Beto O’Rourke, not the NRA, is still setting the terms of debate about the gun violence epidemic that has been plaguing the United States for decades now. The NRA is still peddling their tired claim that freedom = owning weapons of war like AR-15s, but Beto is absolutely correct: “Freedom is being able to go to school without being afraid of getting shot.”
I do want to live in Beto’s America. I want to live in a country where AR-15s and AK-47s are banned and where there is a mandatory buyback of millions of these weapons of war that present such a danger to everyone in our country.
March for Our Lives co-founder David Hogg agrees with Beto as well.
The fact that we are finally having a national debate over how to get AR-15s and AK-47s off our streets is due to Beto’s courageous stand: “Let’s decide what we are going to believe in, what we are going to achieve, and let’s bring this country together in order to do that.”
And as a Mother Jones article points out, history shows that Beto might be right (my emphasis):
Though this marks the first time such a fight has shown itself on a Democratic debate stage, it’s an argument Democrats and gun control advocates have been having among themselves since the 2012 elementary school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. The tragedy had broken the National Rifle Association’s vice-like grip on Congress, and Democratic lawmakers, who had long shied away from guns as a third-rail issue, signaled they would champion reforms. And they set forth on a long road of negotiating with Republicans and gun rights groups to try and pass a modest bill to expand background checks, something gun reformers agreed would do the most to slow the tide of gun deaths.
The measure ultimately failed, and as I wrote last month, some of the veterans of the 2013 negotiations blame their tepid strategy and eagerness to compromise on guns as the reason for its failure. “Nobody who ever got half a loaf asked for half a loaf,” Mark Glaze, who previously served as the executive director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns—now called Everytown for Gun Safety—told me. “If we really wanted universal background checks, we’d be talking about an assault weapons ban. If we really wanted an assault weapons ban, we would be talking about a constitutional amendment.”
Focusing on measures like universal background checks has gotten us nowhere, even after El Paso and Dayton and Midland-Odessa and so many other gun massacres since August 3rd. As MSNBC correspondent Garrett Haake points out, “all the supposed momentum to do anything on guns has dissipated entirely. Again.”
In fact, politicians have gotten nothing done since the Sandy Hook Elementary School gun massacre or any of the numerous gun massacres of children as well as adults all over our country. Another eight people were massacred in Puerto Rico on Thursday.
We must fight for change, fight for a better and safer country, one in which Americans are free to go to school and to work and to shop and to worship without the threat of being massacred using weapons of war like AR-15s and AK-47s.
You can read more about Beto’s plan to combat gun violence in America here: betoorourke.com/...
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