"Mother of 6-Year-Old Boy Fatally Shot on Freeway Speaks Out for the First Time"
Neil J. Young
Illustrated | iStock
March 27, 2021
Perhaps the surest — and sickest — sign that, after more than a year of the pandemic, things are getting back to "normal" in the U.S. has been not only the return of mass shootings, but also the Republican refusal to do anything about them.
After two gun massacres in Atlanta and Boulder in just one week left 18 people, including a police officer, dead, President Biden has asked Congress .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/us/politics/biden-gun-control.html .. to pass stricter gun laws, including an assault weapons ban and tighter background check requirements. "This is not and should not be a partisan issue," Biden told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. "It is an American issue. We have to act."
Employing the twisted logic that has justified Republican inaction on gun violence for years, Cruz contended that rather than reducing crime, gun control legislation only "makes it worse," as if America’s astronomically high rate of gun violence wasn’t obviously correlated .. https://theweek.com/speedreads/973952/america-many-guns-avoid-outsize-gun-violence-research-suggests .. with America’s astronomically high rate of civilian gun ownership. That thinking was also clear in the comments of Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the second ranking Senate Republican, who explained .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/us/politics/biden-gun-control.html , "there’s not a big appetite among our members to do things that would appear to be addressing it, but actually don’t do anything to fix the problem."
But with the National Rifle Association’s increasing influence over Republican lawmakers in recent years — a development that grew directly out of the NRA’s own shift from its history of supporting gun control legislation to its hardline defense of Americans’ absolute right to gun ownership — Republicans largely abandoned their willingness to back gun safety legislation.
[INSERT: Incendiary N.R.A. Videos Find New Critics: N.R.A. Leaders "N.R.A. Leadership and Bankruptcy Assailed by U.S. Trustee "The NRA supported gun control laws until 1977. What good safety reason do you think changed their mind? Not one. Some reading for you. The first one is key if you haven't seen one like it yet. P - Important history. NRA 1977 shift from century of focus on gun safety to aggressive right- wing approach, utilizing fraudulent claims re 2nd Amdt, on profit making for gun industry."" https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=163681419]
Instead, they leaned heavily into the "culture wars" messaging that the NRA and conservative media outlets were hyping while offering no real policy solutions to address the nation’s epidemic of gun violence. Democrats were socialists who wanted to take guns away from law-abiding citizens while opening up the borders for thugs and criminals to come in, they contended.
Of course, the idea that government can’t offer any useful solutions and that Americans must fend for themselves isn’t limited to just the issue of gun violence. It undergirds the Republicans’ approach to nearly all real problems the nation faces, seen most devastatingly in their handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Donald Trump’s refusal to issue a national mask mandate that public health officials were calling for had disastrous effects as infection and death rates soared upwards in 2020. Conservative pundits blasted mask orders .. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/01/masks-politics-coronavirus-227765 .. as "totalitarianism," the same sort of alarmist response given to any proposed limits on gun rights. And Republican leaders, like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida who insisted mask requirements wouldn’t work .. https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/06/26/as-florida-coronavirus-cases-spike-ron-desantis-says-mask-requirement-wont-work/ , encouraged public sentiments that the government didn’t have much of a role to play in combating the virus.
When it comes to Republican efforts on many of the most pressing issues of our day, Shapiro isn’t wrong. Still, Republican inaction on gun violence and COVID-19 looks all the more appalling when compared to where they do devote their energies. Of late, many of them have been busy tossing red meat to their base on Twitter and Fox News over trivial matters .. https://www.startribune.com/gop-struggles-to-define-biden-turns-to-culture-wars-instead/600032376/ .. like Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head, and Meghan Markle.
Such outrages against the so-called American way of life, Republicans are happy to spend hours railing against. Half a million Americans gone because of the coronavirus and tens of thousands killed every year by guns, though? That’s just something we’ve got to live with.
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