By James Moore
Time to tip a hat to America. We’ve only had 45 school shootings this year and what happened in Georgia is (only) the deadliest incident since the March 2023 massacre at the Covenant School in Nashville, which is where (only) six people died. The number of mass shootings in all venues is just 385 for 2024. Go team! Is it possible we are getting this thing under control? Nah. I am certain there are people out there now explaining how the singular method for ending this horror is to arm more people. We cannot stop the killings until we prepare ourselves to kill. Got that? The logic is crystalline, is it not?
We avert our eyes from the cause and nod sadly at the effect, but take no steps to prescribe a solution. The culture of the gun in the U.S. has lost no battles in the modern era. Our politics keep fertilizing the bloody fields with fewer and fewer controls and by blocking efforts to increase gun safety. The four deaths in Georgia are a fine example of how gun love is killing people and the future. Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of Georgia refused to answer questions about gun safety measurements and politics in the aftermath of killings of two students and two teachers. Instead, he suggested this was a time for “thoughts and prayers” for families of the victims, the most meaningless and inane sentiment ever offered to victims and their loved ones.
No one who has paid even slight attention to Georgia politics is surprised by Kemp’s soulless expressions of faux grief. Just over two years ago, Kemp signed into a law an open carry measure that made it legal for his state’s citizens to pack weapons on their person without training or permits. His heart was magnanimous, too, for gunslingers from out of state, because the law authorized them to carry in Georgia. Such gun fun! Prior to the legislation’s passage, firearms purchasers in the Peach Tree state had to get a permit and the application process triggered a background check against their driver’s license. But, Kemp, graciously removed that restriction. Because freedom! Hell, in a campaign commercial, he was essentially pointing a shotgun and threatening a young man interested in dating one of his daughters. Fatherhood has been redefined.
Kemp called the school shooting “everybody’s worst nightmare,” but there are numerous scenarios that are competing for that title. American parents, increasingly, spend their work days worrying whether their children will come home alive on the bus. The 14-year-old student who committed the murders had an AR-15, according to reports, an automatic rifle which can fire sufficient rounds to nearly vaporize a flesh and bone target. Four families must live with that imagery because it was easy for the boy’s father to buy the weapon and give it to his son for a present. A few simple lines of law, inserted into that process, might have prevented a man from arming his son and two teenagers and two teachers would still be alive.
Kemp’s strategy followed that of Texas’ Governor Greg Abbott, who pushed “constitutional carry” because of the belief that Americans are born with a right to carry the “big iron” on their hip and do not have to ask the government for permission. Abbott made his move about 18 months after 23 people were slaughtered in an El Paso Walmart. The Trump Republican had promised the West Texas community that he would increase gun safety with a committee to study the issue. The result was new laws removing all restrictions on ownership of any type of weapon. House Bill 1927, signed into law by Abbott on June 16, 2021, allows Texans aged 21 and older to carry handguns in public without a license or background check, and went into effect on September 1 of the same year. About eight months subsequent to the end of restrictions, 19 children and two teachers were slaughtered in Uvalde, unsurprisingly, by an AR-15, which was easily purchased by a demented teenager.
Abbott, and Kemp, began their psychological flutterings by praising law enforcement and explaining how things could have been much worse were it not for the actions of brave officers. In Uvalde, of course, that was a patent lie as a few hundred police, including Abbott’s Department of Public Safety (DPS) troopers, stood idle and listened as an AR-15 tore through a classroom of children. The Texas governor covered up the DPS’ inaction and did not even cancel his appearance before an annual meeting of the National Rifle Association. While he was affirming the glories of guns in a video presentation, families in Uvalde were contemplating unimaginable losses and why not a single law officer tried to save their children. They still have no answers, and endure endlessly the hollow compensation of, “It could have been worse.”
It is hard to imagine, maybe impossible, how it might have gotten worse in Texas under the administration of Greg Abbott. During the first five years he was in office, from 2015-2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported there were more than 20,000 firearms deaths in Texas. The number the agency recorded in 2021 was 4,613 killed by gunfire, and extrapolating a conservative average of 4600 annually through the next three years, a reasonable conclusion is that approximately 40,000 people have died in Texas from guns while Abbott has been the governor. Why has he not been charged with murder?
Abbott has made a choice of gun rights instead of public safety, and has presided over an era of frequent mass shootings and routine gun violence that included the Sutherland Springs church slaughter, Santa Fe High School, El Paso Walmart, and Uvalde. No matter what the public and policymakers demand, his response has been prayer, not legislation. Seems readily apparent prayers do not work since last year the U.S. witnessed more than 42,000 deaths from guns. The causes were homicides, suicides, accidental shootings, and law enforcement actions. America is gun crazy, by any measure, and determined to protect a constitutional amendment that was written at a time citizens might have needed guns in their homes to protect themselves from rogue armies or depredations by indigenous peoples resisting settlement.
There is no way that what happened in Uvalde and Georgia and Parkland and Columbine and El Paso could have been worse, but, as a friend has suggested, it could have been better. We might have laws that keep guns out of the hands of disturbed people. It could have been better if automatic weapons were banned from public sales. It could be better if every politician is voted out of office after standing in front of a killing scene and saying, “Now is not the time to talk politics.” It could have been better if the father of a 14-year old did not think it was completely normal to buy his son an AR-15 for a Christmas present even after law enforcement authorities contacted the family to ask questions about school shooting threats the boy had made online. It could have been better if our culture and voters refused to accept rampant killings and bad laws leading to mass murders.
But there is no damn way it could have been worse.
This article was originally published on Texas to the world.
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James Moore is the New York Times bestselling author of “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” three other books on Bush and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, as well as two novels, and a biography entitled, “Give Back the Light,” on a famed eye surgeon and inventor. His newest book will be released mid- 2023. Mr. Moore has been honored with an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his documentary work and is a former TV news correspondent who has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976.
He has been a retained on-air political analyst for MSNBC and has appeared on Morning Edition on National Public Radio, NBC Nightly News, Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, CBS Evening News, CNN, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Hardball with Chris Matthews, among numerous other programs. Mr. Moore’s written political and media analyses have been published at CNN, Boston Globe, L.A. Times, Guardian of London, Sunday Independent of London, Salon, Financial Times of London, Huffington Post, and numerous other outlets. He also appeared as an expert on presidential politics in the highest-grossing documentary film of all time, Fahrenheit 911, (not related to the film’s producer Michael Moore).
His other honors include the Dartmouth College National Media Award for Economic Understanding, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television News Directors’ Association, the Individual Broadcast Achievement Award from the Texas Headliners Foundation, and a Gold Medal for Script Writing from the Houston International Film Festival. He was frequently named best reporter in Texas by the AP, UPI, and the Houston Press Club. The film produced from his book “Bush’s Brain” premiered at The Cannes Film Festival prior to a successful 30-city theater run in the U.S.
Mr. Moore has reported on the major stories and historical events of our time, which have ranged from Iran-Contra to the Waco standoff, the Oklahoma City bombing, the border immigration crisis, and other headlining events. His journalism has put him in Cuba, Central America, Mexico, Australia, Canada, the UK, and most of Europe, interviewing figures as diverse as Fidel Castro and Willie Nelson. He has been writing about Texas politics, culture, and history since 1975, and continues with political opinion pieces for CNN and regularly at his Substack newsletter: “Texas to the World.”
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Stop abortion, we need lots of births so we have live people to kill.
That seems to be the American creed
It would not look so good in print, on government stationery, in songs, prose, even in media which prefers brevity, but, we now have the UNITED STATES of …putridity, ignorance, murder, theft, assault, dishonesty, avarice, perverted ambition, vanity, double crossing, graft and corruption, xenophobia, racism, profiteering, gross negligence, untrustworthiness (phew), poxery, supersitious shit, lying, posing, insincerity, manipulation, plantationising, bad diplomacy, evilmilitarism, corruption, superficiality, immoralities, predatory supremacist perversion, utter ruthlessness, so, FIT THAT on your C. V. to the world.
@ Phil, yes it certainly seems that way, or perhaps that is what we see because those attributes describe many people are in powerful positions. (not that I’m defending them or their rubbish in any way)
Bert:
“Pro-life”: carry that foetus to term and then you’re on your own, slut. Don’t come whingeing to us if that chiild gets shot at school, but if it shoots someone we’ll blame your parenting.
The USAnian RRWNJs and ammosexuals are hypocrisy personified.
Just about nails it, Phil. Perhaps with the addition of evilangelism. The combination of RWNJs with downright aggressive religiosity makes a ferkin potent brew, ‘cos these loonies jess know they’s doin’ Gahd’s work and won’t be goin’ to hayl.
The Wild West never ended,it just spread to the entire country,and with technological progress,to every corner of the planet.
Never let a few ‘unfortunate mass killings’get in the way of citizen’s right to kill and pursue the golden dream of wealth.Doesn’t much matter who wins the coming election America,and by extension,the planet, is on a one way trip to hell.
Since WWII, notions of glory by blood set in and was accelerated by hubris and internal politics riddled with domestic criminality. Rather than attend to its own affairs, the American state launched itself as world’s policeman off the back of unrequited Euro-American paranoia. Its inherent West vs East racism and xenophobia coupled with a millennia of evil edicts by religious exploiters saw its incursions reach the height of industrialized murder and filth in Vietnam.
Through that time and beyond rather than humane modernization, it entrenched the deadly lies of its chemical and military industries, and mastered self-deception and lies and pumped the mythological glories of its horrendous foundations. Its increasingly captured and craven politicians have deceived the populous via consumerism and depletive mercantile madness. As it wrought stupefaction and exceptionalism against its own populous, it also immersed its institutions into secrecy, surveillance and schemes to enhance its mindless competitive supremacy not only at home, but also via insurgencies across the globe.
It is now not possible to know or reconcile whether its original intent as world’s policeman was for betterment, or just a convenient deception. A view of post-WWII history seems to reveal an almost constant flow of duplicity, guile and hegemonic paranoia. In hindsight its obsessive competition forced upon the world a global bully hell bent on capturing all the world’s resources for its own aggrandisement. Like for all bullies, despite its schmooze, it has become an intractable paranoid terrorist, infecting all that come within its orbit – exemplified by “You’re either with us or agin us.”. It has perverted democracy, increasingly failed to humanely educate itself and its droves of desperate immigrants, forsaken global institutions, and instead, now saturated itself with almost inextricable paranoia, and kleptocratic plutocracy.
Despite some brilliant scientific achievements, and a plethora of noble laws, its commerce, politics and ‘private’ police have been captured by increasingly emergent cabals to the point it has become a ‘Mafia’-type state, where the honor of ‘cosa nostra’ requires the silent subversion of laws as an inescapable national sport. A reversion to colonialism overlaying feudalism overlaying barbarism.
And so, the whole world with populations turned to decline, seeks to protect itself somehow as it watches America, apparently unable to rescue itself, collapse as have the wielders of colonialism, feudalism and barbarism before. Except, this time it’s at light-speed, and America has about 30% of the world’s economy, almost half the world’s arms, and could in a fit destroy the world.
It lost any moral high-ground it may have espoused, and with it, any ability to transact fairly or by any means other than its habit of coercion.
So, all in about 50 years or so, the world of democracy and collective good faith has been supplanted by a reactive contagion of self-interested escape, the varnished absolute, and trade by treachery with the aura of a death cult.
Good one Clakka,I can feel the heat coming off that comment.It’s like the entire country in the grandest blockbuster movie of all time,now nearing it’s crescendo..the Fall of the American Empire,with everyone playing a part,active or passive.Ain’t life grand?
Get $100,000,000 a year for flinging a ball around,or live under a bridge,and anyone can be President,even the most ridiculous,lying coward.