By John L. Micek
Want to know what rage feels like?
It’s waking on a Wednesday morning on a school day as the cable news talking heads sift through the latest on the shooting at a Texas elementary school that left 21 people dead, most of them children, and looking at your daughter as she gets ready for her final day of classes of the year, and saying, “Please, God. Not today.”
Want to know what it feels like to have your heart break?
It’s kissing your daughter goodbye, reminding her to stay safe, having her look back at you, and listen as she tells you, with perfect clarity, that she’s grown numb to the incidents of carnage that have made mass casualty drills a reality for an entire generation of American schoolchildren.
But then, I’m one of the lucky ones.
I got to kiss my daughter goodbye. For too many families in Texas, and in Buffalo, in Philadelphia, in Pittsburgh, in every American city where our pathological love affair with firearms has destroyed lives and ripped families apart, there will never be another good morning. There will never be another good night. There will never be another happy birthday.
And it doesn’t have to be this way. That is the most heartbreaking and maddening thing of all.
At a time when a clear majority of Americans say they want Congress to enact stricter gun violence reduction measures, bills that would do just that are bottled up in the narrowly divided U.S. Senate.
Insanity, as has been famously remarked, is doing the same thing over and over again, and hoping for a different result. And that is the story of our lawmakers’ ongoing inability to pass even the simplest of gun violence reduction measures.
And, then, under our very noses, we’re hit with another Sandy Hook.
And we’ll wring our hands. We’ll offer our prayers for the dead, and our sympathy to the families. And, past being prologue, nothing will change. And weeks, or maybe even days later, we’ll be back in the same place, wondering how such tragedies can occur in a nation where they happen every day.
That’s not just insanity, it’s utter inhumanity, as a wave of social media memes since the shooting have made clear.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
And it starts with you. It starts with me. It starts with every one of us, standing up, and saying in a loud and clear voice that we’ve had enough.
It’s an election year.
Make it clear to the people seeking your vote that if they don’t support expanded background checks and closing the gun show loophole, they don’t get your vote.
Tell them that if they don’t back an assault weapons ban, or bans on expanded magazines, they don’t get your vote. Make it clear that if they don’t support eliminating the filibuster so that these bills, or bills expanding voting rights, can get an actual up or down vote in the U.S. Senate, then they’re not getting your vote either.
Not one of these measures will infringe on the rights of law-abiding gun owners. Anyone who says differently, isn’t being straight with you. Even the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in the 2008 Heller decision, said that while the Second Amendment clearly allows for Americans to keep and bear arms, that right comes with some limits.
“Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited,” Scalia wrote, even as he sketched out exceptions. ” … the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”
On Tuesday, Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat who represented the families of Sandy Hook when he served in the House, begged his colleagues to reach common ground on reform measures.
“I’m here on this floor to beg — to literally get down on my hands and knees — to beg my colleagues. Find a path forward here. Work with us to find a way to pass laws that make this less likely,” he said.
We should not have to beg for the answers that are staring us in the face. We should not have to beg for parents to have the right to wake up in the morning and not worry that today might be their child’s last day on Earth.
We should not have to beg so that Black people in Buffalo can go to the grocery store safely. We should not have to beg so that the residents of Philadelphia, of Pittsburgh, of Harrisburg, of every American city where these senseless tragedies unfold daily can live safely in their own neighborhoods.
Beg? That time is done. Demand it. And don’t settle for any other answer but “yes.”
An award-winning political journalist, John L. Micek is Editor-in-Chief of The Pennsylvania Capital-Star in Harrisburg, Pa. Email him at jmicek@penncapital-star.com and follow him on Twitter @ByJohnLMicek. Copyright 2022 John L. Micek, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.
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Jackson1955 says
Try to rent a car, you have to be 25 or older , buy alcohol , 21 or older , but a gun is ok at 18 ( Just add an insurance mandate and watch the age limit climb to 25 or higher ). Just so we’re clear, the official republican position is that teenagers are mature enough to own guns but not birth control.
marlee says
It takes 9 months to create a human being and one second for an AR-15 to end it.
The dude says
Much like COVID, the selfish few ignore all facts and science to foist upon all of us something that can be prevented.
Much like COVID, the cow has now left the metaphorical barn.
The venn diagram of MAGATs, COVID deniers and ammosexuals is pretty much just one circle.
Michael Cocchiola says
There is nothing that will help to end the gun menace in America short of a massive revolt by voters. And that will never happen due to clever gerrymandering by Republican governors and legislators and the rise of “Christian” nationalism.
Republicans know that if they “betray” their Christian base they will lose to even farther right-wing competitors. They have created a Frankenstein monster that they cannot control. Vote for guns or be forced to get a real job. We know which choice they’ll make.
D says
Let’s harden up our schools.. criminals will always get guns.. hire retired military or police to guard our kids
Skibum says
This ongoing, tragic and heartbreaking debate over gun safety and conflicting interpretations of the meaning and intent of the 2nd Amendment should also finally and irrevocably prove once and for all how our elections as well as the business of our federal congress members have been hijacked and corrupted by big money lobbyists who have their own specific interests at heart, NOT the public interest. Despite the overwhelming majority of Americans saying loud and clearly that we want, we DEMAND common sense legislative changes that will help curb this country’s horrendous slaughter of school children by other teens who have been able to easily acquire AR-15 assault rifles, high capacity ammo magazines and hundreds of rounds of ammo without so much as a question being asked of them, the NRA and other gun lobbyists keep pumping millions and millions of dollars into the campaign war chests of conservative elected officials, buying them off to the point that the rights and interests of average American citizens don’t even matter any longer to these money corrupted elected house members and senators. While they hold the lives of countless school children in one hand, they hold out the other behind their back to collect millions in contributions from the gun lobby to buy their silence, to buy their complicity, to buy their votes. Not only does America need gun reform, we also desperately need election reform to prevent deep pocket lobbyists from wielding more power and more control over our elected representatives in congress than voters have. America must look at the issues of gun reform and election reform together, and enact changes that give the power back to the voters, NOT billionaire owned corporations who can afford to hire many, many lobbyists with the job of pushing millions of dollars of blood money into the pockets of our federal lawmakers, or our democracy will cease to exist.
Bill C says
There were many cops outside the door while children inside were being massacred in Uvalde and they did nothing, afraid they were outgunned. You must be a Russian bot disseminating discord .
cgm says
all of these shooters should have been red flagged. if you know something say something!