A Night of Horror

(courtesy of the gun industry’s avarice and legislators’ cowardice)

By Thomas Coffin

This attached video* is most difficult to watch but captures the reality of the insane violence that plagues America because the gun industry is allowed to flood the nation with military weaponry for the sake of profits and because legislators are too compromised by the industry’s donations to their campaign coffers as well as too cowardly to dare try to stop it.

A three-year-old boy died in his sleep and his four-year-old sister was wounded in the hail of bullets you see and hear in the visual and audio footage of this deadly attack on their home in Charlotte, North Carolina just before midnight on 9/8/21. There were approximately 150 rounds fired from the assailants’ semi-automatic military style firearms in a firestorm lasting under a minute. Police suspect the shooting was connected to rival gang warfare involving teenagers.

I have been calling for Congress to outlaw the sale of such military weapons for years, pointing out the history behind the arms industry and NRA’s revisionist history of the Second Amendment beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s to invent a supposed “right” of the public to possess military weaponry so that they can rebel against their own government if of the mind to do so.

No less of an authority than Garry Wills, a noted historian and Pulitzer Prize winning author, has thoroughly examined and debunked much of the mythology created by the NRA-driven flood of articles and publications promoting the arms industry version of the Second Amendment. He described it as the product of “wacky scholars” who “think the Constitution is so deranged a document that it brands as the greatest crime a war upon itself (in Article III: ‘Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them…’) and then instructs its citizens to take this up (in the Second Amendment). According to this doctrine, a well-regulated group is meant to overthrow its own regulator, and a soldier swearing to obey orders is disqualified for true militia virtue.” (Wills, Garry. “To Keep and Bear Arms.” The New York Review of Books, Sept. 21, 1995.)

Thus, the argument for citizens possessing military weaponry is simply a dangerous concoction of nonsense which has led to the senseless and devastating violence America is suffering today in its schools, places of worship, concerts, theaters, workplaces, and in our own homes. There is an unassailable reason military weaponry belongs in the strict control of military command—these are weapons of war, designed to inflict mass casualties upon the enemy in combat on the battlefield.

Ask yourselves—how did it ever get to the point in this country where teenage street gangs can get their hands-on military war weapons and ammunition in order to annihilate sleeping families in their beds in their own homes in the middle of the night? The answer is clear—our legislators in Congress have failed us. They hide behind a fabricated distortion of the Constitution as an excuse for inaction as they cower before the influence purchasers with the deep purses that the infamous Citizens United ruling has empowered to cancel the will of the People.

We know that sensible gun regulation can prevent the endless cycle of insane bloodbaths and our rapidly escalating descent to gang and cartel domination of our society. We accomplished a dramatic halt to the carnage with a 10-year ban on Assault Weapons in 1994, only to have it resume when a different Congress not only refused to renew the ban, but instead callously passed legislation to immunize gun dealers who manufactured and sold the weapons being used to terrorize and murder us (the Protect Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, aka PLCAA.)

Please force yourself to watch the attached video. I hope the graphics move hearts where words fail. God knows, myself and others continue to try with our words to inspire meaningful efforts to make our children safe again. We simply have to make taking these military style weapons off the market a priority and emphasize to all of our representatives that we demand action, not excuses.

*Disclaimer: Many of the comments posted below the video play the racist card while ignoring the fact the military weaponry floods all of society and the carnage has no boundaries. It is the refusal to ban these killing machines that is responsible.

9.18.2021