I write about gun violence on occasion knowing full well that it’s an exercise in futility. Why? Easy; our elected representatives, our law enforcement organizations, and now the courts have been overtaken by weirdos and ideologues who have morphed the powers of local, state, and federal government from “law and order” to an alternate reality believing that overturning over 200 years of legal precedent and history and putting guns into the hands of everyone is somehow sane public policy. We’re 24 days into the new year and have already had 40 mass shootings in the US, killing 74 and wounding 170. In that same period of time, over 2,800 people have died from guns and over 2,100 have been wounded. Gun violence has overtaken car accidents and drug overdoses as the leading cause of death in children in America.
There has been an unrelenting effort by the gun lobby to rewrite the Second Amendment from its original intent into a gun-humper’s dream. The amendment that provided for a citizen army to protect the newly formed government in the late 1700s has been turned onto its head with junk law and fake “studies” to turn the amendment into a Guns for Everyone ideology. In unwinding 200 years of case law, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito have relied on bullshit and junk law to justify their politically motivated rulings which included gutting Washington, DC and New York gun safety laws. They’ve relied on a doctrine of “originalism” which, translated from Bullshit to English, is an excuse to turn everything on its head forcing 21st century technology into an 18th century framework of law. The Heller case was the death blow to sanity by declaring that an amendment that provided for a citizen army lead by state and local authorities was actually enumerated a person right for any idiot to carry a firearm anywhere he/she damn well pleased. Using this insanity, even more insane state politicians use the same junk law codified by the SCOTUS to unwind centuries of gun safety laws all over the country. As Michael Waldman, Director of the Justice Brennan Center at NYU Law, said after the Court struck down the NY gun safety law,
“The ruling Thursday says that all these judges got it wrong. Instead, the majority said, courts must assess gun rules especially focusing solely on ‘history and tradition.’ Don’t look at public safety; search for analogies to past laws from a very different time.”
Waldman has written extensively about the history of the effort to rewrite the Second Amendment. The gun lobby did it in plain sight, pumping out bullshit and fake studies while at the same time paying Republicans to kill federal funding into gun violence for almost 40 years. Add that to decades of gutting the ATF and attacking any authority trying to curb gun violence, and the takeover of America by gun nuts is complete. SCOTUS has already communicated that the gun safety law debate is over and insanity won. The Congress won’t protect us, the President can’t effectively act alone so he can’t help; red state governments have completely unraveled what gun safety law we had left, and ideologues sue local and state governments who dare try to protect their citizens. This war is lost.
Until the Court was bought by the multi-billion dollar Federalist Society, we had a chance. But that was lost with the triple assist from TFG. The SCOTUS is now a zombie court that has asserted that it has no authority to protect Americans from massive gun violence, radical gerrymandering and unlimited money that has completely corrupted our elections and destroyed democracy from within. This war is lost so we have two choices – give up and go arm ourselves and join in the chaos and carnage; OR fight back. Grass roots is all that’s left and the job is massive.
The only solution to this dystopian alternate reality is to get rid of the Second Amendment. I know that sounds crazy, but we’re already up to our eyeballs in crazy, so we have nothing to lose. In 2018, Justice John Paul Stevens proposed just this in an op-ed in the NY Times. He was right then, and remains right today. Let’s stop niggling over definitions of assault weapons and semi-auto firearms. The solution is to start – and win – a new war that takes back the safety of our citizens away from the gun nuts and zealots. I know that by no means is this going to be easy, but it’s the only solution left.
