Japan Nuclear Nightmare: Tokyo Fears Radiation

The latest blast at Japan's most crippled nuclear reactor is the worst yet, and raises the likelihood of a nuclear catastrophe to uncomfortable levels, according to worried industry experts. The explosion, at the Fukushima Daiichi plant 150 miles from Tokyo, damaged the integrity of the reactor’s steel containment structure, and nearby radiation levels spiked after. Emergency workers were evacuated due to the threat of radiation exposure, meaning that they will not be around to help avert the possible nuclear meltdown.

The Daily Beast's Lennox Samuels and Takashi Yokota report from Tokyo on the alarm over radiation in the city. Plus, full coverage of the Japan quake and tsunami.
Tokyo and other cities have watched the unfolding tragedy in Japan’s northeast with concern but a sense of distance, even insulation. Until now. A mood of foreboding and alarm began to creep across the nation Tuesday as authorities made it clear that all six reactors at Fukushima Daiichi are beset with serious ailments, ranging from partial meltdowns to radiation levels harmful to human health to rising pressure, that could combine for a nuclear disaster of unprecedented proportions.

Photos: Japan’s Earthquake and Tsunami

As frantic workers struggled to contain the effects of a third explosion at the nuclear plant—which may have actually damaged the containment system—the government said the resulting radiation leak is potentially harmful. Moreover, if the containment system is indeed breached, the result could be a radiation spike to levels not seen so far. Authorities have had to confront explosions at three reactors, Units 1, 2, and 3; are battling a fire at Unit 4; and have now announced that pressure is rising at Units 5 and 6, and according to Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano, “must be monitored and carefully studied.”

NEWSWEEK/The Daily Beast's Lennox Samuels reports from Japan

Officials evacuated 750 workers from the plant in Fukushima Prefecture, leaving 50 on hand, the minimal number needed to handle the situation. Prime Minister Naoto Kan reiterated that all residents within 20 kilometers of the plant must evacuate and everyone 10 kilometers outside that zone must stay indoors. He said Tokyo Electric Power Co, the plant operator, is “working hard” to cool the reactors, whose cooling systems were damaged in the magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami that struck the region Friday.
Residents in Tokyo and its surrounding areas are increasingly nervous about the radiation levels, as traces of radiation have now been detected in even the downtown section of the city. Officials detected radiation levels 20 times higher than usual in the capital’s popular Shinjuku district, though they say the level poses no health risks, at least at the moment. Despite such assurances, Japanese are increasingly uneasy about the nuclear situation. The radiation threat has already prompted several foreign companies, including an international financial-news service, to consider pulling employees out of the city. A number of European investment banks are considering closing shop here and transferring their staff to other Japanese cities as well as outside the country.
Frustration with the Kan administration continues to build, and more people and officials are questioning whether the central authorities are sufficiently clear in the directions they are sending out, especially to local governments.
Katsunobu Sakurai, mayor of the city of Minamisoma, 50 to 60 kilometers north of Fukushima Daiichi, complained that orders from the central government have been “confusing.” He said most residents had left the prefecture, or state, voluntarily, although it was difficult to give instructions to people and that “it’s been worrying to the residents when they listen to the prime minister.” He added that residents cannot leave their damaged homes or drive anywhere. “We are not even able to look for our dead,” he said. Regarding evacuation orders, he noted that people are being asked to walk when there’s radiation in the air. “We would like to ask the central government to help us by providing clear direction,” he said.
Fueling the growing consternation is TEPCO’s less-than-stellar handling of public relations. In response to media questions about the explosion and radiation leakage at Fukushima Daiichi, the best answers the utility has been able to muster are frequently: “We don’t know” and “Let us check on that.” Kan is reported to have admonished—even yelled at—TEPCO officials for failing to keep the government properly informed. Asahi Shimbun quoted Kan shouting: “An explosion is shown on television, and it took you people an hour to report this to the prime minister’s office… What’s going on?”
And when former chief cabinet secretary Yoshito Sengoku called TEPCO to ask how planned rolling blackouts would affect hospitals and vehicular traffic situation, TEPCO responded with a fax saying: “For details, please contact our customer center,” according to the Jiji news wire. An infuriated Sengoku reportedly barked, “Who the hell do you think I am?” To be fair, TEPCO officials at ground zero in Fukushima have gone to heroic lengths to prevent a nuclear meltdown. One veteran TEPCO official—even with the protection of a special moon suit—was exposed in 10 minutes to 100 times the radiation a person should be exposed to in an entire year.
Some critics had also questioned whether the government has enough staff on hand to cope with the demands of preventing a meltdown, especially given the 50 other reactors that must be monitored around the country. Nuclear experts expressed concern about human error and fatigue. “One wonders about a small group of people working nonstop in a situation like this,” MIT security analyst Dr. Jim Walsh told The Daily Beast. “How deep is that staff; how fresh are they? There’s a human dimension to this that could lead to mistakes.”
On Monday, the water level in the Unit 2 reactor dropped, and fuel rods were eventually exposed, raising radiation levels and possibly damaging some of the rods. That all occurred when the employee charged with monitoring the pump that was bringing in seawater to cool off the fuel rods had stepped away.
Lennox Samuels is a Newsweek/Daily Beast editor based in Bangkok. He covered the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
Takashi Yokota is Newsweek’s correspondent in Tokyo

Why is America the only FREE SOCIETY to have BLOODSUCKER HEALTH CARE?

The Supreme Court and the health-care mandate muddle


When the Supreme Court considers whether Congress has the constitutional power to compel individuals to buy health insurance, the argument supporting Congress may rest on a non sequitur and a semantic fiat. A judge’s recent ruling argues that the insurance mandate must be constitutional because Obamacare would collapse without it. A forthcoming law review article agrees with this and with the judge’s idea that, regarding commerce, being inactive is an activity.

Obamacare does indeed require the mandate: Because the law requires insurance companies to sell coverage to people regardless of their preexisting conditions, many people might delay buying insurance until they become sick. But is the fact that the mandate is crucial to the law’s functioning dispositive?

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler’s ruling that the mandate is constitutional conflates moral, policy and constitutional considerations. She says that people who choose “not to purchase health insurance will benefit greatly when they become ill, as they surely will, from the free health care which must be provided by emergency rooms and hospitals to the sick and dying who show up on their doorstep.” So “those who choose not to purchase health insurance will ultimately get a ‘free ride’ on the backs of those Americans who have made responsible choices to provide for the illness we all must face.”

Her disapproval is neither a legal argument nor pertinent to one. The question remains: Does Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce entitle it to create a health-care regime that requires the mandate?

Mark Hall of Wake Forest University, in an article for the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, says there would be constitutional “uncertainty over the mandate in isolation.” But it is “inextricably intertwined” with Obamacare’s “other insurance regulations” — e.g., those pertaining to preexisting conditions — “which indisputably are constitutional.” So the “strongest defense” of Congress’s power to enact the mandate is “the acknowledged undesirability, if not impossibility” of the regulations regarding preexisting conditions, absent the mandate.

Hall says that the mandate “meets a high threshold of necessity to accomplish the overall reform scheme, clearly within congressional power, to create a market structure in which no one is ever again medically uninsurable.” But unless we postulate that Congress has whatever power is required to create such a market structure, this question remains: Does the fact that Congress has the constitutional power to do X — say, guarantee universal access to insurance — make Y constitutional merely because Y is necessary for doing X?

Congress has the constitutional power to combat political corruption, the “appearance” thereof and the “circumvention” of laws for this purpose. But suppose Congress, exercising this power by regulating campaign finances, decides that abridging freedom of speech is necessary for its anti-corruption measures. This necessity, defined by this preference, does not make such abridgement constitutional. The Supreme Court said as much concerning McCain-Feingold.

The mandate’s defenders note that the Constitution says Congress has the power to “make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution” its enumerated powers, one of which is to regulate interstate commerce. “Necessary and proper.” An unconstitutional law is improper.

Does the mandate acquire derivative constitutionality merely by Congress making the mandate necessary for something Congress wants to do in the exercise of the enumerated power of regulating interstate commerce? If so, what would not acquire such constitutionality?

Madison’s constitutional architecture for limited government will be vitiated unless the court places some limits on what constitutes commerce eligible for regulation. So the question becomes: Is the inactivity of not buying insurance a commercial activity Congress can proscribe because it has economic consequences?

Hall says it is unclear what constitutes “pure inaction.” But virtually nothing qualifies as “pure” inactivity if, as he says, “the passivity of non-purchasing decisions does not rob them of their inherently economic nature.” Judge Kessler disdains the distinction between activity and inactivity as “of little significance.” Her Orwellian theory is that government can regulate the activity — the mental activity — of choosing not to participate in a commercial activity.

Hall perfunctorily says that “some limit” on Congress’s commerce power “is necessary” but then says “democratic electoral constraint” — trusting “the political process itself to set limits” — will suffice to restrain government.

The question about the mandate is, however, whether a political institution has traduced constitutional limits placed on it. Because the Framers prudently doubted the sufficiency of “democratic electoral constraint” — because they were wary about “the political process” policing itself — the Constitution was written.
georgewill@washpost.com
George Will Washington Post

Conservative zealotry vs. economic reality

One thing about the current generation of conservatives: Getting mugged by reality hasn’t changed the way they look at the world. We’ve just come through a calamitous financial collapse — caused by reckless Wall Street gambling and toothless watchdogs — that triggered a Great Recession and doubled the U.S. national debt. The collapse is the greatest cause of large deficits, but conservatives act as if the deficits caused the collapse.

A recent stop in London revealed that this isn’t just a Tea Party phenomenon. There, the new Tory-dominated coalition led by David Cameron looks and sounds like a sprightlier offshoot of House Speaker John Boehner’s troops. Cameron has set out on a forced march for fiscal retrenchment, imposing deep and immediate spending cuts (and tax increases) to bring deficits down in Britain. This plan is sold with a jaunty recital of conservative gospel: The economy has begun to recover, and action on deficit reduction will boost the confidence of business and consumers. The resulting revival, it is argued, will generate more than enough private-sector jobs to make up for those lost in the public sector.
Yet the 2010 fourth-quarter economic numbers revealed that the British economy was declining, not growing. The government went from adding jobs to shedding them. And consumer confidence has collapsed since Cameron and his troops started chanting that the country “was broke.” Cameron dismissed the results, declared “war on the enemies of enterprise” and insisted that he would carry on. The magic of what Paul Krugman calls the “confidence fairy” and private-sector growth would overcome all.
In Washington, Boehner’s caucus exhibits the same zealotry. “The American people want us to cut spending,” the GOP speaker repeats, ignoring the vast majority of polls that show Americans care far more about jobs and the economy. We will “cut and grow,” is the new conservative message. Get government out of the way and the economy will blossom.

Yet Goldman Sachs projected this month that the deep cuts in domestic programs in the 2010 budget passed by the House could cut our growth rate in half. John McCain’s former economic adviser, Mark Zandi, projected a loss of 700,000 jobs. If the budget cuts cost federal jobs, said Boehner, sounding like a latter-day Marie Antoinette, “so be it.” He believes the private sector will more than make up for the loss of such jobs.
Remarkably, President Obama has once more been absent without leave. In his State of the Union address, he hailed the recovery and turned to deficit reduction. A few weeks later, he said it was time to “live within our means.” He hasn’t drawn a line against short-term cuts, choosing instead to argue for cutting less.
In the run-up to the 2010 elections, the administration assumed that job growth was picking up (remember “Recovery Summer”). The Election Day “shellacking” stemmed largely from the fact that voters didn’t see the jobs and didn’t think the White House had a clear view on how to create them.
The president and Republicans seem to believe that the “confidence” that comes from immediate spending cuts will offset the jobs lost from those cuts as well as offset declining household disposable income, plummeting housing prices and massive household indebtedness.

In Britain and the United States, it is bizarre to hear the same cruel conservative ideas and arguments defining policy while both countries are still struggling to recover from the human catastrophe they caused. And in both, economic reality doesn’t interfere with conservative faith.
In the United States, 25 million people are in need of full-time employment. Housing prices are headed back down; trade deficits are going back up. State and local governments have largely exhausted rainy-day funds and are laying off workers. Businesses are sitting on trillions in cash while waiting for consumer demand to pick up. At last Thursday’s “Summit on Jobs and America’s Future,” sponsored by the Campaign for America’s Future, economists showed that at current rates it would take eight years for the United States merely to return to pre-recession levels of employment.
For the unemployed, time isn’t measured in hours or months. It is measured by savings exhausted, homes lost, dreams crushed, children uneducated, marriages broken. Eight years is a calamity. But the White House and Republicans are arguing only about how much and what to cut, assuming that business needs only confidence, not consumers, to start hiring again.

You have to admire conservative gall. Financial collapse and global economic calamity changes not a word of their mantras. At the depth of the crisis, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, the Ayn Rand devotee and toothless watchdog whose willful lassitude did as much as anyone to allow Wall Street to blow up the economy, admitted to “a flaw” in his world view. But last week, Greenspan was newly unrepentant, charging that Obama’s governmental “activism” was standing in the way of recovery.
Greenspan didn’t mention that the pre-crisis decade featured declining wages and benefits for most American families, Gilded Age inequality, the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs, unsustainable trade deficits and ruinous financial speculation. But neither Greenspan nor conservatives, nor, tragically, Obama, are about to let reality get in the way of ideology.
Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of The Nation. She writes a weekly online column for The Post.

This and That for March 15, 2011

Barbour Cuts Press Aide After Japan Joke

Mississippi Governor and 2012 presidential hopeful Haley Barbour accepted the resignation of his press secretary, Dan Turner, Monday after reporters discovered he included a joke about Japan in his daily press clippings. The joke, which said Otis Reddings' "The Dock of the Bay" was not popular in Japan now, was one of several off-color remarks: Others made fun of Janet Reno and the Cambodian genocide. Turner can commiserate with Gilbert Gottfried, who was dropped as Aflac's spokesman after making several Japan jokes on Twitter.                                                                                                               Read it at Politico

Muammar Gaddafi Nears Benghazi

Just one city now stands between Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi's troops and the rebel capital Benghazi. On Monday, Libyan fighter jets began attacking Ajdabiya—what Al Jazeera calls their "last line of defense" before Bengazi. Should Gaddafi's forces advance and capture the city, they'll have access to roads to surround Benghazi and cut off the rebels' supply lines with Egypt. Germany and Russia, meanwhile, raised questions at the UN about a no-fly zone that make it seem increasingly unlikely. A spokesman for the Libyan rebels visiting Paris told European leaders and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, "We want a no-fly zone, we want tactical strikes against those tanks and rockets that are being used against us and we want a strike against Gaddafi's compound."                                                                             Read on Al Jazeera

NRA Passes On Meeting With Obama


Looks like the National Rifle Association is not ready to join hands with the anti-gun lobby just yet, despite what the White House might think. In an editorial in a Tucson newspaper Sunday, President Obama called gun-control lobbyists and the NRA to begin "a new discussion" to regulate guns, but the NRA said Monday they will be attending no such meeting. "Why should I or the NRA go sit down with a group of people that have spent a lifetime trying to destroy the Second Amendment in the United States?" said the NRA's longtime Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre. Justice Department officials will meet with gun-control advocates starting on Tuesday and over the next few weeks to discuss changes in policy, and White House officials had indicated they had expected the NRA would be there as well.                     Read it at The New York Times

Japan Warns: Stay Inside to Avoid Radiation


Could the manmade disaster surpass the natural one? Experts are calling the Japanese nuclear crisis the worst since Chernobyl after a third explosion and a fire at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant Monday. Radiation levels near one reactor were 400 times the normal amount a human should experience in a year. Japan's government has told people living within 20 miles of the plant to stay indoors, and the Tokyo metropolitan government has said it has detected radiation levels 20 times above normal over the city. So far, winds have blown most of the radiation out to sea. As the world watches the disaster unfold, Rory Kennedy, who directed Indian Point: Imagining the Unimaginable, and Keven McAlester remind us that America's plants are even more vulnerable than the ones in Japan.                                       Read it at The Daily Beast

U.S. Tensions Rise with Saudi Arabia

Could Saudi Arabia's decision to send 2,000 troops to Bahrain hurt its relations with the United States? Things are already tense between the historically close countries, as Saudi Arabia is annoyed at the way the United States dropped support for Egypt's Hosni Mubarak. "They're not in a mode for listening," a U.S. official says of communications with Saudi Arabia. Apparently, Saudi Arabia's King Abdulllah told President Obama he should support Mubarak, even if Mubarak began killing protesters. Obama ignored his advice. "They've taken it personally," a source tells The New York Times, "because they question what we'd do if they are next."                                                                                            Read it at The New York Times


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Was treated in hospital for addiction.

2,405 Shot Dead Since Tucson

In an op-ed today, Obama laments those killed since the Giffords shooting. But a new ruling—and Dick Cheney—could be a turning point in gun laws. 

On a snowy Wednesday evening in February, the main attraction on the marquee at the Lyric Theatre in Blacksburg, Virginia, was True Grit, the Coen Brothers’ bloody homage to the shoot-’em-up Westerns of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

But the movie playing inside had a very different message to send.

Four years ago, on April 16, 2007, Colin Goddard was one of 49 people shot by Seung-Hui Cho in Virginia Tech’s Norris Hall, a mere 1,000 yards from the Lyric Theatre—and one of only 17 who survived.

 Shortly after 9 a.m., Cho forced his way into Goddard’s French class, firing on the teacher and then methodically stalking the aisles, pumping an estimated 200 bullets from his Glock 19 and Walther .22 into every student he could see.
 Goddard was hit four times: twice in the hips, once in the right shoulder, once in the left knee.

Now he had returned to the scene of the crime. Throughout Goddard’s long recovery—it took a titanium implant and months of physical therapy before he could set aside his crutches and cane and stand on his own two feet—he’d told himself that he wouldn’t let the Virginia Tech massacre define him.
He would graduate and move on with his life. But then came April 3, 2009, and with it a mass shooting at a Binghamton, New York, immigration center that left 13 more people dead. “I watched it on TV all day,” Goddard tells Newsweek. “I knew that all those families were rushing to hospitals without knowing what the outcome would be, having their lives turned upside down. I thought, can we really not do something to make this less likely?
 I decided I couldn’t just sit quietly. I had to find a way to address this.”

In a few minutes, the result of Goddard’s efforts, a pro-gun-control documentary called Living for 32, would debut before a full house of 450 Hokies.
 Fresh from an acclaimed run at Sundance, the film was tragically well-timed. A little more than a month earlier, in Tucson, Arizona, a college dropout named Jared Lee Loughner had gunned down Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others, killing six; the previous weekend, 11 students had been shot and one student killed during a fraternity party in Ohio. The issue was in the air.

But this night, in this town, where the horror of gun violence was no longer an abstraction, had a resonance all its own. “Bringing it here, I thought, was very important,” Goddard, 25, told the audience, emotion evident in his voice. “This is where I grew up as an adult. This is where I came to understand that from such bad can come good.” Staring out from the stage, he saw his fellow ROTC members and remembered when they’d passed the Army’s basic rifle marksmanship course together.
 He saw a couple of his fraternity brothers and remembered the good times they’d had at the local shooting range. Making the documentary, Goddard said, “has been part of my healing process.
” But every time there’s “another Tucson,” he confessed, “I’m right back here again.”
Then the lights dimmed, and the film began.

Gun-safety advocates would argue that Obama has a moral duty to stanch the bleeding, and that may be true. But what’s particularly interesting right now isn’t the moral equation.
 It’s the practical one.
Are people like Colin Goddard crazy for thinking that they can change the politics of guns in America? Most Beltway types would say yes, and with good reason. The National Rifle Association, which regularly ranks as the most powerful lobbying group in Washington, has long had a stranglehold on the issue.
 By outspending, out-organizing, and out-politicking its opponents, the NRA persuaded Democrats, who can control Congress only if they control red districts, to abandon gun safety in the 1980s and 1990s, and since then it has successfully pressed for ever-looser local laws. Consider the case of Tombstone, Arizona, which lies 70 miles southeast of Tucson.
When Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp shot up the O.K. Corral in 1881, civilians weren’t allowed to carry guns in town; a local ordinance required visitors to check their weapons at the Grand Hotel or the sheriff’s office.
But today, Tombstone residents are free to pack concealed firearms pretty much wherever they want, without a permit. The state is now wilder than the Wild West.
 The national numbers tell the larger story.

 Over the last two decades, the pro-gun lobby has outspent gun-control forces by a factor of 20 to 1, according to the Center for Responsive Politics; in 2008 alone, the NRA and its allies shelled out $2.4 million, or 41 times what the other side was able to spend.

 In 1988, 18 states had laws that made it easy for civilians to carry concealed handguns in public; now that number is approaching 40. New Mexico may expand concealed carry to elementary schools and preschools and “liquor establishments”; Michigan has pushed to open up day-care centers, sports arenas, and hospitals. Public opinion, meanwhile, has been trending in a similar direction
In 1959, for instance, 60 percent of respondents told Gallup they favored a ban on handguns except for “police and other authorized persons.” Now, after absorbing decades’ worth of NRA messaging—and after a recent drop in crime that sapped some urgency from the issue—more than 70 percent of voters oppose it.

 Few politicians are eager to paddle against such a powerful tide, which is why so many of them called for “a new era of civility” after one of their colleagues was shot in the head—as opposed to, say, a new era of gun safety. “When I talk to lawmakers in D.C., they’re always polite,” says New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an outspoken gun-control advocate. “But they always say the same thing: ‘Well, guns are important, but I can’t really get into that now.’ ”

President Obama is no exception:
 He’s spent the two months since Tucson paying lip service to the issue.
Shortly after the shooting, three of his heaviest hitters—David Plouffe, Robert Gibbs, and David Axelrod—began to drop hints about the president’s intentions. Axelrod said there’s “no doubt” Obama “will engage in… that debate.”

 Plouffe went further, noting his boss’s support for the assault-weapons ban and promising that “he’s going to address this.” Asked last week for an update, a senior White House official told Newsweek that advisers are still “exploring a variety of ways the president could” weigh in.
 It’s hard not to wonder whether Obama’s plan is to pacify liberal critics by continuing to mention some vague dream of addressing gun safety at some wispy future date—then to cross his fingers and hope they forget.

If you believe the conventional wisdom, this strategy makes a certain sense: Why distract the electorate with a wedge issue when the economy is shaky and the Middle East is blowing up? But what if the chattering class is wrong? What if Obama is missing a rare opportunity?
 As much as he might like to move on, the issue isn’t going away—nor should it. On March 4, a federal grand jury returned a 49-count indictment against Loughner, to which he has pleaded not guilty; a few days later, authorities released autopsies of his victims. Last week doctors revealed that Giffords is now walking, speaking in full sentences, and planning to attend
her husband’s shuttle launch in April. The wires, meanwhile, were filled with reports of fatal shootings: at a Sanger, California, birthday party; a Georgia apartment complex; a San Antonio carwash.

 All told, an estimated 2,405 Americans have been shot and killed since Tucson, adding to the grim toll of 400,000 felled by guns since Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated in 1968. (The estimate of gun murders and accidental deaths is based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.)

Gun-safety advocates would argue that Obama has a moral duty to stanch the bleeding, and that may be true. But what’s particularly interesting right now isn’t the moral equation. It’s the practical one.
Look beyond the hoary Washington logic, and it’s clear that the present moment may be peculiar enough, and the forces at work potent enough, to produce real movement on gun safety—provided Obama proceeds carefully. That means no outlawing specific guns. No relitigating the Second Amendment.
 And no frantic liberal overreach. Just two precautions that a majority of voters favor, according to a new Newsweek-Daily Beast Poll: background checks for every gun buyer (which 86 percent of respondents support) and a revival of the recently lapsed ban on the kind of high-capacity clips that Loughner used in Arizona (which 51 percent support).
If Obama came out in favor of these modest reforms, he’d have libertarians (such as the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy), Republicans (Rep. Peter King), independents (Bloomberg), and Democrats (Sen. Frank Lautenberg) on his side. Even Dick Cheney, a longtime hunter and NRA supporter, now admits that “maybe it’s appropriate to reestablish” limits on “the size of the magazine that you can buy to go with semiautomatic weapons.” The diversity of this group reflects a simple truth: that the vast majority of us have more in common with Goddard than with the two-dimensional culture warriors—the latte-sipping elites, the paranoid survivalists—who have dominated the debate for decades. We respect guns, gun owners, and the Second Amendment, and yet we want gun violence to be as rare as possible. We know that guns can contribute to a community’s safety, and yet we acknowledge that none of the 18 mass shootings since May 2007 was stopped by a legal-handgun carrier.
 If Obama recognizes this reality, and takes action, it’s possible to imagine us having a grownup conversation about guns for the first time in almost 20 years.
Right now, the signs of hope may be faint. But they do exist. The first is Tucson itself—or, more precisely, the fact that the proposed laws emphasize how preventable Tucson really was. In the House, New York Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, whose husband was killed in a 1993 mass shooting on a Long Island train, has introduced a bill seeking to reinstate the prohibition on high-capacity clips that took effect in 1994 but lapsed when the assault-weapons ban expired 10 years later.
 It already has 93 cosponsors—“one of the quickest responses from people on the Hill,” to the knowledge of Paul Helmke, the former Republican mayor of Ft. Wayne, Indiana, who is now president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. In the Senate, Lautenberg has introduced a mirror version of McCarthy’s bill, as well as legislation that requires a background check for every gun sale and prevents people on terrorist watch lists from purchasing firearms or explosives.
 Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, is pushing to improve the national electronic database of drug abusers, domestic offenders, and the mentally ill, which currently receives only 5 percent of the money assigned to it after Virginia Tech and lacks millions of records required by federal law. (Arizona, for example, should have sent in 122,000 names between 2008 and August 2010, according to the Justice Department; the state submitted only 4,465.)

 With a comprehensive “can’t buy” database and loophole-free background checks, neither Loughner nor Cho would have been allowed to purchase firearms: Loughner’s drug use disqualified him from military service, and Cho had a history of mental illness.
 And without access to high-capacity clips, Loughner would have stopped to reload after 15 rounds instead of 31—meaning that he would have been tackled and restrained 16 rounds sooner. “Pro-gun people always argue that laws like these wouldn’t have saved any lives,” says McCarthy. “But of course they would have. Fewer bullets in Loughner’s gun means that fewer shots would’ve been fired—which means that fewer people would have died.”

Despite its conservative leanings, the Supreme Court has also been paving the way for a new kind of gun politics.
 For years, the NRA has invoked the Second Amendment to oppose even the most limited gun-safety measures. First of all, they say, the Constitution guarantees individuals “the right to bear arms,” so any restrictions on that right are inherently unconstitutional. And second, once bureaucrats start infringing on a fundamental freedom, what’s to stop them from outlawing guns altogether?
 These arguments may have made some legal sense in the past, but not anymore. In 2008 the court ruled that while the Constitution does establish an individual right to bear arms, it does not rule out “prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places ... or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”
For the first time, the court placed some constitutional parameters on the gun debate. Can the government regulate firearms? Yes. But can it outlaw them altogether? Absolutely not—no matter what the NRA says.

“The decision undermined two of the NRA’s big arguments,” Helmke explains. “One, that you can’t have any restrictions on guns, and two, that ‘gun control’ is code for ‘gun ban.’ ”
It’s counterintuitive, but the current political climate might favor gun control as well. No coalition suffered bigger losses in the 2010 midterms than the conservative Blue Dog Democrats, who tend to court NRA support. Meanwhile, only three of the 106 Democrats who backed legislation to close the gun-show loophole lost their seats. The results represent up-to-the-minute proof, says Helmke, that the “NRA can neither save you nor sink you”—an argument that could swing a few Democratic votes in the months ahead.

The public, meanwhile, endorses the current proposals, according to the Newsweek–Daily Beast Poll: 51 percent want to outlaw high-capacity magazines; 67 percent back prohibiting the sale of firearms or explosives to individuals on terrorist watch lists; 83 percent support fully funding the national background-check database; and 86 percent favor instant computerized background checks for every gun buyer
. After tacking right on taxes and spending to appease the newly empowered GOP, Obama will need to throw his base a bone in the run-up to 2012. Gun-control is a natural fit: “liberal” enough to please core Democratic constituencies and cheap enough not to bust the budget.

Obama should also be encouraged by new evidence that the GOP isn’t particularly invested in keeping high-capacity magazines on the market. As a congressman, Cheney was one of the few Republicans willing to vote against noncontroversial bans on cop-killer bullets and plastic guns, which were designed to evade metal detectors. Now he’s open to reviving the moratorium on Loughner-style clips—a huge shift. Conservative stalwart Bill Kristol seems to agree, telling C-SPAN in January, “Let’s look at why this guy could shoot so many shots off so quickly.”

 In his speech to the Conservative Political Action Committee, NRA President Wayne LaPierre didn’t bother to explain why high-capacity magazines are necessary. “He knows this is a tough one to defend,” Helmke says. Mitt Romney, the GOP’s 2012 frontrunner, is on record as saying he “would have signed the assault-weapon ban”—a position that will make it hard for his party to oppose a new, less-expansive prohibition on clips if he’s nominated. And in a recent Wall Street Journal column, former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan revealed that ultimately “the Republican Party will not go to the wall to defend extended clips.” If Obama and his allies decide to move forward, mainstream Republicans may not battle back as aggressively as everyone expects—even if the NRA insists it “disagrees” with Cheney and Kristol and will “fight any gun-control scenario down the pike,” as public-affairs director Andrew Arulanandam tells Newsweek.
Tucson was the first mass shooting or assassination plot in years in which neither the shooter nor his target died in the melee—an outcome that will shape the media coverage in ways that may benefit the gun-safety cause.
When a killer commits suicide, there’s no need for a trial; when his most prominent victim passes away, a funeral tends to bring the story to an end. But in this case, the coverage will continue indefinitely—Loughner will go on trial; Giffords will keep on recovering—and gun violence will be a topic of debate as long as their twinned tales are in the news. Factor in the anniversaries of Columbine, Virginia Tech, and the 1981 Reagan shooting, which are coming up this month and next, and the president and his friends suddenly find themselves with a larger-than-usual window of opportunity to weigh in.

 “Obama could go down as one of the greats if he stands up and has the courage to do this,” says Bloomberg, who is spending some of his estimated $18 billion fortune on the issue in the years ahead. “We need leadership.” Back at the Lyric Theatre, Goddard was doing his part.
Watching his documentary, it was impossible to ignore how little we’re doing to stop dangerous people from buying deadly weapons. Of the dozens of private sellers Goddard and his colleagues encountered at gun shows, not one ran a background check before selling them firearms, Goddard says.
Vendors in Maine were the toughest: They requested a local ID. “Minnesota has a system where you can get a permit to buy a gun that proves you can pass a background check, and if you don’t have that, some people won’t sell to you,” he says. “But you can just walk to the next table and buy one there without it.” In Texas, Ohio, and Virginia, Goddard easily bought semiautomatics, often without bothering to show ID. “I bought AK-47s, TEC-9s, a Mach 11, a slew of handguns,” he says.
 “We could have bought books that tell you how to convert a semiautomatic to a fully automatic and how to make a homemade silencer. There were .50-caliber sniper rifles being sold to the general public almost everywhere we went.” In fact, the only time Goddard, who now works for the Brady Campaign, came under close scrutiny was when he delivered his weapons to the police. “I had to show my ID and answer all kinds of questions,” he says. “None of which were asked at the point of sale.”

As Living for 32 drew to a close and the lights in the Lyric came up, one student asked Goddard what kind of action Congress had taken since Tucson. Not much, he said. Then he smiled ruefully. “You’d think they would realize that all American citizens want to be sure that weapons are not sold to people who shouldn’t get them,” he continued. “You would think this would reverberate. We need to tell them that there are some simple things that we could be doing. We’re going to be here, pushing this, until it doesn’t need to be done anymore.

Andrew Romano is a senior writer for Newsweek.