Savor the angry tears shed by the forcible disarmament fetishists at the New York Times. Not even their constant waving of the false and bloody flag of Newton was enough to sway the American people into volunteering another step towards giving government a monopoly on gun violence.
For 45 senators, the carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary School is a forgotten tragedy. The toll of 270 Americans who are shot every day is not a problem requiring action. The easy access to guns on the Internet, and the inevitability of the next massacre, is not worth preventing.
Those senators, 41 Republicans and four Democrats, killed a bill on Wednesday to expand background checks for gun buyers. It was the last, best hope for meaningful legislation to reduce gun violence after a deranged man used semiautomatic weapons to kill 20 children and six adults at the school in Newtown, Conn., 18 weeks ago. A ban on assault weapons was voted down by 60 senators; 54 voted against a limit on bullet magazines.
Patricia Maisch, who survived a mass shooting in Tucson in 2011, spoke for many in the country when she shouted from the Senate gallery: “Shame on you.”
Newtown, in the end, changed nothing; the overwhelming national consensus to tighten a ridiculously lax set of gun laws was stopped cold. That’s because the only thing that mattered to these lawmakers was a blind and unthinking fealty to the whims of the gun lobby.
The National Rifle Association once supported the expansion of background checks, but it decided this time that President Obama and gun-control advocates could not be allowed even a scintilla of a victory, no matter how sensible. That group, and others even more militant, wanted to make sure not one bill emerged from the Newtown shooting, and they got their way.
Their impotent rage oozes from every sentence in the article. It was one thing for Americans to ignore Hispanic drug dealers and black youths killing each other in their ethnic enclaves, and to spare no sympathy for white, middle-aged men shooting themselves in despair over their unemployment and divorces, but this involved cute little children, kindergarteners no less, and white ones at that! About the only way to tug more effectively at America’s heartstrings would have been to advertise slaughtered puppies, kittens, and bunnies.
And America shed a few tears, collectively wiped at their eyes, then stood up and said: “Fuck you, we’re still not letting you take our guns, you totalitarian bastards.”
No wonder they’re upset. Americans aren’t falling for the emotional pornography anymore. Now they’ll have no choice but to go for the brute force option and they know they aren’t assured of winning that way. After all, there are a lot more of us than there are of them.
Molon labe.