AP Photo/John Locher
In the aftermath of the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, it shouldn't surprise us that Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, responded with a lie. Or two, depending how you measure.
After all, Trump's entire campaign is built on lies, whether about the number of undocumented immigrants (11 million, not 34 million, as Trump claims), his Democratic opponent's position on the Second Amendment or the reaction of Jersey City Muslims to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In fact, it could be said that Trump's 2016 campaign began with his Big Lie in 2011, when he threw in with the birthers who claim, against copious evidence to the contrary, that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
As Latinas, Latinos, and LGBT people took on the rituals of mourning the victims of the recent attack in Florida that left 49 dead and 52 wounded at the hands of a lone gunman who claimed allegiance to a handful of Islamist groups that are at odds with each other, Trump asserted that the current president of the United States is "prioritizing our enemies" over Americans, suggesting that Obama is soft on the terrorists of ISIS, and implying that he had a nefarious agenda in doing so. Then Trump doubled down on his claim that gun-free zones attract those who would commit mass shootings.
"It's too bad some of the young people that were killed over the weekend didn't have guns, you know, attached to their hips, frankly," Trump said to radio host Howie Carr the day after the mass shooting.
While Trump's lies are always purposeful, many are not made up by him. Instead, they emanate from an industry of lie-making devastatingly described in Lies, Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics (Anchor), the recently published and meticulously researched book by Ari Rabin-Havt that details the false narratives advanced by various corporate and/or political operatives on such hot topics as climate change, voter fraud, immigration, and gun rights. Take, for instance, Trump's bit about the gun-free zones as murder magnets. It comes from the discredited "research"-if you can even call it that-of one John Lott, the gun lobby's favorite academic and author of the 1998 book, More Guns, Less Crime. While Lott initially claimed the research on which he based his hypothesis came from multiple sources, he later attributed it to his own study. But when pressed to produce the relevant data, he said he had lost it in a hard-drive crash. Writes Rabin-Havt:
Lott's fundamental data was called into question, but that did not stop those with a predisposition to oppose gun regulations from citing it as fact. And why shouldn't they? It confirmed their worldview. Even among those who have no idea who John Lott is, his theories remain fundamental to their advocacy against gun control.
Indeed, the author notes, in the days immediately following the mass shooting of children and educators at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the leaders of the National Rifle Association fell silent, leaving Lott to fill the void on the airwaves with his bogus theory.
Although Lott has no formal affiliation with the NRA, he has benefited greatly from serving its cause: He's a best-selling author beloved by members of the organization.
When NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre emerged from his office-park bunker at a Washington, D.C., press conference a week after parents of Sandy Hook students had retrieved the bodies of their children from the coroner, he picked up Lott's thread, blaming the massacre on the politicians who created the gun-free school zone, saying:
Politicians pass laws for gun-free school zones. They issue press releases bragging about them. They post signs advertising them. And in so doing, they tell every insane killer in America that schools are their safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk. … The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
It's an assertion based on nothing but the ostensible research of a guy who essentially said the dog ate his homework. But LaPierre's assertion of Lott's debunked argument was enough for members of Congress to get the message. There would be no gun restrictions passed, despite public support for the limiting of high-capacity magazines, and for background checks on purchasers of assault rifles such as the AR-15-style weapon that Adam Lanza used to slay third-graders.
Rabin-Havt writes:
Like many effective arguments from Lies, Incorporated, the principle use of John Lott's research is the maintenance of a status quo. If one side claims a reduction in access to firearms improves public safety and a second claims more weapons makes us safer, this deadlock still produces the desired outcome.
This week, just days after the Orlando massacre, the U.S. Senate failed to pass legislation that would have mandated background checks on those purchasing guns either online or at firearms shows. Measures that would have denied or delayed gun purchases to buyers whose names appear on either federal terrorism watch lists or on the government's "no-fly" list also went down to defeat. This after Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut staged a dramatic 15-hour filibuster. "I'm mortified by today's vote but I'm not surprised by it," Murphy told reporters after his measures failed. "The NRA has a vice-like grip on this place."
For all the debunking of his claims, all the shaming he's suffered in such peer-reviewed journals as the Stanford Law Review, Lott sticks to his guns, so to speak. His answer to the Orlando tragedy? Why, more guns, of course! But this time, Lott's schtick exposed a rare rift in the lie-making/lie-consuming continuum.
In a post on his own website, Lott said that Florida's law banning weapons from establishments where 50 percent of revenue comes from sales of alcoholic beverages rendered bars "gun-free zones," and therefore more prone to just such a massacre than they'd be if every patron were packin'. So he wrote, the day after the carnage at Pulse:
There is no evidence of problems despite people being able to carry in states that allow people to carry in bars. Despite the many millions of permit holders in these states, no examples are offered of drunk patrons with permits causing trouble.
He failed to note, of course, that there is no evidence that banning weapons in bars creates massacres. But his post was apparently enough for Donald Trump, who apparently thinks he knows a good lie when he sees one, to jump on Lott's bandwagon. This time, though, Lott was playing solo, and Trump evidently failed to check in with his NRA endorsers before hopping on, novice as he is to the order of things on the right's organizational chart.
After Orlando, the NRA bosses seemed to be feeling a bit more vulnerable than they did in the week following the Sandy Hook shooting.
A bar full of armed drinkers would be a harder sell than a bid to keep one's children safe by arming school personnel. After Trump attempted to burnish his Second Amendment badge by advocating turning the nation's drinking establishments into Wild West saloons, NRA Executive Director Chris Cox told ABC News, "No one thinks that people should go into a nightclub drinking and carrying firearms-that defies common sense. It also defies the law."
But if you're Donald Trump, working from the Trumpian logic that has presumably won you the presidential nomination of the Republican Party (we may yet learn just how much Cleveland rocks), throwing in with Lott made pretty good sense. After all, you're thinking, he's the NRA's theory guy, and the NRA, a big-league GOP-allied organization, just endorsed you. Not to mention that Lott was your enemy, questioning your conservative cred on the op-ed page of the New York Daily News, your hometown paper, until you started picking up his line about more guns adding up to a safer planet. And, crap, now you have to walk it back because the NRA's favorite academic said something that turns out to have been over the top for the N-R-freakin'-A.
Sometimes it's hard to keep all the lies straight. But if you've got nothing else in your hand, you've just got to play them.
Congratulations are in order to Lies, Incorporated. The enterprise at last has the candidate it so richly deserves.
