An assault-weapons ban is probably going to have to start at the ballot box in the November 2022 midterms. After all, how many more silver bullets does president Joe Biden have left in his executive order arsenal after all the excellent counteracting he’s done, in about two months time, of much of the dumpster fire-policymaking displayed over the past four years by former president Donald Trump? But now, unfortunately, he’s facing what will be one of his greatest battles, re-instituting Bill Clinton’s 1994 and 1998 assault weapons bans, or something similar, over what will be a massive and concerted effort by our nation’s far-right, National Rifle Association-loving politicians. Supported, of course, by the voters who put them in over and over again every election, even as the American body count rises exponentially.

We have last week’s Atlanta hate crime (call it for what it is, and quit wasting good oxygen and ink debating the murderer’s monstrous real motives), erasing eight innocent lives including six Asian women in a hail of AR15 bullets, a gun easily purchased earlier that day. And then let’s flash-forward to Monday’s Boulder, Colorado supermarket massacre of 10 innocents, buying their groceries just like we all do, something that should ostensibly be a totally-safe act during a busy day. But not in America, the country with one of the worst per capita records of gun shootings and murders in the Western Hemisphere. Boulder’s killer-de-jour was Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, similarly using that wonderfully-popular AR15 like his Atlanta clone, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long the week before. And the fault of the ease of commission of these horrors is 100% hands-down owned by the Republican Party, and existed long before it allowed itself to be infected by Trump for four horrendous years of bigotry and incompetence. But we can’t blame Trump for starting this one.

Conservatives have always had a problem learning life’s lessons, whether we’re talking scientific facts like climate change, sociological no-brainers like the evils of systemic racism, and the obvious irrationality of America’s lax gun laws, specifically assault automatics and semi-automatics. The GOP loves to deliberately misread the Second Amendment by interpreting the words to intone that ANYONE can be armed with any type of killing tool, when the document is actually referring to an area’s established militia being suitably equipped, and not the general population. And AK47s, AR15s and rocket launchers weren’t on our early settlers’ minds anyway. Meaning that even if we want to keep such an arcane 1791 law on the books unchanged, why not recall all the other ludicrous Puritan regulations that existed centuries ago governing your religious beliefs, consensual sex and whatever recreational activities you want to do this Sunday?

Clinton’s bans targeted automatic and semi-automatic weapons, their importation, dissemination and ownership by our citizens. It had nothing whatsoever to do with curtailing any hunters’ bloody “sport” rifles, handguns for home protection, firearm collections, or anything else that NRAers falsify continuously. And it unfortunately contained several loopholes that were kept in to ensure its passage, some ameliorated by the 1998 additional legislation that specifically prevented semi-automatic weapon importation. George W. Bush predictably let the 10-year initiative end in 2004, beginning the equally-predictable onslaught of mass shootings by devils utilizing weapons that are made to murder as many people as possible in the shortest length of time. This plays right into the evil mindset of the assassin, and forces the voters and politicians who empower them into answering every fresh atrocity with a palms-upraised “Who, me?” as the bodies are being cleaned up.

Gun massacres fell by nearly 40% during Clinton’s decade-long 1994-2004 policy, while the total numbers nearly tripled in the decade after 2004 (183%). These are indisputable numbers, although you can be sure that the NRA crowd will crunch them any way they want to deride the ban’s effectiveness. But the fact that there are between 17-20 million automatic/semiautomatic weapons loose in our most-violent nation should be impetus enough for rational, decent citizens to want to eradicate them. And it’s up to Biden and the Democrats in Congress to keep the pedal to the floor on this one. And it’s also up to our voters next year to do their homework re: their own representatives, state and federal alike, and eliminate the ones collecting their blood money from the NRA. A simple GOOGLE will give you the entire list, and (hint) there’s a lot of R’s on it.

Keep the hunting rifles and handguns … it’s the bad guys who want or need anything deadlier.

Newsletter