If you were to ask Congressional members of the GOP what their solution would be about all of the gun violence in America, you would quickly find out that they do not have one. When large scale gun violence occurs, they sometimes offer “thoughts and prayers”, and recently, Ted Cruz decided to fight to prove that his thoughts and prayers were good enough by getting angry at anyone who thought that his thoughts and prayers were not good enough.
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that God is real and that The Bible represents God’s thoughts. From reading the Bible, it is apparent that God himself does not believe in merely trying to pray a problem away. Sure, lots of examples of the power of prayer are in The Bible. However, what is also clear throughout the Bible is that God does not merely want people to pray. He wants them to *act*. If all mankind needed was prayer, God would not have had various tribes in the Bible fight wars. If all we needed was prayer, Moses would never have needed to do all of the things that he did.
I have never heard a priest, a minister, or a rabbi claim that prayer alone is enough, but Republicans act as if it were. They act as if prayer alone can solve our problems. However, the phrase “Heaven helps those who helps themselves” has been around for a long time for a reason. No society survives without action—without tending the fields, raising the livestock, and teaching people to defend their countryside. History shows us that very few things change from prayer alone. When you hear that “God answers all prayers—but sometimes the answer is ‘no’”, you realize that prayers alone will not solve everything, and, in fact, the God of The Bible obviously does not want human beings to rely only on prayers. God wants people to act. Noah’s Ark was not built only through prayer, and Joshua did not win at Jericho by simply praying. These men prayed, but they also acted.
Yet, Republicans expect us to simply live with the idea that tens of thousands of Americans will be wiped out, over and over again, year after year—and that the only thing to do about it is pray. Even when presented with evidence from places like Australia of how reducing the number of guns can greatly reduce the amount of gun deaths, they ignore the evidence and insist that the only way to live is to live in a country where there are more guns than people.
Yet, it is worse than that. Even if someone believed that so many guns were necessary, shouldn’t they also realize that there are certain people who should not have guns? Surely, people who have used guns in the past to commit felonies should not have guns. Yet, Republicans cannot even support universal background checks in order to make sure that the guns that do exist do not fall into the wrong hands.
So, why is this the case? Well, long ago, the National Rifle Association (the NRA) started pushing the idea that, with regard to gun safety, “if we give an inch, they will take a mile”. It is the idea that the more that is done regarding gun control and gun safety, the more it will inspire further changes, and more restrictions on guns. So, the gun industry believes that it cannot give an inch—even when it makes sense—lest the gun safety supporters soon take a mile.
Because of this mentality, not only does the NRA seem to oppose every single law made to enhance gun safety. They also actively support anything that will tend to increase both the number of guns and the number and scope of gun rights that gun owners have. The NRA and its supporters seek not only to thwart efforts toward creating a safer society. They actively seek laws that result in society being less safe.
When the NRA started pushing to allow people to bring guns into bars, churches, and preschools, people realized that the NRA actually cared very little about safety. You see, over the years, the NRA has slowly became a tool of the gun industry, and the gun industry wants to sell guns. Because of this, at this moment, the NRA is ultimately about gun manufacturer’s profits. This is why the Republicans have also fought hard to make sure that the gun industry is not held liable for all of the death and destruction that their guns cause.
You see, Republicans are afraid what will happen if the gun industry is forced to reap what they sow. If the gun industry were forced to shell out money to pay for all of the misery that their guns cause, that could greatly reduce profits, which means that the gun industry, and the NRA, would have fewer dollars to toss into Republican campaign coffers. Yes, a large reason why so many people in the U.S. keep dying from guns is because Republicans want the money to keep rolling in—and they worry far more about that than how many people get slaughtered by guns each year.
President Reagan used to say that the Republican Party was “the party of solutions”. However, when you look at what the Reagan Administration actually proposed, their “solutions” were simply an effort to dismantle the solutions that Democrats had crafted since the 1930s. Their solutions were to simply make things worse. Looking at today’s situation regarding guns, we can see that little has changed since the days of Reagan. For at least the past sixty years, the Republican party has never been the party of solutions. Instead, since at least the time of Reagan, the Republican party has been the party of making things worse, and the current situation with guns represents that perfectly.