The recent mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia (the 385th mass shooting in America this year) has elicited the same old response. Nothing beyond thoughts and prayers.
Even though the Apalachee HS school shooter was flagged by the FBI as a potential school shooter a year prior, his father was able to buy him an AR-platform gun for his birthday and no one batted an eye.
And why would they? For the past four years, there have been 650 mass shootings on average each year. And even though the vast majority of U.S. citizens (Democrats, Republicans and Independents) agree that common sense gun reform is sorely needed, nothing has happened.
Those potential voters who say they are for gun reform that will keep weapons out of the hands of mass shooters keep getting either out-voted by those cool with the mass shootings continuing non-stop, or they are voting for people who are more committed to the NRA, gun lobbyists and their money than their constituents.
Georgia, home to the latest school shooting tragedy, like Texas, the state that gave us Uvalde, Santa Fe, and other mass shootings not at schools, but which did result in huge losses of life (El Paso, etc.), has notoriously lax gun laws. Both allow darn near anyone with the desire to be strapped to be strapped to the nines. Literally.
The Ugly Numbers
Here’s how that plays out in mass shooting:
The National Institute of Health reported in 2019 that the looser a state’s gun laws (i.e. the easier it is to get a gun), the more mass shootings it has.
This year, Everytown Research, an organization that focuses specifically on this issue, showed the same results: states with the strongest gun laws have not only fewer gun deaths but far, far fewer. California, the state with the strongest composite gun law strength score (89.5), has a better-than-average gun violence rate (8.6 deaths per 100K residents). By comparison, Texas has a score ((13.5) that’s considered one of the weakest in terms of gun law strength, and one of the worst gun violence rates (15.3 deaths per 100K residents). Georgia is even worse, with a weak gun laws score (5) resulting in 19.7 gun deaths per 100K.
The top eight states in terms of strong gun laws are all Democrat-led states. The vast majority of states where it’s easiest to get a gun and easiest to get killed by a gun are Republican-led states.
There are those who assert that voting doesn’t make a difference. But these hard numbers say differently. When folk who prioritize human safety over gun manufacturer bottom lines vote, they create societies where people, especially K-12 students, have a far greater chance of going to school and coming home safe than those in states where gun access is easy.
The Solution: Vote
Literally, the only way to change this, the only way to out-perform big money and the NRA lobby, is to vote in people who are committed to the people and not to NRA profits.
A social media post by @nevschulman put it like this:
How about we treat every young man who wants to buy a gun like every young woman who seeks to get an abortion: 1) a mandatory 48-hour waiting period, 2) parental permission, 3) a note from his doctor proving he understands what he’s about to do, 4) a video he has to watch about the effects of gun violence and 5) an ultrasound wand up the ass just because. Also, let’s close down all but one gun shop in every state and make him travel hundreds of miles, take time off of work and stay overnight in a strange town to get a gun. Let’s also make him walk through a gauntlet of people holding photos of loved ones who were shot to death and people who call him a murderer and beg him not to buy a gun. I mean, it makes more sense to do this with young men and guns than with women and health care. Right? I mean, no woman getting an abortion has ever killed a room full of people in seconds, right?
