Another American weapon of war was used to kill five people in a Louisville bank

How many more times are we going to have to read a sentence like this one from ABC News?

“The suspected shooter, 25-year-old Connor Sturgeon, bought the AR-15 legally on April 4 in Louisville, Jackie Gwinn-Villaroel, interim chief of the Louisville Metro Police Department, said at a news conference Tuesday.”

Nearly everything that’s wrong with our politics, our moral values, and our priorities as a country is in that sentence.  

The gun used to murder five people and wound eight others was a weapon designed for and issued to the military, the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. 

The killer bought his AR-15 less than a week ago, and he bought it legally.  These guns should not be legal for purchase by civilians.  Period.  Not even red flag laws could have prevented this massacre.  There was not enough time between the purchase of the gun and its use for anyone – friends or family members of the shooter, the police department, or a judge – to seek a red flag order against the shooter and confiscate his gun.

The only thing that could have stopped this massacre and the one in Nashville and so many others is outlawing, and I mean completely banning, the sale and ownership of these weapons of war.

If the national government and the states are not going to outlaw these terrible killing machines, they should at least pass laws imposing a 30-day cooling-off period after purchase.  Such a law might have helped in some of the recent mass shootings:

The shooter in Uvalde, Texas, bought his AR-15 days before killing 19 students and two teachers at the Robb Elementary School.  

The killer in Nashville bought two AR-15 style semiautomatic weapons only a few days before they were used to kill three nine-year-olds and three adults.

The shooter who killed 10 in Boulder, Colorado, in March, 2021, bought a Ruger AR-15 style weapon six days before he shot up a King Sooper grocery store.

The killer in the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, bought an AR-15 style rifle and two handguns one week before he murdered 49 people.

The list could go on.  Several other mass killers bought their weapons – sometimes several of them – within months of the time they used their AR-15’s to commit murder. 

The AR-15 is the weapon of choice for these killers who want to shoot up schools, nightclubs, grocery stores, malls, and other public gathering places.  This is in part because the AR-15 can be fitted with a magazine that holds 30 rounds and more.  Cylindrical AR-15 magazines that hold 100 rounds can be bought in states with wide-open gun policies, and there are a lot of them.  Twenty-six states, at last count, allow citizens to carry handguns and rifles like the AR-15 openly with no license or training.  You can walk into a gun store, put down your credit card or about $1,500 in cash, wait a few minutes while they run a highly ineffective background check on you, and walk out with your AR-15 and as much ammunition as you can carry.  You can even take your weapon and ammunition to the car and go back for more.  Some of these shooters had 1,000 rounds with them when they were arrested or killed, and had bought thousands more rounds of .223 ammunition that was found when their homes were searched.

The AR-15 fires bullets as fast as you can pull the trigger.  It’s possible to shoot three rounds per second with one of these awful killing machines, 30 rounds in 10 seconds.  Reloading a 30 round magazine takes only a few seconds, so it is possible to shoot more than 100 bullets in less than a minute with an AR-15.

The bullets fired by the AR-15 are small but terribly deadly, exiting the barrel at 3,200 feet per second.  A bullet from a typical 9 mm semiautomatic pistol travels about half as fast, 1,500 feet per second.  The AR-15 bullet hits a human body and enters with great force and velocity.  The bullets are designed to pierce flesh and upon hitting organs and bones, to tumble wildly, broadening the path the bullet takes through the body, doing much more damage than a handgun bullet or a bullet fired from a conventional hunting rifle.

The AR-15 was designed for use by the U.S. military in wars, and its purpose was to kill and maim enemy soldiers with great speed and efficiency.  It does the same thing to adult civilians dancing in nightclubs or shopping in a Walmart or to children in school hallways or classrooms.

That these weapons of war are available to American civilians is one of the great travesties of this nation.  If we are willing to arm our citizens with such deadly weapons of war, where does it stop?  Here are the words of the Second Amendment:  “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”  Nowhere does the Constitution spell out the definition of “arms.”  There has been a federal law against the ownership of fully automatic weapons for decades.  You cannot buy an automatic weapon like the famous Thompson machine gun you have probably seen in gangster movies.  But under the current illogic of the Supreme Court’s gun decisions, why shouldn’t machineguns be for sale to anyone who wants one? 

The states that allow people to openly carry handguns and rifles like the AR-15, or in some states to carry the same weapons concealed from sight, are allowing people to walk around with a weapon that can fire thirty bullets in 10 seconds.  Why not allow them to carry a fullyautomatic AR-15 that can fire 800 rounds a minute, more than 130 rounds in ten seconds?  What is the difference?  We can already see the damage done by AR-15’s.  The shooter in Las Vegas in 2017 had 24 firearms in his hotel suite, 14 of them AR-15 style rifles fitted with “bump-stocks” making them capable of firing at nearly full-automatic rates of fire.  He shot more than 1,000 rounds in just a few minutes, killing 60 people and injuring 413 more with gunshot wounds or from being hit by bullet shrapnel.

It's just a matter of time before one of the right-wing lawsuit factories like the Alliance for Defending Freedom files a lawsuit in some red state challenging its already extreme laws by advocating a right to own and shoot fully automatic weapons.  They’ll push such a suit all the way to the Supreme Court hoping to get “arms” defined anew to include automatic rifles, maybe even hand grenades or shoulder-fired missiles like the RPG-7.  To the right-wing, the Constitution is just a big loophole to drive its legal truck through again and again.  With the Trump 6-3 majority, maybe they’ll get the court to include the other weapons under the “well regulated militia” clause of the Second Amendment.  There are “militias” fighting in Ukraine right now that are armed with such weapons.  Why shouldn’t Jim Bob be allowed to mount a surplus M-240 machine gun on top of the cab of his pickup truck to defend himself against marauding antifas or other imaginary threats?

We’ve already gone around the proverbial bend when it comes to guns in this country.  We are allowing children to be killed in our schools, and we are not doing a single effective thing about it.  Charlie Kirk, who leads the far-right Turning Points USA Political Action Committee, has already thrown open the door to even more madness, if such a thing can be imagined.  At his Turning Points Faith Conference less than a week ago, Kirk said this: “I think it's worth [it] to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”

According that fresh-faced Republican operative, it’s rational to sacrifice the lives of school children so we can have the right to “keep and bear arms,” including the very arms that are used to kill the children – the almighty AR-15.

More guns means more deaths.  It’s rational according to Charlie Kirk.  Not only that, it is acceptable.

One day our children, who are risking their lives to attend school as I write this, will look back on this time ask why we allowed our nation to lapse into full-on madness.