Stop pretending you do. If you didn’t care when a bunch of elementary school kids were shot down two weeks before Christmas, you don’t care now and you’re not going to care. Miss me with your thoughts and prayers and go back to watching the necks suck off their guns.
I mean, we aren’t gonna do anything. We couldn’t do it after Sandy Hook when the Democrats still had the Senate and the White House, what makes you think a party bought and paid for by the NRA will lift a finger to reduce gun deaths?
There’s a lot to it. There isn’t a simple fix. Banning assault rifles wouldn’t have stopped Fort Hood or Virginia Tech or Killeen. Banning handguns wouldn’t have stopped Sandy Hook or Las Vegas or today. There are all sorts of angles and complications and nothings going to sort everything out quickly, not least because there are literally hundreds of millions of guns in the wild and they don’t expire or go bad or self-destruct. And the official position of the GOP, as explained by feckless human scrotum Marco Rubio, is that since you can’t stop every attack you shouldn’t lift a finger to stop any of them.
Funny thing…there used to be a lot more drunk driving deaths. It used to be the stuff of Dean Martin or Foster Brooks routines. Hell, George W. Bush got popped for it in the 70s, at a time when the officer was most likely to say “now you get home carefully.” And then we changed our mind, because people were dying and we realized it could be prevented. And we jacked up the penalties – not just for killing somebody, but for doing it at all, for putting yourself or someone else at risk. We changed the law around who can buy alcohol, we changed the contents of driver’s ed, we predicated federal money on tougher laws. We didn’t outlaw booze. We didn’t outlaw cars. But we did bring down the death rate from DUI by a substantial amount.
You can start somewhere. You have to. Maybe start by slapping a hard limit on magazine size; ten rounds for everything and no grandfathering. You’re gonna hand in the old ones, because we’ll criminalize possession. Then charge whoever provided the gun used in a crime as a full accessory as if they pulled the trigger themselves. Parent who gave it as a gift? Accessory. Grampa who didn’t lock his arsenal up? Accessory. Neighbor who sold it off the books? Accessory. The NRA loves to say “people kill people” so let’s get all the people involved in the process. Failure to manufacture your long gun without a bullet button or a fixed magazine? You’re liable for any wrongful death caused by more than five or ten rounds fired. And speaking of rounds, never mind background checks for guns, background check and waiting period for bullets. Maybe you can club someone to death with your M4gery, but you’re gonna have a hard time getting into double digits.
But most of all, it’s time to stop allowing gun policy in this country to be dictated by the rich inner fantasy life of people who want to need guns, whose Red Dawn masturbation dreams demand ever more guns in circulation and ever more ability to have them to hand at all times. The worship of firearms cannot and should not be the cornerstone of a modern society. It isn’t, anywhere else in the Western world. At all. And yet, six of the ten deadliest mass shootings in American history have happened in the past five years, at a time when firearms ownership has become its own form of identity politics.
And here you see the toxicity of the GOP: you daren’t offend gun worshippers, because that’s the base. Blame video games. Blame toys. Blame “mental illness” (but not if it means cracking down on abusive behavior or toxic masculinity). Blame the victims for not rushing the shooter, or their teachers for not coming to class strapped like a Matrix movie. Blame anything but the holy precious guns.
When next the Democrats get the opportunity, half-measures won’t do. Strike hard and strike sure, and stop waiting for God to stop the bullets.