The Sickness unto Death, Part II

It’s the Republicans

[The Sickness Unto Death, Part I]

The flag on the roof of a building a couple of blocks away from me was lowered to half-mast on Thursday. It stayed that way until this morning.

Over Memorial Day this year, at least 16 people were killed and over 70 others were wounded by gunfire across 20 mass-shootings, but the flag was not lowered then. It was this time because 18 people were killed by only one man with an AR-15 in the worst mass shooting of 2023.

Technically, the shootings in Maine constituted a spree killing. Days passed before the shooter’s body was discovered—days during which towns were placed on lockdown; and there was every possibility there would be more shooting.

In that regard, what happened in Lewiston Wednesday night, what continued to unfold for three days, was qualitatively different from other mass murders. As one resident put it, “It feels like the whole state of Maine, we’re holding our breath right now. You feel like you’re being stalked by someone. You feel like they’re watching you, but you can’t see them.”

This tragedy has made explicit a fear that, for most of us, lurks almost constantly in the back of our minds.

At the beginning of May, after 2023’s 190^th mass shooting in Atlanta (for those keeping track, the shooting in Lewiston was the 565th), Senator Raphael Warnock said, "It is not right for us to live in a nation where nobody is safe no matter where they are. We're not safe in our schools. We're not safe in our workplaces. We're not safe in the grocery store . . . there's no sanctuary in the sanctuary . . . it's only a matter of time."

While the phrase “it’s only a matter of time” would send chills down the spine of anyone who cares more about human life than they do about guns, it also inspires exactly the kind of paranoia and sense of imminent doom the right is banking on.

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The drift towards Second Amendment extremism gained momentum back in 2008 when then-Justice Antonin Scalia, in the majority opinion for District of Columbia v. Heller, effectively scrubbed the phrase “well-regulated militia” from the Constitution. In other words, the right to own guns became, for the first time, an individual right separate and apart from regulation and collective action (in the service of protecting the United States government). Heller did, however, stress that certain limits and federal regulations were permissible which, in today’s extreme gun culture, seems almost quaint.

The Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc., Et Al. v. Bruen, Superintendent of New York State Police, Et al., demonstrated how much ground we’ve lost at the hands of the extremist wing of the Supreme Court in the intervening fourteen years.

Two New York residents applied for unrestricted licenses to carry a handgun in public “based on their generalized interest in self-defense.” After the State denied their applications for failure to show “proper cause,” the petitioners claimed their Second and Fourteenth Amendment rights had been violated despite the fact that, according to State law, they had failed to demonstrate “a unique need for self-defense.”

The Supreme Court ruled in their favor, thereby negating states’ ability to craft their own laws vis-à-vis gun regulation—using “logic” that was the diametric opposite of that which they used in overturning Roe v. Wade.

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In the wake of last year’s school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in which 19 children between the ages of nine and eleven and two teachers were slaughtered, Republican-led states have continued to expand the rights of gun owners by:

• Crafting legislation that would enable teachers to be armed.

• Allowing college students to carry loaded weapons on campuses.

• Attempting to remove background checks.

• Getting rid of red flag laws (those which allow for the removal of guns from people who may be a danger to themself or others).

• Limiting the number of gun free zones, such as state capitol buildings, bars, churches, schools.

If you juxtapose these alarming trends against the reasons people own AR-15s, you’ll get a picture of just how much trouble we’re in as a country.

The top five reasons given are:

1. Personal safety

If you have a gun of any kind in your home, the people you are trying to protect are at greater risk of being shot than the intruder. If the gun is a semi-automatic weapon, the danger of collateral damage is high. The risk of accidental shootings is also extremely high.

2. Target shooting and recreation

I did riflery when I was a kid, but I’ve only been to a gun range once as an adult (long story). About ten minutes after I got there, a couple of guys with some kind of semi-automatic weapon started target shooting in the bay next to me. I left immediately. It was terrifying.

3. Hunting

Pro-tip: Real hunters don’t use AR-15s.

4. It looks cool

This makes sense if you’re a pre-pubescent child trapped in an adult’s body.

5. “Because I can.”

This is the kind of response you get when there is not sufficient political will to modify the second amendment, leaving the field open for the Supreme Court to misinterpret it.

BONUS REASON

6. It pisses off liberals.

That level of maturity should alarm all of us when it is possessed by the people buying the weapons of war and mass death.

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The family of the shooter in Lewiston knew something was seriously wrong with him. They were so alarmed by his behavior that months ago they contacted the police and the commanding officers at the army reserve base where he served in order to alert them to their concerns.

We need to find out why these warnings went unheeded, but even if they had been, it’s possible that Maine’s yellow flag laws wouldn’t have made a difference—they were written with the input of the gun lobby and are designed to be burdensome and slow to.

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In the wake of the tragedy, Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) came out in favor of banning assault rifles. This is good. We need all the progress we can get. But Golden’s change of heart is not the equivalent of starting to raise money for a disease because you or somebody you love suddenly contracted it. He did not change his position simply because the issue of gun violence has suddenly become relevant to him—as a lawmaker he’s actively involved in making policy decisions about guns. Golden changed his position because the issue of gun violence had become personal.

We will see no such epiphanies on the right. As accidental Speaker and white evangelical fanatic Mike Johnson would have it, “The problem is the human heart, it’s not guns, it’s not the weapons.”

This is no longer about the abstract right to own guns. This is a choice between our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, our right to keep our children safe (our right, that is, to make sure our children survive into adulthood without getting shot at school or at a mall or in a church) vs. their right to own a weapon of mass death . . . because they think carrying around an AR-15 makes them look cool.