How about the freedom not to be massacred?
Between 1970 and 2014, acts of terrorism killed about 3,500 Americans. Most of those killings happened on Sept. 11, 2001.
In 2015 alone, roughly 8,500 Americans died from firearms deaths.
Yet which threat gets more attention from Washington and Tallahassee?
To the idea that the aftermath of the Las Vegas massacre is not the time to discuss gun violence, Congress observed no such mourning period after 9/11. Just three days later, lawmakers authorized President George W. Bush to respond. Talk began again almost immediately about creating a Department of Homeland Security.
Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin spoke for gun-control deniers when he said of the Las Vegas shooter, “You can’t regulate evil.” Bevin channeled President Trump, who called the massacre “pure evil.”
If Stephen Paddock was mentally ill, however, his actions were more deranged than evil. And whether Paddock was unstable or malevolent, he would have posed far less of a threat without his commando arsenal of nearly four dozen weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition.
Washington, of course, will take no action. Washington took no action after the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012 that killed 20 first-graders and six adults. President Trump owes his election in large part to the National Rifle Association. In February, Trump told the NRA that the “eight-year assault” during Barack Obama’s presidency “on your Second Amendment rights has come to an end.”
If only Stephen Paddock’s “assault” had been so tame. Though Obama spoke often about gun control, especially after repeated mass shootings, the only significant legislation to go before Congress came in 2013, after Sandy Hook. The Senate proposal would have banned the sale of certain military-style assault weapons and large-capacity magazine, and also instituted background checks for private sales of firearms and sales at gun shows.
According to a Pew Research Center survey, 90 percent of Democrats and 77 percent of Republicans support those added checks. As Obama noted four years ago, many people believed that they were in place. A compromise exempted transfers among family members.
Yet the Senate killed the bill, 54-46. Marco Rubio didn’t just oppose the legislation. He voted against even allowing a vote. Rubio said, “We should look for ways to keep firearms out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill prone to misusing them, but I oppose legislation that will be used as a vehicle to impose new Second Amendment restrictions on responsible, law-abiding gun owners.”
By all reports, however, Stephen Paddock was “law-abiding.” As for Rubio’s concern about unstable people “misusing” firearms, in February Trump quietly signed legislation that makes it easier for the mentally ill to buy guns and rifles. Rubio voted for the bill.
Since no Republican will challenge the NRA, the best post-Vegas result may be to delay or head off more bad gun bills. One would make it easier to buy silencers. Just what the average weekend hunter needs. Another would make concealed weapons permits from one state valid in states that don’t allow concealed carry. That bill is called the Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act.
Opponents decry the mildest gun-control laws as assaults on freedom. In striking down most of Florida’s 2011 ban on physicians asking about firearms in the home, however, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the law violated physicians’ First Amendment right to obtain information to counsel their patients. And what about the freedom of those concertgoers in Las Vegas to be safe?
Indeed, the Second Amendment is no more absolute than the First Amendment. In his opinion striking down the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns in private homes, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia acknowledged “another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms.” Scalia referenced “the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons.’ ”
Any gun-control legislation would not necessarily be about preventing “the next” Las Vegas or Pulse nightclub or Sandy Hook or Columbine. It would be about finally refusing to accept that, among developed nations, the United States has three times the rate of firearm homicides as second-place Canada and 10 times the rate of Australia. That country’s 1996 reforms mostly ended mass shootings.
Las Vegas and all previous firearm bloodbaths amount to terrorism. Whatever the motivation, we should not tolerate them.
Email Randy Schultz: randy@bocamag.com