Editor’s note: Walt Amses is a writer and former educator who lives in Calais.
[I]magine if the Las Vegas shooter had both a silencer and armor-piercing bullets in addition to his assault weapons that were easily modified to full automatic. What if he shot at jet fuel tanks adjacent to the concert on which he visited his carnage? An explosion would have more than likely killed hundreds. Had the police and first responders not been able to tell where the shots were coming from, the body count would have exponentially increased.
Unthinkable, right? But, in fact, had he postponed his massacre for a few months, a bill heading toward congressional approval would have legalized those precise items, for which there is absolutely no justification, apart from making money for weapons manufacturers, which has become a priority since Election Day, largely because Donald Trump offers zero threat of rational gun control. In light of the president’s position, gun sales have dropped substantially, depriving the firearms industry of the cash flow they desperately need to influence legislation.
The National Rifle Association and its supporters would have it that right now is an awful, insensitive time to discuss gun control and are quick to blame any such move toward sanity as Democrats and the left “politicizing” a tragedy to advance their own selfish agenda. Let’s spend a minute or two unpacking that self-serving bit of mythology.
First of all, there is absolutely no time as far as the GOP is concerned to discuss gun control; in fact, they’ve actually passed laws against it, just as they have essentially made their benefactors in the arms industry immune from any accountability regarding their deadly inventory.
Consider this: The response from Republicans after the worst mass shooting in the history of the country that killed at least 59 people and wounded over 500 was to put off (not cancel) a vote on the silencer grift: the effort to make it easier to acquire these devices, ostensibly to minimize “sportsmen’s” risk of ear damage while hunting or target shooting (or perhaps remaining undetected while strafing a concert crowd). This is a solution so bereft of a problem that it’s startling the bill’s sponsors can maintain straight faces while touting the rationale for its implementation.
But as interpreted by the National Rifle Association and their GOP concubines, the Second Amendment essentially translates into every American having one free mass murder spree because – after all – up to the second the trigger gets pulled, most bad guys with guns were good guys with guns, the arms lobby’s answer to every conceivable question. Before you imagine the good guy-bad guy analogy as logical, take into consideration what happened in Dallas a little over a year ago in what should have been the ideal NRA dream scenario. A lone gunman opened fire on a crowd. Not only was there a “good guy with a gun” but dozens, including well-trained members of the Dallas Police Department as well as 20 to 30 openly armed citizens carrying what appeared to be AR-15s, military style “long guns.”
Things worked out far differently than advertised: The bad guy managed to shoot 12 people, killing five police officers before being neutralized — not by any of the good guys, but by a robot-delivered bomb. The armed good guys scattered when the shooting began. Because many were wearing body armor, camo and gas masks they added to the confusion, making if more difficult for the police to pinpoint the suspect. The Dallas police chief said at the time open carry “doesn’t make sense to us, but that’s their right in Texas.”
But the party that did nothing but send prayers after the slaughter of babies at Sandy Hook, college students at Virginia Tech, and 50 members of the LBGTQ community in Orlando has advocated doing less than nothing since the Vegas massacre. Guns themselves are held harmless. Hopefully, the illusion is wearing thin that Republicans and the NRA have the country’s best interests at heart or care about Americans having the right to defend themselves. They couldn’t care less about protecting anyone. Their commitment to insanity has nothing to do with self-defense. It’s about money plain and simple. Coupled with their retention of power in a vile quid pro quo with arms dealers.
Don’t be fooled by their sudden change of heart regarding “bump stocks,” the mechanism that quickly converts a semi-automatic long gun into a rapid-fire weapon capable of getting off hundreds of rounds before anyone can call 911. Both the NRA and the GOP have agreed to “some regulation” of these deadly devices in a move that CNN termed “cynical,” expecting that any such rules will be watered down to be as lenient as possible through negotiations. Curiously, no mention of regulating the armor-piercing ammunition also included in the bill — laughably termed the “Sportsman’s Hearing Protection Act,” as if that’s all it would do.
Right now, as you’re reading this, America’s next mass killing is being planned. And frankly, it’s too damned easy for anyone to walk out of a store or gun show better equipped than any SWAT team, with the capability of instantaneously killing hundreds of people. Until we do something about it, the Second Amendment will remain nothing more than a license to kill.
