On October 25, eighteen people were killed by a mass shooter in Lewiston, Maine. The day after the shooting, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, in an interview with Sean Hannity, responded to the carnage:
Hannity: This happens with almost every shooting incident. The immediate call by the Left in this country: We need more gun laws. We need more legislation.
Johnson: At the end of the day, the problem is the human heart. It's not guns. It's not the weapons. Even today we have to protect the right of the citizens to protect themselves and that's the Second Amendment. That's why our party stands strongly for that.
I agree with the comments of your guest. This is not the time to be talking about legislation. We're in the middle of that crisis. . . .
That deliberately obtuse, cold-hearted response to this "shooting incident" is a familiar refrain from Republican apologists for the deadly gun culture their Supreme Court justices, Congressional caucuses, and state legislatures have brought us.
There have been 578 mass shootings -- defined as an incident in which at least 4 victims have been shot, whether killed or injured (not including the shooter) -- in the U.S. in 2023 as of this morning according to the Gun Violence Archive. The shooting last week in a bowling alley and a neighborhood bar in Lewiston was the deadliest this year.
Axios reports that what was once rare has become a commonplace:
Mass shootings are becoming deadlier and far more common. There were a total of eleven shootings in which at least 12 people died between 1949 and 2011. There have been 14 since then — more than one per year — including the 2017 shooting at a Las Vegas hotel that left 60 dead.
For two centuries, the First Amendment did not prohibit basic regulation of guns; such regulations have been present throughout American history. A radical far-right agenda, championed in recent decades by Leonard Leo's Federalist Society and funded by wealthy supporters, sought to change our conception of the Constitution. Ideologues invented a legal doctrine and pushed to pack the judiciary with zealots determined to impose their fraudulent 'originalist' dogma on the federal courts.
In May 2019, retired conservative justice John Paul Stevens deplored the high court's ahistorical turn regarding the Second Amendment, a turn which rejected well-established legislative history and judicial precedent, and severed the first words of the amendment, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to security of a free State," from its interpretation. Recalling the words of a previous conservative justice, Stevens wrote:
So well settled was the issue that, speaking on the PBS NewsHour in 1991, the retired Chief Justice Warren Burger described the National Rifle Association’s lobbying in support of an expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment in these terms: “One of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
With Donald Trump's three appointed justices to the nation's highest court, the far right's judicial crusade has succeeded in great measure. And in no area of public policy has their success been more thorough or more damaging than in their rulings on guns and the Second Amendment. With many issues -- voting rights, reapportionment, civil rights, reproductive freedom, marriage equality, immigration, business regulation, taxation -- the country may eventually succeed in pushing back against rightwing policies. But with guns, going back to a more sensible era, a time when mass shootings were exceptionally rare, may be next to impossible.
Republicans in office have sought to enact and enforce a twisted vision of the role of guns in American life. Through their efforts, the GOP has transformed our country. Easy access to guns, and especially to military assault rifles, has created a booming industry of weapons manufacturers; has led to the astonishing proliferation of guns among Americans; and has ensured that the number of shootings, especially mass shootings with high body counts, have become far more frequent.
With each "shooting incident," and especially with mass casualty events -- at schools, movie theaters, concerts, churches, workplaces, bars, and bowling alleys -- Americans have become more unsettled, more fearful, less safe. And a vicious cycle has begun to develop: more folks decide that they need guns to protect themselves as ordinary activities become fraught with the arbitrary, senseless possibility of getting gunned down.
There's no going back. More guns won't increase the sense of security that folks felt when assault rifles equipped our armed service personnel, and were not scattered among homes and neighborhoods throughout the country. Our risks of a deadly encounter from a deranged killer with a military weapon continue to rise. That's the America that Republican dogma about guns has brought us. It is, without question, a result of an extraordinarily successful campaign to transform our society.
But, instead of acknowledging the consequences of their public policy success, Republicans duck and cover, denying any responsibility for an era that represents the new normal: a time when Americans continue to be slaughtered in high numbers, when our safety and security have been ripped away.