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Home > How Ronald Reagan's Gun Fantasies Have Become America's Nightmare
________________________________________
How Ronald Reagan's Gun Fantasies Have Become America's Nightmare
By Rick Perlstein [1] / The Washington Spectator [2]
February 4, 2016
This past June, pulp novelist Brad Meltzer revealed that, while he was
touring Secret Service headquarters for research on a White House thriller,
agents shared with him what Meltzer called a "secret." President Ronald
Reagan packed heat. "It's true," they said. "A .38. Reagan used to hide it
in his briefcase and take it on Air Force One."
Not a secret, actually. Edmund Morris said the same thing in Dutch. And
Ronald Kessler's In the President's Secret Service reported that "Reagan
confided to one agent that on his first presidential trip to the Soviet
Union in May 1988, he had carried a gun in his briefcase." Kessler also
wrote that an agent protecting Reagan during his 1976 presidential run asked
why he was wearing a pistol. Reagan replied, "Well, just in case you guys
can't do the job, I can help out."
It wasn't news then, but Meltzer's retelling of the story got legs. Reagan
loyalists and apologists came out of the woodwork, howling. David C.
Fischer, a special assistant during Reagan's first term, told TIME magazine,
"I never saw a gun in his briefcase." Kenneth Duberstein, Reagan's last
White House chief of staff and a consummate K Street insider, said he had
"no reason to believe it's true." Lou Cannon, whose Reagan chronicles
evolved over 50 years from astringent to sycophantic, averred, "It's so off
the wall that I don't know what to say. I think it's fantasy, at best."
Historian H.W. Brands, whose recent biography was distinguished by the
curious methodological decision of taking Reagan's own accounts of his past
at face value, offered, "I'll believe the evidence when I see it."
Then, we saw that evidence. Reagan's longtime body man Jim Kuhn reported
seeing the gun in Reagan's briefcase (but only once). Biographer Craig
Shirley, on the other hand-a conservative movement activist who has
established an identity defying Washington insiders who'd seek to clean up
what history might judge as Reagan's extremism-said he'd already confirmed
it with the head of Reagan's post-presidential Secret Service detail.
Shirley also reports that Reagan had begun the practice after John
Hinckley's 1981 assassination attempt, that he "routinely" brought the gun
aboard flights on Air Force One and Marine One, that he'd defied both Nancy
and the Secret Service to do so ("Who's going to say no to the President?"),
and that, though Alzheimer's-ridden, he continued the practice until the
Secret Service finally took the gun from him in 1994.
The United States Secret Service is among the most highly trained and
tactically sophisticated police agencies on the planet. Just to qualify for
the job requires hitting a 10-inch target with a handgun four of five times
in 10 seconds. A memoir by Dan Emmett, veteran of three "presidential
protection details," describes other aspects of the two-month initial
training: a surprise simulation of a full-scale motorcade ambush, 20 seconds
of chaos in which distinguishing civilians from attackers was rendered
nearly impossible; firing so many practice rounds he could barely hold a
rifle on his swollen shoulder; fighting lessons from an instructor who had
so many broken bones "three digits still pointed at odd angles"; and "one
hundred hours of control tactics, raid training, hand-to-hand combat, and
reacting to attacks on protectees." All this, incidentally, was just to
qualify for a desk job.
It takes many more years of dues-paying to get on a protective detail, let
alone a presidential protective detail, where the intricacies of tactical
choreography are timed to the split second.
Assignment to a protective detail can lead to situations like Emmett
encountered when President Clinton and Syria's Hafez al-Assad met privately
in a room and Emmett was instructed that if for any reason the Syrian
bodyguards drew their Skorpion fully-automatic pistols with magazines
holding between 10 and 20 rounds, "I would per my training shoot each of
them twice with my Sig Sauer pistol until the threat was neutralized, I had
expended all ammunition, or I was out of the game. I repositioned myself a
bit in order to ensure that President Clinton and Assad would not be in my
line of fire. . . . It would be catastrophic beyond imagination if a Secret
Service bullet from my pistol struck either POTUS or Assad."
Think about it. It was in a situation like this that a 78-year-old president
thought he just might click open his briefcase, in order to "help out."
Reality has never had much to do with the conservative cult that extols
superior firepower as the answer to all of life's little problems. For your
conservative camouflage-wearing neighbor next door, the fantasy of bursting
through a door, guns blazing, mowing down bad guys and saving the day is
considered more realistic than the prospect of receiving a Social Security
check 20 years from now.
Consider the word "tactical," which is everywhere now on the Internet and
means, in this context, "military-style." I recently plugged in the phrase
"tactical training" into Google Maps. I discovered that there were no less
than seven places I could do it within 40 miles of my yuppie Chicago
neighborhood. Think camouflage gear, an AR-15 with a sniper sight, and fat
middle-aged men in a martial crouch.
Did I mention bursting through a door, guns blazing? At the Spartan Tactical
Training Group, in the suburb of Lisle, you can take a "Two-Day Dynamic Room
Entry Course." The course will cover "strategies on how to deal with closed
and opened doorways, moving through doorway openings, controlled room entry
and room domination."
Also "two person team room entry techniques while engaging single threats
and multiple threats during shoot/no-shoot decision making drills. Students
will also learn Close Quarter Battle (CQB) techniques and advanced combat
gun-handling skills that are necessary to engage threats from contact
distance out to 10 yards."
The company promises: "Dominate your domicile-bring a rifle to a handgun
fight." In 2009, Lisle ranked 17th on Money magazine's "Best Places for the
Rich and Single" list, so that training must come in awful handy.
Northwest Suburban Tactical Training Center's marketing slogans are "Risk
Management Through Stressed Tactical Training" and (a nod to Dick Cheney's
"One Percent Doctrine?") "Be Prepared for the 1% Day." A "1% Day" is "when
serious and random events may put us and/or our loved one's [sic] in harms
[sic] way . . . Our sole purpose is training for survival . . . the skills
and knowledge our dedicated and well-versed instructors impart to our
customers are designed to make sure they effectively and successfully
survive a 1% day." They advise, "When it comes to survival, winning is the
only option. . . . After all, your life is in the balance."
I'm not good at math, but are they really implying that situations in which
one's life hangs in the balance transpire approximately 3.65 days of every
year? Yes, it seems they are.
Fear-constant, enveloping dread-is what the tactical training industry is
selling. Northwest's chief instructor, a Marine veteran and former operative
in the military's Joint Task Force Six, which supports law enforcement
agencies in operations against terrorism, narco-trafficking, alien
smuggling, and weapons of mass destruction in the continental United States,
is certified in disciplines including "Sudden Assault Response Systems,"
"Tactical Response to Lethal Threats," and "Combat Physio-Kinetics." He is
also certified in something called the "Refuse to Be a Victim" program. A
registered trademark of the National Rifle Association, RTBAV, a promotional
video informs us, is "not a firearm or self-defense course." No, it is a
paranoia course. Aimed at everyday women, it began in 1993 at the behest of
"NRA members, NRA board members, and even NRA staffers who became more
concerned with the increase in violent attacks, especially on women, in
America." Although actually, there has not been an increase in violent
attacks: according to FBI statistics, there were about six violent crimes
per 1,000 Americans in 1981, five in 1993 when the program began, and about
3.8 in 2013, when the video was made.
Crime went down; fear went up. What else happened? Ronald Reagan was
elected, for one thing, and taught everyone to be more afraid.
In the tactical mindset there are good guys and there are bad guys, and they
are always perfectly easy to tell apart. Who are the good guys? The
semiotics of tactical websites make it pretty plain. Eagles and American
flags. Invocations of 9/11. The pictures featured on the Northwest Suburban
Tactical Training Center website include a self-assured business- man. And
women: a teacher, a mom, and an apparent college student. All the females
are blond. The proverbial good guys with guns, said to be the only thing
that can defeat a bad guy with a gun. The bad guy is represented on the
NRA's "Don't Be a Victim" site as a black silhouette looming at the corner
of the screen. I always want to ask these tactical instructors: how do you
know you're not training him?
I would have liked to ask Ronald Reagan, too-practically the author of the
"good guy with a gun" doctrine. Shortly after World War II, he became
convinced that a complex jurisdictional strike pitting a democratic and
left-wing union against a mobbed-up company union was really a Communist
conspiracy to take over Hollywood. Things got rough at the studio: "I was
fitted with a shoulder holster and a loaded .32 Smith & Wesson," ready to
ward off the Commies if they came at him. (I wonder if that's what he was
thinking of when he took his .38 with him to Russia in 1988.)
Nor was this his first gun. As he told the editors of Sports Afield in 1984,
years earlier when he was a radio announcer in Iowa he had used a .45
automatic he kept on his mantel to rescue a damsel in distress outside his
apartment. Back then, he was a Roosevelt-loving liberal; but the wingnut
butterfly was making ready to burst forth from the chrysalis, fully formed.
I've written about how Reagan was instrumental, in the 1970s, in promoting
the ideology of the newly emergent hard-right faction in the NRA. "Guns
don't make criminals," he said on his radio show in 1975. "It's criminals
who make use of guns. They're the ones who should be punished--not the
law-abiding citizen who seeks to defend himself." (In 1980, the hard-right
faction having taken over, the NRA endorsed Reagan for president, the first
time it had endorsed a candidate for the presidency.)
The fact that everyone's a law-abiding citizen until they break a law, that
good guys become bad guys and vice-versa with regularity, or that one
person's good guy might be somebody else's bad guy (say, the abusive husband
of one of those blond women featured on that Tactical Training Center
website) seems never to occur to any of them. It's as if they've only seen
the species homo sapiens at the zoo, and are not quite sure how the beast
actually behaves.
Wingnuts, naturally, ate up Meltzer's revelation with a spoon. Because this
is their fantasy, too. One tweeter: "Reagan carried a gun in his briefcase?
Awesome. #GangstaGipper." Spencer Irvine of Accuracy in Media pined, "We
miss you, Ronnie." The Washington Free Beacon ran: "Reagan Bigger Badass
than Previously Known." Conservatives had to believe this story: it said
that Reagan was just like them--completely out of their minds on the
subject.
And it's not just the Reaganites and militia types who celebrate the gun
craze.
An equity research report from BB&T Capital Markets investment bank recently
opined: "We believe trends are improving for the Firearms and Ammunition
Industry following the drop in demand in 2014. We are initiating coverage on
the following companies with a buy rating: Sturm, Ruger (RGR) and Vista
Outdoor (VSTO)."
"The surge in demand was the largest in military style rifles (MSRs),
sometimes referred to as black rifles. . . . It is our opinion that a major
driver of commercial gun and ammunition sales is fear of regulations or the
banning/restricting/registering of firearms. . . . before and following the
2012 presidential election, gun sales spoke [sic] nearly 40%. These recent
spikes have been called 'panic buying' by the trade and by consumers. . . .
We expect more debates on gun ownership restrictions during the presidential
election cycle. Any proposals for bans or talks of changes to the regulatory
environment can be expected to lead to market growth as consumers react
through purchasing more firearms and ammunition."
It's quite something to see the rhetoric of paranoid websites translated
into the cold jargon of the securities analyst. There are no serious
"proposals for bans" in any legislature. And as for "changes to the
regulatory environment," President Obama's a new executive order merely
enhances the ability to make sure, a well, bad guys don't get guns: that the
same background checks required of buyers in gun stores extend to gun shows,
too. (When NRA types say we don't need new gun laws, we just have to enforce
the ones already on the books, they're lying.) A vote to extend criminal and
mental illness background checks, which includes a specific ban on a
national registry, failed for the second time in two years only days after
the mass shootings in San Bernardino, with no prospects of passing any time
soon. Indeed, as the sober-sided bankers at BB&T elsewhere explain, one
actual recent change in the regulatory environment has been "the
liberalization of laws governing the carrying of loaded handguns on one's
person for personal protection."
It's all a fantasy. GangstaGipper's fantasy. That's what is driving our gun
policies now. You don't have to pine for the departed Ronnie, Spencer
Irvine. His absurdities are all around.
Rick Perlstein is the Washington Spectator's national correspondent and the
author of "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the
American Consensus," winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for
history, and "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of
America" (2008), a New York Times bestseller picked as one of the best
nonfiction books of the year by over a dozen publications.
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ave-become-americas-nightmare
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/rick-perlstein
[2] http://www.washingtonspectator.org
[3] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on How Ronald Reagan's
Gun Fantasies Have Become America's Nightmare
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Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > How Ronald Reagan's Gun Fantasies Have Become America's Nightmare
How Ronald Reagan's Gun Fantasies Have Become America's Nightmare
By Rick Perlstein [1] / The Washington Spectator [2]
February 4, 2016
This past June, pulp novelist Brad Meltzer revealed that, while he was
touring Secret Service headquarters for research on a White House thriller,
agents shared with him what Meltzer called a "secret." President Ronald
Reagan packed heat. "It's true," they said. "A .38. Reagan used to hide it
in his briefcase and take it on Air Force One."
Not a secret, actually. Edmund Morris said the same thing in Dutch. And
Ronald Kessler's In the President's Secret Service reported that "Reagan
confided to one agent that on his first presidential trip to the Soviet
Union in May 1988, he had carried a gun in his briefcase." Kessler also
wrote that an agent protecting Reagan during his 1976 presidential run asked
why he was wearing a pistol. Reagan replied, "Well, just in case you guys
can't do the job, I can help out."
It wasn't news then, but Meltzer's retelling of the story got legs. Reagan
loyalists and apologists came out of the woodwork, howling. David C.
Fischer, a special assistant during Reagan's first term, told TIME magazine,
"I never saw a gun in his briefcase." Kenneth Duberstein, Reagan's last
White House chief of staff and a consummate K Street insider, said he had
"no reason to believe it's true." Lou Cannon, whose Reagan chronicles
evolved over 50 years from astringent to sycophantic, averred, "It's so off
the wall that I don't know what to say. I think it's fantasy, at best."
Historian H.W. Brands, whose recent biography was distinguished by the
curious methodological decision of taking Reagan's own accounts of his past
at face value, offered, "I'll believe the evidence when I see it."
Then, we saw that evidence. Reagan's longtime body man Jim Kuhn reported
seeing the gun in Reagan's briefcase (but only once). Biographer Craig
Shirley, on the other hand-a conservative movement activist who has
established an identity defying Washington insiders who'd seek to clean up
what history might judge as Reagan's extremism-said he'd already confirmed
it with the head of Reagan's post-presidential Secret Service detail.
Shirley also reports that Reagan had begun the practice after John
Hinckley's 1981 assassination attempt, that he "routinely" brought the gun
aboard flights on Air Force One and Marine One, that he'd defied both Nancy
and the Secret Service to do so ("Who's going to say no to the President?"),
and that, though Alzheimer's-ridden, he continued the practice until the
Secret Service finally took the gun from him in 1994.
The United States Secret Service is among the most highly trained and
tactically sophisticated police agencies on the planet. Just to qualify for
the job requires hitting a 10-inch target with a handgun four of five times
in 10 seconds. A memoir by Dan Emmett, veteran of three "presidential
protection details," describes other aspects of the two-month initial
training: a surprise simulation of a full-scale motorcade ambush, 20 seconds
of chaos in which distinguishing civilians from attackers was rendered
nearly impossible; firing so many practice rounds he could barely hold a
rifle on his swollen shoulder; fighting lessons from an instructor who had
so many broken bones "three digits still pointed at odd angles"; and "one
hundred hours of control tactics, raid training, hand-to-hand combat, and
reacting to attacks on protectees." All this, incidentally, was just to
qualify for a desk job.
It takes many more years of dues-paying to get on a protective detail, let
alone a presidential protective detail, where the intricacies of tactical
choreography are timed to the split second.
Assignment to a protective detail can lead to situations like Emmett
encountered when President Clinton and Syria's Hafez al-Assad met privately
in a room and Emmett was instructed that if for any reason the Syrian
bodyguards drew their Skorpion fully-automatic pistols with magazines
holding between 10 and 20 rounds, "I would per my training shoot each of
them twice with my Sig Sauer pistol until the threat was neutralized, I had
expended all ammunition, or I was out of the game. I repositioned myself a
bit in order to ensure that President Clinton and Assad would not be in my
line of fire. . . . It would be catastrophic beyond imagination if a Secret
Service bullet from my pistol struck either POTUS or Assad."
Think about it. It was in a situation like this that a 78-year-old president
thought he just might click open his briefcase, in order to "help out."
Reality has never had much to do with the conservative cult that extols
superior firepower as the answer to all of life's little problems. For your
conservative camouflage-wearing neighbor next door, the fantasy of bursting
through a door, guns blazing, mowing down bad guys and saving the day is
considered more realistic than the prospect of receiving a Social Security
check 20 years from now.
Consider the word "tactical," which is everywhere now on the Internet and
means, in this context, "military-style." I recently plugged in the phrase
"tactical training" into Google Maps. I discovered that there were no less
than seven places I could do it within 40 miles of my yuppie Chicago
neighborhood. Think camouflage gear, an AR-15 with a sniper sight, and fat
middle-aged men in a martial crouch.
Did I mention bursting through a door, guns blazing? At the Spartan Tactical
Training Group, in the suburb of Lisle, you can take a "Two-Day Dynamic Room
Entry Course." The course will cover "strategies on how to deal with closed
and opened doorways, moving through doorway openings, controlled room entry
and room domination."
Also "two person team room entry techniques while engaging single threats
and multiple threats during shoot/no-shoot decision making drills. Students
will also learn Close Quarter Battle (CQB) techniques and advanced combat
gun-handling skills that are necessary to engage threats from contact
distance out to 10 yards."
The company promises: "Dominate your domicile-bring a rifle to a handgun
fight." In 2009, Lisle ranked 17th on Money magazine's "Best Places for the
Rich and Single" list, so that training must come in awful handy.
Northwest Suburban Tactical Training Center's marketing slogans are "Risk
Management Through Stressed Tactical Training" and (a nod to Dick Cheney's
"One Percent Doctrine?") "Be Prepared for the 1% Day." A "1% Day" is "when
serious and random events may put us and/or our loved one's [sic] in harms
[sic] way . . . Our sole purpose is training for survival . . . the skills
and knowledge our dedicated and well-versed instructors impart to our
customers are designed to make sure they effectively and successfully
survive a 1% day." They advise, "When it comes to survival, winning is the
only option. . . . After all, your life is in the balance."
I'm not good at math, but are they really implying that situations in which
one's life hangs in the balance transpire approximately 3.65 days of every
year? Yes, it seems they are.
Fear-constant, enveloping dread-is what the tactical training industry is
selling. Northwest's chief instructor, a Marine veteran and former operative
in the military's Joint Task Force Six, which supports law enforcement
agencies in operations against terrorism, narco-trafficking, alien
smuggling, and weapons of mass destruction in the continental United States,
is certified in disciplines including "Sudden Assault Response Systems,"
"Tactical Response to Lethal Threats," and "Combat Physio-Kinetics." He is
also certified in something called the "Refuse to Be a Victim" program. A
registered trademark of the National Rifle Association, RTBAV, a promotional
video informs us, is "not a firearm or self-defense course." No, it is a
paranoia course. Aimed at everyday women, it began in 1993 at the behest of
"NRA members, NRA board members, and even NRA staffers who became more
concerned with the increase in violent attacks, especially on women, in
America." Although actually, there has not been an increase in violent
attacks: according to FBI statistics, there were about six violent crimes
per 1,000 Americans in 1981, five in 1993 when the program began, and about
3.8 in 2013, when the video was made.
Crime went down; fear went up. What else happened? Ronald Reagan was
elected, for one thing, and taught everyone to be more afraid.
In the tactical mindset there are good guys and there are bad guys, and they
are always perfectly easy to tell apart. Who are the good guys? The
semiotics of tactical websites make it pretty plain. Eagles and American
flags. Invocations of 9/11. The pictures featured on the Northwest Suburban
Tactical Training Center website include a self-assured business- man. And
women: a teacher, a mom, and an apparent college student. All the females
are blond. The proverbial good guys with guns, said to be the only thing
that can defeat a bad guy with a gun. The bad guy is represented on the
NRA's "Don't Be a Victim" site as a black silhouette looming at the corner
of the screen. I always want to ask these tactical instructors: how do you
know you're not training him?
I would have liked to ask Ronald Reagan, too-practically the author of the
"good guy with a gun" doctrine. Shortly after World War II, he became
convinced that a complex jurisdictional strike pitting a democratic and
left-wing union against a mobbed-up company union was really a Communist
conspiracy to take over Hollywood. Things got rough at the studio: "I was
fitted with a shoulder holster and a loaded .32 Smith & Wesson," ready to
ward off the Commies if they came at him. (I wonder if that's what he was
thinking of when he took his .38 with him to Russia in 1988.)
Nor was this his first gun. As he told the editors of Sports Afield in 1984,
years earlier when he was a radio announcer in Iowa he had used a .45
automatic he kept on his mantel to rescue a damsel in distress outside his
apartment. Back then, he was a Roosevelt-loving liberal; but the wingnut
butterfly was making ready to burst forth from the chrysalis, fully formed.
I've written about how Reagan was instrumental, in the 1970s, in promoting
the ideology of the newly emergent hard-right faction in the NRA. "Guns
don't make criminals," he said on his radio show in 1975. "It's criminals
who make use of guns. They're the ones who should be punished--not the
law-abiding citizen who seeks to defend himself." (In 1980, the hard-right
faction having taken over, the NRA endorsed Reagan for president, the first
time it had endorsed a candidate for the presidency.)
The fact that everyone's a law-abiding citizen until they break a law, that
good guys become bad guys and vice-versa with regularity, or that one
person's good guy might be somebody else's bad guy (say, the abusive husband
of one of those blond women featured on that Tactical Training Center
website) seems never to occur to any of them. It's as if they've only seen
the species homo sapiens at the zoo, and are not quite sure how the beast
actually behaves.
Wingnuts, naturally, ate up Meltzer's revelation with a spoon. Because this
is their fantasy, too. One tweeter: "Reagan carried a gun in his briefcase?
Awesome. #GangstaGipper." Spencer Irvine of Accuracy in Media pined, "We
miss you, Ronnie." The Washington Free Beacon ran: "Reagan Bigger Badass
than Previously Known." Conservatives had to believe this story: it said
that Reagan was just like them--completely out of their minds on the
subject.
And it's not just the Reaganites and militia types who celebrate the gun
craze.
An equity research report from BB&T Capital Markets investment bank recently
opined: "We believe trends are improving for the Firearms and Ammunition
Industry following the drop in demand in 2014. We are initiating coverage on
the following companies with a buy rating: Sturm, Ruger (RGR) and Vista
Outdoor (VSTO)."
"The surge in demand was the largest in military style rifles (MSRs),
sometimes referred to as black rifles. . . . It is our opinion that a major
driver of commercial gun and ammunition sales is fear of regulations or the
banning/restricting/registering of firearms. . . . before and following the
2012 presidential election, gun sales spoke [sic] nearly 40%. These recent
spikes have been called 'panic buying' by the trade and by consumers. . . .
We expect more debates on gun ownership restrictions during the presidential
election cycle. Any proposals for bans or talks of changes to the regulatory
environment can be expected to lead to market growth as consumers react
through purchasing more firearms and ammunition."
It's quite something to see the rhetoric of paranoid websites translated
into the cold jargon of the securities analyst. There are no serious
"proposals for bans" in any legislature. And as for "changes to the
regulatory environment," President Obama's a new executive order merely
enhances the ability to make sure, a well, bad guys don't get guns: that the
same background checks required of buyers in gun stores extend to gun shows,
too. (When NRA types say we don't need new gun laws, we just have to enforce
the ones already on the books, they're lying.) A vote to extend criminal and
mental illness background checks, which includes a specific ban on a
national registry, failed for the second time in two years only days after
the mass shootings in San Bernardino, with no prospects of passing any time
soon. Indeed, as the sober-sided bankers at BB&T elsewhere explain, one
actual recent change in the regulatory environment has been "the
liberalization of laws governing the carrying of loaded handguns on one's
person for personal protection."
It's all a fantasy. GangstaGipper's fantasy. That's what is driving our gun
policies now. You don't have to pine for the departed Ronnie, Spencer
Irvine. His absurdities are all around.
Rick Perlstein is the Washington Spectator's national correspondent and the
author of "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the
American Consensus," winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for
history, and "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of
America" (2008), a New York Times bestseller picked as one of the best
nonfiction books of the year by over a dozen publications.
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ave-become-americas-nightmare
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/rick-perlstein
[2] http://www.washingtonspectator.org
[3] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on How Ronald Reagan's
Gun Fantasies Have Become America's Nightmare
[4] http://www.alternet.org/
[5] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
