Gavin Aronsen

Reporter

Gavin is a Mother Jones reporter in the DC bureau.

Full Bio | Get my RSS | Follow @garonsen

Gavin is an Iowa native, and covered the 2008 first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses for the Ames Tribune. He has also contributed to the Agence France-Presse, Daily Beast, Iowa Independent, Manhattan Media, and Village Voice.

Under Obama, Feds Holster Gun Cases

—By Gavin Aronsen

| Fri Feb. 15, 2013 4:01 AM PST

Despite the amped-up claims that President Obama is just waiting to crack down on gun owners, a new report reveals that his administration has been pursuing significantly fewer gun crimes than the predeceeding one. Under Obama, federal weapons prosecutions have declined to their lowest levels nearly a decade, according to a new report from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research group associated with Syracuse University.

After 9/11, the Bush administration's firearms prosecutions shot up, peaking at about 11,000 cases in 2004. In 2012, the feds prosecuted fewer than 8,000 gun cases:

TRAC

The prosecutions' most common target are felons who illegally possess or sell weapons—not legal owners or sellers who run afoul of the law. And, TRAC notes, counting on federal prosecutions misses the majority of gun cases: "Because of the very different number of the enforcers and prosecutors working at the two levels, state and local gun prosecutions almost certainly dwarf anything that is done by the federal government."

It's not entirely clear how the gun lobby's efforts to hamstring the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives's ability to enforce weapons laws has influenced the decline in gun cases. But of the 3,741 weapons cases referred to federal attorneys in 2012 that weren't investigated, about 40 percent were determined to lack sufficient evidence to pursue. And since 2005, the number of cases referred by the ATF has exceeded the number of weapons crimes prosecuted by federal authorities.

TRAC

Advertise on MotherJones.com

"A Killing Machine": Half of All Mass Shooters Used High-Capacity Magazines

Magazines holding more than 10 rounds were used in 31 of the 62 mass shootings we investigated.

—By Mark Follman and Gavin Aronsen

| Wed Jan. 30, 2013 4:01 AM PST

As lawmakers across the country and in the nation's capital debate possible restrictions on high-capacity magazines, one question emerges: Are these ammunition-feeding devices, which allow a shooter to fire many times without reloading, in fact commonly used by mass killers? We examined the data from Mother Jones' continuing investigation into mass shootings and found that high-capacity magazines have been used in at least 31 of the 62 cases we analyzed. A half-dozen of these crimes occurred in the last two years alone. (With some of the cases we studied, it remains unclear whether high-capacity magazines were used. We included all those involving magazines with more than 10 rounds; in many of the cases their capacities were far greater. For more details, jump to our data set below.)

Tragedy in Newtown

The NRA Myth of Arming the Good Guys

A Guide to Mass Shootings in America

More Guns, More Mass Shootings—Coincidence?

151 Victims of Mass Shootings in 2012: Here Are Their Stories

Do Armed Civilians Stop Mass Shooters? Actually, No.

"A Killing Machine": Half of All Mass Shooters Used High-Capacity Magazines

Mass Shootings: Maybe We Need a Better Mental-Health Policy

Why Mass Shootings Deserve Deeper Investigation

DATA: Explore our mass shootings research

See our full special report on gun laws and the rise of mass shootings in America.

In the shooting that injured Rep. Gabby Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, Jared Loughner emptied a 33-round magazine in 30 seconds, killing 6 and injuring 13. Inside a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, James Holmes used 40- and 100-round magazines to injure and kill an unprecedented 70 victims. At Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Adam Lanza used high-capacity magazines to fire upwards of 150 bullets as he slaughtered 20 kids and 6 adults.

"It turns a killer into a killing machine," says David Chipman, who served for 25 years as a special agent in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Outlawing high-capacity magazines won't prevent gun crimes from happening, Chipman notes, but might well reduce the carnage: "Maybe 3 kids get killed instead of 20."

With Congress undertaking a highly charged debate over firearms restrictions, many observers are skeptical that Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein's proposal to ban assault weapons will garner enough votes on Capitol Hill. But there may be momentum for mandating universal background checks on gun purchasers, and for outlawing the sale of magazines containing more than 10 rounds. A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that a majority of Americans support stricter regulation of firearms sales, and 59 percent believe that high-capacity magazines were significantly to blame in the recent spate of mass shootings.

The problem dates back to long before Newtown. In 1984, the assailant who massacred 21 at a McDonald's in San Ysidro, California, unleashed more than 200 rounds. School and workplace shootings in Stockton, California, and San Francisco in the late '80s and early '90s also involved large magazines, with an estimated 100 shots fired in each case. In 1997, a gunman in Orange, California, fired nearly 150 shots, wielding an AK-47 with a 30-round magazine three years after a federal law banned such assault weapons.

[Read the full article]

MAP: Does Your State Let You Carry a Gun on Campus?

Five states now do, and seven others may soon follow—including Texas, where a shooting just shook up a community college.

—By Gavin Aronsen, Jaeah Lee, and Andy Kroll

| Wed Jan. 23, 2013 6:56 AM PST

On Tuesday, a dispute between two people at Lone Star College in Houston ended in a gun fight. Three people were wounded (including suspects in the shooting), and a fourth person was reportedly hospitalized with an unspecified "medical emergency" in connection with the incident. It was the sixth shooting on or near a US college campus this month.

Texas generally has lax gun laws, but prohibits carrying a concealed weapon on a college campus. The GOP-controlled Texas Legislature may soon change that, however. Last week, state Sen. Brian Birdwell, a Republican, introduced new "campus carry" legislation that would allow firearms to be carried at public colleges with a valid permit. Texas would join five states* that, to varying degrees, now allow weapons to be carried on campuses. And lawmakers in at least seven other states are aiming to follow suit.

Does your state allow concealed guns on college campuses? Hover over an individual state for further details. (Also see lists below the map.)

States with laws allowing guns on college campuses: Colorado, Mississippi, Oregon, Utah, and Wisconsin.

States in which lawmakers have recently introduced legislation to allow guns on campuses: Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, and Wyoming.

For more, check out MoJo's yearlong investigation into gun laws and mass shootings in the United States.

Correction: California was included in this category in the initial version of the story; the state bans concealed guns on college campuses but makes exceptions for individuals with valid licenses who are granted specific permission by school authorities.

Sources: National Conference of State Legislatures; Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Was Hitler Really a Fan of Gun Control?

—By Gavin Aronsen

| Fri Jan. 11, 2013 4:01 AM PST

Near the outset of his rant on Piers Morgan Tonight on Monday, conspiracy peddler Alex Jones warned that the Second Amendment is all that stands between democracy and dictatorship. "Hitler took the guns, Stalin took the guns, Mao took the guns, Fidel Castro took the guns, Hugo Chávez took the guns, and I'm here to tell you, 1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms!" he screamed.

Two days later, the Drudge Report published this visual echo of Jones' claim:

Meanwhile, Google searches for "Hitler gun control" are spiking.

Of course, attempts to equate gun control with fascism are bogus. But the "Hitler took the guns" argument has long had a prominent and fairly effective role in America's gun control debate despite its obvious reductionism.

Its origins can be traced back to at least the early 1980s, when opponents of a Chicago proposal to ban handguns invoked it in the largely Jewish suburb of Skokie by "reminding village residents that the Nazis disarmed the Jews as a preliminary to sending them to the gas chambers," the Chicago Tribune reported. In 1989, a new pro-gun group called Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership began arguing that the 1968 federal gun control bill once favored by the NRA's old guard "was lifted, almost in its entirety, from Nazi legislation." (That false claim is still being repeated.)

Tragedy in Newtown

The NRA Myth of Arming the Good Guys

A Guide to Mass Shootings in America

More Guns, More Mass Shootings—Coincidence?

151 Victims of Mass Shootings in 2012: Here Are Their Stories

Do Armed Civilians Stop Mass Shooters? Actually, No.

"A Killing Machine": Half of All Mass Shooters Used High-Capacity Magazines

Mass Shootings: Maybe We Need a Better Mental-Health Policy

Why Mass Shootings Deserve Deeper Investigation

DATA: Explore our mass shootings research

See our full special report on gun laws and the rise of mass shootings in America.

In 1994, JPFO founder Aaron Zelman implored the NRA's board to seize on the alleged Nazi connection:

Some of you may even have figured out that unless the NRA changes its strategy, the law abiding firearm owner in America will go the way of the Jews in Nazi occupied Europe: extermination…The choice is yours; you can turn your back on a failed strategy—one of compromise with evil-doers—and attack the concept of "gun control" by exposing the Nazi roots of "gun-control" in America. Or, you can persist in a failed strategy, and accept your own extinction.

Whether or not the NRA was influenced by his advice, that same year its CEO, Wayne LaPierre, published Guns, Crime, and Freedom, in which he claimed, "In Germany, firearm registration helped lead to the holocaust," leaving citizens "defenseless against tyranny and the wanton slaughter of a whole segment of its population." The following year, President George H.W. Bush famously resigned from the NRA after LaPierre attacked federal law enforcement officials as "jack-booted government thugs" who wore "Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms." More recently, Stephen Halbrook, a lawyer who has represented the NRA, argued (PDF) that "if the Nazi experience teaches anything, it teaches that totalitarian governments will attempt to disarm their subjects so as to extinguish any ability to resist crimes against humanity."

So did Hitler and the Nazis really take away Germans' guns, making the Holocaust unavoidable? This argument is superficially true at best, as University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explained in a 2004 paper (PDF) on Nazi Germany's impact on the American culture wars. As World War I drew to a close, the new Weimar Republic government banned nearly all private gun ownership to comply with the Treaty of Versailles and mandated that all guns and ammunition "be surrendered immediately." The law was loosened in 1928, and gun permits were granted to citizens "of undoubted reliability" (in the law's words) but not "persons who are itinerant like Gypsies." In 1938, under Nazi rule, gun laws became significantly more relaxed. Rifle and shotgun possession were deregulated, and gun access for hunters, Nazi Party members, and government officials was expanded. The legal age to own a gun was lowered. Jews, however, were prohibited from owning firearms and other dangerous weapons.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

SEC Could Require Corporations to Disclose Their Dark Money

—By Gavin Aronsen

| Tue Jan. 8, 2013 12:26 PM PST

In August 2011, a group of 10 law professors submitted a petition (PDF) to the Securities and Exchange Commission urging the agency to consider requiring publicly held companies to fully disclose their political spending to their investors. After the proposal received more than 320,000 public comments, an unprecedented number, the SEC placed it on its 2013 agenda on the Friday before Christmas.

As it stands now, corporations must publicly disclose much of their political spending, but there is no way to know their total spending, partly because they can cloak their contributions by channeling them through outside-spending groups with lax disclosure requirements. For example, the insurance giant Aetna handed over more than $7 million to the American Action Network and Chamber of Commerce to quietly influence recent elections; those donations were only revealed inadvertently.

The Corporate Reform Coalition, a collection of campaign-finace reform groups led by Public Citizen, is applauding the SEC's willingness to consider the new rules. "Investors have been clamoring for this information from the SEC for some time," said Robert Jackson, a Columbia University law prof who cosponsored the SEC petition, during a conference call organized by the coalition this morning.

Some corporations already voluntarily disclose all of their political spending; others argue that mandatory disclosure would be too burdensome. Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.), a member of a newly formed House task force on election reform that's taking aim at Citizens United and one of 42 members of the House to publicly support the SEC proposal, has rejected that argument, calling for the agency to "mandate uniform disclosure of a minimum dataset" of political spending.

Corporate response to shareholders' demands for political spending disclosure, based on figures from the Center for Political Accountability.

While proponents of the proposal expect strong opposition from corporate America, they are hopeful that the SEC, influenced by what Pennsylvania state treasurer Rob McCord called a "moderate, centrist, good-government impulse," will implement the new rule this year. One of the SEC's four commissioners, Luis Aguilar, is already an outspoken proponent of uniform disclosure requirements. Without them, he's said, "it is impossible to have any corporate accountability or oversight."

And for all the controversy surrounding Citizens United, the Supreme Court overwhelmingly upheld the constitutionality of disclosure requirements as part of its ruling. (Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.) The CU decision explicitly acknowledged the importance of shareholders' "corporate democracy" in "determin[ing] whether their corporation’s political speech advances the corporation’s interest in making profits."

Rep. Sarbanes has called the SEC's willingness to consider the rule-change proposal "an incredibly important development." On this morning's conference call, he referred to outside spending groups as "money drones": "You're walking down the street running your campaign, next thing you know they come at you with a lot of money, and the people operating those drones are hidden because we don't have proper disclosure."