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Shortly after rifle shots wounded former President Donald Trump and killed one of his fans in July at a Pennsylvania rally, the Republican Party held its national convention in Milwaukee to nominate Trump again with Senator JD Vance as his running mate.
One of the creepiest moments in Vance’s awkward acceptance speech came when Vance smiled wistfully and recalled what they found in the house of his grandmother after she died. She’d raised him in Ohio. In his book Hillbilly Elegy, Vance called her “Mamaw.”
“When we went through her things,” Vance said, “we found 19 loaded handguns.”
The Republicans cheered this and laughed at length.
“They were stashed all over her house,” Vance continued. “Under her bed. In her closet. In the silverware drawer.”
Vance then explained the reason for her homestead armory.
“Toward the end of her life, ‘Mamaw’ couldn’t get around so well,” Vance said. “And so this frail, old woman made sure that, no matter where she was, she was in arm’s length of whatever she needed to protect her family. That’s who we fight for. That’s American spirit.”
Well, yee-haw! But, early this month, after two students and two teachers were slaughtered in Georgia in the first back-to-school shooting of the fall semester, Vance spoke in a less glib tone about all those fully-loaded, hand-held, American-spirit, murder machines.
“I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Vance said of school shootings. “But, if you are a psycho, and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets . . . That’s increasingly the reality that we live in.”
Since then, Vance has shifted his recent rhetoric to Trump’s racist lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating house pets like the cats and dogs of Buckeyes like Vance and his ilk. But you can’t blame him for changing the subject and getting away from a gun debate.
According to a study published last week by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, 48,830 Americans suffered gun deaths in 2021 with more than 27,000 of them suicides. There have been 389 mass shootings so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, USA Today reported.
The carnage and menace continued Sunday afternoon both locally and nationally. In Detroit’s Eastern Market, after the Lions game, a fist fight led to a shooting that left one person dead, one wounded, and another under arrest. And, in Florida, Secret Service agents fired on and chased down a man who stalked Trump with a gun.
Nevertheless, a new reality is also bubbling up, from the bottom, not the top. As was the case with Michigan’s Crumbley trials in the Oxford high school shooting of 2021 in Oakland County, local Georgia authorities indicted not only this recent shooter (who also survived) as well as one of his parents.
After charging 14-year-old Colt Gray with four counts of felony murder, they also charged his father, Colin Gray, with two counts of second-degree murder, four counts of involuntary manslaughter, and eight counts of cruelty to children.
In the Crumbley case in Michigan, the student shooter and his parents (who provided the gun) are all serving time for their crimes. In the Gray case in Georgia, the father bought the gun as a gift for his son; the mother no longer lives with them; both father and son are in jail pending trial.
In the often-futile campaign for common-sense gun-safety laws, the indictment of parents feels like at least a gesture in the right direction. Unlike automobiles, guns are designed for just one, deadly purpose. If you can convict a shooter’s parents, why not — by extension — the gun dealer and the manufacturer?
Magical thinking would be better than thoughtless, rote regurgitation of platitudes like “thoughts and prayers”
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Not so fast, argues an opinion columnist for The New York Times, a media outlet not known for right-wing points of view.
“We have to be very careful when it comes to the state being able to charge people in new ways and put them into prison,” said Megan Stack, in a podcast opinion recording on the Times website.
“These prosecutions are very convenient for a lot of politicians who actually don’t want to do anything about guns,” Stack continued. “They can say, ‘Look, it’s just these bad-apple parents, these sort of lowlife parents who aren’t doing their jobs.’”
She said that “one way or another, most parents are flawed” and that some will try to please a troubled child by giving them what “gives them pleasure.” In hunting states like Michigan and Georgia, she said, this might mean the gift of a gun.
In both Michigan and Georgia, the young shooters were troubled teens. In particular, Stack called Georgia’s weak laws “a free-for-all for guns” and said it is inconsistent to “then go after parents for breaking laws that actually don’t exist.”
She suggested that gun violence is a problem that will keep happening despite small steps against it — like indicting the parents of mass murderers after school shootings.
“It’s a bit of magical thinking to think that prosecuting these people is really going to make a difference,” Stack said.
She might be right, but magical thinking would be better than thoughtless, rote regurgitation of platitudes like “thoughts and prayers” and “We really should do something about mental health” and “How dare you politicize this so soon after a tragedy?”
So let’s settle for magical thinking and for thanking the National Rifle Association and the Supreme Court and JD’s Mamaw and right-wing media for another successful demonstration of the Second Amendment.
And, next time Vance holds a campaign rally to boost gun sales or trash black immigrants with lies, he should avoid all those recorded songs that artists are demanding be banned from Trump events.
Instead, why not play “Happiness is a Warm Gun” by the Beatles? John Lennon sings it, including the “Bang-bang! / Shoot-shoot!” chorus.
In that Lennon was a sardonic lyricist who wrote these satirical words and later died by gunfire from a “psycho,” he’d love the irony, had he lived. Even Vance himself might get it.
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Joe Lapointe
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