Roe v. Wade Versus Weapons of War: Who Are The Baby Killers Now?
In 1994, long before mass shootings became endemic, Congress banned semi-automatic assault rifles. Hard to believe, isn’t it?
We mostly agreed back then that it was crazy to treat modern-day, hi-tech weapons of war the same way we have always treated pistols, shotguns, and hunting rifles. The “Violent Crime Control & Law Enforcement Act of 1994” prohibited the manufacture of assault weapons for civilian use. You know, like going into a movie theatre, or a school, or a place of worship, or a shopping mall, and killing as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time feasible before help can arrive? Like the violent video games our children grow up playing?
Unfortunately, the 1994 law had a ten-year sunset provision. And then Newt Gingrich took out a contract on America, the Koch brothers manufactured the Tea Party “movement,” some terrorists flew some planes into the Twin Towers, and the NRA took over the GOP. The ban expired in 2004, a black man was elected President in 2008, and the civilian weapons of war industry took off.
The result is beyond anything any member of Congress in 1994, or even 2004, could’ve imagined. Today, there are approximately 30 MILLION Americans who are prepared to wage civil war in support of an insurrection for the purpose of creating a White Christian Nationalist Police State. And they are HEAVILY armed. Such a hostile takeover of democratic institutions is supported by over half of the Republican Party, or about 30% of the country.
Coincidentally, that is about the same percentage of Americans (32%) who own guns. What the actual fuck is going on here?
And yes, those gun-totin’ white supremacists are the same segment of our population that wants to control a woman’s reproductive choices. They tend to believe that it is the DEMOCRATS who are baby-killing pedophiles. But as a matter of record, it is their political representatives who are complicit in the Sandy Hook and Uvalde slaughter of babes. In psychology, that is referred to as projecting your shadow.
Look — we have got this wrong, America. It is fashionable to say that the GOP is holding our country hostage against the wishes of the other 70% of the population that is us. This overlooks a critical fact. Why did all those Republican legislators vote to de-certify the 2020 election AFTER they had been attacked by an angry mob demanding same? Isn’t that called “siding with the terrorists?”
The answer, as we learned from some Democratic legislators, it that at the same time as the White Christians were ransacking Congress with their Confederate flags and MAGA hats, those GOP legislators were receiving messages from their constituents to the effect that “we know where your family lives.” Not to make excuses for their cowardice, but the root of the civic rot in America right now is those 30 Million heavily armed White Christian Nationalists who are intent on making the “Republic of Gilead,” from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1984), a reality. These are the people Donald Trump unleashed in the wake of Barack Obama’s presidency, and the GOP feels forced to appease.
What can be done? It is not realistic at this point to ban assault weapons, obviously. They’re out there now, thanks to Newt Gingrich, the Koch brothers, and the NRA. However, it is never too late to regulate such weapons of war, by requiring them to be licensed and kept under lock-and-key, at least.
More practically, however, we can still ban high-capacity magazines, as advocated for by the political action group Sandy Hook Promise. Those magazines are what allow assault weapons to be discharged repeatedly without reloading. We could ban them while still allowing them to be sold and used at shooting ranges for ‘sport.’
After all, guns don’t kill babies — bullets do. If America wants to stop being the only place in the world where these kinds of mass shootings have become the sport of demented young white men, then we need to regulate ammunitions. That’s the only sensible way to control violent crime. And yes, that will create a black market for ammo, but the FBI is already presumably infiltrating white supremacist circles, so we just need to make illegal sales of ammo a crime that carries a severe penalty, like life without parole.
Once we have that under control, then we can begin addressing the broader cultural issue of having 30 Million crazy white sunovabitches among us. Like, oh I don’t know, investing in education? Taxing churches??
Actually, back in the days when Congress thought it a good idea to ban the manufacture of weapons of war for civilian uses, Dennis Kucinich had a cultural solution that would have averted much of this craziness. He wanted to take 1% of the Defense budget and apply it to the creation of a Department of Peace. His legislation had a visionary program for addressing violence at all levels of society, with special emphasis on prison reform, gangs, and domestic violence. That 1% slice of our obscene war budget was enough to fund the establishment of “Peace Academies” for the purpose of creating a civilian force of community-based mediators who would attend for free in exchange for public service, under the auspices of the Department of Peace, upon graduation. Maryanne Williamson updated this proposal as part of her presidential run in 2020. Yes, she was right about that, too.
We have created instead a culture of war that now finds itself on the brink of another Civil War. What did we expect when we made weapons of war as freely available to 18 year olds as video games? The only way to fix such a culture, which we must not forget still represents a significant minority of our population, is to replace it with something better. A culture of peace.
Imagine that…
