One day after the fatal shooting at Apalachee High School, in Winder, Georgia, CBS News reported that authorities had released some important information about the gun used in that incident, a type of weapon that has been commonly used in mass shootings, including the deadly school shootings at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, as well as in mass shootings at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket and on the Las Vegas Strip.
The weapon the suspect used was an AR-style platform rifle. These weapons, based on the AR-15 design, are lightweight, semiautomatic rifles popular with consumers. AR-15 guns are often called "assault rifles" — a term that gun advocates say is misleading, since the "AR" stands for ArmaLite, the company that developed the original AR-15, not "assault rifle."
A picture of the gun, in operation, is shown at the top! See if you can picture yourself in an elementary school or high-school classroom (just one way in, and one way out) with that gun blazing away at the door.
With that gun pointed at you!
I am reacting, in this blog posting, to a commentary by Eugene Robinson, which appeared in my hometown newspaper, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, on Saturday, September 7, 2024. Clicking this link will take you to the original, which appeared on September 5th in The Washington Post. Good luck with The Post's paywall!
Robinson's commentary began this way:
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp stood before television cameras Wednesday night and said the cowardly words we always hear from Republican officials in such moments. Hours after two students and two teachers had been killed in a school shooting, allegedly committed by a 14-year-old boy with an AR-15-style semiautomatic weapon, Kemp declared: "Today is not the day for politics or policy" (emphasis added).
In fact, in The United States of America, every day is a day for politics and policy. "Politics" is the process by which we govern ourselves, and we govern ourselves, precisely, by debating and then adopting the "policy" prescriptions that we believe make the most sense for us - that we think are needed; that we think will "work"; that we think are "right."
The day that another outrageous school shooting occurs is, precisely, a day that we should be discussing and debating what we should do about this phenomenon, recurrent not only in school classrooms but in churches, synagogues, grocery stores, convenience stores, and at music festivals in towns dedicated to adult entertainment.
Do our laws provide adequate protections? Do they help avoid further instances of the kind of gun violence visited upon Apalachee High School?
If our laws don't do that (and I'd argue that they clearly don't) then there is no better day than each and every day - including today - to start debating what we need to change, what policies we need to put in place.
We can, of course, seek to establish better ways to find out, ahead of time, about people who might turn to this kind of gun violence. The alleged shooter, a troubled young person from Winder, Georgia, had given signs that should have led to some kind of effective intervention, prior to the attack.
But, shouldn't we also decide that the kind of weapons often used in such attacks (as noted in the first paragraph of this blog posting) should be made illegal, and their sale and use forbidden? We used to have a federal law, authored by California's Dianne Feinstein, that outlawed such "assault weapons." That law expired. The Supreme Court seems to have indicated, subsequently, that the Constitution, itself, says that our right to arms ourselves with such assault weapons is an actual Constitutional right.
But the Constitution can be amended! Remember that! If that's really what the Constitution says, then amend it we should!
In any nation that takes "self-government" seriously, we can and should be thinking about how we want to govern ourselves. Every day!
Today is a good day to go beyond merely "thinking" about the politics and policies related to effective mechanisms that will prevent further incidents of such gun violence. As you consider the topic, look at a picture of Christina Irimie, the high school math teacher who lost her life at Apalachee High School. What would Christina Irimie want us to do?
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