The LuLac Edition #4, 947, April 12th, 2023

 WRITE ON WEDNESDAY 

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This week we share the editorial from The Times Leader regarding the killings in Nashville. 

MORE DEAD CHILDREN, STILL NO DECENCY

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. … You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”

That famous rebuke from attorney Joseph Welch to Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, during the infamous 1954 “Army–McCarthy” hearings, has been on our minds over the past few days.

We were thinking about it after Monday’s deadly shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville, when Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) called the assassination of three 9-year-olds and three adults “a horrible, horrible situation,” adding “we’re not gonna fix it,” when reporters asked what Congress would do about school shootings.

“Criminals are gonna be criminals,” Burchett drawled. Lawmakers, he said, would only “mess things up.”

When specifically asked what could be done to protect children like his own daughter, Burchett responded: “homeschool,” but he also acknowledged that “some people don’t have that option.”

The cowardice, the nihilism, the lack of decency are jaw-dropping, but also not surprising and far too widespread.

The cowardice, the nihilism, the lack of decency are jaw-dropping, but also not surprising and far too widespread.

The school is located in the district represented by Republican Rep. Andy Ogles, who previously posed for a family Christmas photo showing them grinning as they toted high-powered guns.

 “Why would I regret a photograph with my family exercising my rights to bear arms,” he replied to the controversy.

Ogles also sent his thoughts and prayers.

A similar lack of decency has been on display by several other members of the party, who in February decided to make a bold fashion statement by sporting AR-15 lapel pins on the House floor.

Nashville police said the Covenant School shooter was armed with a handgun, an AR-15-style rifle and a semi-automatic pistol-caliber carbine.

Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), a gun shop owner who took credit for distributing the pins, thought it was funny that they were “triggering some of my Democratic colleagues.”

Decency.

Back to Burchett, who clearly realized how his glib response to those reporters sounded, said he had been “frustrated,” and eagerly sought to explain.

“I knew before I said it that folks were gonna go crazy over it and I get that,” he told the Knoxville News Sentinel. “But it doesn’t change the fact that we need a spiritual awakening in this country. And if we had that, a true revival, then this type of thing would not happen.”

Lest we forget, Covenant School is a private Christian elementary school, and law enforcement said the shooter had once been a student there.

Oh yes, as the pro-gun faction was quick to point out, the shooter was transgender and also under a doctor’s care for an unspecified “emotional disorder.”

Many have been quick to grossly tie the two things together (as in “all trans people are mentally ill”), with the more opportunistic (including Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene) going so far as to suggest that the shooting was an act of terrorism with Antifa ties.

The shooter, Audrey Hale, 28, did leave a manifesto, which is expected to be released to the public once the FBI has completed a review of its contents; that had not happened as this was being written on Saturday.

Many in the thoughts and prayers crowd talked about how untreated mental health issues are the cause of such carnage, not guns. Others have called for increased security in schools.

Our nation absolutely needs more funding and focus on mental health issues, likewise for beefing up school security. Maybe this time Congress will make real progress on those issues.

It’s intellectually dishonest to pretend the flood of high-capacity weapons that can rapidly tear bodies apart isn’t a factor. As the Washington Post found, the number of them has spiked from an estimated 1.5 million at the time of a 1994 ban (which lapsed in 2004) to about 20 million today. The number of deadly mass shootings using them has increased as well, from Sandy Hook to Uvalde to Nashville.

Confiscating these guns clearly is not an option, even if the will were there.

 Restrictions on future sales, as well as a government buyback option for the guns and magazines, would be better solutions, as President Joe Biden has previously suggested.

We know there are reasonable people on both sides of this argument who want to respect the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding gun owners and protect Americans from further carnage. Last year’s passage of bipartisan gun safety legislation, signed by Biden in June, reminds us of that.

Presently, however, members of the Republican-controlled House have made it clear no new gun control action is likely.

Meanwhile, Rep. Barry Moore (R-Alabama) in February introduced a bill that would declare the AR-15 style rifle the “National Gun of the United States.”

The move is more likely more symbolic than anything, and what it symbolizes to us is that too many of our elected officials have zero sense of decency.