Gun control’s unlikely champions
In just the first three months of the year, the Gun Violence Archive has counted 130 mass shootings in the U.S. School shootings are “wildly unpopular,” yet in the decade since Sandy Hook, little has changed.
Yes, a month after last May’s school shootings in Uvalde, TX, Congress passed modest gun reform legislation, the first law in nearly three decades. In the wake of the Nashville murders of six, including three nine year olds, isn’t it time to go further? We got a hint that the answer is yes the other day, when 1,500 people, including many students, flooded the state capitol in Nashville demanding gun control.
After the Nashville shooting, Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett told reporters that “laws don’t work” to curb gun violence. “It’s a horrible, horrible situation, and we’re not gonna fix it,” Burchett said. There isn’t “any real role” for Congress to play in reducing gun violence other than to “mess things up. I don’t think you’re gonna stop the gun violence,” he claimed. “I think you gotta change people’s hearts.”
Huh?! Too many hearts have already stopped beating, Rep. Burchett. Yet, why feel hopeful? Why? When former Ohio Gov. John Kasich urges citizens to take to the streets and force politicians to pass gun laws with teeth, you don’t need a weather person to know which way the wind’s blowing.
The old Kasich, once a second amendment stalwart, recently said on national television that he has been reading up on the civil rights era Montgomery bus boycott, seeing the connection between that campaign and today.
“…Those women down there in Montgomery. They just kept marching. They kept doing everything they could. And that’s what it’s going to take here,” he said.
Kasich is encouraging people to “begin to get into the street and say enough of this… We all have to mobilize. Without it, the politicians will look the other way. [I]t’s not going to happen in a week or two. It has to be ongoing in order to get this changed.”
From his mouth to God’s ears. It’s time.
Rob Okun, syndicated, is editor-publisher of ‘Voice Male’ magazine.
