May 20, 2018
The news bulletins flashed across our screens mid-morning on Friday, alerting us to an “active shooter” on the grounds of a high school in Santa Fe, Texas. By the time the day was over, ten people (nine of them students) had been murdered and another 13 hospitalized with serious injuries. The 17–year-old shooter had been captured alive. The post shooting Kabuki theater unfolded almost instantly, with conservative Texas politicians offering thoughts and prayers, together with a resolve to prevent it from happening again, as long as the preventive measures had nothing to do with gun control. The absurd proposals included the suggestion of having schools with fewer doors (although this wouldn’t have prevented this shooter, as he was a student entitled to enter). Lt. Governor Dan Patrick has called for ramping up the effort to arm teachers (even though there was an armed officer at the high school, who was shot by the gunman), (Source: “Texas Lt. Governor Blames Everything but Guns after school shooting,” by Terence Cullen and Erin Durkin, The New York Daily News, 5/20/18).
Trying to use logic to analyze the thinking of those determined to block gun control is a fool’s errand. Logic is clearly not the point. It is ironic that these people are determined to control every aspect of our lives except for guns. They would rather turn our schools into killing fields than subject any gun owner to even the slightest inconvenience. Texas has some of the most lax gun laws in the nation, with no requirement that guns be locked up. This is what made it so easy for the Santa Fe shooter to steal his father’s handgun and sawed off shotgun to use in a murderous rampage.
Each time this happens we wonder why Republican elected officials continue to do nothing. We lament that their dependence on NRA campaign contributions prevents them from acting, without stopping to think that there is more to it. We don’t consider that these Republican officials may share more than an absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment with the NRA. The NRA makes no secret of its view that Americans can be divided into “us” and “them,” with progressives, feminists, people of color and LGBT people clearly in the category of “enemies” that their members should be arming themselves against (Source: “The NRA’s new viral ad dividing Americans into “us” and “them” is a centuries’ old tactic,” by Lola Fadulu and Heather Timmons, Quartz.com, 6/29/17). Republicans likewise govern as if the majority of Americans are their enemies and pursue a legislative agenda that would cause them demonstrable harm. Like their patrons in the leadership of the NRA, they demonstrate vicious contempt for most people in this country. Of course, the NRA doesn’t even speak for the majority of its own members, yet their poisonous views control the debate, and, as these school shootings show, are influencing young men.
Both the shooter in Santa Fe, Texas and the shooter in Parkland were motivated in part by rage at young women who rejected their advances. Violent misogyny is the gateway hatred to a host of other toxic ideologies, including white supremacy and anti-Semitism. The truth is, the real right that the NRA and their Republican enablers seek is not the right to bear arms. It is the right to impose their will on the rest of us, at gunpoint if necessary.
#Guncontrolnow
#Neveragain
#Bluewave2018