‘You do it to yourself, just you, you and no-one else.’ That was the Radiohead lyric that came to my mind as I was reflecting on America’s most recent school shooting yesterday. The new, ‘Only in America’ tagline is no longer the moniker for inspiring stories of success, but of the irrationally tragic gun violence that only exists to this extreme extent here. The cause of death for children in this country that is most likely is from guns, surpassing auto fatalities and all cancers and deadly diseases. You would think we would have learned from Columbine, or Sandy Hook, but this exists as a largely one sided political problem.

Republicans in both chambers of Congress have torpedoed every attempt at responsible gun legislation for my adult lifetime behind the monetary backing of gun lobbyists. With each passing tragedy, nothing is able to penetrate the wall of strategic indifference to a national epidemic. We don’t know all the details yet, but a 28 year old woman was able to wander into a school with not one but two assault rifles and a pistol to murder 6 people before being killed by police. I hesitate to even write this today, because I could probably end up doing the same post in two weeks.

While cozying up with Wall Street is a bipartisan elixir, gun regulation is not, and we need to start holding these out of control conservatives accountable for the damage they are doing to our society. They frequently malign statistics by citing total numbers instead of per capita numbers about gun violence and murder rates in cities run by Democrats. This is something often quipped by presidential wokeful Ron DeSantis, despite the fact that the murder rate is higher in Florida than either New York or California. He is actively pushing a permitless carry law, so you may be seeing a lot more of those, ‘Florida Man’ stories in the news.

Lauren Boebert, a lunatic representing Colorado (Yes, the Columbine state) stood in congress to declare that Americans possess 46% of the guns in the world, and followed the statement saying, ‘I think we need to get our numbers up boys and girls.’ This kind of idiotic sentiment is far too pervasive among the far right. Marjorie Taylor Green, a lunatic representing Georgia said, ‘If Steve Bannon and I had organized that (The January 6th Assault on the Capital), we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.’ After backlash she claimed it was sarcasm, but this kind of rhetoric from elected officials is dangerous.

I’ll be driving through Indiana again tomorrow so how could I forget Mike Pence, ‘The truth is, the most violent and lawless cities in America have the most stringent gun controls.’ Despite all of the negative press that Chicago gets, Indiana actually has a very comparable homicide rate to Illinois (11.2 and 9.7 per 100,000 respectively). The point he is trying to make is also obliterated by the fact that 66% of the guns used in crimes in Chicago come from neighboring states with weaker laws like Indiana. I’m not being hyperbolic to say I’m more worried about being shot at a gas station in Indiana than I am on the Chicago Metra.

The truth is that an assault rifle serves no civilian purpose but to commit mass homicide, and we should all be voting in the direction of re-instating the national assault weapons ban. On my bucket list next to Medicare for All is a national mandatory buyback program to get these weapons out of mass circulation, but that is a pipe dream. Locally, we should all work to support candidates who enforce ‘Red Flag’ laws that would drastically reduce incidents of domestic violence. We can make progress together if we try, ‘If I had a gun, I’d shoot a hole into the sun, and love would burn this city down for you.’