On gun laws, maybe there is no common ground

Having read the recent op-ed by Broward County Commissioner Jared Moskowitz in the Sun Sentinel, which implores politicians to work across the aisle to achieve meaningful gun safety laws, these authors applaud his efforts to achieve a modicum of bipartisan support for reasonable measures in Florida. However, given the intractability of the Republican Party in Congress, the sentiment is a bit naive.

Retired Major Gen. Paul Eaton, who ended his career in charge of the Army’s training and doctrine, refers to the AR-15 as a “weapon of war.” It is long past time for negotiation when one political party holds the majority of Americans hostage because they are being funded by a special interest group hell-bent on selling as many weapons of war as humanly possible.

Each time a national tragedy occurs, the answer robotically peddled by the National Rifle Association (NRA) is to sell more guns and create a greater national stockpile of bullets. Unimaginative NRA adherents simply follow lockstep reading off the same callous, repeated script.

Give them some credit. In every other civilized country, horrific gun violence events typically resulted in a reasoned response that ultimately yielded no further or at least dramatically reduced similar events. Simply put, other nations learned from this cause-and-effect approach. Why can’t we?

This scientific approach has been quite successful in the United States when dealing with motor vehicle deaths and other catastrophic events such as the Chicago Tylenol drug tampering murders of 1982. Imagine what would have happened if some idiotic legislator, responding to the drug industry’s lobbying efforts, stood in the way of making Tylenol tops tamper resistant back then? Had the NRA overseen pharmaceutical lobbying, we would surely have seen indifferent senators such as Marco Rubio stand up and say, ever since I was a West Miami City Commissioner, I’ve opposed any action to make Tylenol bottles harder to open! But instead, logic prevailed and resulted in the introduction of tamper proof bottle caps.

And yet, a group of politicians, blinded and cornered by the NRA, would have you suspend logic when it comes to weapons of war. Make no mistake, what you are being asked to do is to reject reason and put more dollars in the pockets of a select group of gun manufacturers who then pass on donations to politicians who are bought and sold to stand in the way of peer-reviewed science and common-sense logic.

The respected Scientific American magazine recently published a compelling data-based piece finding that, “The science is abundantly clear: More guns do not stop crime. Guns kill more children each year than auto accidents. More children die by gunfire in a year than on-duty police officers and active military members. Guns are a public health crisis, just like COVID, and in this, we are failing our children, over and over again.”

Neither the NRA nor any of its unwavering supporters have contributed anything that may have saved one life lost to these senseless warfare attacks. And yet, we are being asked to be endlessly patient and negotiate with those who demand the suspension of science and logic.

Let’s all admit that, casting aside the tired NRA script, a common denominator in each of these mass shootings is that tools of war — an assault weapon equipped with massive amounts of bullets kept in detachable magazines, was used to shake up the fabric of our communities. It’s that simple.

In business there is an axiom that: “You can’t negotiate against yourself.” Yet, that is the paradigm more than 80% of this country finds ourselves inhabiting. Instead, these authors suggest a different tack similar to that taken in Europe when the needs of the majority are being subjugated by the profits of the very few. Unless the Republican Party casts aside the NRA and its stranglehold over scientific discipline and common sense logic, then there is nothing to negotiate over. For too long, they have held the rest of the country hostage while sacrificing other families’ children. It’s easy to say, “Enough is enough,” but those words alone are not sufficient. If Washington is unable to secure reasonable and constitutional solutions, we must recognize there is no negotiation with stupidity and with folks whose own moral compasses are fatally compromised.

Most free-thinking people of this great nation must follow the example of our European allies; we must strike until such time as a meaningful ban on these weapons of war is passed and signed into law. Until such time, there really is no reason to contribute any further to the economic engine now hamstrung by wayward organizations that have enabled doddering politicians to hold power over truth, science and logic.

and David Weiss