Enough
Children are still being murdered and the people who can stop it are doing nothing
I’m sitting in front of my computer feeling as if I have nothing to say after this past week. But that’s not true - it’s simply that I don’t want to have to say it. Or it feels exhausting that I still have to. Or I don’t want to fill people’s inboxes with it when they’ve been facing it in the news, in their own minds all week.
It’s the same thing that’s been at the mental forefront of so many for the past several days. Another school shooting. More kids - kids - cut down with an assault rifle. A weapon that has no business being in anyone’s hands, let alone a teenager’s.
We have already been beset by the calls of the charlatans, the legislative accomplices of this horrendous act, to provide the equally worthless placebos of thought and prayer as a solution to this horror. This is always infuriating, of course, but never moreso then when it comes from the mouths of Republican politicians who are the very reason that nothing is ever done to solve this problem.
Ban assault rifles. Increase regulations for all other firearms. As a start. It is that simple.
They won’t do this, of course. They claim it’s because they are honoring the Bill of Rights, but they only honor the parts they care about. These are the same people who are trying to remove books from schools. They don’t give a shit about the Bill of Rights. They probably haven’t even read it. The notion that the Second Amendment provides the freedom for individual citizens to own firearms, let alone assault rifles, is a generous reading at best and complete bad faith at worst1. Moreover, the two words they never seem to bring up from that text are “well regulated.”
Well regulated.
We don’t regulate them at all.
The reason we don’t do that - the real reason - is because the gun lobby and the NRA have all of these soulless politicians in their pockets.
I am not a gun owner. I don’t care if they take them all away. But if we must start with simply re-banning assault rifles and heavily regulating everything else, I do not believe for a second that it is a slippery slope to the revocation of further rights any more than I believe that needing a license to drive a car adds the looming threat of further disenfranchisement.
I am not the first person to point out that for last twenty years we have had to take our shoes off every time we board a plane because one dipshit tried to light his shoes on fire and blow one up one single time. The first instance in which a child’s body was ripped apart by one of these weapons, they should have been off the streets. And any politician who says otherwise, or votes otherwise, should have the photos of each and every one of those dead children carved into their gravestones.
Those stones would have to be exceptionally large.
These things hit harder now that I am a parent, and as someone who works in a classroom. I have friends who teach in public schools. I have friends whose children were in lockdown as a result of this shooting because it happened so close to their schools. It all feels a little closer to the surface, but it also shouldn’t matter where or to whom this happens. None of us should stand for it. Many of us don’t - it’s a matter of getting those in power who continuously do to listen. They may never do so, but this is of course the hard work of democracy that we sometimes like to forget about - you have to keep leaning on these people and making them uncomfortable until they have no choice but to cave to the will of the people that they are supposed to be serving anyway.
Posting doesn’t accomplish that. Venting to friends doesn’t accomplish that. Writing this doesn’t accomplish that. What does accomplish it is direct political action and organization. Lean on the people who can do something about it, and vote them out when they don’t.
A good place to start is to donate and volunteer for Lexi Doherty, who is running in the congressional district in which this latest shooting took place against Mike Collins, a stain on the earth who said that the aftermath of a school shooting was not the time to talk about gun control. Maybe it’s the time to talk about sending him to the unemployment line come January. And let’s certainly not even entertain the notion of voting for the presidential candidate who couldn’t even spell “gun control,” let alone would have any interest in enacting it.
What Collins, and all those of his ilk, also need to consider is that the day is going to come very soon when the younger generations, who have grown up under the specter of this most shameful of American rituals, are going to reach the age where they start running for office, and I sometimes get the feeling that once they do they are going to come for all of the guns. Good riddance, I say, but if these ghoulish lawmakers love their weapons as much as they seem to, they may want to start thinking about the future.
-cs
I saw this more from a grammatical perspective than a legal one, though notion that the Amendment applies to individuals wasn’t even established legally by the Supreme Court until 2008 (in District of Columbia v Heller), and even that decision acknowledged that the right was not unlimited.