Conn. senators seek probe into weapons marketing to children
GOP Texas Sen. Ted Cruz says Democrats threaten rights of gun owners
Connecticut’s U.S. senators on Wednesday joined in an effort to prompt a Federal Trade Commission investigation into the marketing of military-style weapons to children, including the rifles used in the Buffalo murders of 10 people last weekend as well as the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
But hours later, during a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing led by U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal on a separate proposal to prohibit domestic abusers from possessing guns, Sen. Ted Cruz, of Texas, illustrated the partisan divide on the issue of gun safety that has paralyzed federal action, even as states like Connecticut have created some of the tightest gun laws in the nation.
Cruz attacked Democrats, charging that they routinely threaten the rights of gun owners and have attempted to “defund the police,” while doing little to address underlying mental health issues that have resulted in many shootings including last weekend’s murder spree in a Buffalo neighborhood supermarket.
At about the same time, on the U.S. Senate floor, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy pointed the finger at the former president for raising the level of hate in this country that has set off a firestorm of gun-related violence and further stoked congressional gridlock.
“Fueling the kind of racist, hateful fear of your neighbor demagoguery practiced by Donald Trump, it exacerbates American violence,” Murphy said. “Doing nothing year after year about the flow of illegal and highpowered weapons into our streets exacerbates American violence.”
The congressional day began with a request to probe firearms marketing techniques and tactics.
“The United States is in the midst of an epidemic of gun violence,” Blumenthal and Murphy wrote in a letter to FTC Chairwoman Lina M. Khan that was signed by nine other Democratic senators including Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois.
“Despite the unacceptable levels of gun crime and its devastating effect on our youth, some weapons manufacturers are blatantly flaunting their efforts to market firearms to children,” said the letter, which named the firearms dealer Wee1 Tactical, with a website logo that has pacifiers in the mouths of death skulls and crossbones.
“These are weapons of war that have no place in the hands of our nation’s children, and can cause them substantial harm and even death,” the senators wrote.
A request for comment from the Federal Trade Commission was not immediately returned on Wednesday.
The $73 million settlement reached in February by several families of the Newtown school shooting victims came as their lawyers were preparing to bring internal marketing documents to a court trial against Remington, which manufactured the AR-style semi-automatic Bushmaster XM-15 used at Sandy Hook and Chicago.
By mid-afternoon Wednesday, during Blumenthal’s hearing on a proposed federal law named in part for Lori Jackson of Oxford, whose 2014 murder by her estranged husband led to a Connecticut law requiring people under protective orders to surrender their firearms, Cruz
charged that Democrats around the country are a threat to gun owners.
“If the objective is to stop violent crime, what is effective is targeting actual violent criminals,” Cruz said. “The approach of today’s Senate Democrats is to try to go after the firearms of law-abiding citizens instead of targeting the violent criminals that are the real threat. Firearms, yes, are used by violent criminals but they are also used over and over and over again by victims of violent crimes to defend themselves.”
Sen. Ron Wyden, DOregon, followed Cruz and noted that 600 women in the United States are shot to death annually by intimate partners.
“And Sen. Blumenthal, the chairman and I believe, the Congress has a moral obligation to do something about it,” Wyden said. “Should have eliminated the loopholes that leave women in the crosshairs of
violent spouses and partners with guns a long time ago. What we’re talking about, I say to my colleague from Texas, is not going to take away gun rights for law-abiding citizens.”
“Like you, I refuse to accept that Congress is going to be complicit and again do nothing,” Blumenthal said to Wyden. “I’m very very hopeful that this time will be different.”
Witnesses at the hearing from included Kacey Mason, sister of Lori Jackson, who fought back tears recalling the systematic abuse and harassment that led to her murder, in her parents’ home, at age 32 with a gun that was purchased in Virginia.
“This is why it is so important to have this law on a federal level,” Mason said. “This way abusers cannot evade the law by purchasing their guns in another state. It’s too late for Lori, but this law can and will make a difference in another family’s story.”
Holly Sullivan, president of the Connecticut Citizens Defense League, which she said represents 43,000 gun owners, said she has been the target of threats, and warned that many gun owners are reticent to seek mental health counseling because of so-called red flag laws that could lead to the seizure of their firearms “with no meaningful penalty for perjury.”
She charged that the Connecticut General Assembly “finds a solution in need of a problem as often as a problem in need of a solution.” Sullivan said that last year there were 40,000 new gun owners in Connecticut, with women a fast-growing demographic. “In fact, African-American women in Connecticut had the greatest increase in
new permit issuance compared to any demographic,” she said.
Blumenthal has been attempting the pass the federal proposal, now titled Stop Gun Violence: The Jackson-Elias Domestic Violence Survivor Protection Act, since 2014.
Murphy, on the Senate floor, hearkened back not only to the deaths of 20 first-graders and six educators in Newtown, but the invention of the revolver by Samuel Colt in Hartford in the 19th century and the “an ugly tradition in American politics of leaders trying to drum up irrational fears of Blacks or immigrants or Muslims, gay people, or Hispanics or Jews,” notably used over the last years by Richard Nixon and Donald Trump.
“The Buffalo shooter’s manifesto is a tribute to this tradition. But he is not alone,” said Murphy, the author of “The Violence Inside Us.” While quoting the FBI’s latest report on hate crimes showing a spike in racism and bigotry, “most alarming was a 40-percent increase in 2020 in hate crimes against Black Americans, foreshadowing the Buffalo attack.”
He pointed several times at Trump, who “has spent the last decade relentlessly spreading the gospel of fear and anxiety and hate. There’s a straight line from this embrace of racism and fear to the increase in violence in this country. I know many of my Republican colleagues don’t use the same terminology, the same language that Trump does, but they know the danger he poses to this nation. They know that his movement has egged on violence, and they do nothing about it.”