If politicians think gun carnage is acceptable, they should just admit it

Not when the Uvalde massacre came just 10 days after an 18-year-old white supremacist was arrested on suspicion of using a similar weapon to kill 10 innocent victims in a Buffalo supermarket. Not when chaotic gunfire erupted at a Charleston, S.C., block party on Memorial Day, leaving 10 people wounded and the shooter or shooters still at large. Not when a middle-age man armed with a rifle and a handgun stormed into a Tulsa hospital Wednesday and shot four people to death before killing himself. Not when there have been 233 “mass shootings” involving four or more victims so far this year, according to the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive.

If you think such carnage is acceptable, then come out and say so. If you claim you want to end or even just mitigate this orgy of death, you have to deal with the fact that the one common thread in mass shootings — the common factor in all shootings, by definition — is guns.

It’s not mental health or school security, which are the two subjects Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he is willing to discuss. It’s certainly not marijuana use, which Fox News host Laura Ingraham has bizarrely ranted about in her “coverage” of Uvalde. And the solution is not arming teachers, as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wants to do, or mandating that schools have only one entrance door, as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who clearly has never met a fire marshal, unhelpfully suggests.

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There is already broad consensus on the steps we need to take. An April 2021 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 81 percent of U.S. adults favored universal background checks for purchasing guns, including in private sales and at gun shows; 66 percent favored creating a federal database to track all gun purchases; 64 percent favored banning high-capacity magazines holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition; and 63 percent favored banning “assault-style weapons.”

None of these popular, lifesaving measures is ruled out by the Constitution. “Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the Supreme Court’s landmark District of Columbia v. Heller ruling, which established that the right to possess firearms belongs to us individually rather than collectively.

Yet it appears that the bipartisan talks being held by a group of nine senators are — let’s be frank — nibbling around the edges of the problem. They have reportedly been talking about mental health and “red-flag” laws that could take firearms out of the hands of people who show signs of potentially committing acts of violence. Preventing even one mass shooting would be worthwhile. But not nearly enough.

The negotiations are being led by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), the chamber’s most passionate advocate for gun control, and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.). “I’m not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” Murphy told me on Thursday. “Maybe back in 2013, I wouldn’t have settled for anything less than comprehensive background checks, but now I think it’s important to show Republicans that there is political reward for voting with 90 percent of your constituents, that the political sky doesn’t fall.”

I hope Murphy’s optimism is justified. I really do. But I have to wonder whether 10 Republican votes in the Senate — the number needed to break a filibuster — can be found for any bill that has any tangible impact on gun violence.

Wednesday night, conservative radio host Joe Pagliarulo fretted about rumors that Cornyn is “open to making gun laws more restrictive” but said, “Until I hear him say he wants to restrict my 2nd rights, I’ll refrain from judging.” Cornyn quickly replied: “Not gonna happen.”

If the senators come up with something that Republicans consider sufficiently toothless and symbolic, will that at least be progress, however incremental and inadequate? At this point, I’m inclined to support Murphy’s “do something, anything” approach. We know from long and tragic experience what happens when Congress does nothing at all on gun violence. If Congress does something hugely ineffectual, I don’t see how we’ll be any worse off.

“How are we okay with this as a nation?” Rep. Lucy McBath (D-Ga.) asked in exasperation Thursday. McBath lost her 17-year-old son to gun violence in 2012. She decided to run for Congress after the 2018 Parkland, Fla., school massacre in which 17 students and employees died.

It’s the right question. As voters, as citizens and as human beings, we demand an answer.