From gun violence to abortion bans, know the devil before it breaches your door
Through at least 564 mass shootings this year up to Oct. 25, Representative Jared Golden of Maine stood against banning assault weapons. Then last week, a mass shooter killed 18 people and wounded 13 in Lewiston, Maine — Golden’s hometown.
“I have opposed efforts to ban deadly weapons of war,” Golden said the day after massacres at two locations in Maine’s second-largest city. “The time has now come for me to take responsibility for this failure, which is why I now call on the United States Congress to ban assault rifles.”
Only when the devil breached the door of his hometown was Golden moved to recognize its horror and finally do something to fight it.
To be clear, Golden not only did the right thing, but a very rare thing for any politician — he changed his mind and admitted he was wrong. In 2022, Republicans (and a smattering of Democrats) blocked restoration of the assault weapons ban that could help keep their constituents safe from harming themselves or others. Golden was one of those Democrats.
Asked by the Bangor Daily News why he didn’t change his stance on assault weapons after last year’s mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 19 children and two teachers, Golden said, “I think the simple answer is, it’s easy to feel shielded from that happening in your own life and in your own community, and it’s easy to go on justifying your own personal positions or even your own possession of these firearms under the assumption of, well, I’m going to protect my people.
“But when something like this happens,” he said, “that kind of humility I talked about is a pretty harsh lesson.”
It’s not just gun violence that’s compelling some to reevaluate their views.
On CNN last December, Matt and Jill Hartle, a South Carolina couple, talked about how an ultrasound four months into Jill Hartle’s pregnancy revealed a rare heart defect in the unborn child they named Ivy Grace. The Hartles were faced with two devastating choices — carry their daughter to term despite knowing that she would die shortly after birth or subject their infant to multiple heart surgeries with no guarantee of survival.
What the conservative Christian couple wanted to do was terminate the pregnancy. But because South Carolina has a six-week abortion ban, the couple’s only option for the procedure was to wait two weeks for an appointment to get an abortion in another state, which was already overwhelmed with other desperate outof-state patients.
Jill Hartle, who called the delay “probably the most tortured two weeks of my entire life,” said, “It’s not fair for the government to tell you what you should or should not do.” The couple now runs the Ivy Grace Project, which hopes “to help make a big enough impact to codify abortion rights and one day live in a world where Republican US legislatures remember their role is to help the people of the United States, not hurt them.”
Of course, it’s never been fair for the government to intrude on anyone’s reproductive choices — or who someone chooses to marry or the gender identity that best fits who they are. But just like Golden, it took a personal tragedy, albeit a very different one, for the Hartles to see how quickly an issue that once seemed distant can upend their own lives.
Audre Lorde, the great writer and poet, once said, “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” That’s how it is — or should be — with the tragedies befalling this nation, whether it’s an angry man with an assault rifle or legislatures dominated by men determined to remake America into a Christian nationalist authoritarian state.
These are earthquakes whose tremors should unsettle us all. A mass shooting in a small city many miles away or the machinations people must now navigate in the many states that have banned or severely restricted abortion access are never as far away as people want to believe.
As of Tuesday, there have been dozens more mass shootings since the slaughter in Lewiston, Maine. With this nation’s intolerance and violence, and as rights are threatened and erased, no one can selfishly afford to see harrowing events and human suffering elsewhere and believe “things like that don’t happen here.”
Aided by inaction and ideology, those things — those devils — are already “here.”
It’s not just gun violence that’s compelling some to reevaluate their views.