In wake of shooting, follow the money

President Donald Trump and the gun lobby’s servants in Congress have cast the slaughter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School as a mental health issue. In part it is, begging the question of why any civilian, sane or insane, needs a rapid-fire, high-velocity weapon that was invented for maximum killing efficiency in warfare. But since the gun apologists prefer to talk about mental health, let’s consider their record on that.

Trump had been in office barely five weeks when a stroke of his pen struck down a measure designed to help keep guns out of the hands of people who are mentally infirm. Virtually every Republican in Congress, including all of Florida’s, had voted for the bill he signed. Florida Republicans Thomas J. Rooney of Okeechobee, Ted S. Yoho of Gainesville and Bill Posey of Rockledge were original co-sponsors.

The legislation repealed an Obama administration rule, not yet in effect, by which the Social Security Administration was to give the National Criminal History Background Check the names of people receiving some forms of mental health benefits. People who have been adjudicated mentally ill are barred by law from buying firearms. The regulation did not impose a new restriction. It merely made the law easier to enforce. It was estimated that only 75,000 people would be affected.

Why repeal it? In what passes for logic among congressional Republicans, it was a regulation, it was Barack Obama’s, and it had to do with guns. The ACLU opposed it also, but it would never have been heard without the gun lobby’s backing.

President Obama promoted the rule in the wake of Congress’ failure to do anything meaningful following the 2012 murders of 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

There is a wealth of sensible gun legisla- tion pending in Congress, none of which would deny law-abiding people access to guns for self-defense, hunting or marksmanship. The only legislation that’s moving goes the wrong way: The House sent the Senate a bill forcing every state to honor another’s concealed carry permit, no matter how lax the criteria. Only 14 Republicans voted against it. To their credit, Reps. Carlos Curbelo and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Miami were among them. Fifteen other Florida Republicans cosponsored it.

To understand why common-sense gun bills don’t pass and bad ones do, follow the money. The National Rifle Association invested $30.3 million in Trump’s election, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The NRA spent $50.3 million more on six high-profile Senate races, including Florida’s Marco Rubio ($3.2 million). The lobby lost only one of them.

Rubio voted to repeal the Obama rule. Sen. Bill Nelson voted to keep it. On Thursday, Rubio responded to the tragedy in Parkland by parroting the NRA line that gun control wouldn’t prevent mass shootings. That came in a joint Miami Herald interview with Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, who was saying the same things. Diaz-Balart is the NRA’s top moneyman in the less expensive Florida House delegation with $26,450 since 1998.

If the same sort of calculated defeatism had prevailed upon medical science, smallpox would not have been eradicated worldwide.

Polio, diphtheria and scarlet fever would continue to strike down thousands of American children every year. Cholera and yellow fever would still be decimating low-lying American cities, and malaria would have remained endemic in the South. Gun violence is no less of an epidemic — it claims an average of 96 American lives each day — and needs to be fought with the same intelligence brought to bear against pathogens. That means stopping it from spreading and then going after such indefensible causes as the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

Rubio and other NRA mouthpieces in Congress deliberately misstate the issue when they argue that gun control won’t prevent mass shootings. The object, rather, is simply to make them less likely by making it more difficult for those who would try. As it happens, Australia actually did the impossible. Responding to a 1996 shooting that took 35 lives, it banned rapid-fire weapons and offered to buy back those already in circulation. There hasn’t been a mass shooting, defined as one with five or more fatalities, since then. There had been 13 from 1979 through 1996. The United States had a short-lived ban on new assault weapons sales, but it expired in 2004. Political reality being what it is, only the professional fear-mongers at the NRA foresee a total ban here.

The first step is simply to know more. In a surprising and welcome development, Alex Azar, the new Health and Human Services secretary, promised a House subcommittee Thursday that the Centers for Disease Control will conduct research on gun violence prevention. That’s been blocked for years by an absurd interpretation of an appropriations restriction against spending HHS money on “gun control.” Clearing that up is the object of HJR 1478, one of many bills gathering mold in committees. It has 122 co-sponsors, all Democrats. It should be passed to reinforce Azar and the CDC against a certain blowback from the NRA.

Curbelo, a rarity among the Florida Republicans in that he can talk sensibly on the issue, is the sponsor of a bipartisan bill, HJR 3999, that would ban “bump stocks” and other enhancements to make AR-15s and similar weapons fire faster. It is stuck in a judiciary subcommittee along with HJR 3947, a similar bill with 175 Democratic co-sponsors. Both were prompted by the Las Vegas massacre last year.

Public opinion polls show voters overwhelmingly support such reasonable legislation as universal background checks, ending the so-called gun show loophole, and that even majorities of NRA members do by substantial margins. But the NRA leadership — which contests the findings — is in thrall to its own fanatic ideology and to the gun manufacturers who are believed to supply the bulk of the money that buys the obedience of the Congress.

It’s blood money, Senator Rubio. How can you bear that on your conscience?

The National Rifle Association invested $30.3 million in Trump’s election, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The NRA spent $50.3 million more on six high-profile Senate races, including Florida’s Marco Rubio ($3.2 million).