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.

Texas is now distributing DNA kits to schools.  Abbott signed the law to do so at the end of the 2021 legislative session, feigning that they were to be distributed to identify children who were kidnapped and trafficked.  The occurrence child kidnapping is tragic, but rare.  What is more common, especially in Texas, is mass shootings by deranged young men who are legally allowed to purchase assault rifles and unlimited ammunition that can kill dozens of kids in just a few minutes.  The law was passed after the mass shooting at a public school in Santa Fe.  The state says the kits are to be used in the event of an “emergency” and are trying to make it about kidnapping, but since bullets fired from an AR-15 cause massive injuries, including decapitating 6 year old school children, the kits are necessary to identify the bodies of victims of these now commonplace shootings.  In Uvalde, some of the children’s bodies were so mangled that they had to be identified by their shoes.

The answer to mass shootings is unbelievably “complicated”, and only 32 of 33 advanced countries around the world have figured it out.  The only way we stop these shootings is banning these weapons and the ammunition shot from them.  We can only do that with brave leadership.  Because Americans don’t vote like they should, that brave leadership will never materialize and the problem won’t be fixed.  The gun and DNA kit manufacturers are perfectly happy with the status quo.

The problem of gun violence, especially mass shootings, is not all that complicated.  The solution for it has been figured out by every other industrialized nation on the planet.  The US has CHOSEN to not solve it.  Those reasons are also simple – power.  As long as the gun culture has an outsized voice with the electorate, namely the Senate, nothing will happen.  That doesn’t mean the answer is complicated, but money and power wont allow it.  To avoid talking about the real solution to gun violence, politicians and the gun lobby repeat bullshit every time there is a mass shooting, which is now a weekly occurrence.

Let’s review said bullshit:

1. Good guy with a gun – the most common, yet one of the most false.  Almost no mass shootings are stopped by an armed citizen, and in fact, armed citizens are generally killed or wounded trying to help, like the security guard at the Tops Grocery in Buffalo New York a few weeks ago.
2. An armed society is a polite society” – this one is as stupid as it sounds.  Name me an Open Carry Texas member who is a polite member of society and I’ll show you a fictional character.
3. More guns equals more safety – if that were true, we’d be the safest society on the planet.  As it is, our gun violence death rate is 4 times that of industrialized nations.
4. Crime decreased as we loosened gun laws – which equals, “I ate ice cream yesterday, then it rained.  Eating ice cream causes rain.”  Correlation does not equal causality, but I can say now that the states with looser gun laws have greater per capita gun deaths than those with strict gun laws.
5. What about “shall not be infringed” do you not understand – which is one of the silliest arguments.  All historic documents, including James Madison’s own notes, showed that the Founders were terrified of standing armies, (especially the British) and decided to defend the new US government with citizen militias under local authorities federalized during times of war.  That history is well documented and easily studied for those who read past the NRA’s propaganda.  In the early days, firearms were kept at home, but ammunition and gun powder were kept in local armories for safety.  Our founding generation was not populated by idiots.
6. Criminals don’t follow the law – again, an idiotic argument which supports the notion that, if this is true, we shouldn’t have stop signs, traffic lights, or speed limits.  Laws aren’t written for people to obey, since responsible citizens do that.  Laws are written to establish a framework of enforcement and punishment for those who don’t follow the law.
7. We should harden our schools and have armed law enforcement guarding the schools – again a stupid argument.  First, making every school in the nation a fortress is impossible.  Second it doesn’t work.  Case in point, just YESTERDAY, there were armed police at the school in Uvalde when the shooter got there.  They shot at him, but he was wearing body armor and was returning fire with an AR-15.  Even though there were armed officers at the school, he got in anyway, then killed 19 children and two teachers.  The cops got him only after SWAT arrived and blew him away with comparable weapons to what he was using.
8. We should arm the teachers – Ted Cruz made this idiotic statement many times including yesterday. This is the dumbest goddam suggestion of all.  See number 7 above.  If police couldn’t stop him, how the fuck is little Ms. Perrywinkle, the second grade arithmetic teacher two years out of college going to do it?

Ted Cruz, pull your head out of your ass.

Today in Tokyo, Trump said that the mass shooting in Sutherland Springs Texas yesterday was “a mental health problem” and “not a guns situation”.  As we’ve pointed out before, every country has mental health issues, but the ONLY country that has a mass shooting problem is the United States.  The difference between us and other developed countries?  Guns.  Hundreds of millions of guns.

The Sutherland Springs shooter was 26 and had received a bad conduct discharge from the Air Force in 2014 after serving a year in a military jail for assaulting his wife and his child.  He bought his assault rifle at an Academy in San Antonio.  How in the hell can an individual with this kind of criminal record?  Answer – The background check system in this country SUCKS.  Many records are still paper.  Not all criminal records make it into the system.  NO mental health data gets into the system unless a court adjudicates a person incompetent.

In short, any idiot, criminal, and weirdo can easily put his hands on a weapon(s) with a high capacity magazine and all the ammo he can afford.  This is not a mental health problem, Donald, it’s a GUN problem.  Hundreds of millions of guns.

First, let me state one critical fact – EVERY OTHER DEVELOPED COUNTRY ON THE PLANET HAS FIGURED THIS ONE OUT. The United States is the only country with the chronic problem of mass shootings.

A few points:

1. Do we have mental health problems?  Of course, but so does every other country.
2. Do we sell violent video games?  Yes, but so does every other country.
3. Do we have violent television shows and movies?  Yes, but so does every other country.
4. Do we have a breakdown in the family unit?  Yes, but so does every other country.
5. How about churches?  Are our churches shrinking?  Yes, but they are doing the same in other countries.

So what’s the difference? Why do we have such a wrenching problem with mass shootings?  The difference is the omnipresence of guns.

The US is awash in a tsunami of guns that is drowning our country and the lame gun laws we manage to enact are designed to fail to protect our society from people who have no business owning a gun.  As a country, the US is 4.4% of the world’s population, yet we own 42% of the world’s guns.  Let that sink in.  Our homicide rate in the US is over 300% that of the average of the rest of the OECD.

The problem here is obvious.  The solution is simple.  The population of the US is not crazier, or more evil than other countries’ populations.  The only factor that makes our country an outlier  is the overwhelming presence of guns.  Guns can be easily acquired in private sales with no background check.  Guns are trafficked by the millions.  The NRA has successfully stifled research into gun violence, has kept the ATF hamstrung in enforcing existing laws, and has even prevented the electronic tracking of guns from being done.

The real crime here, besides the massive murders of innocents, is that committed by our elected representatives who have taken hundreds of millions of dollars from the NRA and other pro gun industry lobbyists to keep us awash in guns.

That’s the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.