No excuse for GOP inaction on guns
As the killings continue, Republicans refuse to take action on gun control – and they will pay the price at the polls.
Thoughts and prayers. That’s the standard response from US politicians any time there is a mass shooting. This week, we heard those empty platitudes yet again in the wake of America’s 18th school shooting of 2018.
Nikolas Cruz, a troubled 19-yearold with an affinity for guns, knives, hunting and white supremacy, gunned down students and staff at his former high school in Parkland, Florida.
I heard the news of a mass school shooting as I exited the winding Karangahake Gorge, just west of Waihi on State Highway 2. Home to visit family and friends, during our two-week stay in New Zealand I have been largely insulated from US news, in part as a mental health break from the roller coaster of hyper-partisan politics.
As my husband and I drove into Paeroa, we learned that Cruz had killed 17 people with his semiautomatic rifle. By the time we arrived in Auckland, we learned that he’d injured a dozen more.
By Friday, we learned that the shooting was premeditated, and lasted just seven minutes; that Cruz escaped by abandoning his weapon and running away from the school, pretending to be one of the terrified students; that people who knew Cruz had half-joked that if anyone was going to be a school shooter, it would be him.
As we drove, it sunk in that another horror had visited the school children of America. I looked in my rear-view mirror at my 3-year-old daughter, who had napped, sung and counted cows on the journey from Tauranga, her blonde curls electrified by the North Island’s tropical humidity, her sweet voice a mix of American and Kiwi vowels – and I felt sick.
She’ll be in school in New York City in a few years. She will be introduced to active shooter drills. To school lockdowns. To metal detectors at the front doors of her school. She will one day be old enough to understand what happened in Parkland, and at Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook and Columbine before that.
I asked myself, how can I live a moral life, subjecting her to this reality? Where is my culpability in this ethical morass?
Speaking out is step one to addressing those questions.
The US president let a day go before addressing the tragedy – perhaps because one of his first acts upon taking office was to do away with restrictions imposed by his predecessor on the availability of firearms to people with mental illness.
Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida, expressed dismay at the shooting but reaffirmed his support for the Second Amendment right to bear arms. Rubio, who has received over US$3 million in funding from the National Rifle Association during his political career, also suggested that stricter gun control laws cannot stop someone committed to propagating mass murder.
Perhaps Rubio should have paid more attention to another news story this week.
Here in New Zealand, a Canterbury teenager admitted eight charges after planning, but not executing, a mass terrorist attack. Indoctrinated online into supporting Islamic State, the teen planned to drive a car into a group of people and then attack them with a knife. He started the plot but abandoned it, in large part because he couldn’t get hold of a knife to inflict the kind of carnage he had hoped for.
The vast majority of Americans support stricter gun control laws, including universal background checks and restrictions based on mental health. The NRA, which has bankrolled more politicians than I’ve had hot breakfasts, represents only a small fraction of US gun owners, who are otherwise generally open to sensible gun safety reform.
Once a moderate organisation quite comfortable with gun regulation, since the late 1970s the NRA has shifted towards extremism, provoking fear of governmental tyranny to propagate the notion that Americans should be armed to the teeth, despite the very real and macabre cost of the free availability of guns. The NRA does not speak for most Americans, but punches above its weight with direct and lasting influence on America’s public ‘‘servants’’.
The inaction of Republicans, as children die violent deaths in classrooms that should be havens, will fuel the building resistance ahead of November’s mid-term elections.
I can feel Americans’ anger from 14,000 kilometres away. I feel it myself – as a parent, for my daughter, and for 17 families that I have never met.
The NRA ... represents only a small fraction of US gun owners, who are otherwise generally open to sensible gun safety reform.