Monday , March 18 2024

Good Guys with Guns Can’t Stop Mass Shootings

Only Thing That Stops A Bad Guy With A Gun Is A Good Guy With A Gun.” The favorite bull*hit spewed by the NRA, Trumpsters, MAGAs. Nothing is holier than the second amendment, for which there is only one reading, one interpretation according to the usual suspects.

Really. No, I meant, think about it. Yesterday morning at an Independence Day Parade in Highland Park, IL (Full disclosure: my home until a few weeks ago.) A mom and apple pie day, with high school marching bands, and more first responders with more guns than can be possibly counted.

good guys with votes

Lots and lots of good guys with guns. And in the blink of an eye and the pop-pop-pop of a succession of bullets fired in less than a minute from an automatic weapon, all those good guys with guns were completely powerless to react, to stop the terror. How could they? Six dead, more than three dozen injured. Good guys with guns? How could good guys with guns have stopped that? It happened before anyone less with superhuman abilities could have even reacted.

The slogan is pure bullsh*t. A slogan that is meaningless in the horror of one mass shooting after the next, after the next.

So yesterday was Independence Day. That independence means you have the right to tote around your AR-15 military weapons and all other weapons. That right, according to SCOTUS, according to some politicians, is inviolable, sacred, and fundamental as an American.

I have a right to life and liberty. My pursuit of happiness involves hiking, writing, singing, and enjoying nature. Yours is killing things, maybe people, maybe rabbits (but who the bloody hell needs Military-Grade weapons for killing rabbits?) But, you know the Second Amendment, and all that.

But today you have destroyed Independence Day. Your liberty Trumps mine, apparently. So to speak. You get to shoot off your AR-15. And the rest of us? My friends cowering in the gunfire in Highland Park today? They get their liberty (and some, their lives) stolen by your liberty. Well, as long as you have the right to bear whatever arms you f*ing want to bear, unbridled by regulation and sanity, it’s all good, right?

Yeah, and about the life thing…you’re all about life–at least until it’s out of the womb and fitting prey for your gun. Then all’s fair game, right?

“Only Thing That Stops A Bad Guy With A Gun Is A Good Guy With A Gun.” Right. Keep on believing that, spreading the NRA propaganda. Then ask a first responder, ask a local cop if they could have responded to that. To the firestorm of automatic weapons fire. Assault weapons in the hands of civilians can only cause carnage. And maybe that’s what the NRA wants. Carnage yields more carnage and more weapons sales of bigger and badder weapons.

I urge, I plead, with everyone for whom life (really matters), who is genuinely pro-life (once it is born) to vote out every Republican (’cause it’s mostly them–and don’t “what about” me) because they are the problem. They are the ones who are preventing sane gun regulation (and by the way, the barely bi-partisan law just passed is a mere drop in the ocean and won’t even cause a ripple.)

I’m not in the mood today when I’m hearing about close call after close call from close friends at yesterday’s parade. I’m not in the mood when I still don’t know how everyone I know and for is doing. Whether they are okay.)

In the meantime, protest. Link arms and shout from the rooftops, register voters, get them to the polls. Get rid of the filibuster and pass real laws. No one is trying to take everyone’s guns away (although that is my current instinct), but the Second Amendment is not the absolute right to own assault weapons. Give ’em muskets. At least they won’t spray hundreds of bullets per minute.

That is the ONLY way this will stop and the country can begin to heal.

About Barbara Barnett

A Jewish mother and (young 🙃) grandmother, Barbara Barnett is an author and professional Hazzan (Cantor). A member of the Conservative Movement's Cantors Assembly and the Jewish Renewal movement's clergy association OHALAH, the clergy association of the Jewish Renewal movement. In her other life, she is a critically acclaimed fantasy/science fiction author as well as the author of a non-fiction exploration of the TV series House, M.D. and contributor to the book Spiritual Pregnancy. She Publisher/Executive Editor of Blogcritics, (blogcritics.org).

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