The power of money and guns
America’s gun lobby, which includes the NRA, is putting corporate interests ahead of public safety.
Las Vegas is America’s playground for grownups; a glittering landscape of mirrored skyscrapers and neon lights. It’s a campy homage to the world’s landmarks – Paris’s Eiffel Tower, Egypt’s Pyramids, and Venice’s canals – rising high above the desert. It’s a hedonistic maze of pool parties and nightclubs and vast, ornate and windowless rooms filled with slot machines and blackjack tables.
It is now also known for mass murder on a scale not seen in modern US history. This week, a lone gunman broke two golden windows in one of the city’s shining buildings. Armed with dozens of weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, he murdered 58 and maimed more than 500. He then turned a pistol on himself.
One of the biggest questions facing Americans after this tragedy is how to prevent the next one. But underlying that question are a number of more specific, and more important inquiries: how to separate citizens’ interests from corporate interests, how to combat the power of money in politics.
Looming large in this conflict between the right to bear arms and protecting the lives of innocents is the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA has some 5 million members, only about 6 or 7 per cent of all US gun owners. Its board of 76 members, however, contains executives from a number of firearms manufacturers. And the NRA has considerable power in American politics. Over the past two decades, it has donated millions to members of Congress (the vast majority of them Republicans). It donated some $30 million to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
In addition to the money, the NRA publishes ‘‘ratings’’ for candidates for Congress, which demonstrate how pro-gun or antigun any candidate is. An NRA rating is a clear signal to singleissue voters on a candidate’s commitment to gun rights.
There are some aspects of gun control on which almost all Americans agree. First, universal background checks prior to the purchase of any weapon. Pew Research polling indicates 90 per cent of Democrats and 77 per cent of Republicans support this measure.
Second, banning gun purchases for people on no-fly lists. Eightyfive per cent of Democrats and 82 per cent of Republicans support this measure.
Third, preventing the mentally ill from purchasing guns. Some 89 per cent of both Democrats and Republicans support this measure. And yet, no legislation has ever been passed at the federal level that reflects these broad agreements across all Americans. Why? It’s at least in part because the NRA, which is effectively an interest group for the most hard-core gun owners, as well as for deep-pocketed gun manufacturers, has made it political poison for Republicans to oppose them.
Americans are proud of their Constitution, the promises of which have been exported around the world to newer, fledgling democracies, and which guarantees their rights against the tyranny of government. This land was born of revolution over English oppressors, after all. But what many Americans do not realise is that they have traded tyranny by government for tyranny by corporation. The NRA is just one example where a corporate interest group is fighting for laws and policies that run counter to the wellbeing, safety, or consensus of the American people.
The US Chamber of Commerce, and other business groups, have for years worked to limit aggrieved consumers’ access to the class action lawsuit, where groups of people, sometimes with a relatively small individual claim, can band together to sue one entity for the similar harms done to them all. Corporations have managed to force consumers into cell phone and credit card contracts where the fine print requires people to arbitrate their claims, closing the doors to the courts for the ‘‘privilege’’ of using these products.
The lesson here is that money means access to the levers that shape law and policy. The imbalance between individual and corporate interests was exacerbated in 2010 with a Supreme Court case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which determined that corporations’ ‘‘free speech’’ rights extend into the political realm. This decision opened the floodgates, sending a tsunami of corporate money into US elections. And it further pushed individual Americans out of the most important conversations and decisions of our time.
Barring a constitutional amendment, money in US politics is here to stay. And the outsized effect of corporate interests in the gun debate means that comprehensive gun reform remains a long way away. The NRA began making noises late this week that it would support a review of the legality of ‘‘bump stocks’’ – an accessory used by the Las Vegas shooter that effectively convert semi-automatic weapons into fully automatic weapons. While it is a respectable step in the aftermath of an American tragedy, it is a mere surface scratch on America’s gun violence epidemic.
And so, despite it all, the unvirtuous cycle continues. A nation consumed by fear of being victimised by gun violence is a nation of ready and willing purchasers of guns.
The ugly truth is that some prefer it that way.