Shootings spotlight tragic gun failures

Way back when Groupon and Living Social coupons were a thing, an offer for a discounted day at a shooting range crossed my inbox. I had never held a gun, much less owned or shot one, but a friend was interested in trying something like this, so I called her bluff.

This is how the two of us and our husbands ended up at a shooting range near Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, two days before our coupon expired on Dec. 14, 2011.

The noise was piercing. The darkness seemed menacing. The smell was awful. And I kept forgetting to keep the gun pointed down, which seemed to unnerve my husband. (Go figure.)

We had been treating this outing as a lark, or maybe a school field trip to learn the customs of others, but my friend and I found it deeply disturbing and cut our session short.

A year to the day after our coupon expired, a 20-year-old gunman would mow down 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. On Saturday, an 18year-old gunman shot 13 people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, in a predominantly Black neighborhood, and 10 of them died. Two mass shootings happened even as I wrote this column – at a church lunch honoring a Taiwanese pastor in Laguna Woods, California, and at a flea market in Houston.

The accused Buffalo shooter, from what we know so far, is a stereotype of our age. He threatened to shoot up his school last year at age 17, had a mental health evaluation and was sent home. Was there any follow-up? Did his parents know what he was up to? Was anyone paying attention? The assault-style rifle he used was legal, but he modified it illegally and he lied to get it in the first place. What good is New York’s red flag law if it couldn’t prevent this massacre?

This much is clear: The Buffalo shooter’s motive was racial. Authorities are working to authenticate a racist, antiimmigrant, antisemitic document he allegedly wrote that refers to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory advanced by Tucker Carlson – that Democrats are plotting to replace the current electorate with “more obedient voters from the Third World.”

This baseless claptrap is now accepted by 47% of the GOP and promoted by GOP Senate candidates, House members such as Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and the president of the Border Patrol union.

It is tempting to throw up your hands. How can you not? Why can’t America fix this? Why won’t it even try?

Let me amend that: Why won’t most Republicans even try? And will voters ever punish them?

I have never seen a more tragic congressional vote than the Senate’s 54-46 defeat of a bipartisan bill tightening gun background checks. It was such a minimal step, tailored by West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin and Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey to have broad appeal, yet it fell a few votes short of the 60 needed to end a filibuster and advance the bill.

That was in April 2013, four months after the Sandy Hook rampage. “Shame on you,” Patricia Maisch, who survived a mass shooting in Tucson, shouted from the Senate gallery.

It’s now nearly 10 years after Sandy Hook, and what has Congress done? The House tries when Democrats are in control, then their bills die in the Senate. And while closing a few holes in the background check system would be helpful, there are more than 400 million guns in America, 98% of them owned by civilians – or 120 guns per 100 citizens.

We need a much larger scale national intervention: limits on how many and what kinds of guns people can own and how and where they can carry them, licenses and training requirements to own guns, voluntary buybacks of as many guns as possible and then, yes, confiscating guns if necessary to enforce new federal laws.

The prerequisites to even the most incremental progress are electing more Democrats and getting rid of the filibuster that enables a 41-senator minority to stop almost any bill in its tracks. President Joe Biden is doing what he can by himself, such as banning “ghost guns.” Meanwhile, only seven states require safety training to buy a gun.

Based on my single up-close and personal encounter with a firearm, that’s a scary thought.

In Buffalo, we see the tragic intersection of vile rhetoric from political and media figures, a disturbed mind and gun “rights” advocates irrationally and immorally opposed to any restrictions or safeguards on what they seem to view as their absolute Second Amendment right to bear arms. They need to get over themselves. All rights are regulated, and some rights are much more important than that one – first and foremost, the right to stay alive.