The GOP has a long list of minority groups which it has attempted to either marginalize or destroy outright: gays, blacks, women, Latinos, transsexuals, Muslims, poor people, immigrants, union workers, NPR employees, and polar bears, to name a few.
We may now add toddlers to that list.
This week, the hugely Republican Florida legislature passed a bill prohibiting pediatricians from educating parents about gun safety. Pediatricians generally ask new parents a litany of questions, dealing with bike helmets and seat belts and pools and other common household hazards. Asking about guns and suggesting safety measures, though, is a clear violation of parents’ Second Amendment right to allow their child to accidentally blow his brains out.
“It’s none of my business what kind of weapons, if any weapons, you have in your home,” said Republican Sen. Alan Hays. “When you come to see me, my obligation is to find out what medical things are pertinent to your particular situation.” Hays used his credentials as a retired dentist to claim expertise on the matter, and I must note here that most periodontists do not have to worry that their patients will inadvertently fire off a loaded gun after getting a cavity filled.
But the real battle, as usual, was waged by one particular special interest group. “We take our children to pediatricians for medical care,” claimed an NRA lobbyist brought in by the GOP to testify on the bill’s behalf, “not moral judgment, not privacy intrusions.”
It is interesting to hear this legislature discuss privacy intrusions after passing a bill requiring women to obtain and personally pay for an ultrasound before getting an abortion, and another bill mandating that welfare recipients be drug tested before receiving their benefits. Governor Rick Scott also issued an executive order requiring random drug-testing of all state employees, not just the ones who are poor and therefore obviously raging crackheads.
So while public school teachers and low-income families have no right to privacy, gun-toting parents are apparently in desperate need of special protection. The original bill would’ve made inquiring about guns and recommending gun safety precautions a felony, punishable by a $5 million fine or jail-time for the meddling pediatrician. In the final version, these penalties were somewhat lessened--mostly because Florida prisons are already overcrowded with nonviolent offenders.
If you find these penalties severe, it’s only because you’ve bought into the American Association of Pediatricians’ seemingly benign yet utterly sinister attack on the American way of life. Republicans argue that the AAP asks about firearms not out of concern for children but because of their “anti-gun political agenda.” This agenda, according to the agenda-free NRA, is “being carried out in examination rooms by doctors and staffs”; you just haven’t noticed it because you were too busy feeling weird about getting naked in front of all those motivational posters of kittens doing adorable things.
Or maybe that’s just me.
Anyway, if not wanting children to shoot themselves or others is now “anti-gun,” I am intrigued as to what being “pro-gun” might entail. What bills might the NRA next push through Republican-heavy legislatures in the name of the “pro-gun movement”? The possibilities are endless! Here are a few of my own proposals:
-The Louisiana Killing Quotients Act: Every gun owner must shoot at least five people per year, including one member of minority groups. Anyone who shoots a member of a double minority group--a Muslim transsexual, for instance, or a gay NPR employee--doesn’t have to pay taxes for a decade.
-The Georgia Cradle-to-the-Grave Firearms Act: Starting at age five, schoolchildren must be taught to use a broad range of firearms, from handguns to semi-automatics. All current funding for the arts must be channeled into this program. High school graduation will be contingent upon students’ ability to shoot fleeing welfare recipients who have failed their drug tests.
-The Arizona “We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Badges” Act: All Arizonians will be drafted for a year’s service of armed border security. If, by the end of the their year, they have failed to shoot any illegal border-crossers, they must engage in a duel with Gov. Jan Brewer, who will be armed with an Uzi.
-The South Dakota Legalization of Murder Act: This act would make the make it “justifiable homicide” for someone to shoot anyone trying to harm an “unborn child”--in other words, abortion doctors.
(Actually, this last one is real and is on track to pass into law.)
These bills may sound extreme, but you should probably get used to them: we live in the United States of the NRA now, a land where no pro-gun measure is too absurd, severe, murderous, or outrageous to ram through a Republican legislature. The guns-for-toddlers bill is especially odious, but I suppose the GOP isn’t too worried about losing preschool voters to accidental gun violence.
The youth vote is notoriously liberal, anyway. Might as well prune the pack with a few stray bullets to ensure that big boys stay in charge, right?