End the Gun Culture and Take the Court With It

I’ve talked about the short vacation we took to see the Northern Lights, but right now I’m exploding with anger about the latest mass shootings including one that took place just before we left. They’re both awful and very personal. It’s not just the shooters that have my anger but all their protectors.

I left Peace Corps training at the University of Texas in Austin days before Charles Whitman climbed the tower and killed 15 people who happened to be in the area, and injured thirty-one more. I’d been within range of that tower a few days before we left.

We had an exchange student who got her Masters degree from Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia, not long before another mass shooter killed 32 people and wounded 17 others there.

Our daughter got her Ph.D. at Michigan State, thank heavens more than a decade before the latest mass shooting there, shortly before we left.

My former colleague, Sarah Rogerson, had a family member hurt in another Michigan mass shooting.

Anyone in our family or any of our friends could have been in any of those places or many of the places where countless other mass shootings took place, any of those times.

The US used to feel like the safest place in the world. What’s happened to us is tragic.

Whether the shooters were psychologically deranged or in the thrall of some nonsensical conspiracy theory, the political muscle behind letting people have and carry assault weapons comes from gun manufacturers, the NRA, the lingering effects of racism and the Civil War, and from people who romanticize what they call “The Lost Cause”, people who regret not conquering the United States and hate the fact that the States are still United with a functioning government elected by the people. It comes from people who hate African-Americans, think their slavery should not have ended and that our problems stem from the African-American community – now that’s the pot calling kettle black – the mass shooters have been almost all white and my Black friends are not vulnerable to the kinds of nonsensical conspiracy theories that distort the minds of whites trying to refight the Civil War – whites who want to ban the teaching of everything they don’t know because it might blow the lies and distortions out of their weak minds.

There was a time when we banned machine guns. Now we allow ever more powerful weapons developed for war and make them available to those cheering for a war against America.

Most guilty and responsible are the members of the Supreme Court who think the Second Amendment authorizes war on the US. They’re traitors in black robes. I’d try, convict and “lock ‘em up” without the opportunity to communicate beyond the walls of their cells. Their job description calls for justice. Their work stokes Civil War. They’re the Devil’s cabinet and frequently violate the Code of Conduct that applies to the rest of the federal judiciary.

It’s time to ban assault weapons, take guns out of the hands of abusers, require insurance to carry weapons, hunt down the paramilitaries who are determined to destroy our country, and their judicial protectors too. Let the Supreme Court nominations roll.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on March 7, 2023.