70-FUCKING-MILLION
22%
One out of every five Americans
Only the Republican Party can end our mass shootings epidemic
LOUISVILLE — The only path out of America’s cycle of gun violence is for the Republican Party to change course and join Democrats in backing far-reaching gun control. Otherwise, Americans will continue to be victims of gun violence, see friends or relatives shot, or be haunted by those possibilities.
I joined the third group this week.
On Monday, a man fired shots at a downtown building in Louisville, killing at least four people and injuring numerous others. I had been at the building, which housed a bank branch as well as office space, for a news conference in December, as Mayor-elect Craig Greenberg announced top aides in his administration.
The ongoing national wave of these shootings has made me increasingly leery of attending large events or visiting schools or other venues where mass carnage is all-to-easy to imagine. Five years ago, a high school friend of mine was shot (but thankfully survived) in a mass shooting in nearby Cincinnati. Monday’s shooting makes me even more nervous — I had been in this physical space before.
Because these shootings just keep happening, so many Americans now know someone affected. Twenty-one percent say that either they or a family member or friend has had personal experience with gun violence, according to a 2022 poll conducted by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That statistic now includes Gov. Andy Beshear (D) of Kentucky, who said two friends died in Monday’s shooting.
Each year, more than 20,000 Americans are killed in non-suicide incidents (mostly homicides) involving guns in the United States. Several hundred times a year, four or more people are shot and either killed or injured in a single event, which is how the Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting.
But, of course, this is not inevitable. Countries such as Australia and Canada have dramatically lower gun-related death rates than the United States. California and Massachusetts have substantially lower rates than many other states, including Kentucky.
It’s no mystery why. Australia, Canada and other nations have stringent gun regulations. States with higher rates of gun violence are largely Republican-dominated, with looser regulations, while those with lower rates are often blue states with greater gun control.
The solutions aren’t simple, but we can fix this problem. By some estimates, there are nearly 400 million guns in circulation in the United States, meaning we have more guns than people. A good incremental step would be for Kentucky to embrace gun laws similar to California’s. But ultimately, we need the United States to have gun laws more like Australia’s.
If the United States severely restricted AR-15’s and other such weapons, there would be fewer mass killings in which one person shoots dozens. But to truly reduce the number of homicides, we have to restrict handguns, too.
So we need Americans to voluntarily give up their guns en masse — or be required to do so. That would require numerous, aggressive pieces of gun-control legislation, judges upholding those laws in court — and potentially a constitutional amendment stating that the Second Amendment does not provide an individual right to gun ownership.
I don’t think that’s impossible. Australia did something similar in the 1990s after a mass shooting there.
But we all know the problem. Such massive policy changes would require Republican politicians, powerful right-wing institutions such as Fox News and many hard-line conservative voters to stop acting as though radical gun freedoms are essential to a free society. In our current political environment, Fox and other conservative entities regularly suggest that conservatives are under mortal threat and that owning a gun is both good and necessary. Republican politicians also whip up pro-gun sentiment. And many rank-and-file Republicans both have fairly extreme views on guns and are pushed even further right by party leaders.
This makes for a self-reinforcing cycle of fervent opposition to gun control. Just last month here in Kentucky, for example, the GOP-dominated legislature adopted a provision declaring the state a “Second Amendment sanctuary” barring local law enforcement officials from enforcing some federal gun laws.
For the United States to make progress on guns, the Republican Party has to change direction. That would require powerful parts of the Republican coalition, such as former president Donald Trump and Fox News, to start telling Republican voters that conservatism doesn’t require opposition to gun regulations. But it would take even more than that: You would also need some agreement among candidates to not outdo one another in demagoguing gun control during Republican primaries, and some major donors and groups to spend money boosting pro-gun-control candidates.
I know how far-fetched that sounds. But ultimately, that’s the only solution. The Democratic Party can’t impose gun control on its own, particularly in GOP-dominated states such as Kentucky. Nor can it push aggressive legislation if Republicans are loudly suggesting Democrats want to put conservative voters in bondage.
We have become a nation of mass-shooting victims and people like me are traumatized by hearing about so many mass shootings. This is a terrible problem, but it is one we can solve. Slavery was abolished. Jim Crow was outlawed. Mass shootings and gun violence can be dramatically reduced, if not eradicated.
But we need some Lincolns and Kings to emerge in the Republican Party to push it in the right direction. I am not optimistic, but I am not fatalistic, either.
LOUISVILLE — The only path out of America’s cycle of gun violence is for the Republican Party to change course and join Democrats in backing far-reaching gun control. Otherwise, Americans will continue to be victims of gun violence, see friends or relatives shot, or be haunted by those possibilities.
I joined the third group this week.
On Monday, a man fired shots at a downtown building in Louisville, killing at least four people and injuring numerous others. I had been at the building, which housed a bank branch as well as office space, for a news conference in December, as Mayor-elect Craig Greenberg announced top aides in his administration.
The ongoing national wave of these shootings has made me increasingly leery of attending large events or visiting schools or other venues where mass carnage is all-to-easy to imagine. Five years ago, a high school friend of mine was shot (but thankfully survived) in a mass shooting in nearby Cincinnati. Monday’s shooting makes me even more nervous — I had been in this physical space before.
Because these shootings just keep happening, so many Americans now know someone affected. Twenty-one percent say that either they or a family member or friend has had personal experience with gun violence, according to a 2022 poll conducted by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That statistic now includes Gov. Andy Beshear (D) of Kentucky, who said two friends died in Monday’s shooting.
Each year, more than 20,000 Americans are killed in non-suicide incidents (mostly homicides) involving guns in the United States. Several hundred times a year, four or more people are shot and either killed or injured in a single event, which is how the Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting.
But, of course, this is not inevitable. Countries such as Australia and Canada have dramatically lower gun-related death rates than the United States. California and Massachusetts have substantially lower rates than many other states, including Kentucky.
It’s no mystery why. Australia, Canada and other nations have stringent gun regulations. States with higher rates of gun violence are largely Republican-dominated, with looser regulations, while those with lower rates are often blue states with greater gun control.
The solutions aren’t simple, but we can fix this problem. By some estimates, there are nearly 400 million guns in circulation in the United States, meaning we have more guns than people. A good incremental step would be for Kentucky to embrace gun laws similar to California’s. But ultimately, we need the United States to have gun laws more like Australia’s.
If the United States severely restricted AR-15’s and other such weapons, there would be fewer mass killings in which one person shoots dozens. But to truly reduce the number of homicides, we have to restrict handguns, too.
So we need Americans to voluntarily give up their guns en masse — or be required to do so. That would require numerous, aggressive pieces of gun-control legislation, judges upholding those laws in court — and potentially a constitutional amendment stating that the Second Amendment does not provide an individual right to gun ownership.
I don’t think that’s impossible. Australia did something similar in the 1990s after a mass shooting there.
But we all know the problem. Such massive policy changes would require Republican politicians, powerful right-wing institutions such as Fox News and many hard-line conservative voters to stop acting as though radical gun freedoms are essential to a free society. In our current political environment, Fox and other conservative entities regularly suggest that conservatives are under mortal threat and that owning a gun is both good and necessary. Republican politicians also whip up pro-gun sentiment. And many rank-and-file Republicans both have fairly extreme views on guns and are pushed even further right by party leaders.
This makes for a self-reinforcing cycle of fervent opposition to gun control. Just last month here in Kentucky, for example, the GOP-dominated legislature adopted a provision declaring the state a “Second Amendment sanctuary” barring local law enforcement officials from enforcing some federal gun laws.
For the United States to make progress on guns, the Republican Party has to change direction. That would require powerful parts of the Republican coalition, such as former president Donald Trump and Fox News, to start telling Republican voters that conservatism doesn’t require opposition to gun regulations. But it would take even more than that: You would also need some agreement among candidates to not outdo one another in demagoguing gun control during Republican primaries, and some major donors and groups to spend money boosting pro-gun-control candidates.
I know how far-fetched that sounds. But ultimately, that’s the only solution. The Democratic Party can’t impose gun control on its own, particularly in GOP-dominated states such as Kentucky. Nor can it push aggressive legislation if Republicans are loudly suggesting Democrats want to put conservative voters in bondage.
We have become a nation of mass-shooting victims and people like me are traumatized by hearing about so many mass shootings. This is a terrible problem, but it is one we can solve. Slavery was abolished. Jim Crow was outlawed. Mass shootings and gun violence can be dramatically reduced, if not eradicated.
But we need some Lincolns and Kings to emerge in the Republican Party to push it in the right direction. I am not optimistic, but I am not fatalistic, either.
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