Tennessee school shooting shows what 2nd Amendment wasn’t meant to protect
Sandy Hook is the mass taking pictures I hear talked about most frequently when folks discuss concerning the second they knew nothing would change.
A madman murders 26 folks — most of them 6 or 7 years outdated — and Congress was nonetheless unable to go substantive gun or psychological well being laws. The assault weapons ban that Sen. Dianne Feinstein launched in 2013 was defeated within the Senate with 15 Democrats siding with Republicans in opposition — not that it mattered. Even when the yeas and nays ran down celebration strains, the measure would have been 5 wanting passage.
For lots of people, that vote 10 years in the past was a transparent signal that the Nationwide Rifle Assn. and the gun foyer had gained. I consider that indication got here 60 years in the past with the Kennedy assassination.
Think about this: In 1963 the president of the USA was murdered by somebody who purchased his rifle by mail for $12.78, and but the piece of gun laws his demise is credited with inspiring didn’t grow to be regulation till 5 years later.
Simply weeks after Kennedy’s demise, Sen. Thomas Dodd (D-Conn.) launched a invoice to ban mail-order gun gross sales (amongst different restrictions), and it acquired caught within the Commerce Committee.
In its journal, the NRA known as the invoice “irrational emotionalism.” It was in an earlier problem of the identical journal the place Lee Harvey Oswald noticed an advert for the gun he used to kill Kennedy.
There have been different payments launched, and so they too fell wanting the end line. Kennedy’s assassination, as horrifying because it was, didn’t deliver urgency.
Dodd had warned colleagues concerning the mail-order danger and rising gun violence as early as 1961. However elected officers spun in circles for 5 extra years after Kennedy’s demise whereas Malcolm X, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy had been all gunned down.
If it weren’t for the Black Panther Social gathering, Dodd’s trigger may by no means have made it out of committee. Nevertheless, after armed members of the group entered the Capitol in Sacramento in 1967 to protest a invoice limiting open carry, the winds shifted in California.
“There’s no cause why on the road immediately a citizen must be carrying loaded weapons,” then-Gov. Ronald Reagan mentioned on the time, including that it was a “ridiculous approach to remedy issues that must be solved amongst folks of fine will.”
After Kennedy was murdered, the talk continued for years.
But after the Black Panthers issued a press release in 1967 — which learn partially “The Second Modification of the Structure of the USA offers us a proper to bear arms. We due to this fact consider that each one Black folks ought to arm themselves for self protection” — there was gun management in California that very same yr. And the following yr, Dodd’s close to 10-year effort was rewarded with nationwide laws towards mail-order gun gross sales.
As Carol Anderson factors out in her guide “The Second: Race and Weapons in a Fatally Unequal America,” it wasn’t the demise of Kennedy that acquired the NRA to permit gun management in California. It was the sight of armed Black males.
Don’t get mad at me. I’m simply the messenger. The message is the 130 mass shootings thus far in 2023.
Not each mass taking pictures is similar. What motivated the assailant in Nashville seems to be completely different from what motivated the attacker in Monterey Park, which was completely different from Pulse, which was completely different from Sandy Hook. Every taking pictures can result in a special dialog. And the gun foyer has grow to be fairly adept at altering the topic.
“What about Chicago?” has lengthy been a favourite.
Extra typically immediately’s gun regulation critics play whataboutism with proposals, highlighting urged restrictions that will not have prevented another mass taking pictures. It’s as if the aim had been legislative perfection versus saving as many lives as attainable. Whereas co-anchoring an L.A. Instances TV particular final week concerning the Monterey Park taking pictures, I requested a younger lady by the identify of Nathalia Jackson why she stored observe recurrently of gun violence statistics. She mentioned it’s partially as a result of she retains hoping they’ll get higher.
Since that dialog, there have been at the very least two college shootings, together with in Nashville, the place six households have grow to be a part of a gaggle that nobody needs to affix, however whose membership continues to develop nonetheless.
But, it’s as a result of the membership continues to develop that these elected officers — those who solely have ideas and prayers to supply in moments like this, those who see gun debates as a fundraising alternative, those hoping the NRA arms them a gold star — are working out of locations to cover.
I’m positive 60 years in the past there have been components of America that felt untouched by the nation’s brewing gun violence. Sure, there have been high-profile assassinations on TV, however Malcolm X, King and the Kennedys had been all murdered in huge cities. Absolutely, there isn’t an issue with gun violence in a spot like … Newtown.
Or a university campus in Michigan.
A retailer in El Paso.
Church buildings and synagogues.
This can’t be the sort of freedom the 2nd Modification was meant to guard.
This can’t be the model of freedom members of Congress need to depart behind for younger folks like Nathalia to develop up in and make sense of. Preserving observe of what number of younger folks have been shot and killed isn’t freedom.
It’s scary.
