The United States is alone among advanced countries in having gun policies that facilitate, rather than obstruct, deadly rampages such as Kelley’s. The Supreme Court has made clear in its rulings that the Second Amendment permits reasonable gun-control measures. This crisis is political, not constitutional.
You and I have the power to elect leaders who will reduce gun violence. The blood of innocents is on our hands.
That is the conclusion of Eugene Robinson’s Washington Post column in response to Sunday’s horrific shooting.
It is thorough, and very much to the point, and you should read it.
This is an issue to which Robinson has returned again and again, in large part because we have repeatedly as a society had to confront mass shootings. As he writes in the column
I’ve written this column before, and I will have tragic occasion to write it again. I don’t care about that. I’ll keep writing it because we cannot become inured to this horrific gun violence. We cannot allow mass killings to become normalized, even though they happen with increasing and numbing frequency. We can accept the loss of life on the battlefield as the price of freedom but not senseless murder in the church pews.
We should not become inured, yet we have to wonder — after all, after the massacre at Sandy Springs elementary many of us thought we had finally reached the breaking point, and yet????
Robinson, who won a well-deserved Pulitzer for commentary some years ago and who is a regular on MS-NBC, reminds us that the NRA and its apologists will always tell us how any particular method of gun control would not have prevented the most recent massacre. We have already seen the President pivot to saying this latest massacre was a mental health issue, which is was, somehow omitting the relevant fact that under his administration a regulation that would have prevented people with mental health issues from obtaining firearms was canceled without offering any replacement protections.
Robinson tells us why the NRA and its coterie do not want us to focus on guns and ammunition, because of many inconvenient questions which might arise,
Chief among them: Why do we make it easier to amass an arsenal of weapons of war than to get a driver’s license or register to vote?
I can remember Admiral Mike Mullen when head of the Joint Chiefs testifying that weapons like AR-15 types of rifles like that used on Sunday did not belong in civilian hands. Except now there are millions of them.
Robinson calls not only for mandatory background checks, but for registries, of guns and ammunition. That is likely to be strongly resisted, but that does not make it something that should not be seriously considered.
Yesterday our ridiculous President told the Japanese that they need more guns — in a nation that last year had number of gun deaths less than ¼ that of the United States in just the shooting Sunday at the church — 6 total in a nation of 127 million, whereas we had about 33,000 in a nation less than 3 times as populous. We are far more likely to die from gunshot domestically at the hands of someone who we would not classify as a terrorist than we would from any causes including guns at the hands of terrorists, as the recent incident in New York City should have reminded us. Yes, we could theoretically consider the Las Vegas shooter a domestic terrorist but even the more than 50 killed there would not significantly alter that basic ratio.
And if you want to get a sense on the scope of how wide spread the problem is in America, perhaps you might spend some time at the Gun Violence Archive.
As he nears the conclusion of his powerful piece, Robinson also takes aim at the fevered conspiracies of some on the political right with this paragraph:
To those who spend part of each day scanning the skies for black helicopters, I say relax; the government already knows who you are, where you live, what you drive and how much money you earn. If you’re on Facebook, you’re probably telling the whole world much more. A week ago, Kelley posted a photo of his assault rifle.
As we should have learned during the Reagan administration, there is a ton of information about us readily available online. When Congress tried to bar John Poindexter’s government run idea on Total Information Awareness, there was nothing to stop the Department of Defense or other government agencies from purchasing that information from corporations who already gather it. All newer phones have GPS that tracks our location. And many people, like the shooter Sunday, put lots of information about themselves on social media.
We fret about how this information is a violation of our civil liberties. Perhaps But our most basic civil liberty is life itself. And NO right in the Bill of Rights has ever been absolute, which can give the government the power to restrict otherwise protected rights if it can meet the strict scrutiny standard.
And as Robinson writes in the paragraph before the two with which I began this post,
I hear you sighing that none of this, realistically, is going to happen. I respond: But it should.
Today is an election day. Here in Virginia where I sit in a living room in Arlington writing this piece, we will elect all 3 statewide offices and all 100 members of the House of Delegates. There are real distinctions between candidates for these offices. My wife would say that the most important is to honestly address the environmental crisis, because if we destroy the environment nothing else will matter. That may be true. Life itself could be jeopardized for billions.
Here in the United States life is increasingly jeopardized by gun violence, and as recent incidents have shown us none of us can necessarily feel secure from it even in ordinary tasks of living.
To which I would add that those who oppose sensible gun control are also those who seem to want to deny the reality of climate change.
Which brings us back to the fact that today is an election day.
And that brings us to the final words in Robinson’s column, which I now repeat:
You and I have the power to elect leaders who will reduce gun violence. The blood of innocents is on our hands.
Peace? Not until we address this crisis.