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Political Rants

Shouting down the barrel of a gun

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As often happens, I’ve taken at least a week to think about a major event before commenting on it. I resisted writing about this last time around because so many voices were weighing in and I felt I had nothing useful to add. The nation is cycling through the iterative process of absorbing yet another mass shooting and ultimately choosing to do nothing about it. What can I say to make sense of this?

After the Sandy Hook atrocity, when Congress did nothing to restrict the sale and ownership of assault weapons, I felt certain that they never would. Slaughtering young school children with a weapon of war felt like a bridge too far, but it turned out not to be. Now it has happened again, in Uvalde, Texas, right on the heals of a racist massacre in Buffalo, NY, and the Senate has gone on break. Schumer may attempt a demonstration vote in a couple of weeks – that’s their response. What the burning fuck?

Gun-shy good guys

The debate about whether or not we should restrict gun ownership is over, frankly. If this massacre in Texas proves nothing else, it has certainly demonstrated this much. The Uvalde school district had all the resources it was supposed to have to prevent this sort of thing. It did active shooter drills, created its own police force, established a SWAT team that practiced at the school – none of this amounted to shit. The model the right and the NRA has been advancing for the last thirty years is an abject failure.

This is true even at the level of “good guy with a gun” vs. “bad guy with a gun”. In this case, at least nineteen good guys with guns stood in the hallway while the shooter did his work. Hard to criticize their reluctance – who wants to be the first to walk through that door? Let’s face it – consumer fire arms are now so powerful that even the cops are afraid of them to the point of inaction. If you’re a law-and-order Republican, why the hell doesn’t this bother you?

Prohibitive cost as an accessory

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the Second Amendment and some possible ways around its application. That was in response to Buffalo. Now, with this latest school shooting, I’m convinced that we need to push for positive change wherever and however government will accommodate it. If we don’t have the votes to pass an assault weapons ban / buy-back program at the federal level, we need to do two things: (1) get more votes in Congress, and (2) experiment at the state and local levels, where possible.

One thing that might be worth trying is the application of legal liability. It’s possible that something like this could pass in states like New York or California. Senator Kevin Parker introduced a piece of legislation to this effect in the NY State Senate about five years ago. This law would require any gun owner in New York state to carry $1 million in liability coverage. That sounds like a splendid idea, particularly with respect to AR-15s and other high-powered killer rifles. My vote would be to raise the coverage required in accordance with the deadliness of the weapon.

Texas v. Texas

Then there’s that other kind of legal liability – the kind envisioned by Texas lawmakers when they passed Senate Bill 8 last year restricting abortion. Empowering citizens to sue gun owners sounds like a ripping idea, particularly since the Supreme Court seems unwilling to touch this legal vigilante brand of legislation with a ten foot pole. Can we pass a bill that would empower citizens of New York to sue anyone who owns an AR-15? How about suing the manufacturers of AR-15s?

Hey …. when the right hands you the tools to blow them to hell, you may as well use them.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Fire one.

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Last Friday, I thought there had been two mass shootings in a single week. Michael Moore’s podcast Rumble set me straight on this. Based on law enforcement’s definition of a mass shooting – four or more victims – there were seven that week. As I said in my last post, this is nuts. We’ve become a nation of people waiting to be shot. For the more than 80 percent of us who do not own firearms of any sort, that’s a pretty nerve-wracking place to be. It’s not like there’s a safe place. Shootings happen in schools, movie theaters, grocery stores, outdoor concerts, restaurants, you name it. Anyplace a gunman can enter, so too can the gun, and like that Chekhovian cliche, if there’s a gun in the first act, you know that someone will be shot by the end of the play. So the operative question is, how do we get the gun out of the first act? If we’re depending on Congress to answer that question, it’s going to be a long play.

I will admit, I thought for certain that Sandy Hook would have been sufficient to put gun control over the edge. A hideous massacre of young school children – that had to be enough to shock the conscience of a nation. Perhaps …. only not this nation. Of course, Obama was president, the House was in Republican hands, and the Senate – while still run by a significant Democratic majority – was tied up in knots by its fealty to the modern version of the filibuster. Even the small-bore gun law they proposed could not make it through, and ultimately it was dropped. Now we live in a post-Heller gun-owners paradise, in which a particularly expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment – one that implies a personal right to gun ownership – rules the day. I have to think that even if we were to get meaningful gun measures through Congress and signed by the president, the reactionary U.S. Supreme Court might well knock them down.

There are some who defend this notion of the Second Amendment. People like Joe Scarborough are fond of saying that the amendment “says what it says” – a kind of shorthand textualist approach. The trouble is, they don’t seem to know what the amendment says. (Scarborough in fact affected to read it from memory on his show last week, and added in a few terms not found in the original.) For one thing, they all seem to ignore the dependent clause at the beginning of the text; the part about the well-regulated militia. If you’re a strict textualist, shouldn’t that, too, be considered sacrosanct? But setting that aside for a moment, the fact is that this is clearly not an unlimited right – we do, in fact, limit our interpretation of the Second Amendment, like we do with every other text. The word “gun” appears nowhere in the document. It uses the term “arms”, which we interpret narrowly as meaning “guns”. I think most people agree that there is no constitutional right to own chemical or nuclear weapons, even though those are “arms”. I suppose a bazooka could be considered a kind of “gun”, and yet we disallow ownership of those under the Second Amendment. (At least, as of now.)

I guess what I’m getting at is that we are all potential victims of semantics. If we could limit our interpretation of “arms” to our Founding Fathers’ use of the term, Americans might have a limited right to own flintlocks and other muzzle-loaders. I think I could live with that kind of originalism. How about you?

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.