In the wake of the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, tempers have started to flair between Democrats and Republicans.
Now personally, I am not an anti-gun absolutist. I can understand why some people want to be able to own a gun for their own protection. But just like car owners, they should have a license and be required to carry insurance. That would not prevent anyone from owning a gun, it would just require them to take some care to use it properly.
But Republican pro-gun activists left reality behind a long time ago. Now, the tiniest infringement on anyone owning and carrying a gun wherever they want to is, in their view, a major assault on the Second Amendment. It is not.
Democrats have noted that Republicans are willing to regulate the uterus, who can get married, which books can be banned, what history can be taught, and who can transition, but when it comes to regulating guns they are just throwing up their hands. Nothing can be done.
GOP Representative Andy Ogles, a pro-gun extremist who represents Nashville, where the shooting occurred, caught a serious amount of flack for offering the usual and completely useless “thoughts and prayers” after his most recent Christmas Card featured his entire family holding guns.
In a Christmas card.
Then New York Representative Jamaal Bowman got into a heated argument with Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie, after he noted — quite accurately, by the way — that Republicans won’t do shit about guns.
Democrats have slowly had enough.
And spare me “red flag” laws, which really do next to nothing to protect anyone either.
In the case of the Covenant School shooting, Republicans were all agog (of course) about the fact that the shooter — Audrey Hale — was someone who was transitioning their gender. Police initially identified him as a woman but later said he was a transgender man, assigned female at birth, but now used masculine pronouns.
It was probably the only interesting thing about this particular shooter.
The problem is AR-15 style assault rifles. When we banned them for about a decade from 2005 to 2017, gun deaths went down to a remarkable degree.
It’s not rocket science.
The question is, how many children have to be mowed down before Republicans think, well, maybe there really is something we could do about guns.
