Most Americans vs the NRA, GOP Legislators and GOP-Appointed Judges

We’ve watched repeatedly as overwhelmingly popular sentiments, born of democracy, are dramatically ignored by rightwing America through conservative lobbyists, legislatures and judges. Through gerrymandering and voting restrictions, we have a nation that is currently governed, on huge personal safety issues, by a radical minority. Safe access to abortion, favored by almost 70% of the American electorate, and meaningful gun control, favored by 60% of that voting body, are crushed, stifled and denied by Republican legislators and judges, financed by lobbyists paid by America’s gunmakers (including the National Rifle Assn) and accelerated by a primary system that filters out those willing to compromise.

A single ultra-rightwing judge (Matthew Kacsmaryk), who spent years prior to his appointment to the Texas federal bench by Donald Trump working as a religious activist, including an intense commitment to end abortion, singlehandedly banned an FDA-approved abortion pill across the entire United States in early April. While that ruling has been temporarily suspended by the US Supreme Court pending full review, that a judge could even think of imposing a nationwide ban against a federal agency with a large staff of medical experts and a rigorous review process is astounding. To some judges, their loyalty to religious texts rather obviously trumps their clearly defined duties to the US Constitution.

As a practicing lawyer for decades, having read hundreds of Supreme Court rulings, just reading these opinions – from the dramatic misciting of applicable precedents that permeated US Associate Justice Antonin Scalia’s 2008 Heller vs DC (which held for the first time in US judicial history that the 2nd Amendment created effectively a ubiquitous right to gun ownership) to U.S. District Judge Kacsmaryk’s very recent Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA ruling banning Mifepristone (the most commonly prescribed abortion drug) – I am angered by judges’ literally misciting case law and pulling interpretations out of thin air, ignoring rather specific wording (e.g., “a well regulated militia” in the 2nd Amendment) in the constitutional provisions they are seeking to interpret.

Control over women’s bodies and the desire not to live in a nation where concealed or open-carry firearms combined with tens of millions of once-banned military assault rifles routinely result in hundreds of mass shootings every year are what most of us want. But what we get is a government reaching into the most personal medical decisions a woman could ever make and forcing all of us to live in world where we fear gun violence… everywhere. On April 11th, the politically neutral Kaiser Family Foundation released a study – Americans’ Experiences With Gun-Related Violence, Injuries, And Deaths – serendipitously timed after recent mass shootings in two red states with very lax gun laws (Tennessee and Kentucky). Here are the study’s key findings:

• Experiences with gun-related incidents are common among U.S. adults. One in five (21%) say they have personally been threatened with a gun, a similar share (19%) say a family member was killed by a gun (including death by suicide), and nearly as many (17%) have personally witnessed someone being shot. Smaller shares have personally shot a gun in self-defense (4%) or been injured in a shooting (4%). In total, about half (54%) of all U.S. adults say they or a family member have ever had one of these experiences.

• Gun-related injuries and deaths, as well as worries about gun violence, disproportionately affect people of color in the U.S. Three in ten Black adults (31%) have personally witnessed someone being shot, as have one-fifth of Hispanic adults (22%). One-third of Black adults (34%) have a family member who was killed by a gun, twice the share of White adults who say the same (17%). In addition, one-third of Black adults (32%) and Hispanic adults (33%) say they worry either “every day,” or “almost every day” about themselves or someone they love being a victim of gun violence (compared to one in ten White adults). And one in five Black adults (20%) and Hispanic adults (18%) feel like gun-related crimes, deaths, and injuries are a “constant threat” to their local community, more than double the share among White adults (8%).

• The majority (84%) of U.S. adults say they have taken at least one precaution to protect themselves or their families from the possibility of gun violence, including nearly six in ten (58%) who have talked to their children or other family members about gun safety, and more than four in ten who have purchased a weapon other than a gun, such as a knife or pepper spray (44%), or attended a gun safety class or practiced shooting a gun (41%). About a third (35%) have avoided large crowds, such as music festivals, or crowded bars and clubs to protect themselves or their families from the possibility of gun violence. Three in ten (29%) have purchased a gun to protect themselves or their family from the possibility of gun violence. Smaller shares, but still at least one in seven, have avoided using public transit (23%), changed or considered changing the school that their child attends (20%), avoided attending religious services, cultural events or celebrations (15%), or moved to a different neighborhood or city (15%).

• One in seven (14%) adults say a doctor or other health care provider has asked if they own a gun or if there are guns in the home, while about one in four (26%) parents of children under 18 say their child’s pediatrician has asked them about guns in the home. Few (5%) adults say a doctor or other health care provider has ever talked to them about gun safety.

• Four in ten (41%) adults report living in a household with a gun. Among this group, more than half say at least one gun in their home is stored in the same location as the ammunition (52%), 44% say a gun is stored in an unlocked location, and more than one-third report a gun is stored loaded (36%). Overall, three in four (75%) adults living in households with guns say any of their guns are stored in one of these ways, representing three in ten overall adults (31%). About four in ten (44%) parents of children under age 18 say there is a gun in their household. Among parents with guns in their home, about one-third say a gun is stored loaded (32%) or stored in an unlocked location (32%). More than half of parents (61%) say any gun in their homes is stored in the same location as ammunition.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gunshots have become the leading cause of death among children and adolescents ages 1 to 19. We know that only one civilian gun homicide in thirty is deemed justifiable. And still there are red state bills pending to reduce restrictions on gun ownership, lower the age where individuals can purchase guns, make open and concealed carry legal without a permit, etc., etc. After our assault weapons ban expired under a sunset clause in 2004, mass shootings skyrocketed. What we have is a rising autocracy of radical rightwing zealots vying with each other to see which elected GOP official can be more rightwing.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I yearn for the years when this nation at least tried to be a democracy and accord equal protection of the law to all Americans.