“Two days after a gunman killed 10 people at a Colorado grocery store, leaving many Americans on high alert, Rico Marley was arrested as he emerged from the bathroom at a Publix supermarket in Atlanta. He was wearing body armor and carrying six loaded weapons — four handguns in his jacket pockets, and in a guitar bag, a semiautomatic rifle and a 12-gauge shotgun.” NY Times, January 2nd. His entire arsenal is pictured above (from an Atlanta PD photo). He didn’t threaten anyone, there were no overt signs of mental illness, and Georgia is one of many states that permits open carry of all sorts of guns. There are no statutory limits to the number of guns one can carry or against publicly wearing body armor under Georgia law. The weapons were legally purchased. Marley might not have violated any law at all.
How would you feel, shopping at your local supermarket, witnessing a man with a pistol strapped to his hip and an AR-15 slung over his shoulder? Safe? Comfortable? Intimidated? Terrified? Marley may have had more than this scenario, but what’s the difference? Except for nations embroiled in civil war or facing an out-and-out invasion… or those those in crazy states like Afghanistan where ununiformed Taliban wander through the civilian population with intimidation as the goal… civilians flaunting guns in ordinary public places just does not make sense. Doesn’t sound particularly civilized, and in truth, it isn’t. Most of the planet is both fascinated and repelled by the American love affair with guns, particularly military-grade assault rifles.
“The question of how to handle such [overly weaponized, open carry] situations has been raised most often in recent years in the context of political protests, where the open display of weapons has led to concerns about intimidation, the squelching of free speech or worse. But it may become a more frequent subject of debate in the wake of a landmark Supreme Court decision in June, which expanded Americans’ right to arm themselves in public while limiting states’ ability to set their own regulations.
“The ruling also affirmed the principle of allowing states and local governments to ban guns in ‘sensitive places’; as examples, it cited legislative assemblies, polling places and courthouses. But the high court left much open for interpretation. ‘A wave of litigation is going to confront the courts with questions about what, for example, makes a restriction on guns in schools and government buildings different than in museums or on public transit,’ Jacob D. Charles, a professor and gun law expert at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law, wrote in a recent blog post.”
“For much of the nation’s history, disease was the No. 1 killer of children. Then America became the land of the automobile, and by the 1960s, motor-vehicle crashes were the most common way for children to die. Twenty years ago, well after the advent of the seatbelt, an American child was still three times as likely to die in a car accident as to be killed by a firearm. We’re now living in the era of the gun.” NYT, December 18th. Indeed, 18% of childhood deaths today are from motor vehicle accidents. But 19% are the result of gunfire. Cancer (8%) and drug overdoses (7%) lag far behind. It is a shameful statistic.
Mass shootings, often occurring on school and college campuses, are inexcusably horrific. Thru mid-December, “The Gun Violence Archive has counted at least 635 mass shootings … Of those shootings, 21 involved five or more fatalities, including the attack at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Va., on Nov. 22 and the shooting at an L.G.B.T.Q. nightclub in Colorado Springs on Nov. 19 that left five people dead… The group recorded 692 mass shootings last year, with 28 involving four or more fatalities.” NY Times, December 26th. And instead of contracting the use of such weapons, red states are tripping all over themselves to make gun possession easier with fewer restrictions.
Effective January 1st, Alabama residents do not need a permit to carry concealed weapons. Indeed, as of now, “half of the states in the nation, from Maine to Arizona, will not require a license to carry a handgun… The state-by-state legislative push has coincided with a federal judiciary that has increasingly ruled in favor of carrying guns and against state efforts to regulate them.” NYTimes. The focus of GOP minimal acceptance of gun control, as reflected in recent federal legislation, is an assumption that if we can filter out the mentally ill and convicted felons, gun violence will simply fade into irrelevance. That’s pretty much it.
For Supreme Court “originalists,” they have incorrectly cited historical precedent (Heller vs DC, 2008) from the era of musket and flintlocks to define modern gunowner rights. As the NRA justifies assault weapon ownership as a protection against an oppressive government (which right-wing zealots define as any political system that opposes their views), the Court skips over the intimidation and chilling effect over free assembly and speech arising from armed protestors confronting unarmed protestors.
If the Court believed, incorrectly in the eyes of the vast majority of Americans, that Roe vs Wade was wrongfully decided, they should have no problem overturning Heller vs DC, the first case in American history to hold that the Second Amendment created a ubiquitous right of gun ownership… a case decided 232 years after the founding of our nation. But the Supreme Court has become a highly-partisan, right-wing rubber stamp to the minority views reflected in the MAGA movement.
I’m Peter Dekom, and as academic standards of our educational system slides lower, as we fail to address the climate change burden that will be carried most by our youngest citizens and as guns kill more children than any other cause… it is clear that American politicians have dramatically deprioritized the well-being of our nation’s young in favor of... just about anything else.
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