutional rights? I can no longer continue suffering under the jackbooted heel of Obama.
- singlspeed
July 16, 2012 at 11:55am