“Poor Elijah’s Almanack” is written by Peter Berger of Mount Holly, who taught English and history for 30 years.
I began my vigil when Donald Trump descended on his golden escalator.
Since then, KellyAnne Conway, who ought to know better, reintroduced us to Orwell and “alternative facts.”
Marjorie Greene, who appears to know nothing, alerted us to the perils of ignorance, antisemitism and Jewish space lasers.
Trump’s official clowns and conspirators wrapped themselves in the flag their deeds betrayed.
Republican loyalists pledged allegiance to limited government, even as they outlawed abortions, usurped parents’ sovereignty over their children’s health care, censored other people’s access to art and literature, and manipulated voting rights. The only right Republicans appear unwilling to restrict is the right to carry and use firearms.
MAGA partisans clapped and cheered while Trump mocked Americans he abused, and promised to pardon the insurrectionists he incited.
Trump tried to steal the free and fair election he freely and fairly lost.
Gunfire punctuates our days.
From schools and malls to churches, mosques and synagogues, Americans bearing arms have broken our hearts and shaken our confidence in our government’s willingness and ability to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility,” and in simplest terms keep us safe.
Children, our dearest casualties, hide from bullets where they used to hang their coats. Six-year-olds have added “active shooter” to their vocabularies. Children watch as bullet holes bloom in classmates’ bodies.
Those unrecognizable child corpses aren’t the “price of freedom.” The more guns we’ve produced, the more we’ve endangered our lives, and the more grotesque our children’s dreams have become. The guns that were supposed to keep us safe have killed more of us than they’ve saved.
Each slaughter triggers the NRA’s usual malice and distortion. No, the media don’t “love mass shootings.” Supporting a ban on assault weapons doesn’t make you a socialist. Advocating closer regulation of guns when the word “well-regulated” appears in the Second Amendment doesn’t make you subversive. It doesn’t mean you “hate individual freedom.”
The explicit individual right to keep and bear firearms didn’t exist until Justice Scalia articulated it in 2008, two hundred seventeen years after the Second Amendment was ratified. Justice Scalia made clear, though, that “like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited,” and “not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”
I’ve drawn no conclusions about individual NRA members, but I’ve seen enough to determine that the NRA organization is not a force for good. We’ve lived too long in thrall to an extreme position on guns, promoted and funded by a minority of Americans.
When Donald Trump convened a post-Parkland “listening session,” some participants suggested training teachers and students to identify children in emotional distress. No workshop, though, will render me or my students competent to distinguish between normally moody, anxious adolescents and a child troubled enough to murder his classmates. Even if we could tell the difference, there’s little we could do preventively without “red flag” laws.
Trump initially supported raising the minimum age to purchase assault weapons from 18 to 21. He endorsed “strong background checks” but without addressing waiting periods and private sale loopholes. He proposed “focusing very strongly on mental health” without noting that his proposed federal budget reduced funding for school safety and mental health programs.
Trump subsequently abandoned all these proposals under pressure from the NRA.
Trump was most enthusiastic about arming “highly adept” teachers, of which he insists “there are many.” He literally envisioned a school scenario where his chief of staff, General Kelly, armed with a gun, is your history teacher, “teaching about how we win wars,” while the rest of the faculty includes “friends of his from the Marines.”
The problem is I’m actually your child’s history teacher. Ten, twenty, or forty percent of our faculty, Trump’s pipedream estimates, wouldn’t be “more comfortable” or more effective carrying a gun in class than I’d be. There’s also no surplus of military veterans qualified or hungering to teach.
At another moment, Trump speculated that it would require 100 to 150 security guards to protect a school campus, which “would look terrible” and cost too much. He concluded by proposing to offer armed teachers “a little bonus,” which they would “love getting.”
I don’t share Trump’s glee at “bullets flying in the other direction.” Our children deserve a solution that doesn’t turn schools into armed camps. If the only way we can safeguard our children against being murdered in their classrooms is to arm teachers, it doesn’t just look terrible. It is terrible.
Trump talks about “hardening” schools to scare away “sicko shooters.” He claims “they’re all cowards” without noting that most school shooters expect to kill and be killed. He also blames video games, movies, a shortage of mental hospitals, and his predecessors in the Oval Office, all of whom allegedly “took no action” to prevent school shootings.
He appears to have considered every possible aspect of the gun problem except guns.
Part of our Constitution’s genius is its ability to remain faithful to our founding principles while adapting to changing circumstances. There was, for example, no radio or internet when James Madison wrote the First Amendment. That changed in the 20th century. The freedom of the press had meant the government couldn’t license newspapers, but radio technology requires that the government does license radio broadcasters so the available bandwidth is parceled out to allow clear signal transmission.
We adapted.
The founders likewise couldn’t foresee the future extent of interstate trade. As manufacturing grew, and trade increasingly crossed state borders, more and more children were drafted for dangerous factory work. Congress cited the Constitution’s commerce clause to authorize federal regulation of trade and with it, child labor.
We adapted.
Well-trained Revolutionary-era soldiers could load and fire their muskets three or four times a minute. In 2012, the Sandy Hook school shooter fired 154 rounds in less than five minutes, one round every two seconds.
We haven’t adapted.
There’s nothing uniquely sacred about the Second Amendment. Background checks, age restrictions and “red flag laws” aren’t unconstitutional. All weapons aren’t legal for civilian use. Firearm use is expected to be “well-regulated.”
The Second Amendment is one sentence long. With all that’s changed in 232 years, you’d think we could be more honest and reasonable about what it says, and doesn’t say.
I wrote this on a Wednesday. We hadn’t had a mass shooting since Monday.
I don’t think that’s what Madison meant by the security of a free state.