Republicans are the Party of Child Murder
The evidence is clear and undeniable
Welcome to a Thursday evening edition of Progress Report.
Times are tough, but I can’t complain much about the events of the past 36 hours: Billionaire union-buster Howard Schultz was roasted in the US Senate, the Mets won their first game of the season, and oh yeah, Donald Trump was indicted by a grand jury here in Manhattan.
That the sky didn’t fall and people didn’t line the streets mourning political norms should be a wake-up call for Merrick Garland and a reminder that he doesn’t have to cower at pursuing justice against the world’s most glaringly guilty criminal.
Cowering in the face of ugly, unpopular menaces to society is an old Democratic pastime that continues apace, even children are getting their faces *literally* blown off by assault rifles every single week. The media is no help in this regard, as it treats Republican refusal to do anything about the endless mass murder as a legitimate political position, obscuring reality in an effort to provide “objective” coverage. Time to blow that out of the water.
Ignore the narrative peddled by political media and conservative politicians, because there is no “debate” over guns in this country. There are simply people who don’t want children to be murdered, and people that are fine with children being murdered.
That’s it. This is a binary. The mass school shooting in Nashville on Monday was yet another maddeningly clear sign that Congress is morally obligated to ban semi-automatic weapons. Suggesting alternative approaches to solving the everyday scourge of mass murder is simply an act of callous deflection away from the fundamental problem.
This country is suffering from a mental health crisis, but people all across the world suffer with mental illness.
Poverty is endemic everywhere.
Organized crime and ideological extremists hold tremendous influence in just about every nation.
Yet there is only one place where people get blown apart by semi-automatic assault rifles with any regularity, because there is only place where people have easy access to semi-automatic rifles.
If a politician does not support gun control laws that would eradicate AR-15s and other weapons of war, they are sentencing countless other children to the same gruesome fates as Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney and Hallie Scruggs, the three nine-year-old children who were murdered in Nashville on Monday. Because this will happen again; the massacre at Covenant
Simply put, voting against banning semi-automatic weapons is looking devastated parents in the eyes and yelling that they do not give a shit that their kid was rendered unrecognizable by an exploding bullet, and in fact do not want to do anything to prevent other children and parents from experiencing the same horrific fate.
That this has become a partisan issue is among the most dismal symptoms of our cultural and political derangement. It wasn’t always like this, but money and media have incentivized this race to the seventh circle of hell.
When two troubled kids ripped through Columbine High School in suburban Colorado with semi-automatic weapons and shotguns, they murdered 13 people and shattered a national myth. In the aftermath, tragedy and mourning gave way to a particular kind of American anxiety: Mass shootings were supposed happen in troubled inner cities, not in an upscale suburb like Littleton, Colorado.
The shooting so perplexed and horrified people that the national media spent months and months trying to understand why the suburban bubble had suddenly burst with such violence. MSNBC even broadcast a town hall conversation from the high school gym in the town where I was attending middle school at the time, which was deemed the most demographically similar to Columbine in the country. (The proximity to MSNBC’s studios in NYC probably helped).
Back then, it was worth trying to examine the societal forces that may have led those two disaffected goths to decide that they wanted to shoot up their high school, but any introspection would soon be obliterated by the expiration of the national ban on semi-automatic weapons.
There have been 376 school shootings since, with more than 348,000 kids impacted. There are a few othersthat were publicized enough to be given their own shorthand — Parkland, Sandy Hook, Uvalde, Buffalo come to mind — but at this point, the rest of them sort of blend together and wash out of our memories on a blood-red tide.
This is how Republicans want it. They want the mass murders to fade from memory, unless they can use them to further their disgusting agenda, as is happening in Nashville with the gender identity of the shooter. Never mind the fact that the shooter couldn’t have murdered six people had they not had easy access to multiple semi-automatic assault rifles, of course.
Lest there be any doubt about how enthusiastic Republicans are about children being murdered, the policies that GOP legislatures have pushed over the past few months alone should put it to rest.
Republican lawmakers in Florida this week will finalize a bill to allow people to carry a concealed weapon without a permit or training, which will make it the 26th state to eliminate logical minimum requirements to carry a gun.
In North Carolina, the GOP legislature overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of a bill that will let residents purchase a pistol without a permit from the local sheriff.
Iowa Republicans are considering a bill to allow people to store guns in vehicles parked at places where firearms are banned, including schools, colleges, prisons and workplaces.
In Tennessee, GOP lawmakers have proposed bills that would allow 18 year olds to carry firearms without a permit, lowering the age from 21 and authorize teachers and other school faculty to carry guns in schools.
The glibness with which Republicans have responded to the shootings would be astonishing were it not the default to which they’ve sunk. Whereas once the “thoughts and prayers” response had been rightfully maligned as a rote and meaningless reaction to these tragedies, GOP lawmakers have now weaponized their far-right perversion of Christianity against anyone that calls for stricter gun laws.
Republicans will not stop eroding gun laws until they have been eliminated altogether and those of us not working in a newly refortified Capitol are forced to live in constant fear of being blown apart — or worse, having our kids blown apart — at any moment by a weapon more powerful than anything that the Founders could have possibly imagined.
Being a parent is in no way a prerequisite to feeling nauseated and enraged every time there’s a school shooting, but for me personally, the arrival of our baby son has filled me with preemptive rage and despair that begin to percolate at the slightest reminder of the death sentences that Republicans are handing to children every single day.
Don’t let them get away with. Democrats have to speak up. They have to call Republicans the party of child murder. There is no other alternative. If they feel aggrieved over it, they can always stop enabling mass child murder.
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The headline is both accurate and a powerful political statement. It puts to shame every Republican expression of concern for children -- from accusations of grooming through LGBTQ normalization to fears that children would be saddened by their people's history if they learned it.
So were the despicable GQP congresscritters wearing their AR-15 lapel pins on the day these children were murdered?
What about the next day? Did they quietly switch back to the flag lapel pins and hope no one noticed?
Wonder when these ammosexual scumwads will switch back to the gun lapel pins?