And you can do nothing to stop us. For if you do, you will be rightly and justly characterized as the defenders of the murder of children. You will accept common sense regulations, limitations and restrictions on your oh so precious right to bear arms. And you will do so without complaint, just as you have been mostly silent over the last few days. And we all know you have been silent because you have nothing to say. You can’t defend this. You cannot defend yourselves. Really, your silence is an admission of guilt. You, and we, saw this coming. Really, you had to know, eventually, our most vulnerable would fall prey. It was only a matter of time.
And now that time is here.
Take a cue from a fellow NRA 100% approved Conservative Republican, and follow his lead.
While Joe Scarborough and I are ideological and partisan opposites, his righteous anger matches mine. And as a liberal, I take his warning to heart that there is no quick and easy solution that might have prevented this tragedy, or might have prevented this tragedy. But there are easy first steps, and complexity is never an excuse for inaction, and inaction and protecting the status quo makes us all cowards, if not complicit in the next massacre.
So that first step, we are banning semi automatic assault weapons. We are reinstating that ban that you gun fetishists let expire in 2004 when you were in complete control of the government. Then we are banning high capacity magazines.
The only possible use for both is to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible. You don’t use them for hunting or for self defense, and if you do, you are a fucking idiot so mentally incompetent that it is, or should be, illegal for you to own a gun in the first place.
Which leads me to the next step. You have been to your last gun show. Gun shows are banned. Only licensed dealers will be allowed to sell guns and hunting rifles from now on. And before you buy a gun or a rifle, you will be subjected to a 7 day waiting period while a full 50 state and federal mental health and criminal background check is completed. If you have just one single warrant on your record, let alone a conviction for anything, then you are forbidden from ever buying or owning a gun for life. Yes, for life. Maybe that will persuade you to live a non-criminal life.
Next, federal law on the gun issue will trump all state laws. If a state has a more lenient law (i.e. Florida and most of the South), those laws will be nullified in favor of these new federal restrictions.
Next step, anyone caught with an illegally purchased gun or a banned gun is sentenced to life in prison, or permanent deportation from the United States. Your choice.
And now we will turn to public funding for mental illness treatment. President Ronald Reagan, upon taking office in the early 1980’s, drastically cut funding to state mental hospitals and institutions, causing many to close, and putting their patients on the streets. We are going to reestablish mental hospitals and institutions where those who are a danger to others or themselves due to a mental illness can seek treatment or, at the very least, be kept secure so that they do not harm others. It is no accident that crime and homelessness skyrocketed when Reagan closed these facilities. Perhaps with renewed funding of mental health treatment and treatment centers, with commitment of the most dangerously mentally ill, those with mental illness will no longer be a danger to others, and with these new gun restrictions, and new background checks, they will not be able to kill 20 first graders again.
You know, gun fetishists like NRA Executive Director Wayne LaPierre screamed loudly, with no evidence mind you, that Barack Obama had a secret plan to take your guns. He didn’t. He still doesn’t really. In fact, the only ones who had a secret plan to take your guns were people like you. Yes, that’s right. People like you gun lovers who decried any and all restrictions on your absolute Second Amendment right to own whatever weapon you pleased in any amount possible. You made it impossible to prevent tragedies like Columbine, Tuscon, Aurora, Oregon and Sandy Hook. And in making it impossible, you made it possible for a monster to take a military machine gun, a gun that not even armies of small nations possess, and use it to tear apart the bodies of first graders with 3 to 11 bullet wounds per child.
You had to know this would eventually happen. You had to know that one day, your fervent opposition to any gun control at all would eventually lead to a tragedy like this. You feared it. Because you knew that once it happened it would turn public opinion violently against you. And yet you refused common sense gun control. And now 20 babies are dead, so torn apart by a machine gun that they all have to have closed caskets.
Do you really think we are going to do nothing now?
So yes, you were the ones with the “plan” to take your guns, because of what you allowed to happen, we will now be taking your semi automatic assault weapons from you. Since we know these guns are more precious to you than your own family, we will allow you a moment to kiss them goodbye, a pleasure denied to the mothers and fathers in Sandy Hook.
And if you so much as put up a whiff of a complaint about this, then we will go farther. I am told that conservatives interpret the Constitution not a living document, but a dead one etched in stone and unchangeable through time and change in society. And I am told conservatives interpret its passages through the Framer’s knowledge and intentions at the time the constitutional provision or amendment was written. It is that principle that provides conservatives the legal basis to change privacy rights, since there is no explicit words “right to privacy” in the constitution, yet alone references to reproductive freedom, etc. Using that constitutional interpretation, and looking at the Framer’s intentions, the Second Amendment might not mean what you think it means. At the very least, we might be able to restrict your right to bear arms to only the arms then existing at the time of the ratification of the Bill of Rights. Yes, you can have all the muskets you want, but nothing else.
That is, if you complain about the common sense restrictions on the weapons of mass destruction known as the Bushmaster .223 assault rifle and other military style assault weapons like it.