“I’ve seen what these weapons do to adult bodies, let alone little babies’ bodies,” said Senator Tammy Duckworth in a Chris Hayes interview on 5/26/2022. “And you know, these colleagues of mine, at the drop of a hat, put a blown-up giant poster of a fetus on the floor of the Senate. And yet they refuse to look at a little body that has been destroyed by an AR-15. It’s hypocrisy at best and I’m just disgusted by them.”
Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Iraqi War Veteran, and Purple Heart recipient, who served in the Army Reserves for 23 years before retiring, has the perfect background to deal with Republican lies, and excuses about gun control, and I hope she will be the face of the gun control campaign. She grew up with guns. Her dad was a world-class shooter and judge at shooting championships, she has an expert marksmanship army patch, and she carried an M-16, later an M-4 in her military service, but believes weapons like that belong in war. And, Duckworth revealed an immediate plan for gun legislation in the Chris Hayes interview. (For brevity, I’ve edited parts of her interview, which is in the last segment at the bottom on the transcript.)
Hayes started by saying there is a “learned helplessness” about dealing with gun control, and asked Duckworth how she felt. “I’m calling for us to suspend the filibuster and pass sensible gun legislation at the 51 vote threshold,” she replied. “We have a bill that’s already passed the House that we could pass in the Senate. So, there are two things we can do right now, which is getting rid of assault weapons, and reinstating the ban, and instituting universal background checks, and getting rid of the gun show loophole.” (There might be more, but this is what she discussed.)
“If that shooter got into that room full of little babies and didn’t have the AR-15 but had a single handgun because he couldn’t get his hands on an assault weapons at the age of 18, then we wouldn’t have the high death rates we did that day.”
When Hayes started saying how difficult it will be to pass further gun restrictions, and it might not be popular for politicians, Duckworth replied: “Well, they need to listen to their constituents. 95 percent of Americans, including hunters and outdoorsmen, and Republicans, and even MAGA Republicans, some of them support universal background checks...This is about politicians who care more about a check, a pay day, a payoff from gun manufacturers than they do dead babies. That’s the bottom line here.”
For those of you who believe that Democrats will be unable to suspend the filibuster, that’s certainly a possibility. But, rather than waiting for that, Duckworth (and other Democratic Congressional Veterans as well as someone like Representative Lucy McBath whose son was killed with a gun) who should all be on this committee need to start talking up their plan, and the need for suspending the filibuster now! The argument needs to be made throughout the country before the filibuster is voted on. Then, when/if Republicans, Manchin and Sinema reject suspending the filibuster, they can all be soundly blamed for their inaction, but the argument must continue to be made throughout the campaign.