Run Hide Fight

The Guns Everywhere movement has made us demonstrably less safe.

Let’s just begin to frame the issue of gun safety with the known facts:

◦                There are more guns than people in the US.

◦                The Michigan State University killings, brought the total number of 2023 mass killings (two or more victims) employing firearms to 67 as of this writing, but don’t hold me to that number—it will have increased by the time you read this since there’s at least one incident a day that involves the killing of more than two people.

◦                This is the only country in the world where this happens, and yet the powers that be (exclusively on the Right) insist there is nothing anyone can do about it.

◦                We appear to be locked in what California governor Gavin Newsom called a “suicide pact with the Second Amendment.” (Yes, I know you hate him and discount anything he says, but that’s a pithy observation, regardless of its source.)

◦                Parents are afraid to let their children go to school, and kids themselves are afraid to go. 

◦                The vast majority—now 90%—of Americans are in favor of thorough background checks, but Republicans in Congress, who are beholden to the gun manufacturers and their lobby, the National Rifle Association, won’t even let Congress debate the issue. How’s that for the effect of partisan gerrymandering?

This is not a “both sides do it” problem. This deadly, tragic mess lies bleeding at the feet of the Republican Party. Exclusively.

On January 31st, Virginia Republican State Senator, Mark Obenshain said, “You know how many children are dying across Virginia because of fentanyl poisoning? A heck of a lot more than are dying at the hands of guns.” That is, according to the independent fact checker, Politifact, a “pants on fire” lie.

Eugene Robinson is an opinion writer and associate editor of the Washington Post. He wrote, “Right now, we have one center-left political party — the Democrats — and one flaming hot mess of ego, resentment and paranoia.”

Readers here know I am no fan of false equivalences. I know “both sides do it” is sometimes true, but is objectively false here. It is only Republicans from statehouses to the Capitol in DC who are saying we can’t pass universal background checks that 90% of Americans want, we can’t pass the red flag laws that 80% of Americans want, we can’t pass legislation keeping weapons of war out of the hands of 18 year-olds, let alone the total ban on assault rifles that 60% of Americans want.

One of their classic dodges is the idea that right after a mass shooting is not the time to talk about mass shootings. It’s time to grieve and not politicize. The obvious problem with that is that when there is a mass shooting every day, it’s never the appropriate time to talk about mass shootings. How convenient. There’s some very sick logic to that non-approach.

It’s now ten years since Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 26 first graders, teachers and staffers were slaughtered, and five years since Parkland, Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was the sight of 17 murders. And of course it’s not just schools, it’s grocery stores and big-box retailers, shopping malls and nightclubs. As Riverside, California learned, even the office Christmas party isn’t safe.

It’s not as if the Republican Party hit the zenith of nincompoopery and is on the way back from its trip to Crazy Town. No, in fact the inmates now run the asylum. Because Kevin McCarthy, the new Speaker of the House, needed her so he could gain power, Marjorie Taylor Greene, she of the Jewish space lasers and election conspiracy fantasies, is the second most powerful Republican in Congress. Her colleague in the Kooky Caucus, Lauren Boebert, advocates violence at every turn. 

I am the first to say that the country needs a functioning conservative party. There’s much to be said for a loyal opposition, and nothing to be said for a disloyal one. It is often said that government’s fundamental job is to protect us from enemies both foreign and domestic, but that task has fallen to only one party. The one that is protecting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, healthcare, books, public education, and a woman’s reproductive rights. 

Because the Founders could not possibly have known that the muskets of their day would evolve into the assault rifles of ours, I personally favor rewriting the Second Amendment, but I know that is a nonstarter.

This is our new normal, but there is nothing normal about it. If you are a Republican, I hope you hate this column not because a liberal wrote it, but because you recognize in it the party that has left you behind.

We’re begging you, Republicans—please do something.

©2023 Jon Sinton