Since I first started writing this column, I have written three of them on guns and violence —"Violence and Public Safety” in 2013, after Sandy Hook; “America as a Killing Field” in 2017, after the Las Vegas massacre; and “America is Still a Killing Field” in 2019, after Stoneman-Douglas, Atlanta, Pittsburgh and other mass shooting events.
As we grapple with recent mass shootings at Topps Market in Buffalo and at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, the legislative branch of government which has the power to make laws is once again stalled out, leaving it to a small bipartisan group of senators to propose a framework for new legislation that would cover only the mildest, most minimal of controls. On the House of Representatives side, a bill containing a full list of gun controls has been passed, but it was largely a matter of form to get party line votes on the record, acknowledged to be dead before it is sent to the Senate. Everyone up for re-election is careful to sound sorrowful about mass shootings, especially those involving children. But we are not making real progress.
Congress’ most persistent lobbyist, the National Rifle Association (NRA) proceeded to hold its annual conference in Houston just days after the Uvalde mass shootings. On the trade show side, weapons were prominently on display, described as “14 Acres of Guns & Gear.” From a Rolling Stone article:
“Gone are the days when gun sellers pretended to be selling benign 'modern sporting rifles.' At the NRA show, many brands were trading on dark imagery of societal collapse, pitching military-grade hardware to civilians on the theory that they might find themselves in war zone of a future failed state.”
The article describes marketing language used inside the convention as different from what is displayed on the show room floor:
“In flag-waving speeches, the weekend seeking to deflect public rage from the gun industry, NRA executives held up the rank-and-file members of the association as decent and honorable men and women — first responders, former military, even educators — who simply want to preserve a “human right” to self defense. But down on the show room, products catered to the darkest reaches the armed American id. One T-shirt featured a cartoon of a horny-looking 50-caliber round holding up a sign that read: “I wanna be inside you!!”
The NRA is not an unfamiliar entity to Congress, or to those who buy military weapons in anticipation of someone trying to take their guns away, those who have organized in fear the Second Amendment is in danger. Though statistics show us how many mass shooters are under the age of 18, the statistics between military training on assault weapons and organized dark groups is usually unquantifiable. Jake Wood, co-founder of the impressive volunteer veterans’ organization, Team Rubicon, responded after reading a tweet from military.com that veterans make up most of the Proud Boys’ members: “Many veterans are seeking a tribe and a purpose – and that vulnerability can be exploited by malignant cause. Ladies and gentlemen, we gotta clean up our own house.”
We will be hearing more in the January 6th hearings about the complicity from members of Congress in arranging tours of the Capitol for insurrectionists, and perhaps providing even more encouragement than we know about now. Large marches took places yesterday across America to protest guns and violence. But marches are probably not enough to change the minds of members of Congress.
It is an awful fact of the way media directs its attention that mass shootings shine a very bright spotlight on what has been a growing problem in this country, not only in terms of mass shootings, but also in targeted violent acts against persons of color, and in hate speech. We associate these shootings with assault weapons. Technology has made it easy for individuals to create their own narratives of motive, reflecting the dark sources of their conversion to lone wolfs or to members of militia groups who can be called by a former president to assemble and prevent the peaceable transfer of power.
We can see from the first hearing last week just what is at stake for the republic. I expect there will be more to come. Through time, leaders have told us how important it is to vote, and how much more powerful a ballot is than a bullet (Abraham Lincoln). The right to vote was hard fought years after 1776 for all races and for both sexes.
With what lies ahead in an extremely polarized country, please register and vote, both in the primaries and the midterm election. If everyone votes, we stand a fair chance of changing the makeup of Congress to finally vote appropriate gun control measures into law.