Friday, April 12, 2024 | 2 a.m.
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The 10-year sentence handed down to the parents of a Michigan school shooter for failing to take reasonable measures to prevent their teenage son from killing four students in 2021 dominated headlines this week. But it wasn’t the only mass shooting involving a teenaged gunman in the news.
A 15-year-old armed with an assault rifle opened fire Wednesday afternoon in West Philadelphia as members of the Muslim community gathered to celebrate the end of Ramadan.
Less than 24 hours earlier, a 17-year-old opened fire in a popular entertainment district in Tampa, Fla., injuring three people.
Twelve hours before that, police arrested a 16-year-old for shooting and killing a 14-year-old in Washington, D.C.
Those are just the mass shootings recorded by the Gun Violence archive and committed by teens this week. They don’t include the thousands of kids killed each year in other gun-related incidents, often at home with unlocked guns.
Yet, amid the backdrop of children literally killing one another, GOP lawmakers in Tennessee proposed lowering the age at which a person can get a concealed handgun permit from 21 years old to 18, and allow people to openly carry any type of gun in the state, including semiautomatic assault weapons such as AR-15s.
Not to be outdone, a judge in Washington state tossed out a law restricting high-capacity ammunition magazines that contain more than 10 bullets. He reasoned that a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines was unconstitutional because the Founding Fathers didn’t ban high-capacity ammunition magazines in 1791.
“This court finds there are no relevantly similar analogue laws related to hardware restrictions near 1791,” Cowlitz County Superior Court Judge Gary Bashor wrote in his decision.
Of course they didn’t; the Founding Fathers used predominantly single-shot muskets and flintlocks. While repeating flintlock and air rifle technology existed, these were extremely expensive, extremely fragile and thus, extremely rare. They broke regularly and had reload times of 10 seconds or more. Even an air gun like the Girandoni required 1,500 pumps to refill the air supply. A shooter with a modern assault rifle could mow down a hundred soldiers armed with the finest firearm from 1791.
However, according to a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, a gun restriction may only be constitutional if it is “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” In other words, anything lawmakers didn’t consider at the time a constitutional amendment was written is off limits today. Never mind advances in technology.
The problem with the Supreme Courts’ logic is that the protections of the Second Amendment are specific. Under a strict construction, the Second Amendment should only protect muskets, flintlocks and air rifles. Textually, any other gun can be regulated because the Founders were mute on them. Our age of mass shootings will end quickly if people are bringing muzzleloaders to the fight.
Maybe that’s why Minnesota state Sen. Warren Limmer took a more “creative” approach to rejecting reasonable firearms regulations. Two weeks ago, in a hearing on a bill to require firearms to be stored either unloaded and with a locking device or in a locked storage unit, Limmer argued that readily accessible firearms are necessary just in case people need to take down murderous cows.
“Farm animals at times can be dangerous,” said Limmer, a Republican from a suburb of Minneapolis. “Take for example, a cow that has just recently had a calf. You even walk too close to a cow, and it will take you down and trample you into dust.”
Perhaps Ethan Crumbley’s parents should have tried that argument. “I’m sorry your kids are dead, but we couldn’t lock up the gun we bought for our son because he might need to defend himself from murder cows.”
The sheer audacity of the argument would be comical were it not so senseless, tragic and inhumane.
More than 1,500 children and teens lose their lives each year to gun violence, yet Republican lawmakers argue that those lives are outweighed by the risk that cows might turn vengeful and murderous?
More than 600 mass shootings occur each year, but we can’t even give victims a chance to flee while a shooter reloads because we refuse to limit assault rifles or high-capacity magazines — because the Founding Fathers didn’t think to prohibit them in 1791?
The Founders didn’t ban machine guns or tactical missiles either, yet we still manage to restrict access to those.
Then again, right now, even the ban on machine guns is in question after the U.S. Supreme Court spent hours last month arguing over the technical definition of “bump stock” rather than its practical effect of turning a semiautomatic assault rifle into a fully automatic assault rifle, aka machine gun.
The bump stock, of course, rose to national attention after the horror of our own Oct. 1 shooting, delivered by rifles equipped with the accessory.
We have spent years offering rational and well-researched arguments for passing reasonable regulations on weapons designed to quickly inflict mass casualties, only to have those arguments countered with the absurdity of murder cows, clairvoyant lawmakers and other ridiculous hypotheticals.
So now, we are simply asking, “what is wrong with American society?”
As parents we profess to love our kids, but as political actors we keep reelecting pro-gun officials who lack the courage and moral fortitude to do something about the weapons that so often take our children’s lives.
We claim to be the greatest nation on earth, yet we continually prioritize the feeling of cold steel over the warm embrace of our children and loved ones.
Our children are killing each other. It’s time to wrest control of our democracy from those who won’t even try to find solutions. That means giving the boot to any elected officials who fail to support reasonable restrictions on public access to bump stocks, high-capacity magazines and other weapons designed for the specific purpose of inflicting rapid mass casualties.
