As long as it takes.
That’s what I’ve said to myself over and over since I started writing this column last year. Sometimes I’ve said it out loud in print; sometimes it’s a silent pledge to myself as I sit here at my desk staring at a new blank screen. I’ll keep writing about abortion as long as it takes. I’ll write about Ukraine as long as it takes. I’ll write about guns and mass murders as long as it takes. I’ll write about voting rights as long as it takes. I’ll write about America’s racial history and the role my family played as long as it takes.
I said the same thing to myself 30 years ago when I first wrote an op-ed in the New York Times advocating for the right of gay people to serve openly in the military. A few years later, I wrote another op-ed after the school shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas, about kids and guns. I kept at it with both subjects, writing columns, making numerous television appearances, giving interviews on radio shows and to people writing books, and so did the Human Rights Campaign keep at it and so did the Brady Campaign Against Gun Violence keep at it, and so did many, many other brave and good people keep at it.
And then one day a federal law was passed banning the sale of assault-style weapons, and then the Supreme Court decided in Lawrence v Texas that sex between consenting adults of the same gender could not be criminalized, and for both issues, the boulder got a little easier to push up the hill. The assault weapons ban hit its 10-year sunset provision and was not renewed, but in 2011, the odious “don’t ask, don’t tell” law was repealed and a few years later bans against same sex marriage were thrown out by the Supreme Court.
It seemed for a while that we were making real progress, but now here we are reading the draft Alito opinion in the Mississippi abortion case putting not only women’s rights but gay rights on the chopping block, and now another mass shooting of school children has happened right on the heels of yet another racist killing in a public supermarket and we’re right back where we were decades ago.
The two boys who killed their schoolmates and teachers in Jonesboro had been trained to shoot at human beings by their parents at so-called “practical shooting courses.” Way back in 1998 I went on the CBS morning news with a spokesperson for the NRA by the name of Tanya Metaska and I asked her if the NRA supported teaching children who were eight and ten years old to shoot at human silhouette targets with powerful handguns and rifles, and she said yes, the NRA did support that practice because…Second Amendment, or something. It doesn’t really matter why the NRA supported teaching children to shoot to kill human beings. I should have known way back then that I would be sitting in my house nearly 25 years later still writing about children with guns killing children in schools, because that’s what happened yesterday in Uvalde, Texas. That 18-year-old boy – because that’s who you are when you’re 18, you’re a boy – who qualified under Texas law to buy an AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle, did the same thing the younger boys did in Jonesboro, Arkansas. We don’t know if he had trained by shooting at human silhouette targets, and it doesn’t matter whether he did or he didn’t, because the result was the same: dead children and dead teachers killed with high-powered weapons readily available to anyone because they’re everywhere in this country.
The NRA didn’t learn a lesson from the school shooting in Jonesboro 25 years ago, but neither did we. Voters in this country have kept electing political representatives who have done nothing to stop the killing that goes on year after year in town after town all over this country. Those politicians appointed and confirmed Supreme Court justices who decided the Heller case reading the Second Amendment as conferring on American citizens what seems like a God-given right to own deadly weapons, and now the court is poised to decide a case that may confer upon the citizenry the right to carry those weapons anywhere they want to go, including across state lines into states that don’t want you walking around carrying firearms on your person.
The massacre in Uvalde, Texas has predictably produced lamentations that polls show a huge majority of Americans want what they call on the news “common sense gun laws” like universal background checks, and today we heard from some quarters that maybe states should consider passing laws making you wait until you’re 21 years old before you can walk into a gun store and buy a weapon that was designed for the sole purpose of killing soldiers during wars. That’s a good one. If states pass those laws, we’ll be wringing our hands about 21 year old killers rather than 18 year old killers, or in the case of Jonesboro, killers who were only 11 and 13.
Nothing is going to change as long as weapons of war intended to be used by soldiers are permitted to be owned by civilians. The killers and their ages and their motives don’t really matter. There have always been racists among us, just as there have always been boys who were unpopular and bullied at school. What haven’t been always among us are weapons of war that are easily obtainable by ordinary citizens who have no legitimate need of them. The needs that semiautomatic AR-15 style rifles address are the needs of soldiers, not of hunters or target shooters.
The only fix to the problem of massacres that continue to happen in schools and places of business like Tops supermarkets and Walmart stores and nightclubs and even churches is to vote to change the people who make and interpret our laws so that these deadly, horrible things that do so much damage and cause so much heartache will be made illegal and consigned to the place where they belong, which is in the armories of military installations.
I will write about all this stuff for as long as it takes, and we as citizens must do whatever it takes to change the way we organize our system of self-government so that guns don’t count as much as people’s lives do.
Would it not be nice if those Texas Republicans who are so concerned about the "life" of a nonviable embryo in a womb were equally concerned with the actual lives of living, breathing kids in Texas classrooms? Pro-life, indeed!
Beto O’Rourke said pretty clesrly 2 years ago during the Presidential debates. Remove ALL military style weapons from society. ALL… it seems to me that video games about murder & mowing people down serve ss s primer for the young. Make them illegal as well. Great writing, as long as it takes.