{"id":3787,"date":"2013-04-23T00:11:21","date_gmt":"2013-04-23T04:11:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/?p=3787"},"modified":"2013-04-22T23:23:19","modified_gmt":"2013-04-23T03:23:19","slug":"background-checks-and-the-branch-davidians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/2013\/04\/background-checks-and-the-branch-davidians\/","title":{"rendered":"Background Checks and the Branch Davidians"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

In the furor over the recent situations in Boston and West, Texas, we passed quietly over the 20th anniversary of the April 19, 1993 final assault on the Branch Davidian center in Elk, Texas (conventionally reported as \u201cWaco,\u201d which is nine miles away). I do not want to engage the technicalities or disputes surrounding the tank\/tear gas assault ordered by Attorney General Janet Reno, or the cause of the subsequent fire that led to the deaths of dozens of men, women, and children. Let\u2019s just say \u201cmistakes were made.\u201d<\/p>\n

My Baylor and Anxious Bench colleague Philip Jenkins has written two very insightful pieces recently on the anniversary, one at Real Clear Religion<\/a>\u00a0and one at the Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a>. In the former piece, Jenkins considers the Branch Davidians\u2019 surprising (and totally unintended) connection to popular images of terrorism and terrorists. With Oklahoma City following two years after the Branch Davidian debacle, popular images of \u201cterrorists\u201d focused heavily on \u201cdomestic\u201d threats, which usually meant far-right, racist, neo-Nazi, and, in the ugliest versions of the stereotype, conservative Christian. This led to a certain tone-deafness (shared by both the Clinton and early Bush \u201943 administrations) to the looming threat of Islamic terrorism. Our hearing improved after 9\/11.\"\"<\/p>\n

As we waited to see the ethnicity and\/or religion of the Boston bombers, certain journalists on the left seemed strangely eager for them to be Anglo and far-right. At Salon, David Sirota came out and said what others seemed to be thinking: \u201cLet\u2019s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mid-April 2013 will go down as one of the busiest times for news seen since 9\/11, and I want to propose a connection between the Branch Davidian siege and one other news item from the week \u2013 the failure of the Manchin\/Toomey compromise on universal background checks for gun purchases. As Adam Winkler writes<\/a> at The New Republic<\/em>, the adminstration and Democratic leaders spent a lot of capital in allowing the early debates following the Newtown shootings to focus on an assault rifle ban that, in retrospect, had absolutely no chance of passing. It also gave Republicans such as Texas\u2019s Ted Cruz a chance to raise concerns about a national gun registry (which was specifically banned by the compromise). But critics including Cruz have argued that any encroachments on individual gun rights under the Second Amendment represent a slippery slope toward such a registry. The feared end of the slope, for these critics, could be a national ban on personal firearms, and possibly government seizure of them.<\/p>\n

Liberal advocates find this line of argument infuriating, seeing it as yet another example of how paranoia trumps common sense when it comes to gun laws. The problem is that, in the Branch Davidian siege, and also the 1992 Ruby Ridge incident<\/a> in Idaho, conservative critics can point to appalling incidents in which the government\u00a0targeted citizens for \u201cstockpiling weapons\u201d and used brute force against them. As Jenkins points out, the Clinton administration\u2019s initial focus on the Branch Davidians was exclusively about the weapons, not about religiously-inspired \u201cchild abuse.\u201d Save perhaps for the Elian Gonzalez episode<\/a> in 2000, no other incident has confirmed gun rights advocates\u2019 fears of the pressing risk of \u201cgovernment overreach\u201d more than the Branch Davidian siege.<\/p>\n

Even if it is not cited explicitly, our gun control debates are still poisoned by the image of what in 1995 the NRA\u2019s Wayne LaPierre infamously called \u201cjack-booted government thugs,\u201d \u00a0who could \u201ctake away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill\u00a0us.\u201d Whether the jack-booted government thugs image reflects rank paranoia, or realistic concern, is another debate, but it is an image powerfully preserved for many in the flames at Mount Carmel twenty years ago. It is an image that has helped make even minor adjustments to gun laws nearly impossible.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the furor over the recent situations in Boston and West, Texas, we passed quietly over the 20th anniversary of the April 19, 1993 final assault on the Branch Davidian center in Elk, Texas (conventionally reported as \u201cWaco,\u201d which is nine miles away). I do not want to engage the technicalities or disputes surrounding the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1000,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[719,5],"tags":[817,816,819,818],"class_list":["post-3787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gun-control","category-thomas-kidd","tag-background-checks","tag-branch-davidians","tag-national-gun-registry","tag-ted-cruz"],"yoast_head":"\nBackground Checks and the Branch Davidians<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In the furor over the recent situations in Boston and West, Texas, we passed quietly over the 20th anniversary of the April 19, 1993 final assault on the\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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