The GOP Solution for the Mass Murder of your Children: Zero

THE GOP SOLUTION FOR THE MASS MURDER
OF YOUR CHILDREN:
ZERO

 By Thomas Coffin

When I was a child, I went to school, played sports, rode my bike all around town, and in the summertime spent all day outdoors without ever thinking about getting shot at. Sometimes I played hide and seek with my brothers, never dreaming that such a game would ever become a life-or-death drill for school children in today’s collapsed and rapidly sinking social structure. 

Disaster and constant fear have struck us suddenly to rob us of that idyllic environment. 

What is the cause, and what efforts are being taken by our elected representatives to reverse the course? The answers are gun trafficking, and encouraging even more gun trafficking in states controlled by Republican lawmakers. In those enclaves any restraints on gun possession is viewed as a sacrilegious affront to the Second Amendment (as interpreted according to their version—see The Counterfeit Second Amendment.)

Thus we have absolutist gun rights rhetoric from the right wing anti-regulation camp that has brought us absurdities such as the ruling from the Fifth Circuit that struck down a restraining order that prohibited a stalker from possessing firearms after he assaulted his girlfriend and then went on a violent spree shooting at cars (the United States v Rahimi case —see Misogyny on Display in Court Rulings.)  We are afflicted with mass shootings on a daily basis, sometimes multiple mass shootings on a single day. Gun violence has become the main cause of death outside disease in the nation; according to the CDC, firearm deaths now exceed motor vehicle traffic deaths. Yet our society continues to kneel at the altar of the gun deity and adhere to its commandment that we bow before it and do nothing to curb its appetite for the lives of our loved ones.

How many readers know the story behind this tragic betrayal of the freedoms, rights, and liberty that the Constitution really stands for? Here it is in a nutshell: The gun industry was static. Hunting and sporting firearms had reached their pinnacle. Revenues flattened and were heading in the wrong direction. Military firearms were the answer, but the industry was essentially selling them to the military, police, sheriffs, and law enforcement. Civilians were not being viewed as potential customers. I happened to be a federal prosecutor during this era and headed an investigation into the sale of a Sturm Ruger semiautomatic rifle to possible civilians and was advised that the manufacturer actually had a policy against selling such to anyone outside the military and law enforcement because of their devastating anti-personnel power. That all changed suddenly with devastating consequences to, without exaggerating, everyone —I repeat—everyone in our country. There is no one who has not been impacted by the flooding of America with military grade firearms which inevitably find their way into the hands of homicidal maniacs and terrorists.

This dramatic reversal had its genesis in the NRA’s strategy of increasing the revenue of the gun industry, skipping the cumbersome amendment process and instead funding efforts of University of Tennessee law professors to write and otherwise promote scholarship that essentially erased the “well regulated” provision of the Second Amendment to peddle the theory that gun possession was a personal right enshrined in the Bill of Rights. That interpretation was then adopted by the conservative majority bloc on the Supreme Court in the Heller case, decided in 2008.  The majority opinion was authored by Justice Scalia, whose legacy today is sullied for being exposed as having accepted, but not reported, hunting excursions paid for by gun industry notables. He was joined in the Heller opinion by Clarence Thomas, who likewise is being outed today for receiving over a million dollars in largesse from billionaire activist Harlan Crow without disclosing any of it.

Regardless of whether there is any hard proof connecting the “gifts” to any specific case or ruling, the public confidence in the integrity of the Court and the legitimacy of its rulings which are binding on all the people has been sorely wounded.  When Justices are recipients of lucrative emoluments from the wealthiest in our society who have vital interests in their rulings, the rest of us become the ultimate victims. 

Ask yourself what other amendment but the Second has been amended so drastically without use of the formal process that the Constitution requires?  The answer is none. Black men and all women weren’t even allowed to vote without formal amendments to the Constitution being adopted.  For over two centuries the Second Amendment was tied to the “well regulated militia” clause as noted previously. Yet that was simply erased based on NRA-funded “legal research”, mainly by professors associated with Tennessee—a state infamous for having little or no regulations governing firearms sales and possession. 

A Pulitzer Prize recipient and esteemed historian, Professor Garry Wills of Northwestern University, strongly criticized the lack of scholarship in the Tennessee project in his review for the New York Times. Yet the Tennessee essays were enough for Scalia, Thomas, and several of the colleagues to transform gun possession into a personal right. Compare that seismic bit of editing with Alito’s pontificating in Dobbs that women had no rights in the autonomy or privacy of their own bodies. Translated, the conservative bloc on the Court are of the mind that men have more rights in possessing firearms than women have in their own bodies. 

And what are men doing with that newly discovered personal right to firearms (including AR-15s according to a judge in San Diego)?  They are killing thousands of us, adding to the toll several times a day, every day. We are informed that the weapon of choice for mass murderers is the AR-15 or similar semi-automatic firearms developed initially for our military and specifically to kill as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time. 

That is the sordid history behind our Nation’s plague of serial and methodical mass murder sprees that has no sign of receding and every sign of getting worse. 

The obvious question is: What is being done to protect us, our loved ones, and all of us exposed to this never-ending bloodshed? That question is the focus of this article. Given our political system, one political party strives to address the problem meaningfully; the other refuses and blocks any action that is designed to eliminate the core reason behind the killing fields that America has become.

Texas is a prime example of the latter party. The state rejects measures to enact the necessary legislation to ban the weaponry that is the choice of mass shooters, semi-automatic firearms like the AR-15. The truism cited often —that criminals kill people — fails to mention the critical fact that those criminals are using the weaponry sold and promoted for their lethality to do just that. The gun merchants know that full well, as do all of us. Feigning ignorance is not a legal or moral defense to their complicity. Yet Texas and the other Republican-controlled states genuflect to the arms dealers and refuse to act in any meaningful manner to stop the bloodshed.

Instead, their response only aggravates the damage from the ongoing killing sprees. Parents have been advised to collect DNA samples so they can identify the remains of their children (the military weapons often make a corpse unrecognizable.)  Third graders are being told to learn how to apply tourniquets to save classmates from bleeding to death. Students are subjected to active shooter drills where they are given the impression that a murderer is in the building. Hiding places are graded for efficacy. All these measures add to the trauma suffered by students who believe they are about to die (schools typically don’t tell students it’s only a drill.) Psychologists opine that such stress will have a lasting, even lifelong, impact on the children’s mental health, including PTSD. Many students are terrified to even go to school.

All this adds up to sacrificing children, and their parents, to the greed of the gun industry lust for profits as opposed to the safety of the people and their loved ones. It is, to be brutally frank, a catastrophic disaster caused by a government that has succumbed to corruption and consequently has abandoned its primary duty to protect and serve the people.

This betrayal of the people is so egregious as to be fairly described as criminal in nature. At present, innocent people are being shot, wounded, mutilated and killed on a daily basis, most often by the military grade weaponry supplied by manufacturers and dealers who undoubtedly know of such frequent use and even promote their lethality in their sales pitch to potential customers. 

It is impossible to understand any society or culture, much less a sovereign nation, that would remain silent or passive in such serial annihilation of its people and stubbornly refuse to crush it with all the tools of government at its disposal. But here the response is muted and homage is paid to the industry which is the main cause of the existential pogrom being waged without any end in sight.

Amazingly, Congress gifted the gun industry with immunity, the opposite of what is needed. Instead of banning the weaponry which the terrorists use, we continue to allow their sale as if we are blind to the reality of the connection. As noted earlier, DNA samples, training grade schoolers to be combat medics, and introducing a deadly, traumatic version of hide and seek serves as a mockery of a solution. We might as well line our children up against a wall for the convenience of their executioner.

More damning evidence is found in the industry’s promotional materials. For example, Illinois manufacturer Wee 1 Tactical has promoted a light weight AR-15 specifically for children, touting its possession of the same “punch” or lethality as Mom and Dad’s adult version. The manufacturer Combat features an “Urban Super Sniper” which is so precise it will hit the target within an inch at 100 yards. Ask yourself what is the purpose of an urban sniper firearm other than to kill innocent people? Remington Bushmaster ads were tethered to the Sandy Hook shootings and featured its semi-automatic with slogans like “Consider your Man Card Issued” and “Forces of Opposition, Bow Down.”  Daniel Defense showed a child about two years old cradling an AR-15 after the Uvalde massacre with the caption “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Smith and Wesson was subpoenaed by Congress for its marketing tactics, sparking a trite response by its CEO about Second Amendment rights.

A thorough criminal investigation of the gun industry is needed, including in-depth interviews, subpoenas of internal documents, grand jury testimony under oath by insiders, use of immunity to compel testimony from those who assert the 5th Amendment privilege, and other techniques to get at the truth. Already there are cracks emerging within the ranks of the NRA, such as Joshua Powell, who previously served as the chief of staff to CEO Wayne LaPierre and has now called for gun control measures. 

An experienced team of prosecutors and federal agents can be tasked to get to the truth of the matter, as opposed to merely accepting at face value the corporate narrative. But the first step that must be taken is opening an investigation. The public deserves one, and it is long overdue. And keep in mind that a corporation itself can be charged with criminal offenses and sanctioned with serious penalties if convicted, including reparations to its victims. In sum, as I have attempted to demonstrate in this somewhat lengthy op-ed, there is a great deal of evidence out there which sheds light on the necessary elements of knowledge and intent of those who supply the weaponry and profit from their serial use in the egregious slaughter of our people.

This ongoing crisis will not stop until we neutralize the sources responsible. The major source is obvious —the flood of military grade weapons into the unregulated, undisciplined, and unvetted hands of anyone with the cash to buy them, with virtually no restrictions, based on a gun industry revision of the Second Amendment, rather than an actual amendment to the Constitution. Our children have been abandoned, lives forfeited and our government has been tarnished by corruption which negatively impacts its willingness to take action to protect the thousands and thousands of victims each year.

We must stand up for our children. They need us to protect them because they are the helpless prey of our twisted, profit driven, falsified version of the Second Amendment which is literally costing them their lives. 

We must act because we are their only hope. We must love our children more than we love our guns. It’s that simple.

   _____________________________

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 5.19.2023