By Karen Rubin, News-Photos-Features.com
The extremist Republican party has responded to the latest gun massacre predictably, by doubling down. Candidates are proudly trying to outdo one another in declaring their support for some version of “Jesus, guns and babies” or “babies, bullets and borders.”
Republicans at the NRA Convention in Houston, just miles from the latest school massacre, in Uvalde, that killed 19 young children and two teachers just 10 days after the other prominent racist massacre, in Buffalo (and a dozen mass shootings since), declared the solution is to “harden” schools like prisons, which would also mean hardening grocery stores, shopping malls, houses of worship, concert venues...
The NRA, a political machine, the $70 billion gun industry, not to mention the $220 billion security industry, want us to live in prisons, to give up our freedom, security and well being, essentially become hostage to their profits, disguised behind a warped sense of “freedom” ideologically allied with evangelical Christians, White Supremacy and anti-abortion activists.
But as the White Christo Fascist party people are increasingly saying out loud, unfettered gun access is not about hunting or even about self-defense, but “opposing tyranny,” and the rising use of intimidation and violence to achieve their political ends. Who, exactly, are the tyrants to be targeted, killed with these weapons of war? Police? Election officials? Voters you don’t like. Congressmen you don’t agree with? The National Guard, the military? The President you didn’t vote for?
Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate candidate David McCormick, a former hedge fund executive, states in his political ad that the Second Amendment is what guarantees every other freedom. Rather, the Second Amendment negates all the rest of our freedoms. There is no free speech, free assembly, free religion, the right to assemble and protest, to legislate, or even vote, if you have people staring you down with an AR 15.
The fact that children, teachers, blacks, Jews, Asians live with terror is not a bug, it’s a feature. There is a certain assumption that the firepower – 400 million guns in the hands of 100 million people - is overwhelmingly on one side (recall their eagerness to embrace gun control when the Black Panthers were wielding weapons).
Since Columbine in 1999, over 300,000 children have survived gun violence in their schools and are living with that trauma, if not injury, which experts say, impacts their academic and career success and lifetime earnings and productivity. Want to know why schools are having to spend more money on mental health services? Is it COVID or the constant fear of being the latest massacre?
Guns are now the leading cause of death among children – not auto accidents or disease. Guns are the number one cause of death for black men, number two for black women. Women have to live in fear of domestic partners (in Canada, a man can only get a gun permit with permission of his intimate partner).
It took Congress about 15 minutes after 9/11 to pass the anti-democratic, unpatriotic Patriot Act– and we are still taking off shoes, belts and getting x-rayed and patted down at airports (while terrorists on no-fly list can still go into any gun shop and buy a gun). After a single mass shooting, New Zealand, United Kingdom and Australia each instituted gun control, and guess what? No mass shootings since, and the number of gun deaths a year are in the single digits.
But the death toll equivalent of a 9/11 happens here each and every month. Between 1968 and 2017, 1.5 million people had been killed with guns, more than the 1 million who have died fighting in all of America’s wars, going back to the Revolution. Today the number of gun deaths is approaching 2 million.
As umptium people have pointed out, other countries have mental illness, video games, COVID, but no developed country in the world has the public health crisis of America’s gun violence epidemic. The difference is easy access, well promoted and marketed to appeal to any macho fantasy, to lethal weapons. The US with only 5 percent of the world’s population, has almost 50 percent of all guns in civilian hands. Buying a gun should be at least as hard as getting an abortion or voting and having a gun should require at least as much responsiblility as driving a car.
But Republicans in Congress have blocked any sensible gun safety measures which have been proposed and which are supported by vast majorities of Americans: banning assault weapons, high-capacity ammo, bump stocks, ghost guns; universal background checks; close gun show loophole, shut down private and online sales; tax guns and ammo; require owners to register the gun, be licensed, permitted, trained, and have insurance to fund security and victims; require safe storage and make owners whose guns are used criminally liable criminally and civilly; raise the age to purchase to 25 (like a car rental); end immunity for gun retailers and manufacturers.
Now the Supreme Court is poised to take away every state, every locality’s ability to keep its residents safe when it likely nullifies New York State’s right to set criteria for a gun permit.
So since the “sensible” gun safety agenda will go nowhere (again), here’s what has to happen instead:
Teachers throughout the nation, who are now expected to put their lives on the line every day, should go on strike until these protections are put into place, and demand hazard pay.
Teachers should sue gun manufacturers for mental and physical distress; school districts should sue gun manufacturers to recover the cost for the extra security and hazard pay.
Survivors and victims should sue gun manufacturers, law makers and municipalities for failing to keep them safe and for the resulting costs and trauma, and sue the gun seller for aiding and abetting the crime.
Businesses should refuse to do business or move out of states where their employees feel unsafe (not coincidentally are also the states where women are treated like livestock and many of their employees face voter suppression and discrimination). Economic retribution seems to be the only thing that Republicans respond to.
Conventions, conferences, major sporting events should boycott states where their participants will feel uncomfortable, and where the cost of providing security is too onerous (or get sued by victims, also, for putting them in danger).
Internationally, nations should issue a travel advisory against the United States, which will hurt America where it hurts most – the economy. In the past, Uruguay and Venezuela issued such travel advisories; other countries have long-standing cautions including Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, Italy and Japan.
And when the Supreme Court overturns New York’s gun control laws, New York should require every person who currently has a gun or wants one be enlisted in a “well-regulated militia,” which would establish rules for what armaments and ammunition they can possess; be registered, licensed, microstamped, Smart ID’d; obligated for safe storage; pay insurance; require regular training and show up to protect the state (as the Founders’ intended).
“I will call back the legislature to work on a comprehensive package of proposed reforms,” Governor Kathy Hochul said in response to my question at the Little Neck Memorial Day Parade. “New Yorkers should know how seriously we are taking the fight to get guns off our streets.”
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