The horror in Maryland, Washington and Virginia over the last three weeks makes every frame of “Bowling,” Moore’s blistering exploration of America’s obsession with guns, resonate with relevance, frustration and rage.

If you’ve ever found yourself watching the news and wondering what kind of insane country makes it so easy for a madman to arm himself with weaponry that allows him to blithely mow down his human prey from up to 500 yards away, take a look at this film. Featuring Moore’s trademark blend of provocative social satire and deadpan humor, it’s filled with memorable moments that, in their own absurd way, make a dent in the formidable task of answering that question.

These moments include: a stop at a Michigan bank that gives away high-powered rifles to customers opening a new account (“Don’t you think it’s a little dangerous handing out guns in a bank?” Moore reasonably asks a bank employee); a barbershop that sells ammo; and an ambush interview with National Rifle Association president Charlton Heston.

Indeed, the most trenchant — and timely — aspect of the film is its look at the NRA’s in-your-face tactics, brought chillingly to life with footage from a pro-gun rally the group defiantly decided to hold in Colorado just 10 days after the Columbine shootings. Standing in front of a cheering crowd, Heston raises a vintage rifle over his head and bellows: “From my cold dead hands!”

The NRA’s mind-set is particularly pertinent today as we watch the organization — and its gun-loving pals in the White House — use every weapon in its arsenal to try to derail the sniper-inspired push to create a national database of ballistic “fingerprints.”

Despite powerful evidence that such a system would be a boon to law enforcement, the NRA has adopted a scattershot, drive-by-shooting approach to mowing down the idea. The technology isn’t foolproof, the organization’s mouthpieces argue. Ballistic fingerprints can be tampered with. Guns get stolen. What about the 200 million guns already in circulation? And the always popular: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer parroted this bumper sticker cop-out when he helpfully explained why the president didn’t support a federal ballistic fingerprinting database: “In the case of the sniper,” he said, “the real issue is values.” Yeah, like the value of being able to pick off unsuspecting victims at long range with a military-style weapon vs. the value of sending your kids to school without having to worry about whether they’ll come home.

The debate over a bullet-tracing system has quickly turned into what the NRA wants: a case of dueling studies. But making the case against a bullet database is getting harder and harder. Even opponents of the system concede that it is effective in matching up bullets to the guns that fired them at least some of the time.

If such a system were only able to save one innocent person from being blown away by a crazed killer, wouldn’t that be worth it? Why not give the idea a fighting chance by committing whatever resources are necessary to improve the promising technology? Does the NRA’s paranoid brain trust really believe that millions of innocent sportsmen will have their hunting rifles confiscated if they make this tiny, public-spirited concession?

No matter, Team Bush would rather consign the program, which has the support of many elected and law enforcement officials — including the governor of Maryland (one of two states that have gone ahead and established statewide bullet-tracing databases on their own) and the former head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms’ crime gun analysis division — to the political graveyard of “further study.” Maybe by delaying it, the president can give his NRA chums time to find the increasingly rare “expert” willing to risk his reputation by claiming there’s still a reason not to start this program.

It’s funny how the president turns into a raging Luddite when the technology in question runs counter to his — and his financial benefactors’ — political aims. I’ll be sure to remind him of that the next time he asks for another $7 billion to fund his pie-in-the-sky missile defense shield. “Mixed results” don’t seem to have given him many qualms there.

The nexus linking art and a breaking news story can be a very volatile thing. In the wake of the D.C. attacks, Fox wisely decided to pull “Phone Booth,” a sniper-themed thriller, off the fall release schedule. But those same attacks have made “Bowling for Columbine” essential viewing for anyone who thinks schoolchildren should be able to play outside at recess without fear of being gunned down. I understand the White House has a very comfortable screening room.

At first glance, such reductionism seems logical, rational, even boringly uncontroversial. But two recent news items highlight how in a globalized economy, there are troubling consequences that come from the particular kind of export economy we’re building.

The first bit of news came from the Washington Post, which this week reported that “the Obama administration is crafting a proposal that could make it easier to export firearms and other weapons.” Though the Homeland Security and Justice Departments say the new rules could make it easier for terrorist and drug cartels to further arm themselves, the White House is nonetheless citing the “stuff” theory of exports to ignore the objections.

This is part of a larger pattern since President Obama took office. During Obama’s first year in the White House, he began to gut the Pentagon’s approval process for arms exports, weakening controls on what could and could not be sold. Later, diplomatic cables uncovered by WikiLeaks showed, as Fortune magazine put it, “American officials act(ing) as de facto pitchmen for U.S.-made weapons.”

The result is that America has become the true “Lord of War,” as the arms dealer motto goes. We are the leading arms supplier to the developing world and we are responsible for the majority of all weapons sales across the globe. Yes, we are so committed to selling instruments of death to the rest of the planet that military industries have almost tripled their share of the U.S. economy in just a decade.

The second bit of news came from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, whose new study shows that America is exporting our obesity crisis to Mexico. Coupling health statistics with U.S. export data since the North American Free Trade Agreement tore down Mexico’s agriculture trade barriers, researchers found that the Mexican market was flooded by American agribusinesses’ taxpayer subsidized commodities (corn, soybeans) and their processed derivatives. According to the report, that quickly wiped out Mexico’s local food economy, leaving its food system exactly “like the industrialized food system of the United States — characterized by the overabundance of obesogenic foods.” Not surprisingly, Mexican obesity rates have consequently skyrocketed.

Taken together, these export booms represent what could be called America’s new Guns and Butter economy. We are so desperate to export any “stuff” we can, we are now fattening up the world and arming it for permanent bloodshed.

Seeking to short-circuit any objections to this trend, President Obama has said simply that “we’re at a moment where necessity has tempered the old debates” over exports and economic policy. In terms of history, he’s not wrong — during the previous century, America witnessed fevered fights over what constitutes a moral farm policy, and in the 1930s the U.S. Senate’s Nye Committee held almost 100 hearings into “greedy munitions interests” that were unduly influencing public policy. Sadly, Obama is correct – those debates have been silenced.

But should they be? Should we simply say that any exports — no matter their moral, ethical, environmental or health implications — are inherently good? Does “necessity” really mean that “stuff” for stuff’s sake must be the basis of our export economy?

Washington and profit-at-all-cost industries certainly say yes — but that doesn’t mean it’s the right answer.

ALEC is now shutting down its “Public Safety and Elections” task force. ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections task force’s goals were twofold: to improve “public safety” by making it easier for citizens to carry guns everywhere they go and to shoot certain people without fear of arrest or prosecution, and to improve elections by making it harder for politically undesirable types to exercise their right to vote. (Why were gun rights and voter disenfranchisement the purview of one task force? Those two issues really have very little in common besides being of supreme importance to paranoid white people.)

What happened is, people suddenly noticed that self-defense laws had recently become much more “robust” (slash-”insane”) in lots of states after this guy in Florida named George Zimmerman shot and killed an unarmed black teenager named Trayvon Martin and then somehow was not arrested. These new self-defense laws were widely blamed for the police reaction, or non-reaction, and while the NRA had predictably lobbied for them in the various states where they passed, it turned out that ALEC had been instrumental in drafting these laws and others like them that had nothing to do with being “pro-business” but everything to do with quietly remaking the nation into a right-wing paradise.

So major corporations began abandoning ALEC, because they hadn’t signed on for the full right-wing culture war. While Coca-Cola has a vested interest in, say, stopping public health initiatives, there’s no compelling profit-based reason for it to support the dismantling of gun control legislation. People do not get thirstier when they are carrying concealed firearms, as far as I know. Kraft does not, as a company, have any interest in making it more difficult for poor people to vote.

So! ALEC is giving up on the items of its agenda not directly related to helping giant corporations make as much money as possible without fear of lawsuits or union agitation. Because those are less “hot-button” issues.

That’s a slam-dunk argument, right there. And she’s not even done!

Klein suggested that if Cain is innocent he should sue White for libel and went on to attack the media for digging up the allegations. She also said that in politics, “we want a virgin to do a hooker’s job.”

Yes! Herman Cain is a hooker. But a hooker with a heart of gold, and the constitution to resist harassing or assaulting Lori Klein, a noted attractive woman!

Klein is, of course, an expert in what constitutes appropriate, professional behavior among adults, as she proved when she took a loaded gun out of her purse and pointed it at a newspaper reporter who was attempting to interview her in a state Senate lounge.

Lori Klein is a rising star in the GOP. Remember her name. Or she’ll shoot you, for being a Mexican.

[Via Ben Smith]

The NRA has homed in on Operation Fast and Furious in order to advance its agenda of undermining not just Holder but the president. The misguided operation, run by ATF officials reporting to the Justice Department, encouraged Arizona gun dealers to sell weapons to “straw purchasers,” with the hopes of tracing the weapons to the Mexican cartels. ATF lost track of many of the guns, and some surfaced at crime scenes on both sides of the Mexican border, including one involving the murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry last year in Arizona.

Bent on getting this latest ad circulated, the NRA is soliciting funds to air it, and has posted this on the website:

“Watch the video and see how Eric Holder’s lies are destroying freedom and costing lives. Please make a donation to help NRA-ILA air this video across America. And please, forward this video to family and friends!”

The group’s  outrage over guns getting into the hands of the bad guys under Fast and Furious would be slightly more plausible if the NRA ever expressed any concern about U.S. gun laws that effectively armed the Mexican drug cartels with heavy weaponry.

The NRA’s critics note that the powerful gun lobby, based in northern Virginia, has essentially accomplished the same evil as Fast and Furious by lobbying hard — and taking legal action if necessary — to water down tough U.S. gun laws and regulations. The NRA is particularly determined to undermine its nemesis, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which enforces gun laws.

The NRA has adamantly fought ATF regulations that require gun dealers in four Southwest border states to report sales of two or more assault weapons to one person within five days. The NRA also helped derail the confirmation of  Obama nominee Andrew Traver for director of ATF, which has been in dire need of stability. The NRA opposes strict handgun control laws in such cities as Washington that have high rates of gun violence.

“I think the NRA has to have something to scare their members about and attacking Obama and more specifically Holder is part of that plan,”said Kristen Rand, legislative director for the Violence Policy Center in Washington.

Rand says the NRA has conveniently homed in on the guns in Operation Fast and Furious, while ignoring “the hundreds of thousands of other guns that have flooded Mexico and killed tens of thousand of Mexicans.”  And she noted that the  NRA has been mum about news in recent days that  a similar ATF gun-walking operation — Operation Wide Receiver — was pursued under the Bush administration and Attorney General Mike Mukasey.

“They’re not upset about that,” she said.  “They’re directly threatened by another Holder-Obama administration,” and using it to help fundraise.

Few contest the downside of Operation Fast and Furious.

“This operation was flawed in concept, as well as in execution,” Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. “And, unfortunately, we will feel its effects for years to come as guns that were lost during this operation continue to show up at crime scenes both here and in Mexico. This should never have happened. And it must never happen again. ”

“The American public needs to know the whole truth on this,” said NRA president Wayne LaPierre  in a video last June. “The fact is, that brings us to the consequences, these guns are now, as a result of what they did, in the hands of evil people and evil people are committing murders and crimes with these guns against innocent citizens.”

The whole truth is that lax U.S. gun laws — supported by the NRA — are what have helped the Mexican drug cartels to arm themselves and slaughter law enforcement officers, rivals and innocent people.

“The NRA has been devoted to assure that our gun laws remain anemic, ” said Dennis Henigan, acting president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.  ”The NRA is not really interested in stopping the gun trafficking.”

“In large buildings with multiple rooms and lots of people, you need to have some feeling among the staff, as well as the public, that it’s a secure place, particularly where it’s used a lot by children,” said library-district director Harry Courtright, who retired Friday.
[...]
In his 12 years with the district, Courtright said there have been no incidents of a guard drawing a gun.

“And they shouldn’t have to, because they have the training. But that gun makes a difference to the people who are coming in the building who might want to do something that could be bad; they see an armed guard, and the reality is they back off and they don’t do things – it’s a preventative thing,” he said.

Right! Which is why all large libraries in big cities have armed private guards in them. Right, Phoenix libraries?

Interviews with officials at city-run libraries in the Valley that don’t belong to the county district indicate that armed guards are uncommon.

In Mesa, library-security guards are unarmed. The topic of arming them has never come up, said city spokeswoman Lily King-Cisneros.

“If there is a problem, they call the police,” she said.

Chandler’s libraries have a simple behavior policy to follow up on negative behavior, Manager Brenda Brown said.

Chandler employs security guards sparingly: Park rangers help during high-traffic times at the Downtown Library, while at Hamilton and Basha branches, both located on school campuses, security guards are present for a few hours following schools’ closing times. None is armed.

“Most of our behavior issues take place downtown, and police are less than a block away. We call them quite often and quite frequently,” Brown said, adding that stolen bikes are a common problem but threats to librarians are rare.

Phoenix, which has 16 libraries, trains its own guards, who are city employees and unarmed.

Incidents are rare even at the Burton Barr Central Library, where the surrounding neighborhood has a high number of homeless people, said Lupita Barron-Rios, acting deputy director for public services.

“For the most part, we don’t have a lot of incidents that require calling the police,” Barron-Rios said.

Barron-Rios said police are called when a patron’s car or bicycle is stolen.

Of course, none of these minor behavioral issues and occasional thefts would happen at all if literally every person in that library, from the children to the librarians to the homeless people, was carrying a clearly displayed handgun. It’s just a fact.

Is this armed guard program controversial? It wasn’t, until one library made a fuss.

Doesn’t Southwest Regional Library in Gilbert, Ariz., look like a lovely place? Looks can be deceiving! This library is suffering from a rash of “hostile encounters with irate patrons over late fees and other issues,” which is why the town decided to reinstate the guards they let go for funding reasons last year. But! “Town officials contend that the library district never told them of the plans to arm the guards once funding was restored …” I feel like town officials should’ve understood that they’re dealing with Maricopa County, here. There were going to be guns involved, no matter what.

[Via Michel Marizco]