All I can say is that it’s a good thing that Thomas Matthew Crooks was as incompetent as his target. Most important is that there is no place for violence in a democracy. A distant second is that I think a live Trump is easier for any Democrat to beat than any other Republican who could point to him as a “martyr”. While Trump eggs on his supporters/cult members to be prepared to use violence if he doesn’t win the election, any reasonable adult understands that violence just begets violence and everyone suffers.
The last time a president or presidential candidate was injured in an assassination attempt was when Ronald Reagan was shot John Hinckley, Jr. on March 30, 1981. At that time 3 others were seriously injured including Reagan’s press secretary James Brady. Brady was so severely injured that he was never able to return to work or walk again due to brain damage. After his recovery, Brady and his wife, Sarah, spent much of the next 12 years working with anti-gun violence advocacy groups and later running the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act enacted November 30, 1993 and signed by President Bill Clinton, it is often referred to as the Brady Bill or the Brady Act. The Brady Bill mandates federal background checks on firearm purchasers in the United States. The intention of the act was to prevent persons with previous serious criminal convictions from purchasing firearms.
Even though the promoters of the bill were Republicans, its passage was due to 3 times as many Democrats as Republicans voting in favor of the bill. Their own beloved president nearly being murdered wasn’t enough for Republicans to take action on reducing the availability of firearms, as they couldn’t see the value of greater care in limiting who could possess one.
Today with the Republican Party being so closely tied to the firearms industry I can’t see even the small fraction of their federal legislators who voted for controls on firearms in 1993 supporting any further efforts to prevent gun violence now. I realized a long time ago that a major difference between Republican and Democrats is that Republicans lack empathy for anyone not like them. Having reviewed the history of James and Sarah Brady’s efforts to pass their simple and reasonable bill I now realize that Republicans lack of empathy even applies to their own tribe, unless something awful happens to a member of their immediate family they simply can’t appreciate that suffering and therefore don’t care to takes steps to ameliorate or prevent that suffering. Of course they’ll pray for you, for all the good that does.
Last weekend’s violence is unacceptable, not just in the political arena. A former fire chief died protecting his family and two others were seriously injured by the shooter. No one should be able to perpetrate such a violent crime and cause the suffering of others.
Unlike the 6 Republican Supreme Court justices who just weeks ago threw out Trump’s own restrictions on the modification of semi-automatic rifles that allowed the shooter in Las Vegas in 2017 to murder 60 people at a single event, I don’t believe for a moment that the founders of this nation had any intention to enable such a calamity.
I hope that it doesn’t take another dozen years to pass legislation to stop the slaughter of Americans and make it stick. I have no hope at all that Republicans will be any help in accomplishing that unless a family member is murdered.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment