If anyone is waiting for Republicans to do something, anything, about gun violence in this country, a recently retired Republican Congressmen is telling Americans not to waste their time. Nothing will be done to curtail these mass shootings unless and until Republicans are voted out of power, out of the positions that allow them to continue doing exactly that--nothing.
Voting them out is the only solution. Until Americans do that, the carnage will continue. And in fact, under Donald Trump it will escalate.
David Jolly is a former Republican Congressman from Florida. His assessment of the likelihood that any action will be taken towards controlling the spread of automatic and semi-automatic assault weapons in this country is terse, and to the point.
“Republicans will never do anything on gun control. Nothing, ever,” he said. “If this is the issue that informs your ideology, as a voter, the strength to draw in this moment is to commit to beating Republicans. Beat ’em. Beat every single one of ’em.”
Steve Israel, a retired Democratic Congressman, agrees.
The tragic, maddening fact is that too many members of Congress fear the wrath of the gun lobby more than they fear a crazed gunman in a Walmart. They tweet condolences and lower flags and call for moments of silence. Then they wait for the anguish to die down so that you’ll forget their fecklessness and vote for them in the next election.
In an editorial published in USA Today, Israel recalls the various votes in Congress taken on measures to impose some type of restrictions on purchases of these assault weapons. All of the attempts failed, due to Republican opposition. Israel recalls it was maddening:
Many of my colleagues would admit that they personally agreed with these measures, they just couldn’t vote for them without risking political repercussions back home. The tally on their minds wasn’t just the more than 30,000 names of Americans who die by gun deaths annually, it was their gun lobby legislative scorecard, where anything less than 100% was considered “anti-gun.”
Republicans feared a Republican primary, and nothing motivates primary voters more than a “weak” record on guns. In the case of Democrats who opposed these measures (only a handful), they worried that antagonizing pro-gun voters was the one fatal Republican political attack they couldn’t survive.
And so it continues.
The strategy employed by the gun lobby is always the same, and up to this point, has always been effective. Wait until the storm dies out.
And that, according to Israel, is exactly what will happen here. But as he points out, the fault really doesn’t only lie with cowardly Republican lawmakers. It’s the fault of the voters, the American public itself. He wishes that Americans would find it in themselves to actually remember these events, when the media shifts its focus to the latest Trump Tweet, and to actually remember what they are countenancing when they go into the booth and push that little button.
It’s exactly what the gun industry and its lobby expect and count on. They will wait you out.
Think about that when you read past this article. Think about it next week when the words “Dayton” and “El Paso” are supplanted by cable news hosts frothing at another presidential tweet.
The problem isn’t really lawmakers with a narrow and self-serving view. It’s voters with short memories.
The next time someone wonders why “Washington” won’t do something about these killings, they would do well to do more than look to their representatives in Congress. They should look at their neighbors, and at themselves.
More here on Jolly’s statements, from Walter Einenkel.