And You Thought It Couldn’t Get Any Worse

By Thomas Coffin

Since I last visited the horror show featuring the gun industry, Congress, and the Supreme Court, the country has been buffeted by some more grievous assaults from within our own ranks and institutions. There’s a lot to keep track of, so lest I forget here are some short takes on the most outrageous ones.

I begin with the following gun show in Las Vegas: 'A Small Piece of American Freedom': Gun Show to Feature Kids' Rifle Inspired by AR-15.

I have previously written about Wee 1 Tactical, a gun manufacturer based in Illinois, which has developed and is marketing a lightweight AR-15 rifle it dubbed as the “JR-15” for children. It is not a toy, but a very functional and deadly smaller version of the adult version which the manufacturer boasts packs the “same punch” as the grown-up model.

This comes on the heels of a 6-year old first grader shooting his teacher in Virginia with a hand gun. How did this wee one get the gun, learn how to load it, conceal it, shoot it, and ever get the idea to do it in the first place? Perhaps a hint might be found in the fact that a member of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene, recently tweeted support for the JR-15 promotional campaign and suggested the students at the Uvalde school should have been armed with them in order to defend themselves.

So we are descending to a deeper circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno—where children as young as 6 or 7 carry military weapons to grade school.

Speaking of Marjorie, that brings me to the subject of Congress. As we go to print, the GOP representatives are laboring (perhaps a poor choice of words) to cancel Social Security benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, labor unions, taxes on the upper class, voting rights, women’s rights over their own bodies, and everything else that their corporate/oligarch masters have on their list. When last heard from, they were espousing the end of almost all the New Deal social welfare programs. Just imagine Mom and Dad without Social Security and Medicare. “Go home and die; you are of no use anymore,” is the GOP messaging. So be prepared to deal with that if they are successful. And understand that representatives like Marjorie and George Santos (the man of the whatever background he chooses to make up) are not only welcome in the Party’s tent but assigned to important committees as well.

And then there’s the breaking news out of Los Angeles I awakened to the other morning halfway through this op-ed which was already crammed with outrageous reports that seem to be exploding like a dying nuclear reactor: a gunman with a semi-automatic military grade firearm murdering at least 10 people and maiming others at a Chinese festival in Los Angeles. Yet our Supreme Court supermajority of rigidly conservative Justices, stuck in a time warp and under the spell of dubious history created by NRA and gun industry hirelings, declare sensible regulation of guns to be off limits as a solution.

Speaking of the Supreme Court, it is supposed to be the guardian of the rule of law and impartial justice, faithful to the ideals inherent in the Constitution and democratic system that our Founders established to be a beacon of enlightenment for all Nations to emulate.

Instead, it has been packed with partisans vetted by a retro conservative Federalist Society and who are celebrated for their disdain of precedence established by those who came before them. One fears that individual rights and equality are at risk when digesting the trend of the case law emanating from the present Court and some of the foreboding comments by individual Justices. Recall the comments that history does not reflect that women have any rights in the privacy or autonomy of their bodies (Alito) or that access to contraception is a protected right (Thomas).

Our nation is inclusive, not exclusive. We are diverse, blessed with much more than just the white Christian males of the first American government. We are equal, not weighted with a caste pyramid of untouchables at the bottom and rich and powerful at the top. We welcome all religions or even no religions, and we are not a theocracy.

We need a Supreme Court where all the Justices are committed to those ideals, the people, individual rights and especially life, liberty, and their freedoms—not the narrowest goals of corporate interests or absolutist gun rights advocates. We are rapidly losing one of our most important freedoms bestowed on the people—the right of assembly—which is literally being taken away at the point of guns.

The first order of business has to be to emphatically say “enough” and get off the couch, get involved, quit being spectators and make ourselves heard loudly and clearly. The country is under siege by a movement dedicated to cancelling democracy and imposing authoritarian rule, or more accurately, totalitarianism.

Iron fists aren’t open to social welfare programs, e.g., Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Disability accommodations, nor unions and labor rights, voting, and other benefits we have come to take for granted. We the People need to protect our heritage or it will be lost.

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Thomas Coffin was the keynote speaker at the Blackberry Pie Society’s Political Party in February, 2020 and at Politics and Pie in October, 2022. He is a retired federal magistrate judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon and a former professor at the UO Law School. Thomas retired in 2016 after 24 years on the bench, prior to which he had a career as a federal prosecutor spanning 21 years. He is married with 7 children. The Blackberry Pie Society is pleased to include a collection of his essays on our website. We will post them as they become available.

posted 1.26.2023