Uvalde, Buffalo and the Republican Death Cult

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

“America cares more about its guns than it does about its children.”
Michael Moore on All in with Chris Hayes, May 24, 2022 –

“The lesson for today is how to die.” –
– Bob Geldof, “I Don’t Like Mondays,” 1979 –
(Written after a 1979 school shooting in San Diego by an 18-year-old, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08-Ukv_0Sbo, when school shootings by students were still relatively rare and shocking.) –

I could have lived a long and relatively happy life without ever hearing of Uvalde, Texas, just as I could have lived my life without ever hearing of Littleton or Aurora, Colorado; Parkland, Florida; Newtown, Connecticut; or any of the other localities in the U.S. that have been infamous as the sites of mass shootings. And while I certainly would have heard of El Paso, Texas; Orlando, Florida; or Buffalo, New York even if they hadn’t been the sites of mass shootings, those communities, and all too many others like them, are forever tainted by the actions of crazed gunmen who took advantage of the United States’s insanely lax laws about who can and who can’t have a gun to murder their fellow Americans. –

I’ve spent the last few days, ever since the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde (and the mass shooting at the Tops supermarket in Buffalo less than two weeks before), doing a lot of yelling at my television as I watched the news. Much of my anger has been fueled by despair; when the pious hosts on MS-NBC express optimism that at least something might be done this time to curb the epidemic of mass murder ini this country, I start shouting things like “No” and “Never.” With the eyes of the nation riveted on Uvalde, Buffalo and Laguna Woods, California (where just the next day after the Buffalo shooting, there was another one, this time targeting a church with a mostly Asian-American congregation), people in America on the side of sensible gun regulation are once again daring to hope, against all experience, that this time will be different. –

No, it won’t. America’s continuing obsession with guns and the supposed “right” under the Second Amendment to own virtually any sort of gun you want is as settled an issue as political issues ever get. It has been cemented in place, along with so much else wrong with this country, by the undemocratic features built into the U.S. Constitution: the guarantee that every state has two U.S. Senators regardless of population; the near-total ability of state legislatures to determine who can vote, under what circumstances and what legislative districts will look like; and the Electoral College, which in 2016 allowed a candidate who lost the popular vote to become President and, among other things, appoint one-third of the current U.S. Supreme Court. –

It also has been held in place by the extraordinary political power of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other pro-gun lobbying groups (like Gun Owners of America, formed by people who thought the NRA wasn’t sufficiently aggressive in defending gun rights). Though they represent only a minority of the American electorate, they are well positioned in enough states – particularly smaller, more rural ones in which “gun culture” is strong – and they have cultivated a cadre of voters who will vote the way the NRA tells them to. –

If you don’t think the NRA has political power, just ask Al Gore, who didn’t become President in 2000 not because of the Electoral College, the U.S. Supreme Court or Ralph Nader. In 2000 the NRA staged an unofficial but very intense campaign against him in Tennessee and West Virginia. In a razor-close election, Gore became the first major-party Presidential nominee since George McGovern in 1972 to lose his home state. Had Gore carried Tennessee, he would have won the Presidency and Florida wouldn’t have mattered. –

The message the Democratic Party got loud and clear from the debacle of Gore’s campaign was simple: don’t fuck with the NRA. Democrats spent the next two decades avoiding the gun issue as if it were radioactive. Meanwhile, a 5-4 Republican majority in 2008, in a case called District of Columbia v, Heller, ruled for the first time that the Second Amendment confers on Americans an individual right to own guns. That’s not what the Second Amendment says – it says, ““A well-regulated Militia, being necessary for the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” And a previous Supreme Court had ruled in 1939 that government had every right to regulate guns as long as the guns didn’t have “some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia." –

But the Court majority in Heller, in an opinion by Justice Antoniin Scalia, read the whole idea of “a well-regulated militia” out of the Second Amendment and created a whole new “right” out of constitutional whole cloth – exactly the opposite of the “originalist” reading of the Constitution Scalia publicly proclaimed. In his Heller oinion, Scalia was doing what he always criticized liberals on the Supreme Court and other courts for doing: instead of reading the Cosntitution as its plain text clearly meant, Scalia read it the way he wsnted it to for his own ideologincal reasons. (For more comment see https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/new-gun-restrictions-would-likely-be-undone-supreme-court-n1295799.) –

Since then – as Dean Obeidallah, author of the MS-NBC article cited and linked to above, wrote – federal courts have routinely thrown out virtually all attempts to regulate gun ownership, citing Heller as precedent. Already two Donald Trump-appointed judges on a federal appeals court have voted to invalidate a California law that prohibits people under age 21 from buying a semiautomatic weapon Obeidallah said that the current far-Right majority on the Supreme Court – the same five justices that have voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and trash the idea that the Constitution protects people’s right to privacy in their sex lives – “based on the questions that were asked in oral arguments, are poised to strike down a New York state law that’s more than a century old that mandates people show ‘proper cause’ to obtain a permit to carry a concealed weapon.” –

The Right’s Ideological Crusade –

No one can understand American politics today without realizing that the Right is on an ideological crusade. Their goals are sometimes self-contradictory – notably when they proclaim themselves believers in “limited government” and then say that government should have every right to regulate the private behavior of individuals in their bedrooms and how they handle the consequences therefrom. But at its heart is a longing for a past America (which is why both Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump ran their Presidential campaigns on the slogan “Make America Great Again”) in which white supremacy was an acknowledged and unchangeable truth; Americans of color understood that they were a permanent servant class, here only by the sufferance of the white majority; women mostly accepted their destiny as being (as the Nazis put it) “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” – “children, kitchen, church” – and Queers lived their whole lives in the knowledge that they were almost literally the scum of the earth. –

It’s also an America in which government exists mainly to preserve the fortunes of the rich, and the whole purpose of the environment is to be plundered for private gain. It’s an America in which working people have virtually no rights at all – no right to decent pay or fair working conditions or protections to their health and safety, and certainly no right to organize and form unions. When Hillary Clinton asked the rhetorical question during her campaign against Donald Trump, “Just when does he think America was ‘great’ and to which he wants to return us?,” the answer depended on the issue. In terms of the civil rights of people of color, women and Queers, it was the 1950’s. In terms of the economy, it was even earlier – the 1880’s, when corporations literally held sway over the American political system, offices were openly bought and sold, there was no hint of any government obligation to protect the lives of working people or the environment, and organizing a uniou cuold literally get you arrested (if you were lucky) or lynched (if you weren't). –

Americans of other political persuasions – not only the Left but even the center – grossly underestimate the sheer depth of the Right-wing ideological commitment and the success they’ve had in carrying it out. They have successfully packed the U.S. Supreme Court. They have nullified Congress as a legislative body by keeping the Senate filibuster in place (with the aid of so-called “Democrats” like Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona). Their political party is far more unified and disciplined than the Democrats are. –

And they have a breathtaking contempt for the very idea of democracy, including free and fair elections in which every adult citizen may vote and have their ballots counted. Not only have Republican legislators passed hundreds of voter suppression and sabotage bills aimed at making sure they stay in power whether the voters want them to or not, they are using their power to draw legislative districts to ensure that they will never lose control, no matter how people vote or want to vote. The Republican candidate for governor of Colorado has even proposed a system that would replace the one-person, one-vote rule with what is essentially the Electoral College in one state, and the object is to ensure that Democrats can never again win a statewide election in Colorado. –

One part of the Republican myth of America’s past is the obsession with guns and gun ownership. Even Texans who are properly horrified at the Uvalde massacre hasten to add that they are not opposed to gun culture. In fact, they loudly proclaim that they own guns themselves and regularly use them for hunting or target practice. One man interviewed on MS-NBC proudly boasted that he owns an AR-15, the semi-automatic machine gun that was the weapon of choice for the shooters in both Buffalo and Uvalde, and he uses it for target practice. Any sensible person would be horrified that this man thinks he wants or needs a weapon of war for target shooting, but that’s how crazy the gun culture is in this country and how viscerally entrenched it is, especially in the small, rural states that thanks to the Constitutional guarantee of equal representation of each state in the Senate and the Senate rule that it requires at least 60 votes to pass virtually anything, have veto power over government action. –

As I’ve noted before in articles about previous mass shootings (and it’s a sign of how crazy this country is that I have written all too many articles about mass shootings), I have no contact with “gun culture.” I have never even held an actual gun (as opposed to the BB guns and toy cap pistols I played with as a kid), much less fired one. I grew up in San Francisco and Marin County, California, about as far away from the loci of “gun culture” as I could have been. My father broke up with my mother when I was 1 ½, and though I saw him fairly regularly after that, the thought of him taking me behind the barn (we never lived in a place that had a barn) or in the backyard and teaching me how to shoot is inconceivable and laughable. And I regard the Second Amendment, especially as rewritten by the Supreme Court in Heller, as a piece of pestilential dung our Constitution would be better off without. In short, I am exactly the kind of voter red-state Republicans keep telling their constituencies they should be afraid of – and that makes me proud.

Uvalde’s Keystone Kops Law Enforcement –

Since I wrote the above nearly two weeks ago – while the Uvalde shootings were still fresh in the minds of many Americans – a lot has happened. Most horrifyingly, there has been an explosion in the sheer number of mass shootings (officially defined as incidents in which at least four people are killed or wounded). During Memorial Day weekend, there were at least 20 in the U.S. In the next weekend, there were at least 13 more, including high-profile incidents in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (where the U.S. Constitution was written); and Chattanooga, Tennessee. (For details on the Philadelphia shooting, see https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/05/us/philadelphia-south-street-shooting/index.html.) –

Another aspect of mass shootings that should frighten us all is the sheer number of sickos who are willing and able to commit them. They’re able to because the U.S. has an entrenched political base of gun owners that ensure our nation has by far the most lax gun laws in the supposedly civilized world. And they are willing to because we’ve grown up in a culture whose entertainments constantly project and reinforce the idea that the solution to virtually every problem is violence. The National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups want to turn America into a kind of fantasy world based on John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies, in which absolutely every American will carry a gun with them whenever they leave their homes. –

The net result of this, as any American with any degree of logic will tell you, will increase, not decrease, the level of gun violence in the U.S. The Philadelphia shooting reportedly began with an argument between two people who ran into each other on the street. In a less well-armed country – or even a less well-armed era in America’s past – those sorts of confrontations would have been settled with words or, at worst, fists. Now, with the same majority of Right-wing crazies on the U.S. Supreme Court who have already decided to reverse Roe v. Wade on the cusp of throwing out a 100-year-old law in New York state saying you need to show a good legal reason for being allowed to carry a concealed weapon in public, and with state after state eagerly getting rid of laws restricting people’s “right” to bear firearms virtually anywhere they like, it’s almost certain that some of these guns will be used – and more people will die. –

But in some ways the most frightening aspect of the Uvalde massacre is the horrible response of local law enforcement. It reminded me of reading Helter Skelter, the book about Charles Manson;s mujrder of actress Sharon Tate and her friends co-authored by the man who led the prosecution, Vincent Bugliosi. Both times I read the book I had the same reaction to Bugliosi’s description of the spectacular incompetence of law enforcement; I kept thinking, “They had the highest-profile murder in L.A. in decades, and they assigned it to the Keystone Kops?” Manson and his so-called “Family” of killers were finally busted not because of great or even good police work. They were nailed because one of the women involved in the killings got arrested for something else and boasted to a cellmate, “I did Tate.” –

If anything, the incompetence and zealous stupidity of the police in Uvalde makesthe Manson investigation look like a model by comparison. The police chief of Uvalde and the head of the police force of Uvalde’s school system amassed 19 officers from at least five separate agencies – and had them wait in the hallways of Robb Elementary while the alleged shooter took his own sweet time killing schoolchildren in the classrooms they dared not enter. The local and school police chiefs inexplicably decided that what they had on their hands was a “barricade” situation – a man holding people hostage with a gun but not putting them in any immediate danger – instead of the “active shooter” situation they really had. What’s more, police not only wouldn’t let parents of the at-risk kids come into the school to rescue them, they actually arrested them.

Angeli Rose Gomez, an Uvalde field worker and mother of two boys at Robb Elementary, told New York Post reporter Eileen A. J. Connelly that when she was called to the school and told her two sons were in danger, a U.S. Marshal on the scene handcuffed her to keep her from going in (https://nypost.com/2022/06/04/angeli-gomez-says-she-was-threatened-by-uvalde-texas-cops/). Gomez told Connelly that the marshal “said, ‘Well, we’re gonna have to arrest you because you’re being very uncooperative.’” She ultimately got a local police officer to persuade the marshal to take the cuffs off her – and, showing a good deal more courage than the cops on the scene, she immediately went into the school and retrieved both her sons. –

But that wasn’t the end of Gomez’s ordeal. She told Post reporter Connelly that a few days after the incident, she got a call from a local law enforcement official warning her not to talk about the case publicly. The person threatened that if she kept speaking out, her probation on an entirely unrelated case from over a decade ago would be revoked. Fortunately, the judge overseeing her probation not only didn’t revoke it, he publicly praised her heroism. But Gomez remained skeptical of law enforcement’s response. “I was just thinking that they could have saved many more lives,” she told Connelly. “They could have gone into that classroom and maybe two or three would have been gone. They could have done something. Gone through the window, sniped him through the window. I mean, something! But nothing was being done. If anything. they were being more aggressive on us parents that were willing to go in there.” –

The bizarre shabbiness of Uvalde’s law enforcement response has slowly unraveled since, despite the efforts of local and state officials to cover it up. Since the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado in 1999, standard protocol in mass-shooting situations in schools has been to rush in as soon as possible with the weapons you have. Uvalde’s city and school police didn’t do that. Instead, they waited in the hallways of Robb Elementary for an hour and 18 minutes. Federal Border Patrol agents finally defied the orders of local law enforcement, stormed the classroom and killed the alleged shooter before he could take the lives of more victims. The Uvalde response was so awful that the police in Tulsa stressed at their press conference that they had responded to their mass shooting in just three minutes. –

The Uvalde cover-up has continued and extended throughout Texas’s state government as well as the local officials. School police chief Pete Arredondo was secretly sworn in as a member of the Uvalde City Council and has hidden himself from reporters ever since the day after the shooting. The local district attorney has slapped a gag order on all participants in law enforcement’s response, citing the need to maintain secrecy to avoid compromising any investigation – which, as Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out on his MS-NBC show June 6, is patently absurd since the only person who could conceivably be prosecuted, the alleged shooter, is dead. No one in state or local law enforcement has been fired, resigned or in any way disciplined for their terrible response. In fact, the Uvalde school board just gave Pete Arredondo a vote of confidence. –

The Republicans’ Death Cult –

The other big thing that’s happened as a result of the Buffalo and Uvalde shootings – and the myriad of others that have happened since – is a renewed push on the part of certain members of the House and Senate to negotiate a bill to do something about gun safety. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), who’s been involved in this issue since he was a Congressmember representing the district in which Sandy Hook Elementary was located, appeared on Stephanie Ruhle’s MS-NBC show June 6 and shame-facedly admitted that his latest bill does not include the two most important features he would want – a ban on military-style assault weapons and expansion of background checks on would-be purchasers of guns – because he can’t get anything through the Senate without watering it down so much it can get at least 10 Republican votes to overcome the vile filibuster. –

Either one of two things will happen. Either the law Murphy and colleagues are working on will die like all other attempts at sensible gun regulation – which is still by far the most likely outcome – or a bill will pass that will be so watered-down it will do nothing to prevent future mass shootings. Then the gun lobby will come back and say, “You see: You see: We told you gun safety legislation wouldn’t work!” In yet another of the grim ironies of Uvalde, the National Rifle Association held its annual convention in Houston the weekend after the Uvalde shooting – and some attendees wore T-shirts with images of the AR-15 as if it were a rock star. Texas Senator Ted Cruz said that instead of doing anything to control the easy accessibility of guns to Americans, we need to “harden” school sites to keep potential mass shooters out. –

In fact, the Uvalde school district had already done that – and it proved not only useless but counterproductive. While all those cops were waiting outside the classrooms and milling about the hallways of Ross Elementary doing nothing but harassing concerned parents, the alleged shooter used the self-locking impregnable doors to lock himself in the classrooms so he could kill more students. The U.S. Border Patrol agents who finally took him down first had to beg for the key from the school janitor. What does it say about the U.S. as a nation when we need to “harden” every public space – every school, grocery store, church, movie theatre and anywhere else people go for commerce or amusement – to the security level of a prison? And why doesn’t this bother the same people who fought tooth and nail against common-sense restrictions like mask and vaccine requirements to control the spread of COVID-19? –

As Charles Booker, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from Kentucky who’s challenging incumbent Rand Paul, put it, the Republican Party is a death cult. Over and over again, faced with the choice of acting to protect people’s lives or putting them at risk, the Republicans have chosen death over life. Ironically, they claim to be the “pro-life” party because of their oposition to abortion rights in the name of “the sanctity of the unborn” – though, as the late comedian George Carlin put it, to a Republican, “Once you’re born, you’re on your own.” –

If the Republican Party and its Supreme Court majority overturn Roe v. Wade, hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – of real, already born women will die from illegal abortions, either self-administered or underground. The Republicans not only have carried on a jihad against the right of women to end unwanted pregnancies, they blocked an extension of the child tax credit President Joe Biden and the Democrats ini Congress included in one of the COVID-19 relief bills, which would have helped mothers forced to have children by anti-abortion laws to raise them. They have also consistently opposed mask mandates, vaccine mandates and other measures to stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. They’ve even appropriated the slogan, “My Body, My Choice,” from the movement to give women the right to control their own bodies (which Republicans oppose), to justify their bizarre and insane opposition to COVID vaccines.. –

The Republicans routinely oppose laws to protect workers’ health and safety. They oppose laws to protect the environment. They not only don’t want to address the growing inequality of wealth and income in the U.S., they actively and deliberately pursue policies that would make them even more unequal. They oppose any and all efforts to stop the carnage guns and their easy availability are wreaking on this country and its people. And their undying commitment to maintaining the use of fossil fuels as our primary energy source will lead literally to the extinction of the entire human race as our planet becomes so beset with climate change it will no longer support human life. The lesson is if you vote for a Republican – or a so-called “Democrat” like Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema who supports the Republican agenda and the contemptible filibuster that gives a minority of Senators veto power over the entire country – you are voting for policies that will kill people.