We begin today’s roundup with The Washington Post and its editorial on the need for common sense gun laws to end America’s gun violence epidemic:
Mass shootings have become commonplace, and shootings far more so: Guns kill more than 30,000 people every year and injure roughly 80,000 more. Just as there was a last time (an outdoor musical festival a little more than a month ago in Las Vegas) and a this time (a rural Texas church), there will surely be a next time unless national lawmakers come to grips with the problem and take meaningful steps to stem the obscene and unfettered access to weapons of war. [..]
There is no way to prevent all shootings, but steps can be taken to reduce the carnage, as has been proved by sensible and effective gun control in other countries that also must contend with issues of mental health. After every high-profile mass shooting — at a movie theater in Colorado, a college campus in Virginia, a parking lot in Arizona, an elementary school in Connecticut — Congress is beseeched to serve the American public rather than the National Rifle Association. Lawmakers are asked not to prohibit guns but to enact common-sense safeguards: muscular background checks, keeping guns away from domestic abusers, banning weapons designed for battlefields.
So far, Congress has refused. That dereliction is what is truly unimaginable.
Here is David Perry’s analysis at The Nation on the NRA and Republican deflection to mental illness in the wake of such gun massacres:
Within a day of the massacre of men, women, and children in a Texas church, President Donald Trump made three claims. First, he maintained it wasn’t a guns problem. Second, he said the shooter was stopped by someone else with a gun. Third, he blamed mental illness. Together the statements made one thing very clear: There is no amount of violence or sympathetic victims that will ever shame today’s Republican Party to take action on guns. [...]
Stigma is dangerous. When we spread the lie that mental illness leads to perpetrating mass murder, we push people to closet their conditions. Mental health, like all forms of health, requires maintenance and support. Secrecy just leads to vulnerability and self-harm. Even worse, the GOP, led by now-disgraced Representative Tim Murphy (R-PA), has frequently used high-profile incidents of violence to call for forced medication and easing the requirements for involuntary commitment. In other words, the GOP is more than willing to strip away liberties from people with disabilities in order to avoid talking about guns.
At The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik knocks down the typical NRA-fueled arguments against reasonable gun safety laws:
1. The kinds of rules and limitations most often proposed—i.e., a ban on military-style weapons of the kind used in the two most recent high-profile gun massacres and in so many others before—wouldn’t have an effect on gun violence in America, which tends to be concentrated on handguns, and more typically involves suicides and domestic disputes. Gun massacres are not the only or even the most lethal form of gun violence /react-text react-text: 168 .
Nor are measles the only or the worst form of infectious disease, but vaccinating against them raises the level of public health generally and makes the next advance more likely. Making one kind of gun illegal or restricted makes the broader work of restricting violence more plausible. (Which is, of course, exactly why the National Rifle Association, et al., oppose it.) Most reforms in the long history of human progress were initially deprecated as being too small or too soon or not enough—yet a small reform emboldens people to think in new ways about their condition and the possibility of remedying it. All public-health measures seem at first inadequate to the public miseries they attempt to cure. Each step forward—each public sewer built, each antibiotic discovered—clears the way for more.
Turning to the president’s campaign advisor Carter Page, Scott Bixby at The Daily Beast dives deep into his bizarre testimony:
During a seven-hour hearing with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page denied, then quickly admitted to encounters with top Russian government officials during a July 2016 trip to Moscow—and to suggesting that candidate Donald Trump travel to Russia himself.
According to the 243-page transcript of the hearing last week released on Monday night, Page also admitted to soliciting suggestions from the Trump campaign on the contents of his speech to the New Economic School in Moscow and to informing now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and senior campaign adviser Sam Clovis of his trip in advance. [...]
In contentious, occasionally comical exchanges with Democratic and Republican members of the committee, Page continuously contradicted his own sworn testimony, occasionally in the same sentence, to the particular annoyance of Reps. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and Adam Schiff (D-CA).
David Graham writes about how a possible indictment of former NSA advisor Mike Flynn would affect the White House:
The charges that Flynn seems most likely to face are similar to some that were brought against Manafort. Like Manafort, Flynn did not register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act at the time he did work for foreign governments, though like Manafort, he retroactively registered. Like Manafort, who is charged with making false statements, Flynn may have lied to the FBI. Flynn was pushed out of his job as national-security adviser on February 14, making him the shortest-tenured holder of that job in history, after the Post revealed that he had lied to Vice President Mike Pence and others about conversations he had with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. But the paper later reported that Flynn had also lied to the FBI about those conversations.
On the Republican tax plan, Dana Milbank explains how it will usher in a new gilded age:
As the corporate welfare is doled out, the same bill widens the gap between the rich and everybody else. The liberal Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy concluded that the middle fifth of Americans would get a modest tax cut of $460 (1.4 percent of their income) in 2018, while the richest 1 percent would have a cut of $64,720 (2.5 percent of their income). Even the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation, using a more favorable methodology, acknowledges the plan would cost the federal government $989 billion over a decade.
Catherine Rampell adds:
The Republican tax bill is often described as being weighted toward “the rich.” But that’s not the full story.
It’s actually weighted toward the loafer, the freeloader, the heir, the passive investor who spends his time yachting and charity-balling.
In short: the idle rich.
On a final note, if you’re in Virginia today, don’t forget to vote!