Goin’ to Kansas City, Gonna Get Me Some… Bullets

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Kansas City Shooting

Goin’ to Kansas City, Gonna Get Me Some… Bullets

“The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” 

Gospel to the NRA

How many times has the now disgraced and resigned leader of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre, repeated those words? How many gun zealots, GOP candidates pronounced that these words are among the most basic truths in our nation? The United States is charged horrifically with the vast majority of civilian mass shootings and deaths on earth. A survey published in the International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice found that between 1998 to 2019, the US accounts for 73% of mass shootings in developed nations, and 62% of the resulting fatalities. The number of such mass shootings has only increased since then.

Oh, and one more thing: there were 800 trained good guys with guns (police and sheriff officers) on hand on Wednesday, February 14th as hundreds of thousands (a million?) of cheering Kansas City Chiefs fans marched in or watched a Kansas City, Missouri parade celebrating their home team’s Super Bowl triumph. And this array of armed police could not stop young shooters, allowed by law openly to carry their AR-15s in public, from shooting at each other, injuring 21 and killing one celebrating fan in the process. A dozen were between 6 and 15 years of age. Missouri has among this nation’s most lax gun laws and worst gun homicide statistics in the land. But to the MAGA GOP, this state’s open gun laws are a positive symbol of how the Second Amendment is supposed to work. Nothing on earth offers more conclusive proof that guns in the hands of “good guys” cannot stop mass shootings.

This wasn’t Uvalde, where cops were too scared to stop a lone shooter. The brave officers in Kansas City ran towards the perpetrators. People in the crowd attempted to tackle the shooters. Two juveniles were detained as part of an on-going investigation. Children were among the victims. But still bullets ripped though human flesh, fire from assault weapons that were as easy to buy in Missouri as buying an ice cream cone. There is no excuse for this. None. Zero.

From 1994 to 2004, there was a federal assault weapon ban, which expired because then President George W Bush refused to lead an effort to extend the law beyond its sunset provision. For over two centuries, there were no Supreme Court rulings that interpreted the Second Amendment as creating a ubiquitous and fundamental right for civilians to own guns. That Amendment was created in 1789 to allow the citizen-soldiers who won our Revolutionary War against Britain to keep their guns after the conflict ended.

But in the desperate pursuit of profits, vaporizing in the mid-1970s following the end of the Vietnam War, American gunmakers approached the NRA – an organization dedicated to gun safety and held in high regard by most Americans – to create a new, for-profit NRA-sponsored entity, to market the notion of gun-ownership as a basic American value. The NRA was wildly successful in that effort. Slowly, they sold that message to the American public, a message that resonated with GOP-dominated, heavily rural states. The notion truly did not work in cities.

The NRA was making money hand-over-fist. LaPierre was richly rewarded with an astounding array of compensation and perks. Mega-expensive suits, a mansion, private jet travel, and money, money, money. So much that the New York Attorney General began to investigate the bona fides of an entity that still maintained a non-profit operation. The result: the NRA is facing bankruptcy, and LaPierre resigned in disgrace.

Yet Republican Presidents have slowly peppered the Supreme Court with rightwing justices who have removed most barriers to gun ownership. MAGA states have gone out of their way to repeal even the most reasonable gun regulations. Starting with Heller vs DC, a 2008 Supreme Court ruling by Antonin Scalia that determined gun ownership to be that elusive fundamental right under the Second Amendment, courts have stripped away even the most common-sense gun regulations. Scalia miscited British law in creating a history of gun rights and mostly ignored the “well regulated militia” language of that amendment. A supermajority of Americans, even gunowners, favor more restrictive gun controls. The MAGA GOP (i.e., the entire Republican Party) does not, even as guns are now the leading cause of death among American children and teens.

If anything, gunowners are able to use modern technology to create even more lethal, fully automatic weapons, making the United States look increasingly like the Tommy-gun-wielding era of bootleggers in the 1920s/30s. “Nearly a century after a federal crackdown on machine guns largely ended the use of automatic weapons by criminals, they are back on the rise thanks to Glock switches, an illegal modification that lets Glock-brand pistols fire continuously with one trigger pull… Glock switches are about the size of a thumbnail, easy to install, and typically sell for between $50 and $100. Authorities have struggled to regulate them as they have exploded in popularity recently because they can be manufactured cheaply and quickly on 3-D printers. Previously, most Glock switches were imported to the U.S. from other countries.

“‘They’re easily made, they are non-traceable and the profit margin is so high,’ said Jeff Boshek, special agent in charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ Dallas field division… Similar devices can make other pistols and AR-15-style rifles fire automatically, but those aren’t as commonly used in violent crimes.” The Wall Street Journal, February 17th. Cops are often outgunned by perps with superior weapons. What’s even worse, state laws like “stand your ground” statutes encourage gun owners to resort to killing vs avoiding the confrontation. Open-carry and even permitless concealed weapons laws are multiplying.

In 1996, after a mass shooting, even “wild, wild west” Australia was able to get the murder rates down with sensible gun laws, literally taking guns off the streets. This American permissiveness is a product of malign judicial activism from rightwing judges in the 21st century. If it takes a constitutional amendment, sobeit. This slaughter cannot continue!

I’m Peter Dekom, and the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is sensible gun control that does not give general access to virtually an unlimited array of guns.