Just shoot me. (Not really, gun loonies. It’s an expression indicating exasperation). Donald Trump suggests the solution to mass murder by assault rifle in our schools is to ignore the easy availability of assault rifles and to arm teachers with hand guns to shoot back.
What does one make of such a notion, other than to note its purpose, which is to distract from the need for banning civilian access to weapons of war — tanks, fighter jets, nuclear submarines, rockets, flamethrowers, and assault rifles.
First, cast your mind back to your High School and Elementary teachers. Which of them can you imagine playing a Rambo role in protecting you? None? On the other hand, to which would you have liked to bid a fond farewell? In my case, Coach Bell, Mrs. Somerville, and Mr. Schwartz. So it is maliciously amusing to imagine them whipping out a handgun and facing the superior firepower of a homicidal maniac wielding an AR-15.
Second, if teachers are going to be the first line of defense when lethal weapons are involved, will members of SWAT teams, the police department, the sheriff’s office take up the teaching of algebra, debate, and gym? That looks like a twofer. Schools will be less safe, and the students more poorly educated.
Third, the bone-spur president who dodged Vietnam assures us a guy with a gun in a school will scare away potential shooters since all mass murderers are cowards. But it turns out there were three guys with guns at Parkland, and they were the scared ones who never unholstered their weapons as the killing went on.
Whereas, mass murderers are many things — crazed, suicidal, white hot with rage, jealous, delusional, or committed extremists — but they’re rarely cowards. They court suicide by cop, or shoot themselves as a grand finale to their deadly drama. So, an absent-minded math teacher or Shakespeare-spouting schoolmarm is unlikely to strike terror into their dark souls.
And speaking of cuckoo, those who don’t attend closely to what Trump hath wrought, the normalization of the off-the-deep-end forces of the right, might want to take a look at Wayne LaPierre’s speech to CPAC. He’s the head of the NRA with a Hitler haircut, and CPAC a kind of masonic order of right-wing zealotry.
At their annual conclave, which coincided with the aftershocks of the Parkland murders, LaPierre was so far out that he managed to alarm even this crowd of extremists with the extremity of his remarks. Apparently, the notion of kids refusing to be gunned down drove him completely around the bend.
He refused to imagine a world in which military weapons could not be sold to every lunatic Tom, gang member Dick and irate teen-age Harry itching to slaughter people at their school or workplace or in the streets.
With reactionary Republicans in control of the White House, both houses of Congress, a majority of states, and the courts, you’d think LaPierre would be feeling safe and secure, but he must be reading Breitbart and watching Fox since he issued a jeremiad of sheer terror to his fellow posse members. Of course, to be fair, it is his job, for which he is paid $950,000 a year, to wax apocalyptic whenever a restriction on any weapon is proposed.
According to LaPierre, the Republican stranglehold on all the levers of power is an illusion. There’s a rising tide wave of “European-style socialism.” Soon we will be a captive society where resistance will be futile, speech will be controlled, big brother will watch us, and our most basic freedoms — guns, guns, and more guns — will be eliminated.
Who are these lurking enemies? Oddly, they are apparently Trump’s government, the corrupt FBI, Justice Department, EPA, intelligence agencies, and of course Hollywood liberals, the media, universities, billionaire capitalists, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, he warns, even kids who survive school massacres and want to live are tools of the Deep State. Grab your guns, Republicans, you’re surrounded! You have met the enemy and its everyone you ever met, except Wayne LaPierre.
Let’s face it, what really worries LaPierre is not creeping socialism, it’s creeping democracy. A majority of Americans favor every gun control measure the NRA opposes. And now a Children’s Crusade has begun. They are as mad as hell at being targets and they’re not going to take it anymore. I wish them well, but unfortunately I have lived long enough to have seen this movie before.
When the Vietnam antiwar movement took to the streets, it may have had the moral high ground, and it certainly had the best songs (“Blowing in the Wind,” “Masters of War,”
“For What It’s Worth,” “Ohio,” “Fortunate Son”), but the government it opposed had the guns, the tanks, the planes, the cops, and, more importantly, the votes.
Nixon defanged the opposition when he turned the draft into a lottery, since a majority of potential draftees then knew they were off the hook. So, even as the public turned against it, the unwinnable war ground on and on, killing another 25,000 Americans while we waited for the secret plan to end the war to kick in.
Civil Rights protests won some legislative victories, but racism is still alive. Earth Day led to the EPA, but the polluters still befoul the earth and buy legislators dedicated to keeping it that way. And the NRA’s cold, dead hand controls Washington by means of $30 million in campaign bribes to Trump, and millions more to congressional candidates. And it turns out the vote.
The Parkland kids have demanded action, rather than the usual prayers and promises. And they have at least identified the real issues: the availability of assault rifles and a political class on the NRA payroll. But until voters replace those tools of the gun lobby, I fear the killings will continue. The paranoid style in American politics never goes out of fashion, as LaPierre demonstrates, so the armchair frontiersmen get to cling to their weapons, but so do the crazies, the terrorists and the murderous.
With 300 million guns abroad in the land, it’s surprising the death toll isn’t worse. But 13,000 dead and another 26,000 wounded every year is bad enough.
If the Parkland, Columbine, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech kids went to school in Australia, England, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, Japan, or almost any developed country on Earth, they’d still be alive. And their siblings, parents, teachers, classmates, neighbors wouldn’t have to mourn their loss. Have we no shame? We do not. So, the beat goes on.