Editor’s note: Walt Amses is a writer and former educator who lives in Calais.
[T]hey came with the usual predictability, facing the bright lights and cameras, offering the familiar prayers and condolences that have become the air kisses of carnage. They encouraged us to keep the victims in our own prayers, offering sanctimonious platitudes for young lives cut short and how it would dishonor those who died to have crass, political conversations right now. There would be time for that later.
Of course there will never be an appropriate time to have a discussion about school shootings in the United States. Not because it dishonors anyone, but because the frequency of school shootings overlaps with the proscribed wait time to respond. You see, there’s always a school shooting to avoid addressing. They’ve become as reliable as Republicans circling the wagons to protect the National Rifle Association from being victimized by public opinion after another bloody masterpiece.
You’d wonder what kind of torture the NRA inflicted on the GOP to engender their consistently soulless, immoral response. The Grand Old Party’s willingness to turn their backs, over and over, on America’s children literally looking down the barrel of a gun, must be the result of threats, blackmail, torture or unimaginable risks to the well-being of their families. But none of those things are true. How the National Rifle Association convinced representatives elected to serve the people to serve the NRA instead was simple: money. Lots and lots of money.
Every single parasite, every Republican co-conspirator who marched lockstep onto a podium, delivering mea culpas for their masters since the school shooting in Florida last week was purchased, like something from the back page of a cheap tabloid to sell out their constituents back home; to make excuses for murdered children; and to provide cover for the treacherous NRA.
What this is not the time for is the NRA and its minions ducking, dodging and deflecting; this is not the time to quibble over what constitutes an “assault weapon” or how guns don’t kill people, gun free zones kill people; and this is certainly not the time to allow the Republican Party to batten down the hatches until this blows over. Every single elected representative across the country who took money from the NRA needs to be held accountable … NOW. All congressional seats are up for grabs in November and every representative with NRA money in the coffers should be forced to either give it back or use it to finance retirement.
And just as bump stocks and silencers were cruising toward legality when a gunman in Las Vegas opened up on a crowd of concert-goers, as Florida was unfolding, the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, which essentially legalizes carrying a gun anywhere, as long as you have a permit from another state. If you live in Arizona, for instance, where gun laws are nearly nonexistent, your permit would allow you to pack your piece in New York, where ordinarily it’s a felony.
That police across the board are completely against such legislation apparently means nothing to the law and order party. The GOP supports guns everywhere: bars, college classrooms, churches, parks, public spaces, state and national monuments. Everywhere. Period. Well, comma actually. There is one place the brave congressional warriors for the NRA do not support either open or concealed carry. Congress. That’s right. The delusion that guns make places safer does not apply in the hallowed halls of Congress. You know why? Because they’re afraid of getting shot. They have no such concerns for your kids.
The lack of leadership on the issue is appalling. It certainly cannot be expected from the top, where we find President Donald J. Trump the recipient 17 million gun dollars — his silence on weapons can be golden — the NRA’s completely owned president. To expect Trump — who can’t even keep domestic abusers off the White House payroll — to prevent guns from entering schools is a bridge too far. Trump’s typically tone-deaf, thumbs-up response meeting with first responders, who he said arrived in “record time,” demonstrates the level of ignorance we face in making any change at all: The fact that they’re “responders” means it was already too late.
In a nation where the National Rifle Association long ago transitioned from animal hunting to shooting humans via unhinged, paranoid rhetoric, American culture followed suit. We buy more guns, own more guns and shoot more guns than any nation on the planet not involved in a war and — naturally — kill each other more frequently, in larger numbers and with more ferocity than anywhere else. We’re number one with a bullet. American exceptionalism writ large.
A classroom full of dead kids shouldn’t be the price of freedom. To suggest otherwise takes us closer to a national insanity from which we may never recover.
