More than three weeks ago, after a gunman killed 10 people in a Colorado supermarket, Michael Dougherty, the Boulder County district attorney was quoted at a press conference saying, “This is a tragedy and a nightmare for Boulder County.”
Since I started to write this piece, another mass shooting occurred April 16, eight dead at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis. Since the year began, more than 12,000 people have died or have been murdered by guns in the United States. In that time, there have been 151 mass shootings that have left 156 killed – including the horrific incidents in Boulder and Indianapolis – and 485 injured.
It’s not just a nightmare for a single community, it’s a nightmare for the nation, and it has been a nightmare since at least the 1980s when the body count from gun violence began to grow to 2021’s epidemic levels.
The Boulder DA repeated the same observation made after every mass shooting: “These were people going about their day, doing their shopping.” He repeated the same pledge made after every mass shooting: “I promise the victims and the people of the state of Colorado that we will secure justice.”
Yet he knows, as every other law enforcement officer in this country knows, that it’s an empty promise, one law enforcement is unable to fulfill, despite their strongest desires to do so. The dead cannot return to life, to their loved ones. The trauma will linger with those who were injured, as well as the community as a whole, forever.
The promise of justice against gun violence is an impossible promise to keep—prosecutors are blocked by weak laws, police are outgunned. This nation, awash in more guns than people, chose long ago to accept the violence wrought by guns as necessary to their safety and the protection of their constitutional right to own a gun.
In truth, no matter the number of guns sold nor the number concealed-carry and open-carry and stand-your-grounds laws enacted, no one has been or is safe from gun violence. No one. As long as guns remain unregulated, available any time, any place to anyone, no one safe.
As long as gun makers and their lobbyists help lawmakers craft legal loop holes in regulations, thus ensuring anyone can have as many guns as they want, no one is safe.
In truth, neither in the Second Amendment nor anywhere else in the U.S. Constitution are Americans granted the right to own a gun. In fact, there is no mention of the word “gun” in the document. The Second Amendment only entitles the nation – not individuals – to a well regulated Militia (i.e. state and local police forces, the national guard, the military).
The other part of the amendment, the right of the people keep and bear Arms, also does not refer to individuals. In this context, “the people” again refers to the nation. Former Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that “the people” is an 18thcentury term of art, used the century the amendment was written, to refer to the military. Scholars believe the founders wanted to ensure diffusion of resources so governors did not have to rely on the federal government to deploy military resources for state emergencies.
Yes, scholars also believe the founders wanted individuals to have the right to self-protection, particularly in a new country where most communities did not have a police force.
Yet, it’s more than doubtful the founders, including James Madison, the Second Amendment’s author, would agree with today’s status of gun ownership in the 21st century, where every community has a police force but where the members of some communities have more guns, and more powerful guns, than the police.
Nor would they agree with the trade-off—endless violence and random death for the right to “bear arms.” A select group, a minority of individuals, mostly conservative legislators in Congress and state houses across the country who, along with presidents and governors, decided the majority, which poll after poll supports gun control, should live this endless nightmare.
Why? For some, their political fortunes are more important; for others, a lack of principle. The common refrain from politicians with the power but not the courage to act is “that’s not a hill I’m willing to die on.”
Instead, they have left their county to die on that hill for no other reason than their fear of telling their constituents the truth and fighting for the nation’s welfare. We live in a democracy. The majority should rule. With guns, it’s the gun makers and their political arms, the National Rifle Association and The Gun Owners of America, who rule. Everyone else be damned.
For more than half a century, the NRA and GOA have perpetuated a lie that guns keep people safe. That lie created America’s endless nightmare: routine mass shootings and, after decades of inaction, a body count of 1.5 million that is climbing every week.
As I close this piece on Sunday, April 18, two days since the last mass shooting, another has occurred in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Three dead. Three injured.
No one is safe.
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