KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Look, I occur to imagine in prayer, which as the entire remainder of you who do, too, know is nothing like asking Santa for Barbie’s pink Corvette. As my son mentioned when he was little, “Generally, it’s a no.”
In actual fact, I’m the Aunt Crabby who didn’t suppose we should always even be holding our citywide Super Bowl street party on Ash Wednesday, when everybody is aware of that Fats Tuesday is the proper day for revelry.
However I additionally imagine that Emanuel Cleaver II, the United Methodist pastor who represents Kansas Metropolis in Congress, was proper to walk out of a congressional moment of silence after Wednesday’s mass taking pictures. He’s been doing that for greater than a yr now, to protest the truth that his fellow lawmakers refuse to again up their prayers with pro-life action on guns.
With tears in his eyes, Cleaver informed The Star that Wednesday “was alleged to be one of many happiest days in many years, after which individuals are working for his or her lives. I do know that if the homicide of youngsters didn’t encourage Congress to behave, then the homicide of soccer followers gained’t get a chunk of consideration. So it goes on and on and on. I don’t know what to do.”
That half of those fans who were injured were children gained’t change the calculus.
When and solely when voters resolve to elect extra lawmakers prepared to even begin making it cease, then it should. Not instantly, however inevitably.
One authorized change that has been confirmed to work, as I’ve written more than once before, is one thing that was routine. However then, in 2007, the Missouri legislature stopped making anybody shopping for a handgun undergo a background verify in individual at their sheriff’s workplace.
The Johns Hopkins Middle for Gun Coverage and Analysis discovered that within the first six years after the state repealed that requirement, Missouri’s gun murder charge rose by 16% — even because the nationwide charge declined by 11%. The type of regulation Missouri repealed is taken into account the one simplest strategy to hold those that actually shouldn’t have weapons from getting them. Within the decade after Connecticut handed such a regulation, gun murders went down by 40%.
As at all times in these darkish moments, audio system at Wednesday’s information convention in Kansas Metropolis praised the bravery of the primary responders whose job it was to run towards the gunfire. It’s proper that we should always try this, particularly as a result of it’s not a given; first responders on the faculty in Uvalde, Texas, the place 19 college students and two lecturers had been killed, took cover when they heard gunfire.
However what I at all times suppose once I hear these phrases of reward is that if we actually cared concerning the well-being of our first responders, we’d cease making their lives, too, a lot extra harmful than they already are with our anyplace, anytime for anyone in any respect gun legal guidelines. “Again the blue” and “weapons for all” are opposing impulses.
If the presence of 800 armed law enforcement officers on the Tremendous Bowl parade didn’t forestall the gunfire, do we actually suppose that that 801st good man with a gun might need made the distinction?
A few of these readers who wrote to me after the parade mentioned sure, they do suppose that. However we cannot arm our way out of the admittedly complicated problem of gun violence.
Predictably, among the many many arguing that weapons don’t have anything to do with the issue was the Missouri Republican Rep. Mark Alford, who mentioned the one actual concern is what’s in our hearts. However he’s solely half-wrong about that.
I say that as a result of it’s each weapons and free-floating rage which can be killing us, as evidenced by the primary few reactions from Star readers that appeared in my inbox proper after my original column concerning the shootings posted.
Not lengthy after one life was misplaced and others modified endlessly, at a blue-sky civic celebration, the primary three emails I acquired from readers counsel the depth of the commonplace, knee-jerk loathing of somebody I’m fairly certain they’d by no means heard of earlier than yesterday, don’t bear in mind at the moment and knew nothing about for the 5 minutes they gave me any thought in any respect.
“You’re a disgusting human,” mentioned the primary message. “You’ll burn for all eternity. Repent. You evil disgusting pedo witch.”
The second correspondent informed me, as a number of others later did, too, that we don’t have a “crime drawback, however a Black crime drawback.”
“If you go on about shootings at public occasions, I feel it might be useful when you had been to say what everybody in America is aware of, however you media folks gained’t say, is that the overwhelming majority of those shooters are Black. … You ‘journalists’ are protecting for them.”
Between 1982 and December 2023, 80 out of the 149 mass shootings in the USA had been carried out by white shooters. Twenty-six such shooters had been Black and the remainder had been of different races.
“You didn’t waste any time spewing your leftist hate,” the third message learn. “How about an editorial, Praying for therapeutic of these injured and our nation as a complete! You might be Pathetic!!”
Consider me, I notice that these messages don’t have anything to do with me, and are under no circumstances out of the bizarre, both. However that this response isn’t any extra shocking than the gunfire than spoiled not only a blissful event however whole lives is a component of what’s improper.
That social and partisan media continuously inform us that these with whom we disagree are demonic has rather a lot to do with that, however what can we do about it? In some methods, I’m sorry to say, that’s a fair more durable drawback to deal with than our ocean of unregulated weapons.
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