The MAGA right (e.g., a tweet from Rep. Lauren Boebert [R-Colo.]) points out that the July 3rd “mass shooting” in Copenhagen, Denmark (three victims) proves gun violence cannot be controlled. Seriously? A stretch any way you look at it. First, under US metrics, since four or more people were not killed, it should not even be viewed as a “mass shooting.” Further, the last time there was such a shooting in Denmark, in 2015, two people were killed.
As Washington Post analyst, Philip Bump puts it (July 5th edition): “Less than 24 hours later, Americans would be reminded why the incident in Denmark was not really comparable to gun violence in this country. A shooter opened fire at a Fourth of July parade in a suburb of Chicago, killing six people [a seventh subsequently died in the hospital] and wounding more than two dozen. It was the 15th incident this year in which at least four people have been shot and killed in a single incident, according to the Gun Violence Archive’s data.
“Nearly 100 people have died in those incidents — more gun deaths from one cause than Denmark has seen in total in nearly two decades. Americans are about 11 times as likely as Danes to be killed by a gun.” The inevitable number of innocents slaughtered by gun violence, the right-wing says, is simply the price we have to pay for “freedom.” Freedom? We have restrictions and outright bans on abortion, there are severe limits against teaching an honest view of history in many red state public schools, rich people can fund political campaigns without limits, not to mention that gerrymandering and voter suppression in most red states limit minority voices. That so many on the right believe that tolerating the worst gun statistics in the democratic world is just the way it is, but we need severe voter restrictions for unproven fraud, should be shocking. It isn’t. See the above chart from the May 25th Washington Post for the numbers.
Are those on the right telling us that our “freedom” is dependent on wide open gun ownership? That the rest of the democratic world, where there is usually a “one-person, one-vote” system of government… unlike the United States where Wyoming (with under 600,000 people) has the same weight as California (with 40 million people) in the US Senate… is thus inferior, because they severely limit the possession of firearms within the general public? We are indeed the only modern democracy where gun ownership is considered such a basic right, where common sense gun control does not exist, where there are more civilian guns than people, and where there are somewhere between 15 and 20 million military grade assault rifles within the general public. With a little over 4% of Earth’s population, we have 25% of the global inmate population.
What puzzles me is the constant failure to equate the rising number of civilian guns with the rising number of violent crimes in this country. The right blames mental illness. Yet the failure to intercept alleged Chicago shooter, Robert, E. Crimo III, a young man with a well-documented history of violence, deflects the “solution” to a difficult to enforce and nebulous “mental illness” standard while avoiding eliminating the necessary weapons of choice. Simply, this is further evidence that the recent token “red flag” and “background check” enhancement federal statute is vastly too little, vastly too late. Tell that to the little two-year-old found wandering the Chicago streets days after the shooting… because his parents were killed.
Indeed, the explosion of “voter integrity laws” – effectively reducing minority voting rights with support from the 2021 Supreme Court ruling in Brnovich vs DNC (over Arizona’s efforts) – became a competition among red states to see which state could push more Democrats off voter rolls or at least dilute and marginalize their votes. In a trend that continues unabated, “Two Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research polls conducted in February and July 2021 found that two-thirds of Republican respondents believe Biden was illegitimately elected in 2020… [While on an overall basis] Nearly 7 in 10 respondents said Biden was legitimately elected, while 29% said he was not.” Politifact.com, January 30th. The Big Lie continues, as fewer than 27% of Republicans even bothered to watch the recently televised January 6th Committee hearings.
“On Jan. 6, 2021, Boebert gave her first speech as a newly elected member of Congress. It came as legislators were considering the electoral votes submitted by states in the 2020 presidential election; it came, in fact, as rioters supporting Donald Trump had already pushed past police outside the Capitol and were about to enter the building itself.
“In her speech, Boebert sided with the cause motivating those rioters…. ‘It is my duty under the U.S. Constitution to object to the counting of the electoral votes of the state of Arizona,’ she said. ‘The members who stand here today and accept the results of this concentrated, coordinated, partisan effort by Democrats, where every fraudulent vote cancels out the vote of an honest American, has sided with the extremist left.’” The Post, July 5th.
“An analysis of in-person voter fraud completed in 2014 found 241 possibly fraudulent ballots cast in a pool of more than 1 billion votes over the previous 14 years. In the 2020 election, more than 160 million votes were cast, including 25.6 million in six swing states won by President Biden. By the end of last year, the Associated Press had tallied fewer than 500 possibly suspect votes in those states. Possibly! But that’s a rate of 1.8 suspect votes per 100,000 cast in those states.
“So far in 2022 [early July], more than 10,000 gun homicides have been tallied in the United States. That’s a rate of three killings per 100,000 Americans. A higher incidence rate — and one that has a dire, tangible effect incomparable to suspect votes that would not have been determinative in any of the six states’ elections… It’s also a rate that’s 128 times the rate of fraud seen in that 2014 study. In that study, the rate of fraud was slightly lower than the number of Americans killed just in mass shooting events so far this year — the focus of Boebert’s tweet, though she has at times been more expansive.” The Post.
The result: a majority of Americans no longer believe the United States is or will remain a democracy. A survey “conducted among likely 2022 midterm election voters - shows that distrust and pessimism about American democracy have become pervasive problems, and are no longer confined to the extreme fringes of the two political parties… Indeed, more than one-half (51 percent) of voters say that the U.S. democracy is at risk of extinction - including 49 percent of Democrats and Republicans, as well as 54 percent of Independents. Just one-quarter of voters believe that our democracy is secured for future generations (26 percent).” The Hill, reporting the release of a January poll by Schoen-Cooperman Research. That’s our reality today!
I’m Peter Dekom, and if you believe that severe voting restrictions resulting from virtually non-existent voter fraud are more important than taking assault weapons off the streets, you are definitely part of the problem, and not remotely part of the solution, to this nation’s most horrific violence issues.
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