This appeared in the Times-Picayune today. Thoughtful.
American can-do vanishes when the NRA check arrives | Opinion By Robert Mann, Columnist
The instinct is common; the pattern is clear: When people die in accidents or from defective or faulty products, Americans are quick to assess the problem and work to prevent it from happening again. For instance:
Whenever a commercial airliner crashes and kills hundreds of people, we determine the cause and work to prevent similar occurrences. That's why airlines are the world's safest mode of travel.
On American highways, cars often cross medians and strike oncoming traffic. That's why many states, including Louisiana, erect barriers to prevent future crashes.
After decades during which more than 40,000 -- sometimes 50,000 -- people died annually on our highways, federal law in 1968 required automakers to install seat belts in new cars. By 1998, the government also mandated airbags in all new automobiles.
When someone tainted bottles of Tylenol with potassium cyanide in 1981, killing seven people in the Chicago area, it sparked a revolution in the packaging of over-the-counter medication and resulted in the 1983 Federal Anti-Tampering Act.
Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the federal government dramatically increased security at airports and on airplanes.
A would-be shoe bomber tried to blow up a plane on a flight from Paris to Miami in 2001. Today, most U.S. passengers cannot board a commercial jet without removing their shoes.
After 32 infants died in drop-down cribs from 2000 to 2010, the federal Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) banned the manufacture, sale and resale of such cribs.
In the 1980s, more than 6,000 people were injured in lawn dart accidents. In 1982, an errant dart killed a 7-year-old child in California. By 1988, the CPSC banned them in the United States.
Thousands of children once opened medicine bottles and died or became ill after they ingested the contents. Today, child-resistant caps are used for almost all medicine bottles and many other products, such as pesticides and other household chemicals.
Several dozen people, including children, died each year after being locked inside the trunks of cars. In 2001, the federal government required that all new passenger vehicles with trunks must be equipped with an interior release latch.
After scientists proved that second-hand cigarette smoke causes a range of health problems, the tobacco companies fought efforts to ban smoking in offices and restaurants. In spite of Big Tobacco's lobbying against it, many states and hundreds of cities have banned smoking in public places.
If it's a car accident, plane crash, deadly drug interaction, animal attack or botched hurricane recovery, we summon our outrage, muster our courage and dive into doing whatever it takes to eliminate or reduce the threat.
My major boo-boo. Because of ads placed on the on-line paper I missed the rest of the opinion. FWIW here is the rest (which I haven't read. So sue me.)
There is one notable, scandalous exception.
Gun violence is the manner of death Americans seem willing to ignore. We meet other ways of dying with indignation and determination. But gun deaths? We shrug our shoulders, bow our heads and send a few thoughts and prayers to the victims. We mourn a few days before we move on, afraid to do what it would take to prevent future tragedies.
Why is that? What is it about guns that leaves us weak and our leaders feckless?
Perhaps it's the false choices the gun lobby brandishes to brainwash its members. The National Rifle Association (NRA) meets any effort to inject sanity into our gun laws with the same refrain: They are trying to take away your firearms.
The truth is Barack Obama was a boon to the NRA, which used the phony threat of gun seizures to increase its membership and for the manufacturers, who used it to sell more firearms and ammo.
The specter of gun confiscation is difficult to dispel because it's so irrational. Almost no one proposes to take away guns from law-abiding citizens.
Many meaningful, sensible gun-violence-control measures enjoy widespread public support, including universal background checks, preventing sales to mentally ill people, closing the private-sale loophole, mandatory safety features, outlawing cop-killing bullets and regulating the production, sale and ownership of high-velocity weapons designed only to kill as many people as possible.
No matter how reasonable the proposal in the wake of a mass killing, the gun lobby will try to smother it under a blanket of fear and lies.
The NRA has persuaded its members and many politicians that nothing can be done about mass killings. Forget the other tragedies and calamities we have addressed. Stopping gun violence, it seems, is an impossible feat for a great nation that eradicated polio and put men on the moon.
As someone observed on Twitter the other day after a gunman in Las Vegas murdered 59 people and wounded another 527: "American can-do vanishes when the @NRA check arrives."
Robert Mann, an author and former U.S. Senate and gubernatorial staffer, holds the Manship Chair in Journalism at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. Read more from him at his blog, Something Like the Truth. Follow him on Twitter @RTMannJr or email him at bob.mann@outlook.com.
