Two notorious massacres in less than a week. After a year of quarantine, now we are to go back to massacres as the public health epidemic du jour.
People speak of the mental health problems created by the pandemic, but now again, as people make their way back to public settings, the whole of society is forced to live with the daily terror of random carnage. Will it happen to you or your loved one as you innocently go to the grocery, a movie, church, school, a concert? You live at the whim of an AR-15- wielding sociopath whose “right” to have a weapon of mass destruction outranks your right to live.
Racism. Misogyny. COVID fatigue. Mental illness. “A really bad day.” I really don’t care about the motivation. The common denominator to America’s gun violence epidemic is the ease with which murderers, victimizers, terrorists, insurrectionists, sociopaths can obtain weapons of mass destruction.
There is absolutely no justification – not the Second amendment or any of the other lame rationales – for America being awash in guns (over 400 million firearms in civilian hands) and gun violence at epidemic proportions. More shameful than the fact that 100 people are killed every day is the fact there is more than one massacre every day.
In 2020, as though the pandemic weren’t already too much to bear and despite the fact people were not able to gather en masse in public settings, gun violence rose dramatically: 578 mass shootings as of Nov. 26, 2020, according to the Gun Violence Archive, significantly more than the 417 mass shootings recorded for all of 2019.
Ever since the 10-year ban on assault weapons expired in 2004, mass shootings have continued to increase year over year in frequency, fatalities and injuries in the United States, but 2020 has been far worse than “usual.”
Among the reasons cited: COVID paranoia prompted sales of 1.3 million handguns and 700,000 rifles and shotguns as of August 2020, 60 percent more than average. (https://theconversation.com/mass-shootings-in-the-us-have-risen-sharply-in-2020-why-150981)
The rise of armed white supremacist groups, their sense of “victimhood” and “duty” to counter the protests for criminal justice validated and encouraged by President Trump (“Liberate Michigan”) and his enablers provided the match to the explosion in violence.
Besides mass shootings that are likely to accelerate because of the metastasizing of domestic terror groups, domestic violence is also increasing with the ready availability of guns.
“Intimate partner violence and guns are linked,” writes Everytown, a nonprofit organization supporting smart gun policies. “Monthly, 53 women are shot and killed by a partner. Access to a gun makes it five times more likely that an abusive partner will kill his female victim.”
“Firearms are used to control, terrorize and intimidate victims and survivors of domestic violence,” reports the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence: 4.5 million American women alive today have been threatened by intimate partners with firearms, while one million have been shot or shot at by their abusers. “Firearms are the weapon of choice for domestic violence homicides,” it says. https://assets.speakcdn.com/assets/2497/guns_and_dv0.pdf
The guns-everywhere, massacres-be-damned lobby likes to paint the quaint picture of a father teaching his son how to hunt. How sweet. But during the House debate on universal background checks, Congresswoman Victoria Spartz (R-Indiana) made clear what the obsession with guns really is about: “We need the Second Amendment to protect against tyranny,” A gun, she said, “protects all the others [rights].” Not voting. Guns.
“For decades, the gun lobby has peddled the far right’s dangerous conspiracy theories in order to further their ‘guns everywhere’ agenda,” writes Rob Wilcox, deputy director of Policy and Strategy for Everytown for Gun Safety. “The NRA has consistently disregarded public safety and promoted lax gun laws that allow dangerous extremists to arm themselves and open carry firearms at state capitols, like in Michigan, and at counter protests, like in Kenosha. Make no mistake, this anti-democracy armed extremism we are seeing is gun violence.”
President Biden, on the third anniversary of the Parkland school massacre, said, “Today, I am calling on Congress to enact common-sense gun law reforms, including requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets. We owe it to all those we’ve lost and to all those left behind to grieve to make a change. The time to act is now.”
But seeing the House, Senate and White House in Democratic control, showing no appetite for Republican obstruction of common-sense gun regulations, Republicans in state houses are not just racing to enact voter suppression and anti-abortion laws while easing access to guns. Legislation in at least a dozen states would pre-emptively nullify any new federal restrictions, such as banning assault weapons or high-capacity ammunition. Arizona would make it a crime for local police officers to enforce federal gun laws and Gov. Greg (“No Masks”) Abbott is calling for Texas to become a “Second Amendment sanctuary”. https://www.aol.com/news/gop-state-lawmakers-seek-nullifying-140310144-150756242.html)
In between the slaying of eight in Atlanta, including six Asian women at three spas, and the 10 in a Boulder grocery store, including a police officer, Colorado State District Court Judge Andrew Hartman overturned Boulder’s ban on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines, which the city passed in 2018 after the Parkland, Fla., school massacre, as conflicting with state law.
So far, the hysteria of the pro-gun violence lobby is aimed at the comparatively benign and extremely popular regulations to make background checks universal and close the Charleston loophole that allows gun sales to proceed without a completed background check after three business days, which last year resulted in thousands of guns being sold to otherwise prohibited purchasers.
But that is far from enough.
I’m almost as sick and tired of “thoughts and prayers” as I am of rationales like racism, xenophobia, misogyny, mental illness and especially “a bad day” to excuse gun violence, as well as “this crime wouldn’t have been prevented by this particular gun reform like universal background checks” to nullify regulation. The singular common denominator to all these tragedies is the ease of obtaining and wielding weapons of mass destruction and high-capacity ammo clips. Eradicating the underlying causes will take years and require cultural change.
We need to make our communities safe now.
Pass sensible gun regulation, including universal background checks, and restore the ban on assault weapons and high-capacity ammo clips. End the filibuster.
