We begin today's roundup with The Washington Post's
Catherine Rampell who analyzes Donal Trump's position on gun control:
When host George Stephanopoulos noted how uncharacteristically can’t-do this attitude was for Trump, the latter insisted: “Now, George, I could say, oh, we’re going to do this and that and it’s never going to happen again. You have sick people in this country and throughout the world, and you’re always going to have difficulty.”
Taking a page out of the National Rifle Association’s playbook, Trump then laid responsibility for gun violence at the feet of the mentally ill. But he abstained even from advocating for more screening and services for mental illness.
In other words, Trump, like other conservative politicians he claims to disdain, shrugged. Trump, a man who prides himself on his great willingness to speak the politically incorrect truth, dared not offend his base. Trump, who considers himself unrestrained by special interests, paid obeisance to perhaps the most powerful special interest in the country, the gun lobby (from which he seems to have cribbed his own gun policy proposals). Trump, the self-proclaimed strongman, is now mysteriously impotent.
More on the day's top stories below the fold.
Greg Sargent interviews Adam Winkler, a professor of Constitutional law at the University of California:
PLUM LINE: What are your top proposals, and how do you rebut the argument from the gun rights forces that these things wouldn’t make any difference?
WINKLER: The first thing we should do is require a background check on every single gun purchase. We know background checks work. Since the partial background check system went into effect in the mid-nineties, well over one million people have been denied the ability to purchase a gun. One million felons, mentally ill, and other prohibited persons were turned away. Some of those people may have found other ways to get guns. But the easiest way for them to get guns was shut off.
There’s a gun-control Catch 22. Gun rights advocates claim gun control won’t work. And they water down every legislative proposal, such that it won’t work. Then when the killing continues, they say, “look, gun control doesn’t work.” But it doesn’t work because of loopholes that have been put in by gun enthusiasts. The background check system would work a lot better if it required everyone who purchased a gun to go through a background check. Force every criminal into the black market. Don’t let criminals go to a private seller to buy a gun.
The other thing we need to do is increase funding for research on gun violence prevention. This is a major public health crisis that takes the lives of up to 30,000 people per year. And there’s almost no federal money that goes into research on how to reduce gun violence.
Joshua Holland at The Nation takes apart the right's "gunslinger fantasty":
Dr. Pete Blair, an associate professor of criminal justice at Texas State University and director of the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center (ALERRT), has studied mass shooting incidents and trains law enforcement personnel to respond to active-shooter situations. The cops who go through his course conduct live-fire exercises using real firearms which are re-chambered to fire “soap rounds” that leave only welts when they hit.
Blair’s trainees run through a number of real-world scenarios—“force on force training” that’s designed to “inoculate” officers against the problems people naturally encounter in high-stress situations. That stress response, says Blair, includes “tunnel vision, audio exclusion and time dilation,” and one would expect people who weren’t trained in these situations to “freeze up or not know what to do, and to have difficulty performing actions correctly.”
Joan Walsh examines Hillary Clinton's new gun control plan:
Gun control is one issue where Clinton stands to Sanders’s left. The Vermont socialist isn’t terrible on guns: Though the NRA endorsed him in his first race for Congress, he has a D-minus rating from the group. He supported the 2013 background-check bill, in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, and closing the gun-show sales loophole. [...] Sanders’s mixed stand on guns reflects his political reality: He’s the senator from a pro-gun state that suffers little gun violence. In fact, he touts his record appealing to gun owners as giving him the kind of broad populist appeal that might, in the general election, help Democrats in red states and rural areas, where party leaders are often seen as gun-grabbing elitists.
Yet it could hurt him in Democratic primaries. Clearly, after a summer spent losing ground to Sanders on her left, Clinton has begun an offensive on a crucial issue that could have Sanders playing defense. In a season marked by shocking multiple gun-killings from Charleston, South Carolina, to Roanoke, Virginia, to Roseburg, Oregon, the former New York senator has raised the issue of gun control with steadily rising fervor.
Back to Trump,
Michael Barbaro at The New York Times looks at Trump's Twitter strategy:
Mr. Trump has mastered Twitter in a way no candidate for president ever has, unleashing and redefining its power as a tool of political promotion, distraction, score-settling and attack — and turning a 140-character task that other candidates farm out to young staff members into a centerpiece of his campaign. [...]
His online dominance is striking: Over the past two months, on Twitter alone, he has been mentioned in 6.3 million conversations, eight times as many as Republican rivals like Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson — not to mention more than three times as many as Hillary Rodham Clinton and nearly four times as many as Bernie Sanders. He is retweeted more than twice as often as Mrs. Clinton and about 13 times more frequently than Jeb Bush, according to data compiled as of Friday by Edelman Berland, a market research firm that studies social media. His Twitter following (4.36 million) dwarfs that of the rest of the Republican field, and in the coming weeks, he is expected to surpass Mrs. Clinton (4.39 million).
In an interview at his office — interrupted repeatedly by Mr. Trump’s picking up his Samsung Galaxy cellphone, loading new tweets with his index finger and marveling at his nonstop mentions (“Watch this!” he implored) — the candidate compared his Twitter feed to a newspaper with a single, glorious voice: his own.
Randall Balmer at The Los Angeles Times analyzes Trump's evangelical support:
The evangelical repudiation of the faith for a mess of political pottage is not a recent phenomenon. It can be traced at least as far back as the 1980 presidential election, when evangelicals deserted Jimmy Carter, one of their own, for Ronald Reagan.
Whereas Carter advocated racial and sexual equality, cornerstones of a "just society" and articles of faith for 19th century evangelicals, Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. Reagan opened his 1980 general election campaign in, of all places, Philadelphia, Miss., the site of the brutal slayings of three civil rights workers by the Ku Klux Klan 16 summers earlier. In his speech at the Neshoba County Fair on Aug. 3, Reagan proclaimed his support for "states rights," coded language employed by a generation of Southern segregationists. [...] What did evangelicals gain by selling their birthright to Ronald Reagan in 1980 and to the Republican Party thereafter? It's a very good question — and one that evangelicals should ponder carefully as they approach yet another election.
Yes, politically conservative evangelicals have indeed neglected the teachings of Jesus and defaulted on the noble legacy of 19th-century evangelicalism, which invariably took the part of those on the margins, including women and minorities. But Trump is not responsible for these lapses. He is simply reaping the benefits of a much earlier defection.
Turning to the question of Vice President Biden's potential candidacy,
Dana Milbank offers up this analysis:
...to summarize, we have no idea what Biden is doing. Nobody does, except perhaps the vice president himself, and that seems doubtful. Yet the Biden speculation, a daily fixture for the last 90 days, has become feverish. [...] Biden “allies” (or at least those allies who want him to run) leaked word of various meetings the vice president had over the summer with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and others, further raising expectations. But all that came were delays. Biden aides suggested he would reach a decision by the end of the summer. Then they pointed out that the end of the summer didn’t technically occur until Sept. 23. Then they floated Oct. 1, then Oct. 13 (the first debate), then Oct. 24 (a big dinner in Iowa). Some reports noted that deadlines to get on the ballot in some states begin Nov. 6. But Politico reported that Biden’s “inner circle” thinks he can wait until December, or even the spring, to make his decision.
At Mother Jones,
Ben Adler argues for a focus on climate change at the upcoming Democratic debate:
The GOP's commitment to an unpopular, outdated position on climate change isn't some weird outlier but rather the epitome of its rejection of modernity and reason. And so by highlighting climate change, Democrats highlight Republicans' backwardness more broadly. As Jonathan Chait noted in New York magazine on Sunday, a new political science study looked at the platforms of political parties in nine major industrialized democracies and found that every one of the parties accepts climate science except for Republicans. But climate change is not the only issue on which the GOP stands apart from the rest of mainstream politics in advanced democracies. Republicans are also unique in their rejection of evolution and opposition to even modest gun control. None of these are issues that many voters list as their top priorities. The same goes for a number of lower-profile causes Republicans oppose and most voters support: embryonic stem cell research, funding for PBS and NPR, and so on.