America is a country-size arsenal. …
And the obscene ubiquity of firearms in the U.S. explains much about why the country is a killing field without parallel in the developed world. Anyone who has studied the matter arrives at a simple conclusion: More guns means more death.
“Most countries do not have a problem with fatal mass shootings,” Daniel Webster, the co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, told a Fox affiliate last year after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. “It’s because we have decided to make guns readily available to almost anyone and our interests seem to be more protecting those who sell weapons and want to own them as opposed to the broader public.”
This choice has disfigured American society.
Reform is thwarted by cowardice, corruption and craziness. As young children are slaughtered in their classrooms, conservative officials desecrate their memory by suggesting their deaths are the price of freedom. As mass shootings become a daily occurrence, gun-rights zealots double down on the bloodthirsty fantasy that more guns is the answer. …
The Founding Fathers got it profoundly wrong on slavery and discrimination against women. Their next biggest mistake was the Second Amendment. But unlike other errors that the country has tried to come to terms with, society has only compounded the harm that came from the Constitution’s misfire concerning arms. The amendment should be repealed, yet Americans have so romanticized guns, and the judicial branch has imposed so permissive an interpretation of the law, that the country seems consigned to unthinkable bloodshed.
The Second Amendment won’t be repealed anytime soon, but Americans can at least begin a cultural shift and re-imagine what the law means. Society should no longer tolerate the kind of depraved fanaticism that allows someone like U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert to tweet a Christmas greeting with her young sons brandishing weapons of war. It should dismiss from the public conversation anyone who advocates the hell-summoning lie that the presence of more guns will prevent gun violence. It should humiliate without restraint those costume-wearing soldier wannabes who show up with their shooters at rallies. It should elevate judges — unlike the present conservative majority justices of the U.S. Supreme Court — who don’t view the Second Amendment as a national suicide pact.
— Quentin Young in Stop Tolerating Gun Extremists. Shame Them.