Bernd Debusmann

File this under the rubric Only in America – sticks, poles and water guns will be banned from the centre of Tampa at the Republican Party’s national convention next August. Guns, however, will be allowed. The logic behind that is drawn from the U.S. constitution. How so?

The constitution’s second amendment protects the right of citizens to “keep and bear arms”  and that is taken to mean firearms. Sticks, poles and water guns do not enjoy constitutional protection. That, in a nutshell, is the argument the governor of Florida, Rick Scott, used to turn down a request by the mayor of Tampa for guns to be kept away, just for four days, from an event forecast by the organizers to draw at least 50,000 people to the city.

They will include thousands bent on demonstrating against the policies of Mitt Romney, who will be formally nominated as the Republican Party’s candidate for the presidential elections in November. Political conventions and protests make for a volatile mix, which is why Mayor Bob Buckhorn thought the downtown area near the convention center should be a gun-free zone.

That may strike a good many people as plain common sense but Scott is not one of them. The exchange of letters between him and Buckhorn speaks volumes about American attitudes towards guns  much of the rest of the world finds baffling and many Americans consider absurd. Said the New York Times in an editorial: “If this situation weren’t so shameful, and so dangerous, it would be absurd.”

To place the matter into context: the mayor, a Democrat, is no anti-gun crusader. He owns one himself and numbers among the estimated 900,000 Florida residents (out of a population of 19 million) who have a state license allowing them to carry a concealed weapon. The governor, a Republican, was elected in 2010 with the support of the Tea Party movement and the endorsement of the National Rifle Association (NRA).

Buckhorn to Scott:

In anticipation of the many thousands of Florida residents and visitors to the State that will attend the Republican National Convention and its related events, the Department of Homeland Security has already designated the RNC as a National Special Security Event (NSSE). This designation is reserved for nationally significant events   involving the potential for major disruptions…including possibly violent ant-government protests and other civil unrest.

Part of the City’s preparations to respond to threats includes the passage of a temporary ordinance for the downtown area. The temporary ordinance regulates certain items that are usually benign in nature, but have been historically used as dangerous weapons during a NSSE. Some of the benign items that have been used as dangerous weapons include sticks, poles and water guns.

“SACRED TRADITION”

“One noticeable item missing from the City’s temporary ordinance is firearms,” the letter continues. “Normally, licensed firearms…do not pose a significant threat to the public; however in the potentially contentious environment surrounding the RNC, a firearm unnecessarily increases the threat of imminent harm and injury to the residents and visitors of the City.”

Florida state law bars municipalities from passing their own gun regulations but the governor has the power to override restrictions with an executive order. That is what Buckhorn asked Scott to do. His reply:

The short answer to your request is found in the 2^nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution…You note that the City’s temporary ordinance regulates ‘sticks, poles and water guns’ but that firearms are a ‘noticeable item missing’…Firearms are noticeably included, however, in the 2^nd Amendment.

While he shared concern that there might be violent anti-government protests, Scott said, “it is just at such times that the constitutional right to self-defense is most precious and must be protected from government overreach.”

That reflects the philosophy of the NRA, the powerful lobby which helped draft Florida’s 2005 Stand Your Ground law. It allows citizens to use deadly force if they “reasonably believe” that their life and safety is in danger. The law is at the heart of a case that made international headlines in February – the  killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old student. The man who shot him, George Zimmerman, said he had acted in self-defense. Initially, he was not arrested.

Protest demonstrations by tens of thousands eventually prompted his arrest and a review of the case. He is now charged with second-degree murder, free on bail and awaiting trial. Meanwhile,  a public safety task force on May 1 began a review of the Stand Your Ground law. Twenty-three states have adopted similar laws and in several, Democratic lawmakers are now trying to roll back the legislation.

Among their arguments:  the number of “justifiable homicides” has risen sharply in the states that adopted such laws. Will that impress those who view the 2^nd Amendment as “a sacred constitutional tradition,” as Governor Scott put it in his letter to the Tampa mayor?  Don’t bet on it.

The killing of a black teenager by a self-appointed vigilante in Florida has trained a spotlight on gun laws reminiscent of the Wild West in 24 U.S. states. Despite widespread outrage over the Florida case, gun-friendly senators in Washington want to make it easier to extend those laws to most of the country.

That would set the United States, where there are more firearms in private hands than in any other country, even farther apart from the rest of the industrialized world as far as guns are concerned. And it would mark yet another success for the National Rifle Association (NRA) in its long campaign against gun controls.

Before getting into the details of the planned legislation, a brief recapitulation of what happened in the Orlandosuburb of Sanford on February 26: Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old high school student, walked to a family member’s home at night when George Zimmerman, a self-appointed “neighborhood watch captain” spotted him, deemed the teenager suspicious, pursued him and shot him dead with a 9 mm pistol after what he told police was an altercation that made him fear for his life.

Police questioned Zimmerman, a white Hispanic, accepted his account of the incident, and let him go, following the letter or a 2005 Florida state law that allows citizens to use deadly force if they “reasonably believe” they face harm. Unlike previous such cases, the teenager’s killing caught national attention, largely because social media served as a vehicle to carry charges of racism and unequal justice to a huge audience.

On March 8, Martin’s parents posted a “petition to prosecute the killer of our son” on the website change.org.

By March 23, after thousands of demonstrators in New York, Miami and Sanford demanded Zimmerman’s arrest, the parents’ petition had gathered close to 1.5 million signatures. Sanford’s police chief, Bill Lee, stepped down “temporarily” to let tempers cool, as he put it. In Washington, the Congressional Black Caucus, an informal group of African-American legislators, termed the teenager’s death a “hate crime.”

One might be tempted to think that the wave of indignation, steadily gathering momentum since February 26, might have tempered the enthusiasm of gun-loving Washington legislators for expanding controversial laws. But one would be wrong. And one would underestimate the clout of the NRA, considered one of the three most influential lobbies in the United States.

On March 13, less than two weeks after Trayvon Martin’s death, a Democratic senator from gun-friendly Alaska, Mark Begich, introduced the “National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act of 2012.” Just another week later, SenatorJohn Thune from South Dakota introduced a bill “to allow reciprocity for the carrying of certain concealed firearms.” The differences between the two are minor and due to an arcane dispute between the NRA and the smaller and more radical Gun Owners of America. The NRA has asked its members to contact their senators and ask them to co-sponsor the Begich bill.

HAVE GUN, CAN TRAVEL

Both bills would force all states that issue permits to carry concealed weapons to recognize permits obtained elsewhere. States such as California and New York that have stringent regulations on who can carry a gun would be obliged to allow people with permits obtained from states with lax gun laws, such as Florida. Gun control advocates say that it is laws allowing citizens to carry loaded handguns in public that form the basis of additional legislation, Such as the Florida Stand Your Ground law that barred police from arresting Zimmerman.

As Alcee Hastings, a Democratic congressman from Florida put it: “This misguided law does not make our streets safer, rather it turns our streets into a showdown at the OK Corral. But this is not the Wild West. We are supposed to be a civilized society. Let Trayvon’s death not be for naught. Let us honor his life by righting this wrong.” Hastings, who is African American, called for a repeal of the law.

That is not likely to happen, and less so in an election year. President Barack Obama has stayed out of the debate on gun laws, which flares every time there is a headline-making shooting, and with few exceptions, lawmakers seek the gun lobby’s favor and the resulting votes. This is the chief reason why advocates of tighter gun regulations have had little success over the past two decades.

Another reason, according to Kristen Rand of the Washington-based Violence Policy Center, is that most Americans are unaware of the number of people killed in incidents similar to the shooting of Trayvor Martin. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) does not compile statistics on such cases and most of them are never known outside the place where they happened.

“The average person has no idea of the scale of the problem,” said Rand. “If they had, things might be different.”

PHOTO: Demonstrators gather to call for justice in the murder of Trayvon Martin at Leimert Park in Los Angeles, March 22, 2012. Florida Governor Rick Scott appointed a task force on Thursday to investigate the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin as calls grew for charges to be filed against the neighborhood watch volunteer who killed him. Also, the state prosecutor who had been handling the investigation will step aside from the probe, Scott said in a statement.  REUTERS/Jonathan Alcorn

Another American mass shooting. Another rush to buy more guns.

On the Monday after the latest of the bloody rampages that are part of American life, gun sales in Arizona shot up by more than 60 percent and rose by an average of five percent across the entire country. The figures come from the FBI and speak volumes about a gun culture that has long baffled much of the world.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation compared January 10, 2011, with the corresponding Monday a year ago.

So what would prompt Americans to stock up their arsenals in the wake of the shooting in Tucson that killed six people and wounded 14, including Gabrielle Giffords, the congresswoman who was the target of an unhinged 22-year-old who has since been charged with attempted assassination?

To hear gun dealers tell it, demand went up because of fears that the Tucson shooting might lead to tighter gun laws. There was a similar spike in sales after the 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech, where a deranged student killed 32 people and himself in the worst such massacre in American history.

Fear of regulation also drove up gun sales after President Barack Obama won the presidency in November 2008. In the first two months of 2009, about 2.5 million Americans bought guns, a 26 percent increase over the same period in 2008.

According to a CBS poll taken two days after Jared Loughner shot congresswoman Giffords in the head, Americans are almost evenly divided on the issue of gun control – 48 percent said gun laws should remain as they are or be made less strict, 47 in favor of more regulation. That is down from 56 percent in 2002 and confirms a Gallup analysis this week that found public support for stricter gun laws has declined over the past two decades.

That prompts one to wonder how many Americans see gun violence as the inevitable by-product of a free society – and whether the gun lobby has been right all along in saying that gun control advocates are out of touch with much of the country.

As one of the staunchest opponents of more gun regulation, John Lott, puts it in a book entitled More Guns, Less Crime: “American culture is a gun culture – not merely in the sense that in 2009 about 124 million people lived in households that owned a total of about 270 million guns but in a broader sense that guns pervade our debates on crime and are constantly present in movies and the news. So, we are obsessed with guns…”

WORLD LEADER IN PRIVATE GUNS
That obsession has long secured the United States the number one position on the list of gun-owning nations. There are more guns in private hands than anywhere else on earth. On a guns-per-capita basis (90 guns per 100 residents) it is comfortably ahead of second-ranked Yemen (61 per 100), according to the authoritative Small Arms Survey issued by the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.

That obsession, in the eyes of gun control advocates, borders on insanity and some of the wrinkles of America’s permissive gun laws are so bizarre they beggar belief. To wit: “Membership in a terrorist organization does not prohibit a person from possessing firearms or explosives under current federal law.” Neither does inclusion on the government’s ever-growing terrorist watch list.

So found the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the research arm of Congress, after looking into the background checks of prospective buyers gun dealers are required to file to the FBI. According to a GAO report read at a congressional hearing last May, sales of guns and explosives to people on terrorist watch lists totaled 1,119 in a period of six years.

The National Rifle Association (NRA), one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington, came out in opposition to proposed legislation that would have barred people on the list from buying guns. Why? They are placed there on “reasonable suspicion” of terrorist links and the NRA argues that suspicion is not enough for Congress to take away the constitutional right, enshrined in the second amendment to the U.S. constitution, to own and bear arms.

After the Tucson attack hurt one of their own, members of Congress are worried about their safety but whether that will translate into greater willingness to tighten gun regulations remains to be seen. The test will come when a New York Democrat, Carolyn McCarthy, introduces a bill to ban extended magazines, such as the 33-round clip used by Loughner.

Such magazines were illegal from 1994 to 2004 as part of a ban on assault weapons the Bush administration let lapse, a move that prompted gun control advocates to predict a sharp increase in the number of gun deaths. That did not happen. The rate of gun deaths – by murder, suicide or accidents – has held steady at around 31,000 a year and the murder rate has actually dropped.

Which is an argument gun enthusiasts and their lobby are certain to field when McCarthy’s bill is debated. After that, the topic will fade – until the next mass shooting.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)