No Place Safe in America from Assault Weapons and Other Guns

I’m wondering these days, trying to shake the gloom of political paralysis that’s stalking so many Americans in the wake of the Robb Elementary School massacre, if it is indeed a possibility that CEOs of corporate firearm manufacturers, and their Republican allies in the NRA and the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, could ever be held accountable as accessories to literally thousands of murders, including monstrous acts of infanticide in our schools. All of them were committed by people with high-powered assault weapons and other guns made and sold in the United States over the last 50 years. A lot of us consider gun corporations and their allies to be no better than profiteering pirates and hold their leadership accountable for all the unconscionable violence caused by guns we’re suffering, even if the law won’t.

I’m wondering, too, if the gross hypocrisy of terrorizing women by criminalizing abortions while at the same time terrorizing the entire country by refusing to endorse any meaningful gun regulation on the insanely permissive notion that all guns are protected under the Second Amendment, will ever come to snake bite the GOP and drive its increasingly morbid, zombie politicians out of office? That doesn’t seem so far-fetched anymore.

We may be living in a time that is ripening for the repeal of the Second Amendment, itself. Many Americans are giving serious consideration to what the late, Nixon-appointed Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens suggested four years ago, when he accused the Second Amendment of being an out of date relic of the 18^th century. If you can chuck Roe v. Wade because abortion isn’t mentioned in the Constitution, why shouldn’t ownership of assault weapons, and other guns that are designed solely to kill people, be recognized as the anathema they are and be banned for the same reason: they aren’t in the Constitution, either. Why couldn’t the Second Amendment be done away with as a poorly written sop to early Federalists? As Stevens said, the amendment was originally designed to thwart the creation of a national standing army that would threaten federalism and the independence of the states, fears now relegated to the dust heap of history. If originalist Republican justices defend assault gun ownership on the wording of the Second Amendment that says, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed,” then their argument would logically have to conclude that even the Founders didn’t have sufficient imagination and foresight in the age of muskets to conceive of automatic weapons and their protection. But of course, GOP ideology these days is anything but logical.

But what can we do right now? At the very least, Congress should reinstate the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that banned semi-automatic assault weapons, which was allowed to expire in 2004, despite more than 70% of Americans supporting its renewal. Failing that, rational politicians in every state in the union should work to join California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and the District of Columbia in prohibiting assault weapons and concealed handguns.

In New Mexico, it is still legal to have fully automatic, autoloading “machine guns,” although outlawed by federal law. We are a concealed carry state, but one that requires a license to do so. But even with a license it’s illegal, thank heavens, to have deadly weapons on the campuses of schools and universities in our state. You can, however, carry a concealed weapon into a restaurant or other places that sell liquor, if you have license. We need to clarify our gun laws, and at the bare minimum, ban assault weapons. But we love our guns in New Mexico. Catron County, in fact, made it mandatory in 1994 for its residents to own handguns for self-defense in a non-binding resolution. It will be a tough job to pass any new gun regulations, but we need to make a start right now.

Repealing the Second Amendment and banning assault weapons may seem like fairytales. But neither is altogether impossible if rational people refuse to give up, refuse to become immobilized by the outrageous slings and arrows of this moment in history and keep working doggedly and tirelessly — one issue, one law, one regulation at a time — to resurrect a sane, compassionate, conscience-driven America from the depths of our misogyny and idolatry of guns.

The situation is intolerable. The organization Everytown for Gun Safety estimates that over 1,500 people have been killed in our country in more than 270 mass shootings since 2009. World Population Review, an organization that compiles demographic data from a range of sources, says the United states could have had as many as 600 mass shooting in 2020 alone. The numbers all depend on statistics, definitions and, sadly, on partisan fudging.

But no matter how much we understand the vectors of our pandemic of gun violence and the truly calamitous collusion and malfeasance that keeps it roaring, gun killings in schools, churches and other public places have become so outrageously commonplace that they could begin to have a quarantining and economically depressing influence on our culture in the same way COVID-19 has had. Both are public health calamities. And when it comes to gun death it’s overwhelmingly the gun lobby’s fault. This tsunami of guns might turn out to be the last straw that finally breaks the GOP’s back, even if the killings of hundreds of children can’t.

Politics aside, the only reason America has vastly more mass murders that any place on earth is due to the fact that we have vastly more civilian firearms — more than 393 million of them — than anyplace on earth. That comes out to 120.5 guns per 100 people, in 2017 numbers. As the Washington Post pointed out in 2018, that is “enough for every man, woman and child to own one and still have 67 million guns left over.”

That’s three times the ownership rate of the next highest country, Canada, which has 34.7 guns owners per hundred people. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, our gun ownership rate is more than six times higher than the average among other first world nations. That’s the terrible score that leads to the BBC calling gun deaths “a fixture in American life.” Our country suffered more than 1.5 million guns death between 1968 and 2017, the BBC says. “The United States, with less than 5 percent of the world’s population,” reports the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), “has 46 percent of the world’s civilian-owned guns.” When it comes to gun homicides, the United States overwhelmingly leads per capita global statistics, with America having 4.12 gun homicides per 100,000 people and the next highest ownership country, Canada, with 0.5 gun deaths per hundred thousand. Australia is next with 0.18, Norway with 0.07, the United Kingdom with 0.04, and Japan with 0.02 gun deaths per hundred thousand people. And in 2020 alone in America, the deadly surge in gun violence that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic left 19,384 people murdered. That comes out to over 53 gun deaths a day.

We can’t allow such massive horrors to become politically paralyzing. We have to free ourselves from our bewildered apathy and debilitating delusions. There are no big, one-time solutions. But there is a whole list of ideas that we can all peck away at, trusting in the laws of accumulation to give our steadfast action the kind of results that revolutionize gun control in a lasting, life affirming way. But it’s going to take all of us doing what we can with what we’ve got.

We could make it a point to support and beef up the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 in any way we can and close the many loopholes within it. The Brady law imposes an interim five-day waiting period for the purchase of any kind of firearm, not just handguns. It’s named for James Brady, Ronald Reagan’s Press Secretary, who was shot in the 1981 failed assassination attempt on Reagan’s life. Brady survived, but with severely debilitating injuries.

We could do our best to make the idea of repealing, and perhaps rewriting, the Second Amendment a realistic, albeit distant, political goal. We could work for enforceable gun-free zones in our own communities — in schools, churches, shopping areas, parks and other public spaces, recognizing guns for the extreme public health hazards that they are. We could focus on forbidding the sale of assault weapons and fund their recycling and dismantling. We could support prohibitions against selling the multiple-round ammo magazines that assault weapons use. As an interim measure, we could support gun-education laws that would make serious gun instruction and practice mandatory for all firearm owners, so they are as versed in gun safety, maintenance and use as a soldier is. We could support any idea that takes gun ownership out of the realm of casual, nonchalant, and even sometimes glamorous possession and gives to guns the “aura” of danger and menace that they deserve. We could continually make the argument that a gun is an instrument of injury and death, with no other reason for existence but to kill or maim. It’s just like any other human tool. It has a purpose and a function. If you use a gun for hunting, that’s an entirely different thing from carrying around a loaded weapon, or stashing one in your home to protect yourself from other people. You can’t do anything with a gun but kill or wound someone else, or miss them and injure or kill innocent bystanders or the people you’re protecting. Then, you have taken on the role of judge and executioner. And chances are, in a society like ours that glorifies guns, sloppy gun protocols and childish swagger can create the possibility of a situation in which children will be drawn to your guns and make fatal mistakes that ruin their lives, no matter how securely under lock and key your guns actually are.

I don’t believe it’s possible to confiscate most of the guns in America. The genie is out of the bottle. To corral them back in would require a draconian mindset that is unbecoming to a “free society.” But all of us can work to replace the propaganda of the gun lobby with the reality that indiscriminate and virtually ubiquitous gun ownership in our country has become a public health menace of staggering proportions, and one that is threatening what most of us consider the sacred innocence of childhood by ruining the experience of safety and reassuring security at school.

As Sandy Hook Promise reminds us, the U.S. has had 2,032 school shootings since 1970! And guns are the leading cause of death among American children and teens, at a rate more than five times higher than drowning. “Each day 12 children die from gun violence” in our country, according to the Sandy Hook group. “Another 32 are shot and injured.” This shameful reality simply has to stop.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it