Shooting minnows in a barrel

by David Benjamin

“The solution lies in stronger families, more supportive communities, I would argue, renewed faith… We’ve stopped teaching values in so many of our schools. Now we’re teaching wokeness. We’re indoctrinating our children with things like CRT, telling… some children they’re not equal to others and they’re the cause of other people’s problems.” 

― Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) , recipient of $1.3 million from the N.R.A.

MADISON, Wis. — It’s a practice among essayists to avoid broaching the same topic twice in a row. However, in light of the fact that America has endured two mass shootings in twelve days—tacitly sanctioned by the Republican Party, a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Rifle Association (otherwise known as “Sociopaths Anonymous”)—I’m compelled to break the rule. Last week, I wrote a satire about how to improve production quality in a live-streamed racist massacre. This week, I find myself pondering the equivocal verbiage of child slaughter.

“Universal background checks.”

“Mental health.”

“Red flags.”

“Gun-show loopholes.”

“Hardened kindergartens.”

“Duck and cover.”

“Critical race theory.”

This is the sort of language that brings to my mind the succinctness of a kid I knew in high-school: “Chickenshit.”

We are a nation in which the number of unlicensed guns exceeds the number of licensed automobiles by 100 million. We make beauticians, math teachers and marijuana retailers pass tests and apply for licenses. But if a teenager with a grievance wants to line up ten-year-olds in their classroom and blow off the top of their heads like shooting fish… well, minnows, in a barrel, well, go right ahead, kid. You’ve got the Second Amendment in your corner and six Supreme Court justices arguing over who gets to hold your spit bucket.

Speaking of which, it was Chief Justice Warren Burger (appointed by Richard Nixon) who once said, “The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American people by special interest groups that I have ever seen.”

Burger clarified this charge by citing the “original” intent of the Founding Fathers. In an essay published in 1991, he explained, “The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires. In referring to ‘a well regulated militia,’ the Framers clearly intended to secure the right to bear arms essentially for military purposes.”

In short, the conservative Justice was saying to the N.R.A.: “Chickenshit.”

If he’d had Justice Burger’s vocabulary, my profane high-school friend would have been able to define “chickenshit” as a half-baked measure grossly inadequate to addressing a crisis so profound that only brave and dramatic action could begin to mitigate the sheer ghastliness of its affect on innocent people. 

So, in that light, what about universal background checks? Mental-health mumbo-jumbo? Red-flags? Gun-show loop-de-loop? “Hardened” grammar schools and moronic CRT citations by gun-lobby millionaires? These aren’t solutions. They’re platitudes—the juicy output of a leghorn’s ass, okay for fertilizing the radish-patch but cruelly absurd in the context of dead shoppers at the mall and ten-year-olds rendered unrecognizable by the passage, through their heads and hearts, of high-velocity .223-caliber projectiles from a thirty-round AR-15 ammo clip.   

Since the Buffalo bloodbath, I’ve been waiting for a reporter, any reporter, to bluntly ask an N.R.A.-subservient Republican (or Democrat) about the practical purpose of heeling oneself with a battlefield assault rifle in middle-class America. What’s it for?

An AR-15 is not a game rifle. A burst of .223 ammo tends to shred and contaminate, with noxious bodily fluids, the target’s edible flesh. Mikhail Kalashnikov invented a gun whose job was not just to kill people but to kill them quickly and frustrate the efforts of medics and doctors to repair the ravaged entrails and sundered blood vessels of the target body. The AK was designed for its user to destroy, with prejudice, an equivalently armed, armored and deadly enemy. It was meant for trained killers to prevail in mortal combat with other trained killers. 

It has long been a mark of civilized society that such devices belong not in the public sphere but in the segregated and lethal province of the military. When these weapons cross the line, sensible folks have always agreed that something must be done. This was true when the bank-robbing gunsels of the Great Depression—Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, for example, John Dillinger and “Machine-Gun” Kelly—adopted John Thompson’s sub-machine gun as their trademark. In 1934, Texas led the nation in banning privately-owned machine guns. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Congress, egged on by Milton Reckord, the N.R.A.’s executive vice president, passed almost unanimously a federal anti-Tommy gun law. In 1939, the Supreme Court agreed. 

Today, the N.R.A., the state of Texas, the ruling GOP faction in Congress and the Supreme Court all stand aghast and adamant against the “unconstitutional” notion of banning Comrade Kalashnikov’s enhanced Tommy gun. The mindless absolutism of the gun cult imposes an obligation on the rest of us—and our non-N.R.A.-paid representatives—to scorn the meek impotence of half-measures (duck and cover, really?) and press a moratorium against the sort of firearms whose only function is to kill men, women and children, not Bambi, rabid dogs or Al Qaeda. 

There is precedent that predates the Tommy gun. In 1881, a Tombstone, Arizona City Marshal named Virgil Earp drafted and enforced the following ordinance against ordnance: “Section 1. It is hereby declared unlawful to carry in the hand or upon the person or otherwise any deadly weapon within the limits of said city of Tombstone, without first obtaining a permit in writing.”

Virgil followed the example set by his brother Wyatt in Dodge City, and by lawmen who forbade all personal guns in other “Wild West” outposts, including Deadwood, Wichita, Abilene and the entire state of 19th-century Louisiana.

There were objections to Virgil’s gun-control notions. The anarchic 1880s version of the Republican Party was called the Clanton gang. In a response that would have warmed hearts in Sandy Hook and Uvalde, Virgil Earp and his brothers went to the OK Corral and enforced the town’s gun-violence restrictions by shooting to death every Clanton except old man Ike.

I’m reluctant to suggest that Democrats should summon Wayne La Pierre, Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson to the OK Corral to settle the issue. Although, jeez, wouldn’t it make great TV? I’d be satisfied—and dumbfounded—if, instead, our anti-gun bleeding hearts actually fought for serious remedies to a heartbreaking cycle that begins with mass murder, followed by piles of flowers and ugly balloons, followed by pieties from politicians and empty promises for trivial reform—followed by mass murders, piles of flowers and ugly balloons…

Something real! An actual assault weapons ban. A registration law covering every gun in America, just like pickups, parades and plumbers. The melting down of 100 million guns into ploughshares or, perhaps, long, black walls inscribed with the names of murdered children. In the meantime, absent any meaningful change, how about a new motto for the GOP? 

“Save the unborn, shoot the born.”