Campaign Action
Since the Republican Party remains firmly in the pockets of the American gun lobby—specifically, the NRA-led subset of the lobby that considers the right to efficiently murder other Americans sacred, so long as you believe at the time you had a good reason to do it—they continue to resist all efforts to get combat weapons out of the hands of America's most murder-minded people.
But if you want token reforms coupled with a chunk of money no larger than, say, what the American taxpayer will spend shuttling Donald Trump to his golf outings over the next few years, they have that covered.
The Republican-controlled House plans to vote next week on the STOP School Violence Act, a bill that would authorize $50 million annually for safety improvements, including training teachers and students in how to prevent violence and developing anonymous reporting systems for threats of school violence.
The bill, drafted by Representative John Rutherford, a Republican and former sheriff from Jacksonville, Fla., is one of a flurry of bipartisan measures introduced in the House and the Senate devoted to school safety — without curbs on guns. In the Senate, a companion bill would also give schools money for physical improvements, such as installing metal detectors or bulletproof doors.
So the good news is that your child will get to hunker behind a bulletproof door, when a gunman comes to murder them. The bad news is that the surrounding walls won't be bulletproof. The good news is that your child's teachers may have a new website or two to help them prepare for the day when a murderer enters the school intent on killing as many as he (it is always a he) can, and simply because he wants to; the bad news is that Republicans still insist we do not a damn thing to prevent the man, or the child, from getting a rifle far more lethal than the handguns carried by the officers who will then be tasked with trying to stop him, and called cowards in the aftermath.
All of these efforts are focused on the presumption that there will be more and more murders on school campuses due to the proliferation of combat weapons among our nation’s would-be murderers, and rather than doing anything about those guns or those murderers Republicans will simply be training our children on the best places to hide, and training their teachers on how they can try to keep themselves and their students alive until the murderer either runs out of bullets or is himself shot:
But most gun safety proposals — including expanding background checks for gun purchases, raising the minimum age for buying rifles to 21 from 18, banning assault-style weapons like the AR-15 used by the gunman in Parkland and taking guns away from people deemed mentally unfit — appear to be going nowhere on Capitol Hill.
Why? This is a sincere question. The National Rifle Association is, from their own modern literature, dedicated entirely to the interests of gun hoarders preparing for the day when they believe they will have to start justifiably murdering people. The NRA is not a lobbying group, but a doomsday cult. Each of these proposals to limit the ability of mentally unstable people to acquire combat weapons is widely popular, even among gun owners themselves. "Expanding background checks" alone would seem to be a no-brainer; if we more effectively hindered gun acquisition by domestic abusers or those with a history of past violence alone, it would have a demonstrable effect.
The answer would, again, seem to be raw cowardice. The Republican Party still believes themselves to be in a world in which doomsday-minded gun hoarders are the single untouchable constituency, the one that must be preserved even as everyone else around them gets tossed under the bus. This is no longer true, in our elections, but the mere memory of it is, apparently, paralyzing.
But it's not going to be enough. Republican lawmakers are looking yet again, as always, to stave off effective actions by proposing and debating token, ineffective ones; even the efforts at "school hardening" or "arming teachers" are paired with such trivial amounts of cash as to render them transparently symbolic. It's an effort to make it past the next election day without making enemies, even if it means that murders in our nation's schools, and theaters, and concerts, and private offices, and public offices, continue. It is the Marco Rubio version of leadership; promise little, and propose less.
It's not going to be enough. The children of America have now, all of them, grown up in a world of lockdowns and shooting drills. They have hid under their desks from gunmen like we did, in previous generations, from earthquakes or atomic bombs. And they are fucking tired of it, and they should be, and they aren't going to put up with the supposed elder wisdom, from our nation’s most prominent and self-serving collection of cowards, that says they should sit down, shut up, and consider the "rights" of the people dishing out the murders.
They are coming of voting age, they have witnessed the antics of the conspiracy-addled NRA and of cowardly, cash-obsessed politicians for their entire lives, and they are not going to put up with either.