Yesterday, under extreme pressure from the public led by students from Marjory Stoneman High School, Florida governor Rick Scott signed a hastily drafted gun safety law that nibbled around the edges of our gigantic problem of gun violence.  Not completely lame, the new law does raise the minimum age for any gun purchase to 21, imposes a 3 day waiting period for gun purchases by unlicensed individuals, increases the budget for police in schools, raises the budget for mental health treatment for students, and bans bump stocks which should have never been legal to begin with.

What does the bill get wrong?  The bill stupidly legalizes arming school employees which actually INCREASES the risk of gun violence in the schools.  It doesn’t ban assault weapons.  It doesn’t even pause the sales of assault weapons while the state studies gun violence.  It doesn’t limit magazine size or limit ammunition sales.  It doesn’t strengthen the background check system.  In fact, a provision that closed the “lie and try” loophole was left out.  The “lie and try” provision would provide a mechanism to the state to charge people who lie on their background check form with a crime.  Right now, there is a federal criminal penalty for lying on the form, but in 37 states, including Florida, there is no mechanism for the FBI to notify the state that an applicant lied on the form.  Stupid, right? Easy to fix, right?  Well, they didn’t.

Sixty seven “A” rated Republicans voted for this bill, and, of course, the NRA immediately responded by suing the state in an effort to stop it, and its lobbyists have certainly already started threatening those politicians for daring to not do its bidding.

Nibbling around the edges of gun violence will do little to curb it, and will just add fuel to the gun nut argument that “laws don’t work”.  They’ll be correct, of course, since the poorly crafted gun safety bill will do little to actually increase gun safety.

I haven’t talked much in the Salon about gun violence, but it has been one of my focuses for the last decade.  First, I am a gun owner; I own shotguns, long guns, revolvers, and semi-auto handguns.  I have a Texas license to carry a handgun, will carry on occasion, and shoot sporting clays and birds. Second, I do not own an assault style rifle because these weapons have no place in civilized society.  Third, I resigned from the NRA over 30 years ago after it went nuts and Charleton Heston started shouting, “From my cold, dead hands!” Lastly, my position on guns has been evolving since Gabby Giffords was gunned down during a constituent event in 2011.  That tragedy, and all the ensuing tragedies, have continued to drive a personal urgency to push new public policy.

I have always been a Second Amendment supporter, but have also also believed that gun policy should be established and enforced by adults, not gun nuts and weirdos, which is our current reality in the US. Unfortunately, with the sole exception of the assault weapons ban, we’ve been going backwards on gun policy since the late ’80s. We took a giant step backwards when Congress stupidly allowed the ban to expire in 2004, marking the beginning of a new and growing chapter of gun violence in America.  About five years ago, I established a Facebook group called Gun Owners for Reform, to discuss gun ownership and public policy around guns.  For those five years, we have been calling for gun law reform, attempting to be a reasoned voice to balance gun rights with common sense.

Here’s the issue…beginning in 1977, when the NRA was taken over by the gun manufacturing industry, it became one of the strongest lobbying groups in the US, deploying hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to politicians who vote with them, and unleashing hoards of drooling gun nuts against those who don’t toe the line.  For over 30 years, the NRA has maintained a stranglehold on Congress and statehouses all over the country.  Since then, we’ve seen research on gun violence at the CDC and NIH banned, a porous background check system implemented which includes the odd feature of making state crime reporting to the database voluntary. It has vehemently defended the private sale and gun show loopholes, which allow private sales and exchanges of weapons without background (or even ID) checks.  It has pushed internet sales of guns and ammo in unlimited quantities.  It has bribed state politicians all over the country to weaken, and even eliminate gun safety laws.  Ironically, as pointed out by the Smithsonian, gun laws in Tombstone Arizona are now weaker than when Wyatt Earp was the town marshall in the 1880’s.

The NRA has even pushed the US government to turn a blind eye to the threat of “ghost guns”, those that are assembled from partially finished parts and components, completely circumventing ATF laws and regulations.  Even worse, they have steadfastly pushed the proliferation of assault style weapons like the AR-15 and variants.  These high capacity, high powered weapons were designed for the battlefield, intended to inflict massive wounds with lightweight, high velocity rounds.  The ammo fired from the AR-15 travels at 3 times that of normal handgun rounds, resulting in massive wounds and shreded internal organs and arteries.  The AR-15 is now known as the weapon of choice for mass shooters and anti-government weirdos, and it’s long past time to take these weapons out of our society.  Finally, legislation pushed by the NRA forbids a permanent registry of guns sold in the US.  Why?  Because the NRA has successfully brainwashed the gun culture that ANY record keeping of gun sales is an automatic gun registry that allows the government to come for their guns.  The notion is completely idiotic, as if some beer-filled redneck is going to fend off the US military with an AR-15 and a box full of ammo.  Stupid.

My position for years has been that banning these weapons now that there are unknown millions in circulation is not practical.  I always pushed for magazine limits and lethality limits on ammo sold to the public.  For this position, I’ve been called everything from a snowflake to a communist, and I and my family have been harassed, apparently by “good guys” with guns, unhappy with my opinions.

I’ve finally decided that enough is enough. The Second Amendment is a relic of 18th century America in a time of slave-holding.  The Amendment was added to the Constitution to defend the states and the new federal government from standing armies (like the British).  The US was never supposed to have a standing army, but now we do, rendering the Second Amendment unecessary.  The other reason the amendment was adopted was to protect locals from insurrection (read slave insurrection) which was bad for plantation business.  The Second Amendment has no more place in the Constitution today than the article that allotted 3/5 personhood to each slave for the purposes of apportioning congressional districts.  It’s long past time for it to be repealed, replaced with sane gun laws that protect everyone, not just goofballs and weirdos waving guns around in demonstrations in front of the Alamo.

I’m not naive enough to think repeal, at least for now, is very likely; however, banning assault style weapons and associated ammo, is.  Also, enacting universal background checks for ALL gun transfers is common sense that the vast majority of Americans support.  Limiting magazine capacity, making crime and mental data available in the NICS (instant background check system) should have been done decades ago.  All of these steps should be enacted immediately.

Lastly, we adults in the US have failed our children miserably, and the school massacre in Parkland Florida was 100% avoidable.  This kind of violence happens nowhere in the developed world but the US.  Now that we’ve failed, our children and grandchildren are shaming us into doing something about gun violence in America.  It’s long past time for us to stand up on our hind legs and do the right thing.  Our entire society depends on it, and the whole world is watching.

UPDATED:

As we are all acutely aware, the NRA came out with guns blazing today (no pun intended) blaming gun violence on everything but guns.  Wayne LaPierre, chief propagandist, blamed everyone from Nancy Pelosi to Hollywood stars for mass shooters killing hundreds of people with the AR-15, the Official Rifle of Angry White Men.

With all this noise, I believe you might be a bit discourage and feeling helpless.  Well, you’re not.  Remember how we virtually put Rush Limbaugh out of business by shaming his sponsors into dropping out?  You can use that same tactic again, this time against the NRA’s business partners who provide all kinds of discounts to the mouth breathers who are members.  Here’s a handy list to help get you started:

• Hertz
• Avis and Budget
• Lifeline Screening – a preventative health testing company
• Symatec – Norton anti virus software
• Allied Van Lines
• North American Van Lines
• Simplisafe – home security
• Starkey Hearing Technologies
• Manage UrID – personal privacy
• Life Insurance Central
• Medical Concierge Network – doctor care
• eHealth – insurance
• Teladoc – telemedicine service, whatever that is
• FedEx
• LifeLock
• Wild Apricot – whatever that is
• First National Bank of Omaha – issue(d) the official credit card of the NRA.  As soon as Think Progress published their name, the bank dumped the card.  One down.
• Enterprise, National, and Alamo – the conglomerate who owns these three major brands dropped the NRA today.  Two down.

Keep those cards and letters going out, kids, the evil cyclops is starting to stagger.

UPDATE:

As of this evening, here’s who’s dropped the NRA like a hot potato:

• Hertz
• Symatec
• Lifelock
• Simplisafe
• North American Van Lines
• MetLife (not originally listed by us)
• Chubb Insurance (not originally listed by us)

Keep up the pressure, especially on Amazon to drop NRATv.  We’re getting results.

“The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and are prepared to call B.S.

“Companies, trying to make caricatures of the teen-agers nowadays, saying that all we are are self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submissions when our message doesn’t reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call B.S.

“Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the N.R.A., telling us nothing could ever be done to prevent this: we call B.S.

“They say that tougher gun laws do not prevent gun violence: we call B.S.”

“They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun: we call B.S.

“They say guns are just tools, like knives, and are as dangerous as cars: we call B.S.

“They say that no laws would have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that occur: we call B.S.

“That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works.” The crowd was now in a frenzy of anger and sadness, the people around me tearing up as they yelled, “We call B.S.”

And then, in unison, the people gathered began to chant, “Vote them out, vote them out, vote them out.”

Emma Gonzalez, Senior, Douglas High School, Parkland, Florida

Saturday, March 24, Washington DC.  This will be the scene of the March for Our Lives, and organization started by the high school kids who survived the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last Wednesday in Parkland Florida.  Inaction by craven politicians like John Cornyn, Ted Cruz, and many others have put our children’s lives at risk by allowing easy access to weapons of war by criminals and the mentally unstable.  If you doubt the intensity of this effort, I encourage you to watch this.