The Arms Race Against Our Children

By Tom Coffin

As if it’s not perverse enough already, the war against American children has been accelerated exponentially by a recent ruling, from a Trump-appointed federal judge, that machine guns cannot be banned from the general public per the Second Amendment.

Indeed, gun violence has been the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers since 2020. Last week’s school shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia was the 23rd mass shooting in a K-12 school this year. And in total 984 children from ages 0 - 17 have been killed by firearms this year. So far.

Previously I have written about the contrast between childhood death from the automobile industry and from the gun industry. Prior to 2020, automobile accidents caused the most fatalities in children. That dramatically decreased when the government studied causes and initiated safety standards, such as seat belts, air bags, and warning features, which greatly reduced the death toll.

However, in the infamous 1997 Dickey Amendment, Congress blocked any funding that would allow the CDC to study firearm violence and therefore likely recommend gun safety features or gun control measures. Such studies would squarely suggest the banning of the deadliest firearms, such as machine guns, AR-15s, bumper stocks, armor piercing ammunition, etc.

Thus Congress has done the opposite of what it did with automobiles—it has refused to study or protect our children from the deadliest guns being marketed to the general population, including, at present, machine guns.

Translated, the lives of children are forfeited in favor of the interests of the NRA lobbyists and the gun industry profiteering. It is that simple. And it is that cruel.

What society, culture, or political system exalts profits over its very future by forfeiting its own successive generations for 30 pieces of silver? That in a nutshell is what we are choosing with our current gun policies. It is no exaggeration to describe this choice as worshiping the golden calf of a false god in a bastardized Second Amendment, whose history lies in a compromise to enable slave holders to keep their arms in order to quell slave rebellions. Hardly the divine biblical version of Moses and the Ten Commandments (which is never mentioned in NRA propaganda.)

At Apalachee, four people were killed, two students and two teachers, thus qualifying the violence as a mass shooting according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Two years ago, at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, 19 students and two teachers were killed. I want to close with that gruesome reality—the children murdered in the Uvalde massacre were methodically executed one by one as the police stood by because they were afraid, outgunned by the weaponry of their killer. Imagine those last moments of terror.

Tell us about that, NRA. Tell us about their last moments when their lives were sacrificed to the gun god.

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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 9.11.2024