Isn't that nice. So if a husband brings the wife he just beat up into the ER, and she whispers to a nurse that she's afraid to go home, he's got a gun that he threatens to use on her and the kids, the healthcare provider is not allowed to put that information in her file, or to tell a law enforcement officer? You have to appreciate just how extreme these gun-worshippers really are:

This month’s deadly rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School has sparked a national conversation about improving gun control laws and the woeful state of America’s mental health care system. Fortunately, Obamacare will address the latter by increasing access to mental health services through its Medicaid expansion and state-wide health exchanges — but Kaiser Health News reports that a little known NRA-backed provision in the health law may undermine the former.

Inserted into the Affordable Care Act at the request of pro-gun, NRA-backed Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), the Obamacare subsection titled “Protection of Second Amendment Gun Rights” makes it illegal for wellness and better-living programs to require “the disclosure or collection of any information relating to… the presence or storage of a lawfully-possessed firearm or ammunition in the residence or on the property of an individual; or… the lawful use, possession, or storage of a firearm or ammunition by an individual.” The provision also prohibits insurers from using a patient’s gun possession status in order to determine premium rates.

Supporters might argue that gun ownership is a personal choice, and that patients should have a right to privacy from providers and insurers on such a matter. But critics say the provision stifles meaningful dialogue between providers and patients on an issue that undeniably has implications for public health and medical costs.

As University of Pennsylvania social policy professor Susan Sorenson puts it, “A lot of people buy guns every year, and it’s a health concern… To regulate what the provider can or can’t do really intrudes into the role of the health care provider, which is to ensure the health of the individual and the people who are living in that home.”

And Obamacare doesn’t extend this privacy to other costly lifestyle choices. Last month, the Obama administration issued a rule allowing insurers to consider patients’ smoking histories when setting their premium rates.

Gun violence costs Americans $5.6 billion in annual medical bills, but the totals are actually closer to $100 billion per year — the same number that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that smoking costs Americans each year in medical costs — when accounting for lost productivity.

Wayne LaPierre and the NRA are cowards in the face of the death of little children, shot down in kindergarten class. They took down their Facebook page and they're nowhere to be found in the media? Why? Because they can't defend the indefensible. I'm not sure why it's different this time, but I'm convinced this is the time we take on the NRA - and win:

Magazines that fed bullets into the primary firearm used to kill 26 children and adults at a Connecticut school would have been banned under state legislation that the National Rifle Association and gunmakers successfully fought.

The shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Adam Lanza, 20, used a Bushmaster AR-15 rifle with magazines containing 30 rounds as his main weapon, said Connecticut State Police Lieutenant Paul Vance at a news conference today.

A proposal in March 2011 would have made it a felony to possess magazines with more than 10 bullets and required owners to surrender them to law enforcement or remove them from the state. Opponents sent more than 30,000 e-mails and letters to state lawmakers as part of a campaign organized by the NRA and other gun advocates, said Robert Crook, head of the Hartford- based Coalition of Connecticut Sportsmen, which opposed the legislation.

“The legislators got swamped by NRA emails,” said Betty Gallo, who lobbied on behalf of the legislation for Southport- based Connecticut Against Gun Violence. “They were scared of the NRA and the political backlash.”

Proponents abandoned the legislation, which drew opposition from gunmakers including Sturm, Ruger & Co. (RGR) In addition to the e-mails and letters, more than 300 pro-gun activists, including many NRA members, attended a committee hearing to oppose it, said Gallo, a Hartford-based lobbyist for more than 35 years.

[...] Both sides in the debate disputed the role of high-capacity magazines in the Dec. 14 school shooting.
Crook said state legislation “wouldn’t have made a difference.”

“We already have a lot of good gun laws on the books,” Crook said. “You can’t control people who have never done anything wrong before and then just go off the deep end.”

U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, said in an interview that high-capacity magazines “made the crime all the more deadly” and called for limits.

The media office of the NRA didn’t respond to e-mails seeking comment about the shooting or the law, or return phone messages left with an answering service.

[h/t BuzzFeed]

Dawwww, Paul Ryan's little fee-fees got hurt when a local interviewer challenged his assertion that we have plenty of gun laws and not enough enforcement. The reporter followed up with what I consider to be a reasonable question, asking Ryan if he thought tax cuts would bring about that enforcement.

At that point, the interview is over. Ryan's campaign handler tries to block the camera, while Ryan scolds the reporter, telling him he thought the question was "weird."

Actually, no. It's not weird at all. With state, county and city budgets under strain mostly because federal funding for law enforcement has been cut while Ryan has been the chairman of the House Budget Committee, it's a perfectly reasonable question, because it exposes the cynicism of Ryan's Randian outlook on government. Evidently Ryan's handler feels differently. He told BuzzFeed this:

“The reporter knew he was already well over the allotted time for the interview when he decided to ask a weird question relating gun violence to tax cuts. Ryan responded as anyone would in such a strange situation. When you do nearly 200 interviews in a couple months, eventually you’re going to see a local reporter embarrass himself.”

The only one embarrassed in that interview was Ryan. That reporter wouldn't let Ryan have it both ways. Rather than actually being a man and dealing with an honest answer to the question, Ryan walked away, refusing to answer that question or any follow-up questions.

I can't wait for Biden to chew him up. As much as people like to make fun of his gaffes, Joe Biden can be formidable in debate, and I expect he will manage to get under Paul Ryan's skin and throw him off his game.

In 2005, when Florida was considering its insane stand-your-ground-or-perhaps-chase-down-an-innocent-black-teenager-and-shoot-him law, state senator Dan Gelber was a voice of reason. Gelber, when asked what he thought of legislation that would transmogrify many a heat-packing Floridian into a juiced-up Judge Dredd, posed some questions of his own.

When you think someone "looks at your wife" the wrong way or "spills coffee on you," should the message be "to walk away or do we tell them that you're supposed to stand your ground and fight to the death?" According to NRA troll/super-lobbyist Marion Hammer, the supposedly smart Bush who was governor at the time (Jeb) and state senator Dennis Baxley—a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans who likes racial slurs in state songs and wants to remember The great Lost Cause on license plates—the answer was of course, shoot. To kill.

But the bigger story here is the alliance of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC—-a secretive, corporate-sponsored clearing house for ideas that are dopey enough to be purchased by the pound—and the arms-dealer front group known as the National Rifle Association (NRA). A marriage made in Hades to pass legislation that seemingly anyone with any background in law enforcement or understanding of this nation's history knew would lead to a predictable outcome: "racially motivated killings."

Because, you see, this is not a bug, but a feature. Both ALEC and the NRA exist to support the whims and wants of privileged and largely white members of society, while disenfranchising, impoverishing and even allowing the Trayvon Martins of our society to be gunned down in cold blood. Racism is at their very core.

ALEC is behind a nationwide push to take voting rights away from African Americans and any other group that doesn't largely vote for creepily religious, corporate Republicans advocating wish-list items such as a Creationist, Haliburton-constructed lunar colony or the deregulation of melamine and morphine-based infant formula.

As writer Ari Berman pointed out in a piece called "The GOP's War On Voting," there's been "a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council – and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party – 38 states...this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process." Who are we talking about here? "Millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly," according to Berman, or people you might hesitate to call the "Santorum demographic."

These very same ALECites have been (coincidentally, or course), pushing for tort reform bills in states throughout the country, which have been proven again and again to disproportionately hurt the poor and minorities while protecting corporate bottom lines. Meanwhile, "racial issues" and stereotyping have been used by ALEC to push for tort reform, the very same play on white fear that is the literal pitch of the NRA to convince anyone, no matter how unstable or criminally-inclined, to buy more guns.

Part of this pitch has used the first black President ("Communist trained!") to inform their most ardent and paranoid members of secret plots ("massive Obama conspiracy!") to take away their guns (the ones they can now take into National Parks and in luggage on Amtrak because of bills President Obama signed into law) Their day-to-day coded language about protecting "your way of life" or property from invading hordes has obvious connotations to anyone with a few neurons still firing.

NRA Board meetings, meanwhile, could potentially double as klaverns. There's intellectual retch Ted Nugent who has problems with the "Dark Continent" of Africa because no country there "truly respects freedom or the rule of law."

Then there's board member Wayne Anthony Ross, who awarded an art student an “'A' for courage” for a project that included “a hooded and robed stick figure of a KKK member, bearing a cross in one hand and a flag in the other.” Perhaps most impressive, is John Sigler, who accused President Obama's mother of traveling the world "to meet up with 'savages' and civilizing them in the sack! Her efforts even created a President of the United States.” These are not the exception, as the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence has made abundantly clear on their "Who Is The NRA Leadership" site.

Trayvon Martin is not the exception. He is the rule. The collateral damage of a quite open and obvious agenda for anyone willing to take a look.

Follow me on Twitter @cliffschecter

This piece was first published at Al Jazeera English