Delaying Tactic is Republican Weapon to Avoid Gun Control Laws
The Republican Party is as painful as a boil, as cold and calculating as a black mamba and as cynical as the Grinch when they tell us that the wounds are too fresh, the blood has not dried from the latest school massacre and now is a time for condolences and not politics.
The politicians on the right know full well that delay is their biggest ally in not passing sane gun control laws and they know for certain that the window is quickly closing before the general public will move on to the next crisis and the window will not reopen until the next, inevitable mass shooting.
So by claiming they are not politicizing, these smug Republicans are, in fact, politicizing the tragedy in the worst way by delaying and ultimately opposing any real progress on gun control.
That was the case after Parkland, Aurora, Las Vegas, Orlando, Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Dallas, Baton Rouge, Citronelle, Burlington, Broward County, Fresno, Lincoln County, Tehama County, Sutherland Springs, Benton, Nashville, Santa Fe, Annapolis, Jacksonville, Pittsburgh, Thousand Oaks, Sebring, Asension, Virginia Beach, El Paso, Heston and Newton, Dayton, Midland-Odessa, Milwaukee, Springfield, Rockford, Atlanta, Boulder, Indianapolis, Colorado Springs, San Jose, Oxford, Sacramento New York City and now Buffalo and Uvalde.
Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke was exactly right ro confront Gov. Greg Abbott at a press conference shortly after the carnage in Uvalde, and after Abbott said now is not the time to politicize a shooting.
“Now is the time to stop the next shooting … In each case we say this isn’t the time. Now is the time — like, literally right now,” O’Rourke said.
And there were the dishonest and wholly contrived comments from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, speaking in Washington hours after the massacre in Uvalde.
“As sure as night follows day, you can bet there are going to be Democrat politicians looking to advance their own political agenda,” he said, “rather than to work to stop this kind of horrific violence and to keep everyone safe.”
Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., also knew her lines well with her comments after 13 people were shot, 10 African Americans fatally wounded, in a massacre at a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket by a self-avowed white supremacist and neo-Nazi. The Tuesday after the bloodshed Stefanik said, you guessed it, now is “not the time to politicize this tragedy.”
Stefanik has promoted the false and racist conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement theory,” which has been used as a reason to kill by far-right extremists, white nationalists, and white supremacists.
“I want to take a moment,” Stefanik said, “my home state [of] New York, our nation is heartbroken and saddened of the horrific loss of life in Buffalo. This was an act of pure evil and the criminal should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. It is not the time to politicize this tragedy.”
“We mourn together as a nation,” Stefanik said during a Republican House leadership press conference when she changed the subject to announce the formation of the “Hispanic Leadership Trust,” a rather jaundiced, political move.
Cruz and Stefanik were only taking a cue from the cruel Republican and NRA playbook in responding to mass shootings. They have plenty of precedent.
On the night of Oct. 1, 2017, Stephen Paddock, 64, fired more than 1,000 rounds from his hotel room at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino, onto a large crowd of concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest music festival on the Las Vegas Strip, ultimately killing 60 people and wounding 867 others.
The response from the right wing politicians and pundits was painfully predictable.
“Gun control is a legitimate issue,” said Fox News’ Howard Kurtz on Monday morning after the attack, “but for the Dems already raising it after Las Vegas massacre, could we just have a day before plunging in?”
Kentucky Republican Gov. Matt Bevin jumped right in taking a cue from the same sorry playbook.
“To all those political opportunists who are seizing on the tragedy in Las Vegas to call for more gun regs…You can’t regulate evil,” Bevin said.
On Aug. 3, 2019, a gunman espousing white supremacist views opened fire at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, killing 23 people and injured 23 others. Hours after the shooting, Fox News commentator Steve Rogers attacked Democrats for calling for new gun laws, saying “now is not the time to politicize a horrific incident like this.”
At the time, Texas Gov. Abbott, who was endorsed by the NRA and currently has an A rating, told the grieving public “we need to focus more on memorials before we start the politics.”
Patrick Sharkey, the William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, has studied mass shootings and has determined that “the available evidence suggests that it will fade into the background within about four days.” By then, the emotional momentum will have been spent and the public will have retreated from the intractable problem of gun deaths in America, until the next one.
“With most outcomes, the impact of mass shootings (even the most extreme incidents) is close to zero within roughly one week of the event,” wrote Sharkey, who is the author of “Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence.” “The short duration of the impact could be interpreted to mean that mass shootings are not particularly salient events in the lives of most Americans, or it might signify that most respondents move on quickly from any public event that does not affect individuals or their direct networks and friends.”
Sharkey referred to a survey by Gallup which involved interviews with a national sample of Americans every day from 2008 to 2017. People were asked their opinions and perceptions about various issues and were asked about their emotions on a given day: Had they felt happy or sad the day before? Were they angry or smiling?
Sharkey said the Gallop survey found that “almost every day, between 10 percent and 25 percent of Americans reported feeling sadness the previous day.”
But he gleaned an anomalous spike in the middle of the survey period, Dec.15. That happened to be a day after a young man had entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and killed 20 children and six adults before killing himself.
The day after the massacre, nearly 40 percent of respondents reported feeling sadness the previous day, more than double the percentage on a typical day. The number of respondents who said they felt angry was less dramatic but still significant: 20 percent, vs. 12 percent on a typical day.
The poll respondents were not primed to think about the massacre in Newtown but were simply asked whether they felt angry or sad or happy the day before the interview.
“The survey’s value is the window it opens into the way this kind of event weighs on our minds, the collective process of grieving that we all went through then — and are going through again, right now,” Sharkey said. “Crucially, the survey also reveals when these events fade in importance from our minds. The troubling reality is that it doesn’t take long.”
The survey showed that within days after the Sandy Hook shooting, people’s reports of sadness and anger returned to their normal levels.
“This doesn’t mean we forgot about the shooting or no longer cared. It just means that we returned to our lives, that the horror of what had happened had moved away from the forefront of our consciousness even as the sadness and anger lingered in the background,” Sharkey said.
Sharkey and an associate, Yinzhi Shen, gathered more data on all mass shootings from 2008 through 2016. They found that the effect of mass shootings is felt most acutely in the cities and towns where they occur, then fades quickly as the geographic distance between the incident and the survey respondent widens. There were also differences based on individual politics as “respondents who identify as Democrats have a larger emotional response to mass shootings than those who identify as Republicans — but, critically, Republicans also report higher levels of sadness and anger in the aftermath of mass shootings, even if their response is more muted than that of Democrats.”
He said the findings may reflect on why such incidents of monstrous killings have not translated into major new legislation to prevent future mass shootings.
“Research has shown that mass shootings lead to an increase in the number of gun-related bills introduced at the state level, but with few exceptions, they tend not to lead to the passage of legislation designed to confront gun violence,” Sharkey said. “However, this research found little impact of mass shooting on preferences for gun policy beyond the local community.”
In fact, Sharkey said, attitudes about guns and violence leads Republican legislators to enact even looser gun laws. For example, while the nightmare shootings continue, there has been a spread of “conceal-carry laws” for more citizens with minimal training. In Wisconsin, four hours of training is required to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Compare that to the exhaustive training and re-training for police officers, who still make numerous fatal mistakes
“In the days after the latest mass shooting, politicians express their outrage, their thoughts and prayers, and some put forth new proposals to finally confront the problem with meaningful legislation,” Sharkey said. “A few days pass, and the raw emotions we are all feeling dissipate, even if we’re reluctant to admit it. As the attention of the nation shifts, that legislation stalls, and the organized, well-funded forces that favor guns over children’s lives flex their muscles.”
Trump has trumpeted “hardening the targets,” meaning the schools and maybe creating just one entrance and one exit, which would be inviting conflagration in event of a fire. So, kids keep practicing your active shooter drills and don’t forget your bulletproof backpacks because the window to protect you is pretty much closed. Pleasant dreams.