American carnage

Last night, a man with at least eight rifles opened fire on an outdoor country music festival in Las Vegas, NV. At last count, 58 people were killed and over 500 injured: the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.

In his inaugural address, President Trump promised an end to “American carnage.” He was referring, presumably, to threats from outside: travelers who can be banned, immigrants who can be blocked with a wall, and dreamers who can be deported. But who or what can protect us from home-grown terrorists who can easily inflict mass carnage because owning a gun is the one right Republicans believe to be inviolable?

Since the President’s inauguration, many of our constitutional rights have been under siege. Voting rights are under attack because of baseless claims that millions voted illegally, and the right to peaceful protest is under attack because a football player quietly kneeling is more offensive to some than a white supremacist ramming his car into a crowd. Healthcare, we are reminded by an administration who has tried time and again to take it away, is not a right; this very weekend, in fact, the Trump administration let the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) die a quiet death, endangering the coverage of nine million children.

While the first and fifteenth amendments come repeatedly under fire, the second amendment alone is sacred and unquestioned. Because literalists argue the constitutional right to bear arms means individuals have the inalienable right to amass as many high-capacity killing machines as they’d like without the common-sense controls we enforce on everything from cars to cold medicine, the rest of us no longer have the right to feel safe at an outdoor concert, nightclub, movie theater, elementary school, restaurant, college classroom, softball game, or Bible study. We no longer need extremists from abroad to cross our borders to unleash mayhem: we here at home are doing it ourselves, with weapons both Trump and the Republicans refuse to control.

Americans are very good at mobilizing against external threats. We rain down bombs and missiles, we strengthen and threaten to lock down our borders, and we ruefully relinquish personal freedoms in the name of public safety. (Remember the days when you could board a plane without taking off your shoes, limiting your liquids, or tolerating invasive scans and pat-downs of your person?) But when the inflicter of carnage is an American with a gun, we fold our hands and shrug our shoulders, earnestly but not convincingly at a loss for what to do. When the killer of many is an American with a gun, our nation of great ideas and even greater thinkers is suddenly stumped.

Last night before gunfire erupted in Las Vegas, I read the chapter in Hillary Clinton’s campaign memoir where she talks about meeting with mothers of children killed by gun violence or police brutality–the Mothers of the Movement–and how their heartrending stories led her to campaign for sane gun control. An overwhelming majority of Americans (including responsible gun owners) want reasonable gun regulations, but the National Rifle Association shuts down such legislation at every turn, pouring money into attack ads against Clinton in 2016 and preventing any progress toward gun control legislation in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012. There is no way the NRA and its members would let Democrats like Clinton, Obama, or even Gabby Gifford make any headway toward sane gun control laws, and this means President Trump now faces a unique opportunity for bold leadership.

When Democrats even whisper the words “gun control,” gun owners fly into a panic, but these same gun owners trust Trump to protect their second amendment rights. If Trump were to advocate for common-sense legislation that would protect responsible gun owners while taking guns out of the hands of madmen, would Trump’s base trust him to thread that political needle?

If Trump is as wealthy as he claims, he has no need for the NRA’s deep pockets, and if it’s true that diehard loyalists would stand by him even if he stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shot someone (as Trump himself once claimed), now is a perfect opportunity for the President to prove his leadership mettle. If Trump were at least as brave as Hillary in standing up to the NRA, he could prove himself even better than Obama in brokering a gun control deal the Democrats could only dream of. It’s a longshot, but if the President wants to end American carnage, he has to protect Americans from every source of danger, not only ones located abroad.

I shot (and previously blogged) the photos illustrating today’s post in November, 2013, when Laura Ford’s “Armour Boys” were on display at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, MA.