Republicans don’t care if guns keep killing people
It doesn’t matter to them, as long as the constituents are satisfied…
It’s become an ostensibly endless iniquity — this continuous destructive recurrence of mass murders with guns — and our Republican representatives (both populists and moderate Republicans) continue to resist reforming the current laws. Outwardly entrenched in their creed, Republicans only want to give in to their conservative-based constituents, who habitually chant the manta: Democrats are coming for our guns.
These same constituents repeatedly let Republicans off the hook because they have this intrinsic fascination to “bear arms.” What’s even more pitiable about these folks is they don’t even need to own a gun. I have a distinct feeling so many of them do it out of defiance. Thus, we have a categorial discrepancy: the loony toons and the sanctimonious. This is a very dangerous revelation, though a revelation we’ve known about for a long time. Republicans just don’t want to do anything about it. Due to that indifference, we will see more outlandish and misguided individuals given this “free rein” to conspire malevolently.
In a piece in the Washington Post this week, I found it very revealing to see just how futile the Republican strategy of ignoring mass shootings will play out — considering they have lost the majority.
The problem is the Republican Party, which on this issue has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Rifle Association. The Onion accurately captured its ethos in a headline that it keeps running after mass shootings: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” The only Republican response is “thoughts and prayers.” Sorry, we need more than that.
The House just passed two popular pieces of gun legislation that would close existing loopholes. One bill would extend the amount of time the FBI has to conduct background checks on gun buyers. The other would require background checks for gun sales done privately or at gun shows. But almost no Republicans voted for these measures (one of the bills had eight GOP votes, the other two), and they have no chance of passage in the Senate unless Democrats curb or abolish the filibuster. (Boot, WAPO, 3/23/21).
This is what I have a hard time with. If the House has effectively worked on reforming gun legislation, then why can’t the Senate offer any direction on how to reform it as well? Consider what Boot speaks to: thoughts and prayers are not good enough. Since when is one of the greatest countries in the world reduced to this lamentable notion? I’d even take a step further and point to the fact that there might be more uncompromising members in the House than the Senate.
Although covid-19 deaths dwarfed gun deaths last year, gun violence increased. A survey of 34 large U.S. cities found a 30 percent increase in homicides last year — and more than 70 percent of homicides in the United States involve a gun. (The comparable figure for England and Wales, which have strict gun control laws, is 3 percent.) Guns are responsible for even more suicides than murders. The Gun Violence Archive reports that all gun-related deaths in 2020 totaled 43,536 — a horrific figure that would not be considered normal or acceptable in any other high-income country.
The one category of gun violence that actually declined in 2020 was mass shootings after the two worst years on record. But even that trend is now changing for the worse. Last week, a gunman armed with a 9mm handgun that he had purchased just hours before his rampage killed eight people at three spas in the Atlanta area. Then, on Monday, a gunman, who police told CNN and the Denver Post was armed with a rifle, killed 10 people at a Boulder, Colo., supermarket.
No other industrialized nation has gun violence at anywhere close to these levels. Our rate of firearm homicides (based on figures from 2012) is nearly six times Canada’s, nearly 16 times Germany’s and more than 21 times Australia’s. It’s not that the United States has a higher crime rate in general; our rates of property crime are pretty similar to Western Europe’s. But we have a much higher rate of lethal violence because we have a much higher rate of gun ownership. (Boot, WAPO, 3/23/21).
Isn’t this enough to say, what’s going on here? Even during a pandemic that has killed nearly 600,000 people, we lost an additional 50K to gun-related deaths? How indefensible. We recurrently flaunt our accomplishments over the global community, but we can’t even develop a way to protect our citizens from gun-related deaths; we can’t learn to make guns harder to obtain.
While I would prefer guns were merely abolished, that only law enforcement and the military should be allowed to have them, I do understand that will never happen in this country. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make them harder to acquire, and that we should put much more strict laws in place for those who acquire them illegally. The Republicans who love incarcerating people for drug-related offenses are quick to shrug their shoulders on gun laws.
In another piece in the Washington Post, Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent highlight the reforms the House was attempting to move forward:
It just so happens that less than two weeks ago the House passed two bills to require background checks on all gun sales transfers and to create an expanded 10-day review of gun sales. Yet both faced nearly lockstep Republican opposition and will inevitably disappear into the black hole of the GOP Senate filibuster.
At a previously scheduled Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday on this very subject, Republicans were livid at the mere suggestion that we might do something about the thousands of Americans killed with guns every year.
“Every time there’s a shooting, we play this ridiculous theater where this committee gets together and proposes a bunch of laws that would do nothing to stop these murders,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). (Waldman and Sargent, WAPO, 3/23/21).
What’s so wrong with this? Is it not acceptable that we properly screen people who are trying to purchase firearms? For the majority, the murderers who have conspired to these mass shooting atrocities seemingly purchase their firearms before the act. Doesn’t it seem like a reasonable request from Congress to expand the review of gun sales, so that these murderers are not given an easy path? Republicans are ascertaining, yet again, that they find their constituents' gratification with quick and sloppy approvals for firearms the right way to handle gun control.
It’s an unpretentious question: even if it took longer for the responsible gun owners to be approved because the process is more thorough and professional, then what’s the concern? Why the rush? All of it seems very arbitrary. When things are made into subjective and politically constructed grievances, then the entire process is impaired. Republicans should wake-up, realize their progressive colleagues don’t want to keep waking up in a country that shows another headline of a mass murderer shooting up a group of innocent people. If something doesn’t change soon, the U.S. is at risk, again, of falling behind the global community…
Works Cited:
1. Boot, Max. “Republicans want to make voting hard and gun ownership easy.” March 23, 2021. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/23/how-many-more-have-die-before-gop-rethinks-its-opposition-gun-control/. Accessed March 24, 2021.
2. Waldman, Paul and Sargent, Greg. “Is this time different? The latest GOP lunacy on guns demands a tougher response.” March 23, 2021. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/23/is-this-time-different-latest-gop-lunacy-guns-demands-tougher-response/. Accessed March 24, 2021.
