Wednesday, March 29, 2023 | 2 a.m.
View more of the Sun's opinion section
Let’s just be truthful. Let’s look in the mirror and stop pretending. Look in the mirror and stop denying what we see. Look in the mirror and stop lying.
America, we love our guns more than we love our children.
We love our guns more than we love our educators.
We love our guns more than we love feeling safe while grocery shopping, walking through the park, watching a parade, or attending an outdoor concert.
We love our guns more than we love our neighbors.
We love our guns more than we love ourselves.
There’s no lipstick to put on this slaughtered pig. Just truth.
I don’t know what else to say or write about guns.
About pleas to tighten access to guns, particularly to ban assault weapons — guns able to spray dozens of bullets at the snap of a synapse, with one squeeze. To tighten gaps in the sponge-like system of background checks. To require that guns be stored and locked safely in our homes.
Three more children are dead, all just 9 years old. Three more educators, too, all in their young 60s. All now dead.
We don’t care. Read it. Say it out loud. It’s just truth.
Oh, we feel. We hurt. Our stomachs go weak, our hearts skip when we learn of yet another godawful killing spree. On Monday, a day when many families in the South are celebrating spring break, a 28-year-old woman walked into The Covenant School, a Presbyterian school in an affluent Nashville neighborhood, armed with two “assault-style” weapons and a handgun.
We don’t yet fully know why.
Rachel Dibble, who was at the church where parents gathered to be reunited with their forever-changed children shared: “People were involuntarily trembling. The children … started their morning in their cute little uniforms, they probably had some Froot Loops and now their whole lives changed today.”
We all trembled a little bit. Involuntarily. Yet we don’t care.
The Covenant attack was the 130th mass shooting in 2023, notes the Gun Violence Archive. It’s just March.
They make us sick. We don’t care.
We don’t even care about this truth — that the Founding Father architects of the precious Second Amendment upon which we fervently stand and declare our unassailable right to “bear arms” in no way intended for us to “bear” weapons for the hell of it. And certainly not for self-defense, which gun zealots frothingly claim while blithely skipping, like school children on a playground, right over the amendment’s opening words: “A well-regulated Militia …”
A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Roots of the amendment extended back to England over allowing citizens to bear arms enabled the Crown to wield them as loyalists to combat dissidents. Without cannonballing into a whole history lesson, suffice it to say the royals wanted subjects to have guns so they could defend the royals, not themselves.
There’s plenty of debate about the intentions of words and phrases used by the new Americans in crafting the Second Amendment — like does “free State” refer to separate states defending themselves against other states, or the nation/state defending itself against despotism or an attack from foreign shores?
Yet there’s no debating this truth: They in no way intended for us to love guns this much.
So much so our politicians — Republican politicians; this mirror don’t lie — believe you’ll love them simply because they love guns. Not because of their policies, platforms or positions to address America’s greatest needs.
Because they love guns. They ran gun-totin’ campaign ads during last year’s mind-numbing elections.
Vote for us because we love guns, too. More than our children, whom we still struggle to educate; our infants, whom we struggle to keep alive through their first birthday; and our working neighbors who cannot afford quality health care.
You may not know Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., who represents the Nashville district where Covenant School resides. “Utterly heartbroken” is how the lawmaker described his feeling in the wake of the tragedy — “as a father of three,” he wrote in a statement that offered, of course, “thoughts and prayers.”
But in Ogles’ 2021 Christmas photo, he, his wife and the two oldest of his three children gleefully wield automatic rifles. The youngest, legally too young perhaps to bear such arms, instead holds a sign reading, “Merry Christmas”.
God, we love our guns — more than our lives.
If we didn’t, we’d actually do something about them. Just truth.
Roy Johnson is a columnist for al.com.
