Of course, they'll listen to us...we're important

No, they won't, because Republicans care more about guns than your kids

I'm not a snob. Ask anybody. Well, anybody who matters.

• Simon Le Bon

In March of 2023, a shooter carrying “two assault-style weapons and a handgun” shot and killed three children and three adults at the Covenant School in Nashville, a private school associated with the Presbyterian Church in America.

That it happened in a place where a strong faith in God was the norm wasn’t particularly unusual. Mass shootings have happened in churches and synagogues before. Belief in God is certainly no shield from a madman carrying a weapon of war and determined to use it to full effect.

Sadly, Tennessee is particularly ill-disposed to doing anything but issuing copious iterations of “thoughts and prayers.” Being a deeply red state, the Volunteer State’s legislature had no intention of taking action on common sense gun control.

Republican lawmakers in Tennessee weren’t going to do anything to protect children. They had just passed a law banning drag shows in the name of child safety, but they weren’t about to take action to do anything useful. In fact, it was the opposite. Those same lawmakers had proposed a bill to lower the age to legally carry a handgun in public from 21 to 18.

Thought and prayers weren’t going to help anybody.

They had the National Rifle Association (NRA) to answer to, after all. Most of the legislature were wholly owned subsidiaries of the NRA and weren’t about to bite the hand that filled their campaign coffers.

This meant that, if anything, they’d make owning firearms even easier.

‘Cuz an armed society is a scared shitless polite society, don’tchaknow?

[T]he New York Times published an ultimately depressing piece (gift article) featuring some of the parents who sent their kids to The Covenant School, where tuition can run up to $16,500 a year. Those parents believed lawmakers who might ignore other victims would take them seriously when it came to gun safety measures.

[Mary] Joyce and other Covenant parents felt they stood a better chance than anyone at cutting through the divisions on gun control. Among them were former Republican aides, gun owners and lifelong conservatives who could afford to spend days at the legislature.

The article could end right there because you already know how this will play out.

Of course, they’ll take US seriously, they thought. We’re wealthy, influential, White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexuals. Surely, they’ll listen to us; we’re IMPORTANT. They have to consider our point of view.

Uh, no. Not a chance. They won’t give you the time of day for common sense gun control. You think it’s about “common sense;” all Republican legislators hear is “gun control,” and they don’t want to piss off their NRA owners.

And don’t call me “Shirley”….

They thought that being conservative Christian Republicans who had a history of prioritizing guns over people would grant them some kind of power that everyone else simply didn’t possess. Lawmakers would finally see that this wasn’t some attempt by liberals at taking away their constitutional rights! They would understand that basic safety measures were in the best interest of gun owners and families across the state!

But that’s the sort of bullshit you could only believe if you’re fed a steady stream of conservative bullshit in your media diet. Republican lawmakers don’t give a damn about what the Constitution says; they’re not going to compromise on weapons because their identities are wrapped up in the belief that having the ability to murder your enemies at any time—with the most potent weapons available—is foundational to our country, and any effort to moderate that is nothing but a slippery slope to [insert right-wing fever dream involving Socialism and Soros].

Of course, they’ll listen to us; we’re not a bunch of wacky, out-of-touch, woke Liberals who want to take everyone’s guns away. We just want to see what can be done to make sure no one else has to bury their kids after a mass shooting again.

That seems a not unreasonable way to look at it, but as it turns out, they might as well have been sniffing glue or smoking some Panama Jack. They still wouldn't have won over any legislators, but maybe they would’ve left feeling a bit better for it.

Yep. These parents learned the hard way that Republican legislators don’t give a shit about them or their dead kids. Neither of those things will help them win re-election. As wholly-owned subsidiaries of the NRA, though, their loyalties must be with those who write them large checks.

So, money talks. Dead kids walk…figuratively speaking, of course.

After telling their stories and calling for sensible action that would have prevented the shooter, who had mental health issues, from “legally purchasing seven firearms,” the lawmakers just flat-out ignored them.

It didn’t matter than one parent was a Southern Baptist Convention leader and “former executive director of the state Republican Party” who owned several guns of his own or that his argument to prevent gun violence rested on their shared “pro-life” beliefs.

It didn’t matter that they argued against another GOP proposal to let certain gun owners “take handguns onto school campuses” because it would further traumatize their children.

The truth is that today’s GOP is a death cult. Not even the plaintive cries of bereaved parents are sufficient to pierce the uncaring armor of GOP legislators who care more for their re-election prospects than for constituents who’ve lost children to a mass shooting.

And so the only answer to the problem of guns in our society is, of course…MORGUNZ!!!!

The heartless Republican lawmakers just ignored them and did nothing of significance. They don’t believe mass shootings are enough of a problem that they ought to do anything to try and prevent them. After all, these are people who believe guns are never the problem and it’s always something else—mental health, video games, a lack of good parenting, or that catch-all term “sin.”

It was demoralizing, some of the mothers said, to be talked down to, to see lawmakers who had sympathized with their pain in private still vote against them in public. To be told that it was too soon for such serious changes, or that any change at all would threaten the Second Amendment.

Did you know, the parents asked one another, that it was like this? How did I not know?

How did you not know? Because until you lost your children to a mass shooting, it was an abstract concept. You were more worried about losing your freedom to Liberal “gun-grabbers” that you couldn’t be bothered to think about the parents who were forced to bury their children.

Now that you have to bury your own child, you’re having to face the pain that refusing to address the gun problem in America has caused so many.

How did you not know? Because you thought your money and your faith isolated from the reality of America’s gun sickness. You thought Jesus would protect you from the Traveling Random Mass Murder Road Show © that pops up in America too frequently for words.

Where’s your Jesus now?

Nothing…suggests these people will stop going to churches that enable this kind of gun culture. Roughly 40% of white evangelicals own a gun, a percentage that’s higher than any other religious group. It never crosses their mind that believing God will protect them shouldn’t correlate with the need for more weapons.

At the same time, what does it say about these parents that they believed they could talk sense into these lawmakers? It implies that it was easy for Republican lawmakers to ignore victims who weren’t white, who weren’t wealthy, who were LGBTQ, who went to public schools, etc. It’s not like they changed their positions after Sandy Hook, after Pulse, after every other mass shooting. Why doesn’t it bother these parents more that the GOP lawmakers weren’t listening to gun safety advocates in the past? It should. They should have known the same lawmakers weren’t going to listen to them either.

How privileged and spoiled must you be to believe lawmakers who ignored other survivors of gun violence will listen to you? Did they believe that they would be taken seriously, when others were ignored, because they’re the right color and right religion and in the right socioeconomic class?

It takes a lot of chutzpah to believe that lawmakers would listen to you because you’re “important”- because you’re a wealthy and influential White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexual. The awful truth is that legislators, having long since been bought and paid for by the NRA, are far more self-interested than anything. They have no incentive to care for lives that mean nothing to them.

As much as I hate to say this, and as awful as it is to contemplate it until a mass shooting hits home for legislators, it seems unlikely that any positive action will occur. Perhaps when violence and bloodshed are visited upon them, and they feel the pain of losing a loved one to gun violence, the calculus will change for them.

The solution isn’t having conservative Christians urge lawmakers to take the same actions that other groups couldn’t get them to take in the past.

It’s voting out everyone in the party that puts guns over people. And so far, none of these activists seem to have any plan to do that. They’re not personally saying they’re voting for progressive Democrats, and they’re not taking any meaningful steps to encourage their conservative Christian friends to do the same.

Maybe they think that’s futile. Well, the alternative is trying to get conservative Republicans to pass sensible legislation that actually makes people’s lives better—and nothing’s more futile than that. Tennessee is a gerrymandered state designed to keep Republicans in power, which only works because conservative Christians keep voting against their own best interests.

I appreciate that these parents are trying to do something. But without honest introspection and a realization that many of their friends and family members and the kind of people they all tend to elect are the very cause of the problem they’re trying to solve, nothing’s going to change.

Until the people in positions of power experience a change of heart (or demonstrate that they have one), nothing will change. Unless, of course, a mass shooting claims the loved ones of those empowerwon't legislate, which is something no onwho'ved hope for.

Real change won’t happen without changing those who’ve become corrupted by the NRA and the vast sums of money they’re able to pay for remaining intransigent. And that means removing the NRA from the equation.

Good luck with that, eh??

(All of my posts are now public. Any reader financial support will be considered pledges- support that’s greatly appreciated but not required to get to all of my work. I’ll trust my readers to determine if my work is worthy of their financial support and at what level. To those who do offer their support, thank you. It means more than you know.)