When: September 12, 2017
Where: Subcommittee on Federal Lands
Title: “Legislative Hearing on the SHARE Act”
What Happened: Republicans held a hearing on a bill called the SHARE Act that would deregulate gun silencers and make it harder to regulate armor-piercing bullets — remember that this is the House Natural Resources Committee — in the name of “helping hunters.” The vote on the bill was already scheduled to happen the next morning, just so everyone knew the majority was being thoughtful about it.
The bill was originally scheduled for a hearing on the morning of June 14, 2017. It was postponed because a man with a rifle attacked the Republican team practicing for the congressional softball game that morning at a public park in northern Virginia. The attack led to a 10-minute shootout and sent Rep. Steve Scalise to the hospital for surgery, among other victims.
Republicans weren’t deterred for long, possibly because — as Dana Milbank at the Washington Post pointed out at the time — the National Rifle Association was obsessed with moving the bill forward:
But the National Rifle Association was not to be denied. In a statement last week, the gun lobby’s director applauded the revival of the bill, which, he said, “will protect America’s hunters and recreational shooters and help preserve our outdoor heritage.” Among the GOP witnesses for Tuesday’s “recreational shooter” hearing: Stephen Halbrook, author of a book that draws parallels between the current gun-control debate and Nazis’ disarmament of Jews.
The bill, notably, has not been embraced by the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus, and it is likely to draw a lot of opposition from Democrats. Clearly, both groups are dominated by elites who do not understand the joy of pheasant hunting with tungsten-tipped bullets.
If you did a double take at the Nazi comparison, you weren’t alone. The Anti-Defamation League strongly criticized Republicans for inviting Halbrook, who is best known for his widely debunked “scholarship” on the Third Reich:
Halbrook’s book argued that a key element in the Nazis’ repressive policies was the disarming of Nazi enemies, a theory embraced last year by the then-presidential candidate and now-Housing Secretary Ben Carson. Halbrook emphasizes in his book that gun control was not a factor leading to the Holocaust. Instead, he says, it facilitated it.
Historians of Nazi Germany have widely discredited the theory, saying that whatever restrictions on gun purchases the Nazis placed on Jews must be seen as part of the array of repressive measures Nazis imposed on Jews and not as Nazis favoring gun controls per se. In fact, the Nazis in 1938 loosened controls on gun ownership for non-Jewish Germans.
Others have questioned how Jews in Germany, who made up only 1 percent of the population, could have staged an effective rebellion against the Nazis’ military regime.
Given the circus-like atmosphere Republicans created, it’s no surprise that the bill attracted a lot of attention. Even Bustle, an online news site dedicated mostly to lifestyle news for millennial women, ran a fairly in-depth story explaining the bill and why the hearing was held despite the ballpark shooting. As Kara McGrath reported for the site on Oct. 2, 2017 (a few weeks after the hearing and a few days after the Las Vegas mass shooting that left 59 people dead):
The National Rifle Association supports the SHARE Act, saying “suppressors are ‘harmless and very rarely used in crime,’” FOX News reported. The NRA also asserts that the “the joint bill would end the ‘cumbersome and lengthy application process.’” As of noon on Monday, the NRA had not responded to the shooting in Las Vegas.
Critics of the bill specifically point to a mass shooting in February 2013, when former Los Angeles police officer Christopher Dorner killed four people using a silencer. Experts argue that law enforcement may have been alerted sooner, if neighbors of the victims had been able to hear the gunshots coming from Dorner.
The Sept. 12 hearing itself did not go well for Republicans. The Democratic witness, former ATF agent David Chipman, told the Committee that the bill “threatens our public safety and security.” Even Stephen Halbrook, the Republican witness who has argued in favor of gun deregulation as a lawyer for much of his career, observed that many experts say hunters will need hearing protection even with a silencer — which calls into question whether silencer deregulation has anything to do with hunters. (It doesn’t — it has more to do with propping up flagging gun sales numbers.)
If you want to follow the blow-by-blow, you can watch testimony highlights here.
Considering how many bad ideas Republicans have had to defend this Congress, it’s remarkable just how bad a time they’ve had explaining the SHARE Act. When Politico tried to interview Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), author of the silencer deregulation language in the bill, Duncan didn’t respond. After weeks of the public demanding an explanation for why this bill existed, Republicans more or less just dropped it.
In addition to deregulating silencers, the bill weakened background check rules, concealed carry rules and several other standards that — again — have nothing to do with hunters’ legitimate interest in access to public lands, which is what this Committee’s jurisdiction is supposed to cover.
None of this extraneous language made sense or helped the bill’s chances of becoming law. As many outlets have pointed out, our background check system is already weak and full of loopholes, which has led to avoidable deaths and public shootings that the SHARE Act would do nothing to prevent. TIME Magazine reported earlier this year:
In 2016, 4,170 guns were sold to people with criminal records, mental illnesses and other circumstances which should have prevented them from being able to buy a firearm. The reason? The FBI failed to complete background checks before a three-day deadline, so these people were automatically cleared to purchase a gun.
Gun control advocates have termed this the “Charleston loophole,” because it allowed Dylann Roof to buy the gun he’s accused of using to kill nine churchgoers in Charleston, S.C. in 2015. The more than 4,000 guns sold this way in 2016 marked a 44 percent increase from 2015, and is the highest number since 2001, according to the latest FBI data.
Though debates on gun control have resurfaced in Congress following the massacre at a Parkland, Fla. high school that left 17 people dead, including 14 children, there has been little public discussion about extending the three-day deadline for background checks.
The remarkable thing about this whole episode is that there was a straightforward, bipartisan version of the SHARE Act that could have become law a year ago. It would have met the needs of sportsmen, increased public lands access and generally been the more sensible approach. That version of the bill, introduced by Ranking Member Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.), stripped out the unnecessary gun language and kept the popular measures.
So what happened to that version? Republicans angrily rejected it. McClatchy told the whole sad story:
The SHARE Act, sponsored by Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., was on track to be passed by the full House months ago. GOP leaders had difficulty finding a way to forge ahead, fearing an uproar.
Grijalva and Thompson introduced a new version of the SHARE Act scrubbed of gun-related provisions to show Republicans that Democrats were prepared to work in good faith to pass a pared-down bill.
Allen Klump, a spokesman for Duncan, was dismissive.
“This bill is nothing more than a desperate publicity stunt attempting to halt the momentum of the only comprehensive sportsmen’s package in the House,” Klump said in a statement. “You can’t say you’re standing up for hunters and recreational sport shooters when you want to restrict the Second Amendment.”
The results of their insistence on pleasing the National Rifle Association at sportsmen’s expense speak for themselves. After much ado, the SHARE Act has gone nowhere, leaving sportsmen’s entirely legitimate legislative requests in limbo. To Republicans’ credit, while they’ve never explained what they were thinking with the bill, they have at least stopped talking about it.
As usual, there was plenty of actual environmental news that week that Republicans decided to ignore.
On Sept. 11, alarming new research was published showing that much of the U.S. East Coast is — this is a direct quote — “slowly sinking into the sea,” and faces significantly increased risk of flooding for the foreseeable future. We’ll let the article speak for itself:
Cities such as Miami on the East Coast of the USA are being affected by flooding more and more frequently. The causes are often not hurricanes with devastating rainfall such as Katrina, or the recent hurricanes Harvey or Irma. On the contrary: flooding even occurs on sunny, relatively calm days.
This Committee oversees the Army Corps of Engineers. What might that agency do to protect our lives and property given this news? What role is climate change playing in this trend, and how might we combat it over time? Republicans weren’t interested in finding out.
On Sept. 13, the world’s first research was published on the public health impacts of the chemicals used to clean up the catastrophic, immensely expensive Deepwater Horizon oil spill. As the researchers found, “Workers who were likely exposed to dispersants while cleaning up the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill experienced a range of health symptoms including cough and wheeze, and skin and eye irritation[.]” Republicans have rejected any serious oversight of the Deepwater Horizon spill or its long-term consequences.
On Sept. 14, news came that older fish are increasingly hard to find because of global overfishing. Older fish are more likely to reproduce, and play a crucial role in their ecosystems because of their size and appetite, but a team of researchers found “a significant decline” in the populations of older fish among many species due to overfishing. What impacts will this have on U.S. fisheries, which are squarely in our jurisdiction? Do these findings have Endangered Species Act implications? Thanks to Republicans’ lack of curiosity, we never found out.
On Sept. 6, Ranking Member Grijalva and Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-Calif.) wrote to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke asking him why he stacked the Interior Department’s Royalty Policy Committee — which is supposed to maximize returns to taxpayers for the extraction of public resources — with industry-friendly political figures rather than impartial experts. No states with Democratic governors were given primary representation on the newly reformed panel, and no public interest groups were represented. The RPC was formed through the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which mandates public transparency in the panel’s conduct — a mandate Zinke seems to have ignored.
The day before the hearing, Ranking Member Grijalva warned Republicans that passing a bill to make the National Rifle Association happy would not end well: “If this package becomes law, we’ll have no animals left to hunt and nowhere left to do it, and law enforcement will face bigger guns on the streets that shoot more deadly rounds and make less noise. My Republican colleagues don’t seem to care about hunters, anglers or for that matter public safety — they care about keeping the NRA happy.”
The day after the hearing, as Republicans got ready to pass the bill out of Committee, Democrats went public en masse with their criticisms of what was, in the end, a public relations exercise (and a bad one) for the NRA.
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