It Ain’t Just AR-15s

Navy Seals with fully automatic AR-15s

It Ain’t Just AR-15s

A Uniquely American Problem

“The Second Amendment’s becoming a suicide pact.”

California Governor Gavin Newsom after the lunar New Year shooting in Monterey Park, California

2023 started off with a bang, actually, according to witnesses, more of a rapid sequence of bop, bop, bop, bop, bog as bodies crumpled to the ground. 42 shell casings, 11 killed and 9 injured in a Monterey Park (Los Angeles County) dance club that catered mostly to elderly Asians from the community, once regarded as one of the safest neighborhoods in urban America. The shooter, a Asian septuagenarian misfit, Huu Can Tran, ended his own life with a single shot when police cornered his van. He had attempted another mass killing a few miles away, but a brave and astute young receptionist successfully disarmed Tran before he could shoot.

It's not as if this were a unique incident, although the death toll was high; another set of shootings in Half Moon Bay (San Mateo County, CA) from a single shooter took out seven lives within 24 hours. Not to mention the dozen plus mass shooting incidents across the United States in the month of January. And this was not one of those mass shootings using a semiautomatic, military grade assault rifle (like the notorious AR-15). Tran’s weapon of choice was self-customized 9-millimeter MAC-10 (an older, less lethal and inaccurate, semiautomatic pistol) with an oversized magazine and an elongated barrel silencer. A search of Tran’s mobile home in nearby Hemet revealed a sizeable weapons stash with lots of customized guns.

“Thoughts and prayers,” outrage and that ubiquitous blame on mental illness followed with predictable regularity. Candlelight vigils, citizens and politicians demanding gun control were everywhere, in the state with the tightest gun control laws in the nation. But guns, weapons of virtually every description, are available just about everywhere. Even with recently enabled federal background check mandates, some new “red flag” laws (to identify persons who should be accorded the right to buy a gun) were now on the books across the country, so what?

Recently, a six-year-old in Virginia took his parent’s handgun, purportedly “secured” in the home, packed it in his backpack and shot his teacher in her midsection. She survived, but the point is how easy it is for anyone, and I do mean anyone, to procure a gun anywhere in the US. They are stolen, borrowed, 3D printed, openly purchased at gun shows or between private sellers or bought legitimately at one of the almost 53 thousand federally licensed gun dealers in the United States. If your state has tougher restrictions, you can drive to neighboring state where restrictions are much easier. Live in Chicago? Take a short drive to Indiana. Southern California borders Arizona. But normally, there is a purveyor of guns locally to save you that trip.

In 1996, a mass-shooting in Tasmania quickly led Australia – a conservative country where guns are cherished – to vastly tighter gun control laws. After 51 Muslim worshippers were gunned down in Christchurch, New Zealand, fierce new gun controls and gun confiscations were enacted… and enforced.

But an unwarranted set of very recent gun wildly incorrect US Supreme Court rulings – with opinions from Antonin Scalia in Heller vs DC (2008 a 5-4 majority), Samuel Alito in McDonald vs Chicago (2010, 5-4) and Clarence Thomas in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen (2022, 6-3), illogically applying “originalism” (looking to the time when the Second Amendment was passed, the 1789 era of flintlocks and muskets) – have responded to mass shootings here with quite the opposite rulings.

For 219 years, since the passage of the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights, there had been no high court cases interpreting that amendment as supporting a ubiquitous right for citizens to own guns. That certainly changed, just as the technology of personal weapons accelerated. There are now more guns than people in the US, and well over 20 million military grade semiautomatic assault rifles in private hands. Read the Second Amendment for yourself, noting it was passed 234 years ago, and interpret it with a modicum of common sense. “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” That “Militia” was mostly the Revolutionary Army, comprised of volunteers who frequently supplied their own weapons.

I’m tired of the oft-repeated NRA mantra – “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” – when government statistics tell us that only one out of thirty civilian homicides is ever “justifiable.” I find the decades of blaming mental illness for mass shootings, given the virtually unlimited access to guns, when a mentally ill individual with a knife could not remotely inflict death and destruction compared to using a semiautomatic gun, pistol or rifle. That the ease of buying guns in the United States is the principal power behind Latin American drug cartels that have destabilized so many countries south of our border.

James Densley, a criminal justice professor at Metropolitan State University in Minnesota, and Jillian Peterson, a professor at Minnesota’s Hamline University, who started a database of mass shootings, called the Violence Project, noted that “there’s no question that mass shootings have increased recently, with 7 of the 10 deadliest shootings having occurred in the last decade… [T]he increase in such shootings comes as record gun sales during the pandemic have placed more firearms into circulation, some of which are lost, stolen or sold and otherwise end up on the black market.” Los Angeles Times, January 24th.

I am tired of old men in mostly White state legislatures and the new House majority in Congress, imposing the values of rural America (the country was 94% rural in 1789, it’s about 90% urban today) on crowded cities where gun violence has exploded. The rogue Supreme Court’s gun rulings are even inconsistent with the view of the majority of Americans, even gun owners. With COVID under control, foreign tourists generating billions of dollars in revenues to American businesses are increasingly scared to travel here based on our notorious and nonsensical worship of guns, the resulting and well-publicized violence, without any notion of reasonable efforts to make our nation safe. These semiautomatic guns aren’t hunting weapons or basic self-defense; they are offensive weapons designed to kill multiple human beings quickly and efficiently.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I long for a time when school children no longer have to practice

“active shooter” drills… when America begins to care more for its children than guns.