On the heels of yet another mass shooting, conservative politicians are yet again falling over themselves to demand, in outraged tones, that nobody learn a thing from it. The usual militia-minded advocacy groups for "good" vigilanteism and "good" insurrection are yet again bombarding their memberships with warnings that their rights as Good Murderers are on the cusp of being taken away. The nation's epidemic of gun violence in general is treated as solely a political problem, not a matter of public health. The debate is not over whether the steady background hum of gun murders experienced in this country above all peacetime others should be tamped down to match those of other countries, but over what the "correct" balance of murder sprees, workplace violence, family violence, religiously premised assassination etc., etc., should be in order to prove this nation has more raw freedom than the others.
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The two sides are "all of that violence, and as much more as you can imagine," and "perhaps slightly less." The "slightly less" side is, according to the All Of It side, such a threat to the republic that it may also require murdering. It is the All-of-Its that make plans to kidnap governors; that march armed into statehouses, grocery stores, and mall fast food courts alike; and that have internalized their agenda to such a point that any government efforts to protect public health are seen as tyrannies. So here we sit, dull-minded and exhausted, as each wave of bullshit washes over us in the scheduled order. The death of an armed responding police officer inside a supermarket did not do a damn thing, for example, to dampen the brickheaded proclamations of Team Murder that if only some larger number of amateur gun-toters was present, everything would have been fine. Several of these toads have been longtime public advocates for the all-shootout, all-the-time approach to Making America Safe, and you can bet that no matter how large the firefight inside a King Soopers might have become, in that scenario, they would be on television afterward to proclaim that the problem could have been solved by piling another 20 guns on top of that.
Tired? Yeah. I think we're all tired.
We are now at the point in the process where United States senators appear on the Sunday shows to tell us that by gum there is a real chance at bipartisan gun reforms this time around—maybe not on the whole constellation of reforms with broad public support but here or there—as long as everyone is super nice and polite about it. Oh, but it will require ditching the most significant reforms. And possibly some of the other reforms. And cutting out those things will not result in Republican support per se, but could maybe lead to it, maybe, if the resulting spirit of bipartisanship reaches up to their little mountain cave and grows their hearts three sizes between now and the point several weeks from now when top national politicians expect the current feelings of horror to have faded and the networks have instead moved on being outraged about shoe advertisements.
Hmm. This is aggressively cynical, even for me. This can't be healthy. I mean, it's all accurate, to a near certainty, but it still can't be healthy.
All right, let's get to the point already. On the Sunday shows, Republican Sen. Pat Toomey played the part of the reasonable member of the Insurrection Party, one dispatched to promote the idea that while he could not necessarily identify likely Republican votes to "make it more difficult for people that we all agree shouldn't have firearms" to get them—which is his own promoted approach—those Republican votes might theoretically exist. The main reforms possible might be tightening background check rules to encompass gun shows and internet sales, something the Senate's supposed insurrectionist moderates might possibly be willing to vote for.
Toomey's moderate credentials here come from cosponsoring a bill to similarly expand gun background checks after Sandy Hook elementary school children were brutally murdered in 2013, a bill that his Republican allies filibustered into oblivion with the same vigor they have used to block gun safety measures before and since.
On the other side, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy appeared on the same show to hum much the same tune. He's looking for a compromise Republicans can support, and claims the "politics have shifted dramatically" since all those previous gory murders Senate Republicans were quite willing to ignore. "You're going to have to make some reasonable accommodations if you want 10 Republican votes," said Murphy, and he is working on background check expansions as the issue that can supposedly now get bipartisan support. The implication here is that reasonable Democrats like Sen. Chris Murphy can work in good faith with reasonable corruption-enabling law-nullifying cynical traitors to the republic like Sen. Pat Toomey to hash something out, so long as no big reforms are attempted, and the hint of such a thing caused the usual news coverage because no matter how many times Republican moderates make similar suggestions of basic human decency, journalists can't exactly say for certain that this one will fail like all the others.
We're not journalists, however, so we can insert a bit of logic into this situation and make some educated guesses. If the members of the world's least deliberative legislative body follow the same ground rules they have followed for a full decade and then some, what will happen here is:
- Somewhere between one and three Republican senators will proclaim themselves to be open to perhaps some modification to the nation's woefully insufficient gun safety measures, while simultaneously vowing that Democratic-backed measures will never, ever see the light of day.
- After the usual back-and-forth trying to nail down just what those allegedly moderate dolittles could actually support, the designated Republican moderates—all of whom are facing reelection in purple-tinged states—will push back in increasingly snippy terms and with suggestions that well now if everybody is going to start actually debating these things with them rather than simply basking in their generous but vague proclamations then maybe you are all simply too mean to be worked with.
- After hashing out, to great fanfare, some new "moderate" plan that adopts some small fraction of reforms carefully tuned to do almost nothing …
- ... the whole thing gets buried by a filibuster, after which the insurrectionist hacks from hard-right states send fundraising letters to their constituents claiming once again to have saved the nation from tyranny while the theoretically moderate negotiators shrug and wash their hands of the whole thing.
There. There ya go. What's going to happen here is that Toomey and a handful of others will proclaim they are open to negotiations, Murphy and others will engage in negotiations, Toomey will demand that all but a handful of reforms be thrown out, and the remaining reforms are swiftly killed by the filibuster because in a party willing to lend their protection even to a presidential effort to overturn a United States election via extortion, corruption, intimidation, and physical force, there is not a chance in sulfurous hell that the same party will abide the disarming of the nation's most violent fringe. This is performance art, and a 10-year-running production at that.
Toomey is not one of the moderate ones. There is no such thing, and he has no such credentials for it anyway. When Donald Trump extorted a foreign government, extorted Georgia officials, and helped organize and rally a crowd bent on the overthrow of government, Toomey provided his protection. Toomey does not give a shit about the safety of the public, no more than any of the others who sailed blindfolded through half a million pandemic corpses, and you can put that on a needlepoint and hang it in his office and it really doesn't matter if he considers it rude or not.
There is exactly one damn way that the current Republican Party, a hive of the incompetent, the fascist, and the power-obsessed, can prove moderation in this or any other of the nation's most long-running crises. They can vote that way. Not scuttling to hide under a pile of procedural loopholes; not grandstanding about how they would have done the right thing if only the other side had not tied their hands by irritating them in some minor fashion. Not muttering vague nonpromises to the gullibles of Meet the Press, or keeping silent during killing times when the party's ideologies appear to be egging on the deaths.
They could do the job rather than cocoon inside an insurrection-backing movement willing to abide criminality in service to party power. That would be the barest definition of moderate, and there is no Senate Republican who can reach all 10 of their fingers even to that low bar. There is not a chance in hell that Toomey or the others will act with sincerity on gun violence when their caucus cannot manage even that.