What's it going to take?

A Republican congressman getting shot? Oh, wait! That already happened!

Boulder police respond to mass shooting at supermarket

Las Vegas wasn’t enough.  Sixty dead at the Harvest music festival.  Over 400 wounded.

El Paso wasn’t enough.  Twenty dead at a Walmart near the border.  Twenty-six wounded.

Pittsburgh wasn’t enough.  Eleven dead at the Tree of Life Synagogue.  Six wounded.

Dayton wasn’t enough.  Nine dead at a nightclub in the city’s Oregon district. Twenty-seven wounded.

Gilroy wasn’t enough.  Three dead at a garlic festival.  Sixteen wounded.

Parkland wasn’t enough.  Seventeen dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.  Seventeen wounded.

Orlando wasn’t enough.  Forty-nine dead at the Pulse nightclub.  Fifty-three wounded.

Atlanta wasn’t enough.  Eight dead at two massage parlors. 

Boulder won’t be enough, either.  Ten dead at a supermarket.

That’s 18 dead from firearms over the last week.  There were three other mass shootings within a week of the El Paso shooting in August of 2019.  Thirty-four were killed in seven days.  Seventy were wounded.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, we have already had 107 mass shootings this year.  The archive defines a “mass shooting” as one where at least four people are either killed or injured.  A hundred and twenty-two people were killed over the last 81 days.  Three hundred and twenty-five were wounded.

There were 615 mass shootings in 2020.  Five hundred and twenty-one were killed.  Two thousand five hundred and forty-one were wounded.

There were 434 mass shootings in 2019. Five hundred and seventeen were killed.  Two thousand one hundred and sixty were wounded.

There were 336 mass shootings in 2018.  There were 346 mass shootings in 2017.  There were 382 mass shootings in 2016.  There were 336 mass shootings in 2015.  There were 269 mass shootings in 2014.

The Gun Violence Archive keeps a record and does the math, but it’s easy to lose track.  I had to write down the figures in a notebook next to my laptop, but they start to run together, even looking straight at them.  Three hundred and something?  Was that shootings, or dead people?  Oooops.  It’s the number of people wounded this year, 325. 

How about this one?  More than five million people were first-time gun buyers last year.  You know who was a first-time gun buyer?  The shooter in Atlanta.  He bought the gun he used to kill ten people last Tuesday morning on the day of the murders.  Same with the shooter in Gilroy, California in 2019.  He bought the AR-15 style assault rifle he used a couple of weeks earlier in Nevada.  The Las Vegas shooter went around to different gun stores and bought his arsenal in the weeks before he killed 60 concert-goers.  He didn’t own them for very long.  He bought them for the purpose he used them:  to kill people.  If you spent the time to look up the reports of the hundreds of mass shootings listed above, I’ll bet you would find that more than half of them used firearms they bought for the express purpose of going out and killing a bunch of people.

There is more connective tissue between these mass shootings.  Almost all of the killers were men, and similarly, almost all of them were white.  The other thing they had in common was access to a gun store or a gun show.  Every one of them could put down a few hundred dollars and walk out with a killing machine and all the ammunition they could carry.  Those were legal transactions.  You give me your money, I will give you a killing machine.

This is madness.  We, as a nation, are selling the instruments of our own destruction to the people who are killing us, and it’s all perfectly legal.  There are laws against selling firearms to enemies of the United States.  If you were to go out and sell a whole bunch of AR-15’s to the Taliban, or to member of ISIS or Al Qaeda, you could be arrested by the FBI and tried as a felon in Federal court.  But neither the Taliban, nor ISIS, nor Al Qaeda, nor any other enemy of the United States has killed nearly as many Americans over the last several years as were killed in mass shootings in the first two and half months of this year alone. 

But nobody was arrested for selling firearms to the killers who have committed over a hundred mass shootings this year.  Nobody went to jail for selling a dozen assault rifles to the killer in Las Vegas.  Nobody is going to go to jail for selling firearms to the Atlanta killer or the Boulder killer.  They were legal sellers, and the killers were legal buyers.

This is madness.  Every one of these figures is madness:  Almost 400 million firearms are in private hands in this country.  More than 23 million firearms were sold during 2020, according to the Washington Post.  More than two million firearms were sold this January alone, almost a 100 percent increase from January of last year, and the third highest monthly sales total on record. 

This is madness.  People are buying so many guns, there are reports of shortages from some firearms sellers.  The gun sellers don’t care who they sell to.  The Congress of the United States doesn’t care who they sell to.  If you have a driver’s license and you don’t walk into a gun store wearing a straight jacket directly from a mental health facility, you can buy a gun in this country.  Hell, you can buy ten guns, or twenty guns.  You can buy five hundred rounds of ammunition, or a thousand if you want.  There are no laws preventing you from arming yourself with as many weapons and ammunition as an infantry squad.  There are no laws preventing you from buying the same military equipment worn by infantry soldiers – ballistic vests, Kevlar helmets, camouflage uniforms, military boots, dozens and dozens of ammunition clips and all the bullets to fill them.  Many of these killers go out to kill dressed up like soldiers.  If the footage of the police response to the killings in Boulder yesterday is any measure, so do the police who respond to the scenes of the mass killings.  There were enough cops wearing enough protective gear carrying enough military assault rifles to win a battle against an entire company of Taliban fighters.  Did all of that military hardware, all of those macho cops and all of their powerful weapons do anything to prevent the shootings in Boulder?  No.  But they sure did look tough.

This is madness.  We’re turning America into an armed camp.  We surround ourselves with heavily armed police and we give them the money to purchase surplus military assault vehicles and other gear and then we sit back in our houses while a few thousand gun stores throw open their doors and invite anyone who wants a gun to come in and buy one, or two, or ten guns.  And then we sit in our houses and wait for at least some of those gun buyers to go out and murder dozens of us as we go about our daily lives, buying groceries at a supermarket, or dancing at a nightclub, or pushing a cart down the aisles of a Walmart picking up t-shirts and Cheetos and motor oil.

This is madness. The Congress of the United States is sitting there in Washington D.C. doing absolutely nothing about it.  If nobody has a right to food and shelter and clean air and healthcare in this country, nobody should have a right to own a weapon of mass destruction, a firearm that will shoot bullets as fast as you can pull the trigger and kill as many people as you can aim the thing at.

This is madness, and we will continue to die at the hands of our fellow citizens who legally go out and buy guns as long as we continue to let it happen.