All The Stupid Laws That Have Passed Instead Of An Assault Rifle Ban
"Few people are interested in taking away all guns from all citizens, just ones that are literally designed for mass killing," the author writes.
Here’s how tragically absurd mass shootings have gotten in our country: This piece was written and ready to be published on Monday when we got news that a man entered a Louisville, Kentucky, bank from which he had reportedly been recently terminated and opened fire, killing five people and injuring others.
The shooter livestreamed the attack; he apparently died while exchanging gunfire with police.
As of press time, injuries and other details are still being sorted out, but we know the gunman’s weapon of choice: an AR-15 assault rifle that he legally purchased only a week earlier.
It’s the same type of gun another shooter used to kill six people, including three 9-year-olds, on March 27 at The Covenant School, a private Christian grade school in Nashville. It was yet another day we had to endure news stories featuring the faces of innocent children who were cut down.
The Nashville shooter — who was also killed by police — reportedly took the rifle to the school in a bag along with two other guns and ammunition. Nashville police say that the shooter legally purchased several guns from five different stores despite being under care for an “emotional disorder.”
An AR-15 was reportedly used in 10 of the last 17 deadly mass shootings in the country, including the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012 that claimed the lives of 20 children, all under eight years old. And it isn’t just school shootings —the AR-15 or some variant of it has been used in more mass shootings than anyone not paid to keep track of it can reasonably be expected to.
President Bill Clinton signed into law a Federal Assault Weapons Ban in 1994; the ban expired 10 years later. Despite research concluding that mass-shooting-related homicides were reducedduring that decade, attempts to renew the ban have not been successful.
Even President Donald Trump questioned the necessity of private AR-15 ownership — albeit not publicly enough. Yet, in many red states, it’s still easier to buy an assault rifle than a bottle of high-proof liquor.
In the wake of the Nashville shooting, President Joe Bidenrenewed calls for an assault weapons ban. Anyone who’s been conscious and living in America knows his pleas will go nowhere, especially with a divided Congress. Sure, you’ll get “thoughts and prayers” up the wazoo, but we’ll quietly move on and wait until the next tragedy to resume the fatuous cycle.
It’s the movie “Groundhog Day” manifest in political agendas.
Demonstrators call for a ban on assault rifles in August 2019 during President Donald Trump's visit to El Paso, Texas, following back-to-back mass shootings there and in Dayton, Ohio.
In a country where I can’t purchase Sudafed without identification, banning a weapon for citizen use that can fire dozens of rounds per minute is an issue that somehow still divides the masses. Hunting with an AR-15 is impractical, and there are many other legal weapons suited for home defense.
People bark about protections granted by the Second Amendment — written during a time when weapons were muskets — but seemingly refuse to acknowledge that few people are interested in taking away all guns from all citizens, just ones that are literally designed for mass killing. Some politicians, voted into office for the purpose of protecting their electorate, seem more interested in challenging the government to take away their assault rifles with juvenile bluster (see: Colorado Rep. and resident asshole Ken Buck).
From anti-climate legislationto banning dildos, politicians across the country have a dubious record of focusing on things that don’t actually improve our safety. Here’s a (very non-exhaustive) list of recent state and federal legislation — and other priorities — that lawmakers are more focused on than protecting pre-pubescent humans from getting torn through with metal:
Anti-LGBTQ legislation:
As soon as it was reported that the Nashville shooter was transgender, I knew it’d be the worst thing for a community perpetually working hard for normalization — because amoebic Republicans would leverage the shooting to attack the trans community. And they were right on time.
Politicians with a hard-on (literally and figuratively) for LGBTQ issues is nothing new, but it feels like they’ve been going a bit harder lately — because we know the one thing that freaks politicians out more than gun violence is (gasp!) consenting adults just living their lives.
There has been a maelstrom of anti-LGBTQ bills throughout the country, including a bill passed in Kentucky in March that bans gender-affirming care for trans people and prohibits conversations on sexual orientation in schools, among other foolishness. An anti-drag law passed in Tennessee the same month.
The irony of our public outrage over Uganda’s new draconian law essentially criminalizing homosexualityis that the United States isn’t so far behind in 2023.
Anti-abortion legislation:
For my dollars, the most egregious legal decision I’ve witnessed as an adult is the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, which granted Americans abortion rights for nearly 50 years before the U.S. Supreme Court extended a strong middle finger to the people.
While many governors are admirably standing in defiance of that decision, several Republican-led states leaned into it with “trigger laws” that immediately criminalized the practice of abortion. In Florida, lawmakers proposed a “heartbeat bill” that would ban abortions as soon as a heartbeat is detected, which is about six weeks after conception.
The message here? Protect the fetus by encroaching on the rights of the mother, perhaps to her detriment, so it’s born into a world where we won’t give a damn about the child’s well-being and that child can easily be cut down by gunfire at school.
Laws making it easier to obtain guns:
Common sense and a basic understanding of human nature dictates that getting one’s hands on tools specifically designed to kill should be no mean feat in any state.
Lawmakers in the state where the Covenant School shooting took place have pushed to ease up on gun laws via two bills — one that would drop the handgun carry age from 21 to 18 and another that would allow staff members in schools to carry concealed guns on school grounds with a permit. As a former teacher, I can’t stress how bad an idea that is for so many reasons.
The Tennessee House voted on April 6 to expel two of three Democrats who led protests for stricter gun laws in the wake of the Covenant School shooting. Two of the representatives — Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson — are Black men; Rep. Gloria Johnson is a white woman. It’s Tennessee, so I’ll give you one guess as to who wasn’t expelled.
The push for more restrictive gun laws in Texas, home of Uvalde and seven other mass shootings in 13 years, buckled under the weight of the gun lobby, which owns more politicians than Questlove owns vinyl records.
Republicans in North Carolina proposed bills just a few hours after the Michigan State University shooting in February that would repeal a permit requirement for purchasing a pistol and allow people with a concealed carry licenses to bring their weapons into churches, even when they have a school on the property.
Florida (again) passed a law allowing legal gun owners to carry concealed weapons without a state-issued permit or the training required to get it. Of course, defenders of the law suggested it would make the Nashville incident less likely to happen. See again what I said about human nature…
Considering banning TikTok:
Yes, this one is comparatively silly: The U.S. Government had a serious squabble with the Chinese-owned-and-operated social media behemoth, concerned that the country’s Communist government is using it to spy on all the 45-year-old moms shimmying in front of their phone camera to Taylor Swift. The conversation started with the Trump administration and was recently renewed by Joe Biden.
I’m no expert in social media security, but I think the jig was up on our general privacy the first time we decided to sign up for BlackPlanet, and it’s only gone south from there.
Thing is, there’s no real, tangible evidence that TikTok is siphoning data for nefarious means, and there’s a little thing called free speechthat’ll make it difficult to nuke the app on our shores.
But if TikTok somehow manages to get banned before AR-15s, maybe I’ll just move to China so I can freely do the “Fancy Like” dance on the app. And not fall victim to a mass shooting.
CORRECTION: A prior version of this article misstated the number of rounds an AR-15 can fire in a minute.
