Legalized Slaughter

Until the moment the shooters, armed for mass killing, entered the schools at Columbine High School, Sandy Hook Elementary, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and Robb Elementary in Uvalde, they had broken no laws.

For the last three decades, Republican-led legislatures and governors along with Republican-led Congresses and Presidents have passed and signed the most non-restrictive gun laws or blocked federal research into gun violence.

The result: gun-violence today is the leading cause of death in children; mass shooting deaths occur weekly, sometimes daily, and gun deaths, intentional or accidental are daily on average.

The National Rifle Association and the Gun Owners of America along with Republican and Democratic legislators at the state and federal levels have ensured the country is awash in guns, high-capacity weaponry built and designed to slaughter schools, classrooms, churches, grocery stores, parks, etc. Pick any place and it is a designated kill zone.

While the aforementioned are responsible for this carnage, there is another group that has so far escaped any scrutiny: the average gun owner.

And not just the gun owner who equates their manhood (or womanhood) with toting open and concealed handguns, hunting rifles and assault-style weapons such as the AR-15 that don’t care how many children are slaughtered by guns because they are confident in their ignorance about the Second amendment.

No, it is the gun owners who like to say they support common sense gun regulation, but never do anything about it other than to vote Republican (or Democrat, if the NRA approves).

We’ve seen mothers march and students march in support of reducing gun violence through such measures as eliminating high-capacity magazines and automatic and semi-automatic weapons; we’ve seen them march for universal background checks.

We’ve never seen gun owners for common-sense gun regulation march or give up their AR-15s, even though countless children and adults have given up their lives as bullets rip their flesh apart.

At this point, after the latest massacre of 19 children and two teachers by an 18-year-old with an AR-15, we can only believe that talk cheap for gun owners and so is life. Year after year, polls show an overwhelming majority of voters wants these and other gun reforms, yet nothing ever happens.

After all these years, and all these senseless gun deaths, gun owners have been getting away with murder by not accepting responsibility for their indirect, but supportive role in gun violence. Legislatures and Congresses have gone out of their way to protect them with one law after another that ensures they have amble weapons and ammunition with little fear of restrictions or law enforcement interference.

Not just politicians, judges and juries, too. Just one of the more recent examples is then 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse who intentionally shot three men, murdering two, but who a Wisconsin jury with the judge’s blessing, acquitted of all charges, despite overwhelming evidence.

For years, the NRA’s popular refrain against gun regulations was “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” but now neither guns nor people kill because the laws of the land says so. America has legalized gun slaughter because gun owners love their guns more than their children.