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
Of course, as police chiefs all over Texas and, really, across the nation know, the effect of this broad policy will be the precise opposite of what Trump, Sessions, and Abbott claim. It doesn’t take a criminologist to understand how this works. The police don’t have omniscience; they rely on people who see something to say something, as the slogan goes. Without the cooperation of people in the community, they can’t effectively do their jobs. Undocumented aliens are not going to step forward if they believe that police will detain them because of their immigration status. The Texas Governor can assure them all he wants that if they haven’t committed a crime they have nothing to fear – that obviously counts for nothing. The police would be severely constrained by this law. If they don’t report undocumented individuals to ICE, they can be fined and even prosecuted. So what the hell is Abbott talking about?
TPP / MAI – It’s been a full court press on the Trans Pacific Partnership fast-track authority issue currently facing the House of Representatives. As it happens, 
Mess with Texas. I imagine you’ve heard by now that the great state of Texas is under threat of invasion and the imposition of marshal law by a socialist-slave U.S. military. You’ve heard, that is, if you spend most of your free time on paranoid right-wing nut-job web sites. This fantasy, rooted in the kind of conspiratorial blather that has animated the right since Obama’s election and before (remember Ruby Ridge?), is all the more bizarre because it is taking hold in a state that prides itself as being the home of many, many U.S. military personnel. All that flag-waving, and still Governor Greg Abbott feels it necessary to task his national guard with observing the upcoming special forces exercises. Freakish. Amazingly, these people think climate change is some elaborate conspiracy theory.
Texan was in the White House – the headline went something like “Bush to U.S. Businesses: Create Millions of Shitty Jobs.” I think it’s kind of a Texas thing, because many of those great Texas jobs that are not either in government or in the extractive industries are of the low-wage, no benefits, no security type. Anyway, here is what the governor had to say: