The Theater of Congress

Democrats decided to end their day-long sit-in protest on the House floor over gun control Thursday.

Rep. John Lewis, who launched the sit-in Wednesday morning that eventually drew 170 lawmakers, lit up social media, and infuriated House Republicans -- but spurred no legislative action -- said the fight was not over.

"We must come back here on July 5th [when Congress returns to session] more determined than ever before," Lewis said.

  CNN

John Lewis - celebrated civil rights activist who "never saw" Bernie Sanders at any civil rights movement in the 60s - thinks a sit-in is the right way to go about addressing the crisis of gun nuts in the US. No, he doesn't really. He just knows good theater when he sees it.

"We are going to win," he told supporters on the Capitol steps after the sit-in was halted. "The fight is not over. This is just one step of when we come back here on July the 5th we're going to continue to push, to pull, to stand up, and if necessary, to sit down. So don't give up, don't give in. Keep the faith, and keep your eyes on the prize."

He should be ashamed to disgrace and co-opt the struggle of his fellow blacks in the south (including  himself!) for civil rights with a ridiculous bunch of hooey that actually would decrease civil rights for Arab-Americans. Another of Glen Ford's  (and his colleagues at Black Agenda Radio) "black misleadership".

The move is fantastic political theater. It’s also a tremendous waste of popular support and activist energy in support of a measure that isn’t just ineffective but also actively offensive.

The Democratic proposal has been catch-phrased and hashtagged as “no fly, no buy,” because it would prevent people who end up on government terrorism watchlists, including the “no fly list,” from purchasing firearms. This would do little to reduce gun violence, but it would add an additional layer of surveillance and government scrutiny to a particular class of people.

[...]

The vast majority of gun deaths—suicides as well as homicides—are caused by handguns, and the majority of people firing those guns are not suspected terrorists (which invariably refers, in contemporary discourse, to Muslims, and no other groups or individuals dedicated to political violence).

The no-fly list is a civil rights disaster by every conceivable standard. It is secret, it disproportionately affects Arab-Americans, it is error-prone, there is no due process or effective recourse for people placed on the list, and it constantly and relentlessly expands. As of 2014, the government had a master watchlist of 680,000 people, forty percent of whom had “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.” This is both an absurdly large number of people to arbitrarily target in gun control legislation, and far, far too few to have any meaningful effect on actual gun ownership, let alone gun violence.

[...]

But if it is, as it appears to be, more of an effort to highlight the unpopular extremism of Republicans on gun issues, it is a stupid and counterproductive hill to theatrically die on. Almost any popular and previously debated gun control measure would have made a better symbolic lost cause. Democrats could be staging a sit-in in support of [...] waiting periods, nationally standard gun licensing and training requirements, and tougher restrictions on where and how guns are sold. All of those, or even any one of those, would have been more defensible both politically and morally. Instead House Democrats are going to the mat for a shitty, racist, useless bill.

  Gawker

You can read commentary by Black Agenda Radio's managing editor Bruce Dixon on the "sit in" here.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.