Politicians don’t need to sell their souls to gun lobby
The mass shooting that took 17 lives in Parkland, Fla., tore open our hearts before they had time to heal from the last one. These events are following each other in such rapid succession that the outlines of our country’s most horrific gun massacres are beginning to blur.
Spineless politicians argue that there is nothing we can do to stop them. Sadly, they are right as long as their fealty to the National Rifle Association supersedes their desire to save lives.
Goethe’s Faust sold his soul to the devil in exchange for earthly power. We should be furious at the Faustian bargain that so many U.S. lawmakers have made in order to continue receiving donations and Aratings from the gun lobby.
If a Congressional seat has more value than a person’s moral compass then we shouldn’t be surprised that so many souls are for sale. But here’s one of the saddest aspect of the mass marketing of souls: Lawmakers are sacrificing their integrity needlessly. When the overwhelming majority of Americans want the added protection that universal background checks and gun violence restraining orders would provide, it should not take courage to support these measures.
Voting for them would, in fact, be a two-fer: Doing the right thing that is overwhelmingly popular while appearing to take a morally courageous stand.
Politicians who vote their conscience on the gun issue are usually reelected handily. Examples (often decades-old) of politicians who were opposed by the gun lobby and lost their seat are the rare exceptions that too many of their colleagues believe prove the rule.
Too few lawmakers remember the example of their late colleague, U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., who, in his first campaign went to northern Minnesota (gun country) and announced that he would be supporting the Brady Bill. During debate on the first assault weapon ban, Wellstonecalled a press conference, asked a police chief to hold up a scarylooking military-style, semi-automatic assault rifle so people could see how it differed from most hunting rifles, and said that he wanted to explain to his constituents why he would be supporting the ban. He won his reelection by a large margin.
In stunning contrast, Gov. Rick Scott, R-Fla., became a poster child for moral cowardice when he evaded a question about the need for new gun laws. He paused, twisted his head sideways, and spoke of his love for his grandchildren, then fell back on one of politicians’ most shameless evasions for dealing with the fundamental cause of our epidemic of gun violence. “It’s too soon,” he said.
No, Gov. Scott and all of you lawmakers who refuse to discuss the role of weak laws in perpetuating our national epidemic of gun violence, it’s not too soon; it’s too late; it’s long past time, and the mounting list of gun casualties should be laid at your feet.
A small business owner in Santa Fe, N.M., confessed to me the day after the Parkland massacre that he was a gunsmith, an NRA member and holder of a permit-to-carry. I told him that the gun owners and hunters in my family all supported stricter screening to keep firearms out of the wrong hands. He surprised me by saying that he agreed — he believed it was wrong for anyone to be able to bypass a background check. Since he and so many other gun owners disagreed with NRA leadership’s extreme positions, he was considering dropping his membership. Their views did not match his and those of most other gun owners, he said.
Only when lawmakers band together and do what common sense and common decency require; only when they acknowledge the one difference accounting for the overwhelming disparities in rates of U.S. gun deaths and those of other developed countries — then, and only then may they be able to buy back the soul they pawned when they entered into league with the gun lobby.