Another WTF day has come and gone

The following words appeared on the front page of the New York Times today: “By raising expectations that a bipartisan deal on gun safety, mental health and school security is even possible…”

The story is about Chuck Schumer and a few Democrats and a couple of Republicans trying to put together something that will pass the Senate about guns.  There is so much wrong with that sentence fragment, I hardly know where to begin. 

First of all, is this really what these apparently well-meaning senators think they’re doing?  WTF kind of federal law could they pass on “gun safety?”  Some kind of requirement that anyone buying a gun has to take a course on the safe operation of the gun and pass a test, like you do when you go for a driver’s license?  Is that what they’re fantasizing about, that any of these yahoo Republicans representing red states like Texas even cares about gun safety? 

And how about the next part of the so-called deal they’re supposed to be working on:  mental health.  WTF does that even mean in the context of a potential federal law?  That somehow they’re going to appropriate a ton of money and throw it at the states to increase access to mental health care?  What will that potential money go for?  New facilities that will provide additional beds in hospitals dedicated to mental health care?  Some kind of whack-o requirement a gun buyer has to pass a mental health test before he or she can buy a gun?  Is there such a thing?  We’re talking about a bunch of states that haven’t even taken advantage of joining the Medicaid part of Obamacare over a decade after it became available.  Does anyone think that Tennessee, for example, is going to let its Medicaid rolls languish but do a whole bunch of stuff that will make sure everyone in the state is mentally healthy so nobody will go out and buy two assault rifles and 1600 rounds of ammunition and decide to shoot up a school?

And now we come to “school security.”  What are they going to do, get Ted Cruz on board by adopting his theory that guns don’t kill schoolchildren, doors do?  Yeah, that’s the ticket!  Let’s spend a whole bunch of money on “hardening” the locks on school doors!  Or how about this – let’s pay for every school to have ballistic classroom doors that will stop bullets from AR-15 and AK-47 style rifles!  Or let’s go along with the Republican proposal to arm teachers that first raised its ugly head after Sandy Hook!  There are about 3.5 million public school teachers in the U.S., and about 500,000 private school teachers, so hey!  Four million is a nice round number!  Maybe we can buy four million guns and put four million teachers through courses teaching them to load, unload, and fire the guns accurately, and then let’s put them through active shooter training!  At least we can get Tailgunner Ted and the NRA on board, because it’ll mean four million more gun sales!

I read the rest of the article in the Times, and it’s so depressing I don’t want to recount even a smidgen of it here.  On the same day that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada announced that they’re going to stop the importation and sale of handguns and require anyone owning an AR-style assault rifle to turn it in through a national buy-back program, the New York Times is reporting that the United States Senate is basically frozen over guns in this country, unable to get off its collective ass even to pass new a background check law that would close the so-called gun show loophole that allows guns to be sold without any background check at all.  More than 50 percent of all gun sales in Texas, for example, are done through private or gun show transactions without background checks…and that’s just one state out of fifty.

The plain truth, which was nowhere to be found in the front page article in the Times today, is that everyone knows exactly what must happen if we are to stand even a teeny-weeny itty bitty chance of reducing the number of mass killings of schoolchildren or anyone else in this country:  ban the sale and ownership of the guns that are used by the killers who do the mass murders, the AR-style semiautomatic rifles that accept large capacity magazines that can enable these weapons of war to fire as many as 100 bullets without reloading as fast as a shooter can pull the trigger.

Mexico doesn’t have a school shooting problem.  Canada doesn’t have one either.  We have a school shooting problem.  We have it because we allow the manufacture, importation, sale and ownership of military weapons of war to civilians, and in 31 of our 50 states, we allow those weapons to be carried openly on streets and inside many places of business.

Not at last weekend’s NRA convention in Houston, Texas, however.  The NRA, for all its problems and corruption and ignominy, knows enough about guns that they banned the carrying of handguns and rifles, including AR-style assault rifles, from its convention, presumably because they didn’t want anybody coming in there and shooting up the place like the 18-year-old brand new gun owner did at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

That’s the USA for you:  security for us but not for them.  And when the time comes to have a party with a former president and some senators and representatives and gun manufacturers and NRA officials, no guns allowed.