A young poet sums it up in just two sentences:
It takes a monster to kill children. But to watch monsters kill children again and again and do nothing isn’t just insanity—it’s inhumanity.
— Amanda Gorman (@TheAmandaGorman) May 24, 2022
The U.S. Senate as currently configured is the obstacle to a solution, as usual. Pick your existential crisis — voting rights, women’s bodily autonomy, police reform, LGBTQ equality, climate change, tax reform, gun safety, whatever: the U.S. Senate is the cracked saucer where desperately needed legislation drains away.
Every Senate Republican will oppose doing anything to stop the next monster who will use a battlefield weapon to mow down schoolchildren, grocery shoppers, concert goers, movie viewers, etc. At least one but probably two Democrats will help them make sure nothing is done.
According to PawPaw Blacklung, letting a simple majority in the Senate pass legislation is “total insanity,” but apparently ongoing intolerable carnage is just the price we have to pay to maintain the glory that is the fucking filibuster.
Goddamn, I hate these people. All of them who refuse to address this, for whatever reason. I despise them jointly and severally.
This guy makes a good point:
Ten days ago it took the Senate about twenty minutes to unanimously pass a bill extending security protection to the family members of Supreme Court justices when it looked like a house might be picketed.
— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) May 25, 2022
Further, he said it’s all about which families are worth protecting, and he’s 100% correct. Brett Kavanaugh’s family is. The families in Uvalde, Texas aren’t. Yours and mine aren’t either.
I don’t know what to do with the anger and sadness anymore.
Donate, volunteer, organize — blah blah blah — that’s how we’re supposed to channel our rage and despair. And it’s true, but it’s also maddening that citizens are asked to bang our heads against a brick wall for decades in an attempt to fix a fucking problem with known fucking solutions.
That said, citizen-driven action is the only thing I’ve ever seen work on this problem, ever, even if it worked just a little bit, at the margins. In the aftermath of the 2018 Parkland massacre, the hard-right governor of Florida and the hard-right statehouse passed a meaningful gun safety law.
It wasn’t enough. In fact, it was pathetically inadequate as a response to the horror it was conceived to address. But it wasn’t nothing either.
Under pressure from the citizens of this state, the Florida GOP prized its nuts from the iron grip of NRA lobbyist-sociopath Marion Hammer long enough to raise the age to purchase a gun from 18 to 21, impose a three-day waiting period, ban bump-stocks and enact a “red flag” law that has been used thousands of times since to remove guns from dangerous people.
Maybe that’s the only way anything gets done. Focus on your state, since the U.S. Senate is as worthless as teats on a boar, and President Biden has done all he can through executive action.
If the traumatized teens from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School could marshal public opinion and pressure Rick “Bat Boy” Scott and the assemblage of drooling half-wits who make up the majority of the Florida statehouse to enact gun safety laws, by God, even Texas isn’t off the table.
While it’s true that a citizens’ initiative strategy generally requires a horrific massacre to get the ball rolling in your state, chances are, you won’t have to wait long. The monsters are already here.
A lot of blue states passes gun measures because states aren’t burdened by the filibuster.
Voting Dem by itself will not solve all of our problems, but it is a precondition to solving all of our problems. Despite the limited success in Florida after Parkland, good people have very little influence over GOP politicians.
Way back when I lived in Virginia the legislature at one time passed a law whereby citizens could only buy one firearm per month. Naturally the gun nuts went insane and as soon as the Republicans came back into power the law was repealed.
“A lot of blue states passes gun measures because states aren’t burdened by the filibuster.”
Yup. And, by and large, it works: NYS has some of the strongest gun laws in the country, and very few mass shootings.
Even chipping away at the margins is good. We’re not going to win it all, but winning some means life or death for the people involved. Every time that a red flag law keeps a gun out of an abuser’s mitts, that’s one more woman not murdered by her ex. For her, that’s huge.
Just got off the phone from ranting and ultimately crying to a staffer in Grassley’s office. Freedom without responsibility is toddler status and an adolescent dream of denial. I try to drip drip drip my deaf senators but they only move to the music of money.
David Hogg takes shit on a daily basis from gun nuts on Twitter, yet he keeps on persevering.
Things fly by so fast on social media that I already can’t retrieve the thread, but it made sense to me. It said, in effect, decades of erosion of governmental power, a project that really got rolling under Reagan (so, 40 years now), ends up fueling this legitimate sense of powerlessness.
And when that powerlessness gets to things like repeated mass shootings of children, we either just give up our agency, or – for some – even welcome authoritarianism because it promises to “get shit done.”
That authoritarianism sucks at accomplishment, because it is nearly universally a set up for corruption and self-dealing is a lesson to be learned too late.
I honestly don’t know what to do at this moment. My hope is that exhorting Schumer et al to get off the frunking stick and move legislation (doomed as it may appear) is part of a multi-step battle to heighten contrasts and give voters a sense that Dems will fight.
But being angry at Dem leadership can look like eating our own. Is it infighting, or a righteous push to engage in necessary political warfare. I want it to be the latter.
@oldster: I read somewhere Florida’s red flag law has been used 5K times. It has probably saved hundreds if not thousands of lives, and that’s not nothing. Of course, the NRA has been suing the state for the past four years to try to repeal every measure passed. But so far, they’ve lost.
@Betty Cracker
Ali Zaslav
@alizaslav
In interviews with
@mkraju
, Florida GOP Sens. Marco Rubio & Rick Scott defended the need for AR-15s and semi-automatic weapons, and dismissed calls for expanded background checks
@oldster: “NYS has some of the strongest gun laws in the country, and very few mass shootings.”
Yeah, but as we found out last week, it doesn’t take much to simply drive over to Ohio or something to buy an extended mag for your AR-15 and let it rip at a local supermarket. Unless we have federal action, the state with the strictest gun law will always be at the mercy of the one with the loosest.
@Jonas:
State-level laws do accomplish something. They aren’t as useful for preventing people who want to stage a massacre, but they are pretty good for reducing the total number of guns around. That’s still very useful because most gun deaths aren’t from massacres or any kind of premeditated crime. They’re from the kind of spontaneous decision that having a gun around makes massively worse, so reducing the number of guns is highly effective at reducing the number of gun deaths.
@oldster: “Even chipping away at the margins is good.”
I think chipping away at the margins is the only way it can work. We’ll need a sustained, decades-long (generations-long?) effort for things to change significantly, in part because it took that long to get to where we are now.
The dramatic changes other countries have taken (see a Post article from about a year ago that’s on their front page today) are of a different scale. For example, the Australian federal government restricted gun ownership and bought back 650,000 firearms, which was impressive and well worthwhile.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/03/23/mass-shootings-response-other-countries-gun-laws/
Here in the U.S. we have almost 400 million guns owned by 100 million people, many of them fanatical about their weapons. Even if by some miracle there were federal and state laws passed to reduce that number, it will take a very, very long time for enforcement to have an impact. Starting now, even if we don’t see results, is the best we can do.
@jonas. State action won’t solve everything. Federal action won’t solve everything. If regulations make it harder for murderers, that a good thing. If having to go out of state to buy things prevents one shot up child, it helped. We need to look for things we can do even if it is at the margins. We also need to work on the bigger things. More seats in the Senate. Court reform. We have a fucking majority in the country on this issue (just like we do on reproductive choice). Let’s do something with it. Vote. Work the phones. Donate.
Since schools* don’t cause school shooters why do schools have to fix the problem?
*substitute grocery stores etc as needed.
@JPL: I remember when that shit-stain Rubio showed up at a CNN town hall after Parkland and scoffed incredulously at the notion that AR-15s should be banned because “they’re one of the most popular guns in Florida.” Boy did he not read the room. Got booed loudly.
There’s a great synopsis of the historical meaning of the Second Amendment at the Brennan Center, called ‘How the NRA Rewrote the Second Amendment.’
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/how-nra-rewrote-second-amendment
The whole article is worth reading, but below are (to me) the most important quotes. It turns out that back in the 1700s, the phrase ‘keep and bear arms’ exclusively referred to military service:
‘[State] militias were the product of a world of civic duty and governmental compulsion utterly alien to us today. Every white man age 16 to 60 was enrolled. He was actually required to own—and bring—a musket or other military weapon. ….
“At the time, Americans expected to be able to own guns, a legacy of English common law and rights. But the overwhelming use of the phrase ‘bear arms’ in those days referred to military activities. ….
“the original version [of the Second Amendment] passed by the House included a conscientious objector provision[, i.e.,] … “no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.”
“[F]or two centuries … courts overwhelmingly upheld these [gun] restrictions. Gun rights and gun control were seen as going hand in hand. Four times between 1876 and 1939, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to rule that the Second Amendment protected individual gun ownership outside the context of a militia. As the Tennessee Supreme Court put it in 1840, ‘A man in the pursuit of deer, elk, and buffaloes might carry his rifle every day for forty years, and yet it would never be said of him that he had borne arms; much less could it be said that a private citizen bears arms because he has a dirk or pistol concealed under his clothes, or a spear in a cane.’ ”
As I pointed out yesterday, if the conservatives on the Supreme Court approached the 2nd Amendment the same way they are approaching abortion, only this 18th century interpretation would prevail.
@RSA
Much agreed, this is all the result of a multi decade effort and it will take a multi decade effort after to turn it back. We’ll have to take the wins where we can get them and not be stupid to refuse those that only marginally make things better.
I think the gun buyback will be a big piece of this, it won’t be the start. It will start with us getting better background checks. We can then start to nibble around extended magazines and hopefully after time we can get the assault ban back. After that, it would be a good time to push the buyback, because any assault ban will most definitely grandfather older assault guns.
Steve Inskeep
@NPRinskeep
· 5h
The US has 87,498 elementary schools. If the answer is “armed guards,” each needs enough trained and armed to face a gunman in body armor. Say, four? Then 349,992, more than the army that occupied Iraq. That’s not for or against the idea; just what it is. ”
Or, we could just say that you have to be 21 to buy a gun. A completely reasonable regulation that would cost the public nothing and might help.
We’re all paying for gun nuts. We pay and pay and pay. Lives lost, hundreds of millions spent “hardening schools” all so that a small minority of gun nuts don’t have to be even slightly inconvenienced.
Madness. We’re hostages.
The US has 87,498 elementary schools. If the answer is “armed guards,”
Have any wingnuts made death threats against Amanda Gorman yet? I wouldn’t be surprised. Look at what happened with Dr. Anthony Fauci, who had to hire security to guard his family during a pandemic that the far right insisted was a hoax.
Still hoping the gun-toting scum that plan to party in Houston this Friday have second thoughts.
realbtl May 25, 2022 at 1:04 PM
Since schools* don’t cause school shooters why do schools have to fix the problem?
The United States dumps every problem they can’t or won’t solve on public schools.
Imagine if schools could just be schools instead of acting as the entire safety net for every problem in this country?
Abbott just came on my TV and fortunately the remote was nearby. Yesterday he made a point of saying the shooter had a handgun and then later on mentioned a rifle.
He signed a f..king bill that allowed the shooter to walk into a gun store and by weapons of war.
Will said, “this is all the result of a multi decade effort and it will take a multi decade effort after to turn it back.” I don’t know that that’s necessarily true, and saying it as if it is plainly true can be discouraging. Yes, it MIGHT take a multi-decade effort to get back to some semblance of sanity, but it doesn’t have to. Sensible gun control is a position held by the vast, vast majority of Americans. Even in red states, there are gun control measures that have majority support. If everyone, EVERYONE, sickened by this routine carnage voted like they were, we could turn this around nationwide in the midterms. No, we can’t get a 60 vote majority in the Senate, but we can get a 50+ majority that is enough to get rid of the filibuster. It would take a mighty upheaval from coast to coast, but we’ve got the public on our side, and a Republican party acting like they’ll never have to face the voters again and are free to indulge in their most fascist fantasies. I’m not saying that it will happen, but it could happen, if we can just convince the public sickened by the war on women and the war on children that they don’t have to put up with it anymore. And telling people ‘this will take decades’ could cause some people to just give up.
@Kay The United States dumps every problem they can’t or won’t solve on public schools.
As a retired child/ado therapist tell me about it. Local school had an “almost teen shooter” and hired my wife with similar credentials in the aftermath. 1.5 years later things calmed down so her position was merged with an existing non-mental health credentialed teacher.
And all schools will keep their armed force forever? Right. //
@JoyceH. I think we have to work on two tracks. One track is things we can do with just few more good legislators. Some of this will only be actions on the margins. Worth it because it will save lives. And any lives saved are a unqualified good thing. The other track is to wind down the crazy that the right has stoked for decades. That will take longer, but is necessary in the long run.
I just hate seeing this same cycle like so many other things – over and over again. There is going to be a lot of brouhaha, and the GOP will say some shit and they’ll delay and eventually the American public forgets all about. Then something happens and it starts up again, the same conversations, the same finger pointing – we’ll soon have a 10 year anniversary of Sandy Hook. We’ve done nothing since.
Yet, we need to persevere. It seems that it is becoming more and more imperative that we gain control of the Senate completely and totally.
Beto O’Rourke interrupted Gov. Abbott’s press conference a little while ago and said the killings are on Abbott because he made the choice to do nothing after previous massacres, or something along those lines. The corpulent white men surrounding Abbott shouted in outrage, so it was hard to hear in the clip I heard. Go Beto!
@ Omnes: “The other track is to wind down the crazy that the right has stoked for decades. That will take longer, but is necessary in the long run.”
I think we need to remove their drug. Fox News Channel. Yes, there are certainly other sources of the ugly, but Fox is the most prevalent, has a fig leaf it does not deserve, and attracts a mass audience. A lot of whom will not admit they get their ideas from there, but they do.
Joseph Goebbels could only dream of what we allow Rupert Murdoch to do.
Other nations do not allow this brainwashing product. We should not either. You cannot replace brainwashing with “better information.” You need to remove the source, and then deprogram.
Between the January 6th hearings coming up, a fresh classroom full of dead schoolkids, and Roe and other “rights” that derived from the “Right to privacy” under attack, I think we could see some serious change and attitude adjustment in the coming months.
Get the Republicans on the ropes. And then take them out. Rhetorically and electorally. They are a minority view. Make that painfully clear.
@JoyceH: We got where we are because of a decades long, well funded, PR campaign by the gun lobby. It’ll take just as long to deprogram people.
It used to be a guy carrying a gun in public was assumed to be up to no good. Then came conceal-carry laws that promised crime reduction, so people with guns in public became accepted. Now gun laws are moving so anyone can carry a gun anywhere, with no training and a large part of the public accepts this as the way things always were or some such other irrational reasoning.
The battle isn’t just over laws, but over public perception of what’s acceptable.
Does the constitution grant the right to own body armor? Why is it allowed to be sold to civilians? What purpose does it have?
@Elizabelle:
“They are a minority view. Make that painfully clear.”
The problem we face is they are not a minority view in enough parts of this country. In too many places, Republicans represent the views of the overwhelming majority of voters. Those places aren’t as heavily populated as CA or NYC, but they still send Representatives to the House and Senators to the Senate.
Expanding seats in the House might help reduce the influence of rural areas, but that doesn’t seem like anyone in power has the desire to try it.
The first step is to make Manchin and Sinema superfluous. End the filibuster and then pass the needed legislation. Unfortunately, this puts any potentially meaningful change off for at least the next 8 months. How many more victims will be created in that void?
@Elizabelle. I agree that there are issues on which we have the high ground that will be in play this fall. I think our chances are a lot better than the polls indicate.
THIS is what a pro-life crowd sounds like.
Betty
I’m sorry but I think teats on a boar have far more usefulness than any rethuglican.
They don’t cause death and destruction of life itself, so dramatically better than rethuglicans.
We have learned about this most recent shooter’s screwed up life and family. He also happened to be Latino. I want to know when we are going to get the same detail about the Buffalo shooter – a white supremacist. What’s the story on HIS life and family. Looks like that is not being discussed as contributing to his outcome. Petty I know, but I want to know about that white killer and his clan.
@ gene108 ” Republicans represent the views of the overwhelming majority of voters.”
I don’t agree, you go listen to what they are saying the are repeating conservative slogans but clearly don’t believe it. They certainly can’t argue their positions and when cornered they lash out in personal attacks. The last day they’ve been frothing because of the Cognitive Dissonance in their head between “we must save the babies, at all costs” and “we must allow child murder, at all costs” They are more like sleep walking and at some point they will wake up they are living in a land of BS, so all this stuff is moving them towards that moment.
For one thing, people never want to admit they got their “news” from Fox News.
They … read and see all kinds of news. Not.
A lot of this is an implanted, artificial, and ugly view of the world, and, removed from the constant manipulation, we might have a chance to get past it.
I don’t see how you have a democracy, which depends on an educated (or educable!) public and Fox News, which exists to polarize and radicalize.
Why are we all victims to the Rupert Murdochs and the NRAs? Other countries do not allow this.
Mart May 25, 2022 at 2:23 PM
“Does the constitution grant the right to own body armor? Why is it allowed to be sold to civilians? What purpose does it have?”
.
It’s purpose will be to protect us from the gun bullets, silly. In fact, I’m beginning to think we should all be issued heavy-duty, combat ready body armor, free of charge, just in case we’re randomly attacked by gun bullets.
But alas, the Repubs will never go for another “Democrat handout”. Oh well, back to the public safety drawing board.
Compare and contrast:
Just catching a clip of Stephen Colbert last night. His take on the Georgia GOP gubernatorial primary as a proxy war (“Otto von Skidmark” aka TFFG vs. Pence): “There are very fine people on neither side.”
Why is my comment being moderated?
@Ellie
The first comment on this site has to be manually approved before any comments will show up. I just approved your first and second comments, so you be all good now.
I see there are two new posts up, so this is probably a dead thread, but the NYT says that the gunman was in the school for
ONE WHOLE HOUR before border agents were able to kill him.
Let’s see, want to bet that the border is about an hour away from Uvalde?
Just called and vented at Ron Johnson’s voicemail. It won’t change anything, but it is always nice to tell him he disgusts me.
It took right-wing lunatics decades to get where they are, but don’t expect it to take nearly as long to reverse it. They’ve been fighting the tide, while we’re working with the tide. The polls show it, particularly in their ever-shrinking numbers among younger people. The snapback from their disconnection from public opinion will be massive and fast.
It may involve the collapse of the US government, because the undemocratic, malapportioned US Senate is simply intolerable — an undemocratic oligarchy — but once that’s out of the way, it’ll go very fast. The fake supreme court is no longer considered legit by most lawyers, let alone people in general; next step is for the US Senate to be considered illegitimate by people in general, and then the blockers to reform are out of the way.
The French Revolution’s government replaced hundreds of years of feudal law overnight; replaced the judicial system, the legislature, the tax system, the administration, the entire law code, reorganized all the borders (replacing provinces with departments), and did massive land redistribution, as well as changing the legal status of women, and abolishing slavery. Things changed FAST. The Russian Revolution was only slightly less extreme; there were massive societal changes in about 5 years. Even the incremental-change UK had massive changes throughout the 1830s.
When reactionary forces have been trying to hold back the tide, things can change very fast once they’re ousted.
@Nathanael: “It may involve the collapse of the US government… The French Revolution’s government replaced hundreds of years of feudal law overnight…”
I think most of us would prefer to avoid a Reign of Terror.
@Betty Cracker (dead thread, but…). Oh, yeah. Beto! And those self-righteous schmucks had the utter … gall? I don’t have a strong enough word) to say how dare you bring in politics at a time like this!