Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is quoted asserting that given the vast number of guns in American society, we should be “the safest country on Earth.”
Well, we aren’t. Not by a long shot.
Yet the National Rifle Association, at its annual meeting this weekend, is singing the same, tired mantra that the explosion of gun violence isn’t a “gun problem.” It is a “mental health problem.” It’s a “societal problem.” Donald Trump, the indicted ex-POTUS, told the NRA it’s a “spiritual problem.”
I will agree that all those factors have contributed to the violence. Yet the common denominator in all the massacres that have occurred in this country continues to be guns and the ease with which nut cases are able to acquire them.
The NRA and their Republican toadies in Congress are on the wrong side of history and of public opinion with their continual resistance to any reasonable legislation that could deter loons from obtaining guns and killing people.
Universal background checks are popular among most Americans, even most Republicans. That hold no water with the GOP and the NRA. They lean on the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which references a “well-regulated militia” as “being necessary to the security of a free State.” Can someone justify that the founders’ assertion that a well-regulated militia means any knuckle-dragger who’s able to purchase a firearm?
I continue to believe that there are legislative solutions that can be implemented that do nothing to infringe on law-abiding citizens from owing firearms.
Except that the NRA adheres to the all-or-nothing approach to interpreting the Constitution. The gun lobby’s stubborn resistance is going to get more Americans killed.
More guns mean more death and mayhem.