Daily Kos: Science has answers to why conservatives fall so easily for COVID-19 and Russian propaganda

Watching the stunning ignorance displayed at Trump’s recent Michigan rally is shocking, and although it’s tempting to say it’s pure ignorance, the science explains that it is more about how we are wired. There are multiple studies that show how liberals and conservatives differ, not just in political views, but in different purviews of life. Conservatives register a greater response to negative stimuli because they tend to view the world as a dangerous place and are “hyper-attuned” to the hazards in the world.

This is why fearmongering is used more often as a persuasion technique in right-wing media, and why conspiracies are more likely to take root in conservative thought. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to be more hopeful about mankind and are much more likely to respond to persuasion over the perceived benefits of something presented. This explains why there is such a huge disconnect in legislative policy initiatives from both parties.

Democrats push legislation to expand rights, create programs, or build infrastructure. Conservatives, however, tend to promote bills to address perceived dangers-–even if the dangers are fake. This past year we saw bills dealing with “critical race theory,” undocumented immigrants, and more recently, bills to “protect” children from “grooming.” Here in Florida, our governor just signed a ridiculous bill to protect kindergartners from what they believe is a secret society of teachers trying to convert them into homosexuality.

This perception of made-up enemies is nothing new, but a trait of cult-like behavior. Another trait is idolizing a leader, which Republicans have been prone to do for decades. The worship of Ronald Reagan was just the beginning. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/5/24/2088332/-Science-has-answers-to-why-conservatives-fall-so-easily-for-COVID-19-and-Russian-propaganda

Jonathan Bernstein: Dysfunctional Republicans Bail Out on Gun Violence

The problem isn’t mainly that the GOP lacks practical solutions to calamities like the Texas school massacre. It’s that it isn’t making the slightest effort to find any.

I don’t have the expertise on guns and violence that some of my Bloomberg Opinion colleagues or many academic experts have. So I really don’t know which of the gun-control policies Democrats have proposed would be helpful, which would make little difference and which would create new risks.

What I do know is that that Democrats are a normal US political party, which means that they are mainly pragmatic problem-solvers. That is, what US political parties are usually good at is finding out what makes their constituents unhappy and attempting to do something about it. They listen to voters in their districts; to the party coalition that nominates them; to their strongest supporters. Some of their solutions may turn out to be highly ideological. Some are not. They’re generally willing to cut deals to pass something, figuring that something is better than nothing. If it doesn’t have the votes, or it’s implemented and it doesn’t work, they’ll try something else.

The Democrats have been like that for well over a century. The Republicans used to be like that, too. The instinctive approaches the two parties took differed, in part because of ideology, in part because different groups made up different coalitions and in part because parties wind up with legacy policies that they support because they’ve always supported them.

That Republican politicians are almost unanimously lacking any interest in doing anything about those problems? That’s the breakdown of democracy. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-26/texas-school-massacre-dysfunctional-republicans-bail-out-on-gun-violence

Jonathan Chiat: The Conservative Playbook for Deflecting Anger After Mass Shootings

The broader reality that there is obviously a connection between America’s extraordinary permissive gun-control regimen and its extraordinarily high rates of gun violence. The way this game works is to point out that Solution A would not prevent Episode X, and Solution B would not prevent Episode Y, and thus imply no solutions exist whatsoever.

The final step is to locate solutions outside of gun control and blame Democrats for opposing them. “Democrats, unfortunately, are unwilling to talk past their base’s gun control desires,” writes Erick Erickson. “So now, instead of trying to solve the problem of gun violence, they will use it to campaign on — letting the problem fester in order to mobilize their base.”

Erickson is echoing a widespread conservative assumption that Democrats are merely pretending to care about gun violence. “To this administration, the Texas victims are not much more than a stick with which to beat their opponents and an opportunity to capitalize on their vendetta against firearms and those who value the rights of law-abiding Americans to bear them,” writes Zempel. “That [Biden] would make comments like this tells you he doesn’t care at all about what happened. He doesn’t care about the victims. He doesn’t care about their families,” insists Sean Davis.

The Federalist has already thrown online one column blaming the attack on aid to Ukraine (headline: “Sandy Hook Proved The Need To Enhance K-12 Security. Congress Armed Ukraine Instead.”) and another proposing homeschooling as the remedy (headline: “Tragedies Like The Texas Shooting Make A Somber Case For Homeschooling”). That “somber” is a subtle touch, no doubt reflecting the need for some level of taste when capitalizing on a murder to propose eliminating public education (“Name-calling, blame-shifting, and calls for gun restrictions fill social media in the public’s quest to find a solution,” the author writes. “But to protect the most precious, innocent lives among us, parents must educate their kids at home.”).

These kinds of exertions are extreme even by the standards of the right-wing media. They are the product of the right’s keen grasp of the intense but fleeting dangers posed by a televised display of the costs of their agenda. Once the murder has left the headlines, normality will resume. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/05/the-rights-playbook-for-deflecting-anger-after-shootings.html

Eric Lutz: The NRA Is Pouring Millions Into Blocking Gun Violence Prevention

On Thursday, Republicans blocked an anti-domestic terror bill, which House Democrats approved after the recent racist attack on a Buffalo supermarket, in a partyline vote. The bill “just doesn’t make any sense to me at all,” Texas Senator John Cornyn, a top recipient of gun lobby dollars, said earlier this week, per the Washington Post.

If Thursday’s vote is a bellwether, that would seem to suggest that any attempts next month to expand background checks, implement red flag law, or ban military-grade weapons that have left a trail of dead from Uvalde to Newtown could be doomed to meet the same fate as other no-brainer measures the gun lobby has undercut, from funding for gun violence research to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, which hasn’t had a Senate-confirmed director since 2015. Cruz and other Republicans justify their obstruction by deflecting to other causes — like mental health, which they also do little to address — and insisting that gun control measures wouldn’t work anyway. “It’s not effective,” Cruz told reporters later Wednesday. “It doesn’t prevent crime.”

But that’s just not true. Obviously, there is no law that would “prevent” violent crime.

But background checks, assault weapons restrictions, and other measures do, in fact, curb gun crime. That’s why they enjoy broad support among the American public — just not the gun lobby. “The problem in the Senate is simple,” Schumer said Wednesday. “Too many members on the other side of the aisle are disconnected from the suffering of the American people. Too many members on that side care more about the NRA than they do about families who grieve victims of gun violence.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/05/nra-blocking-gun-control-ted-cruz-uvalde-shooting

Nicholas Goldberg: No action on guns? Blame the founders

Sometimes we explain our inaction by blaming the enormously powerful National Rifle Assn. And certainly the NRA (which has faced its own travails in recent years) deserves a sizable portion of responsibility.

Or we blame the cynical, self-interested gun industry.

Or unconscionable Republican obstinacy.

Or voter apathy, short attention spans and peripatetic news cycles.

All are partly to blame, no doubt. But one of the most serious obstacles to meaningful gun control laws dates back to the beginning of the republic. It’s the piece of historical bad luck that ties our hands: The founders of this country — those men in their powdered wigs, revered for their prescience and common sense — blindly and stupidly enshrined gun rights in the U.S. Constitution.

Well, perhaps stupidly is the wrong word. They didn’t actually mean for the 2nd Amendment to be what it has become. The founders presumably couldn’t have foreseen a violence-prone society more than 200 years in the future flooded with assault rifles and automatic weapons and ubiquitous handguns. They couldn’t have predicted copycat killings, elementary school shootings, domestic terrorism or senseless, random homicide.

Surely Thomas Jefferson and James Madison didn’t intend to protect the right of people like Salvador Ramos, Payton Gendron, Dylann Roof and Adam Lanza to massacre innocent people with deadly weapons of war.

But regardless of their intentions, the 2nd Amendment they left us with is a jumbled piece of work. Historians and scholars and judges have spent years battling over whether it was actually meant to confer on each individual American a right to “keep and bear arms” that may not be abridged, or whether it was supposed to apply only in the context of the right to form self-defense militias.  https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-05-25/gun-laws-constitution-amendment-supreme-court-uvalde-texas

Susan B. Glasser: On Guns, Biden’s Call for Action Is a Painful Reminder That He Cannot Make It Happen

If anything, the near-surety that Biden’s demand for action will very likely not produce action speaks to one of the larger questions raised by this awful moment in American politics: What does Presidential leadership even mean anymore, in a society paralyzed by its own political fissures and in a culture dominated by blame-shifting hatred? It used to be that national tragedies called for words of national consolation. There was the aspiration, if not the reality, that such horrors might eventually lead to reforms. Or at least to a shared sense of sorrow and renewed purpose. No longer. We can’t have collective grief anymore. We can’t have collective anything.

Since the first major mass shooting of the modern era—a massacre at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966, during Lyndon B. Johnson’s tenure, that left seventeen dead and more than thirty wounded—American Presidents have struggled to deal with them, as the historian Tevi Troy, the director of the Presidential Leadership Initiative at the Bipartisan Policy Center, wrote in a fascinating 2018 study. This particularly grotesque aspect of our national politics is a uniquely American phenomenon; other countries, such as Australia, have rewritten their laws and changed their societies after one or two mass shootings. Not America.

In this context, another mass shooting or two or three is not a game changer. Biden is just another Democratic President stymied by the fact that there are two parties in this country, and one of them—not his—obstructs the passage of popular gun-control measures. Before Buffalo and Uvalde, gun control was not a top issue among voters of either party in the run-up to the midterms. The electorate is as fatalistic as their despairing President about the prospects for meaningful preventative action. It has given up. The voters are not wrong. Biden’s call for action at such a moment is also a reminder that he himself cannot produce it.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/on-guns-bidens-call-for-action-is-a-painful-reminder-that-he-cannot-make-it-happen

Jessica Winter: Seeing America, Again, in the Uvalde Elementary-School Shooting

Nineteen children and two adults were murdered in Texas. This is the country that gun-rights advocates have chosen.

On Tuesday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released a report titled “Active Shooter Incidents in the United States in 2021,” which logged sixty-one mass shootings last year. The deadliest of these was at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado, where ten people were killed, a death toll that was matched ten days ago, at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and then exceeded, at Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, Texas, where an eighteen-year-old shot and killed nineteen children and two adults. Early reports indicate that he used a handgun and a rifle. Families who gathered at the local civic center, which was used as a reunification site, were asked for DNA swabs to assist investigators in identifying their loved ones. The shooting began around eleven-thirty in the morning; as darkness fell, many families were still waiting outside the civic center, without word of their children.

This is the second-deadliest K-12 school shooting in U.S. history, after the December, 2012, massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, where twenty children and six educators were killed. Eventually, Sandy Hook also came to be seen as the graveyard of the gun-control movement: in 2013, a new assault-weapons ban, and also a bill to require universal background checks for firearm sales, failed in the Senate. If an entire classroom of dead first-graders could not spur even remedial action in Congress on gun control, nothing would. And nothing has. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/seeing-america-again-in-the-texas-elementary-school-shooting

Karen Tumulty: Abbott vows change after a school shooting. We’ve heard that before.

The Lone Star State has long ranked near the bottom of the nation when it comes to how much it spends on public schools, and it is no more generous when it comes to the dollars it would take to turn them into the kind of fortresses that many conservatives claim they should be. Kevin Brown, executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators, told me the state allotment of funds for school security is a mere $9.72 per student annually. And in recent years, Texas voters have become increasingly resistant to bond measures, which would be needed to fund extensive physical improvements to school buildings.

Pretty much off the table, politically speaking, is doing much of anything about guns. After the Santa Fe school shootings, Abbott asked the Texas legislature to “study the possibility” of a “red flag” law allowing courts to order the seizure of guns from people deemed an imminent threat. When state lawmakers balked at even looking at the possibility, Abbott backed down.

More difficult still would be making it harder for an 18-year-old in Texas to buy assault rifles — as the Uvalde shooter did just days after his birthday.

After the 2018 Parkland massacre, a place once known as the “Gunshine State” quickly enacted new firearms restrictions, including raising the age at which one may be purchased to 21. But Abbott said that Texas is different from Florida. The future governor was given his first .22-caliber rifle when he was 12 or 13, he recalled, and grew up in an area where high-schoolers typically drove around with gun racks in their pickup trucks. “It’s part of the culture in Texas. Kids get shotguns as gifts at Christmastime to go hunting or for their birthday or whatever,” he said. “I don’t see that changing in Texas.”

Having grown up myself in a gun-owning extended family in Texas, I don’t either — at least, no time soon. As children, my own sons shot at targets under the careful eye of my uncle. But there is a vast difference between the rite-of-passage experience in which a youngster gets his own rifle to go deer hunting with his granddad and the purchase of a weapon of war by a troubled teen. Surely there must come a day when even Texans can recognize that.

The country will inevitably move on as Uvalde fades from the daily news, until there is another Uvalde or Parkland or Sutherland Springs. Then, we will once again hear politicians promising how, this time, things will change. The truth is, there will never be a single cure to the sickness of gun violence in this country. Which is why it is long past time for leaders like Greg Abbott to stop repeating the same tired tropes and start taking action on multiple fronts at once. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/greg-abbott-uvalde-texas-school-shooting-vows-change-again/

Jelani Cobb The Atrocity of American Gun Culture

Ten years ago, in the aftermath of the horror in Newtown, Connecticut—where a twenty-year-old with a semi-automatic rifle entered Sandy Hook Elementary School and fatally shot twenty children and six adults—Wayne LaPierre, the C.E.O. of the National Rifle Association, said, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The idea of vigilant protectors subduing armed antagonists spoke to a vision of a society in which firearms are as commonplace as cell phones, and where more guns mean more safety. If the idea seemed absurd then, the passage of time has only made it empirically so.

Two years ago, a study published in the journal Justice Quarterly examined the effects of gun laws in every state. Emma Fridel, an assistant professor of criminology at Florida State University, looked at gun-ownership rates and the proliferation of concealed-carry laws between 1991 and 2016. State lawmakers pushing for laxer laws have tended to argue that a more broadly armed public would serve as a deterrent to violence. Fridel found the opposite: gun-homicide rates in states with more permissive carry policies were eleven per cent higher than in states with stricter laws, and the probability of mass shootings increased by roughly fifty-three per cent in states with more gun ownership.

The most obvious indicator of the absurdist thinking on this subject can be seen in the fact that the latest massacre happened in Texas, a state that has more than eight thousand gun dealers, and where an estimated thirty-seven per cent of the population owns firearms. Last year, Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill that allowed most Texans to carry handguns without a license or mandatory training.

This legislation did not prevent the Uvalde carnage any more than previous legislation allowing easier access to guns prevented the 2019 shooting that killed twenty-three people at an El Paso Walmart, or the 2017 attack in the town of Sutherland Springs, which took the lives of twenty-six worshippers in a rural church. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/06/the-atrocity-of-american-gun-culture

Dana Milbank: There’s no reasoning with a GOP hijacked by disinformation

Once you’ve taken leave from the reality-based community, every day is fantastic!

It has been particularly so over the past week. As the rest of the country mourned the latest young victims of gun violence, the QAnon crowd and their enablers in the Republican Party have constructed a walled fortress of alternative facts.

Beginning in the hours after the elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Tex., right-wing social media churned out every manner of conspiracy theory: The shooter was an illegal immigrant! No, he was transgender! Or maybe the massacre was a false-flag operation perpetrated by the anti-gun left! And the grieving families are paid crisis actors!

The disinformation then followed the usual paths, finding its way to Alex Jones’s Infowars (the shooting had “very suspicious timing,” coming days before the National Rifle Association’s convention) and right into the claims of Republican members of Congress.

Rep. Paul Gosar (Ariz.), who has repeatedly tied himself to white nationalists, tweeted that the gunman was “a transsexual leftist illegal alien” — and let that multi-headed falsehood stand for two hours before deleting it.

“We stopped teaching values in so many of our schools; now we’re teaching wokeness. We’re indoctrinating our children with things like CRT, telling, you know, some children they’re not equal to others and they’re the cause of other people’s problems.” — Reminded by host Neil Cavuto that school shootings were happening long before CRT became a (Republican-invented) issue, Johnson added the claim that CRT was “going on under the radar for quite some time.”

Then came the ubiquitous Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who, fresh from a GOP primary victory, repeated in a live Facebook broadcast the false narrative that the perpetrator was trans (“wearing eyeliner, cross-dressing”). She also nodded to the conspiracy belief that the shooter couldn’t have afforded the weapons and therefore anti-gun forces must have given him the guns to create a pretext for gun confiscation. “He must have really been saving up,” she said.   https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/31/gun-safety-compromise-impossible-gop-disinformation/

Edward Luce: Is America heading for civil war?

In the summer of 2015, America caught a glimpse of how its future could unfold. The US military conducted a routine exercise in the south that triggered a cascade of conspiracy theories, particularly in Texas. Some believed the maneuver was the precursor to a Chinese invasion; others thought it would coincide with a massive asteroid strike. The exercise, called Jade Helm 15, stood for “homeland eradication of local militants”, according to one of the right’s dark fantasy sites. Greg Abbot, Texas’s Republican governor, took these ravings seriously. He ensured that the 1,200 federal troops were closely monitored by the armed Texas National Guard. In that bizarre episode, which took place a year before Donald Trump became the Republican nominee for president, we see the germs of an American break-up.

As with any warning of impending civil war, the very mention of another American one sounds impossibly alarmist – like persistent warnings from chief Vitalstatistix in the Asterix comic series that the sky was about to fall on Gaulish heads. America’s dissolution has often been mispredicted.

Yet a clutch of recent books make an alarmingly persuasive case that the warning lights are flashing redder than at any point since 1861. The French philosopher Voltaire once said: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” As the University of California’s Barbara Walter shows in her bracing manual, How Civil Wars Start, US democracy today is checking all the wrong boxes.

Even before Trump triumphed in the 2016 presidential election, political analysts were warning about the erosion of democracy and drift towards autocracy. The paralyzing divisions caused by Trump’s failed putsch of January 6th, 2021, have sent it into dangerous new territory. Polls show that most Republicans believe, without evidence, that the election was stolen by Democrats backed by the so-called “deep state”, the Chinese government, rigged Venezuelan voting machines, or a feverish combination thereof.

In This Will Not Pass, a book by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, Joe Biden is quoted telling a senior Democrat: “I certainly hope [my presidency] works out. If it doesn’t I’m not sure we’re going to have a country.” That a US president could utter something so apocalyptic without raising too many eyebrows shows how routine such dread has become. https://www.irishtimes.com/world/us/2022/05/31/is-the-united-states-heading-for-civil-war/