Gun Control
Among political hot button issues in the United States, it is hard from one day to the next to know which are the hottest buttons. Yesterday it was abortion because of the Supreme Court ruling on Mifepristone. That unanimous ruling has not ended the controversy altogether because all it did was establish that the plaintiff lacked standing because they were not either users or prescribers of Mifepristone. Strangely enough, that “none-of-your-fucking-business” defense is sort of the central point of most anti-abortion cases, holy-roller old white men telling young women and their doctors what to do with their own bodies or what not to do to help a patient. Mifepristone is what is called a progesterone blocker. It has several medicinal uses for rare conditions, but is mostly used to force the premature end of a pregnancy, whether to force a medically necessary miscarriage or to simply terminate an unwanted pregnancy. It works for pregnancies within 10 weeks and is the single biggest means of abortion in America. As such, the conservative and faith-based crusaders have been so frustrated with the existence and easy access to Mifepristone that they wrangled a relatively junior U.S. district court judge in Texas, named Matthew Kacsmaryk, to allow the case to proceed and then advance. Despite stopping short of banning the important drug to many women’s reproductive health, conservative and often liberally-reviled Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, couldn’t resist and subtly slipped language into his opinion that could expand protections for physicians who refuse to provide emergency abortions, potentially imperiling the lives of patients.
Republicans are shit scared of the abortion issue since they know that the vast majority of Americans, even including many Republicans, are in favor of abortion rights (not to mention contraception rights). They recognize that if they follow the path preferred by their most MAGA members, they may well pay the price in lost votes. Mifepristone is a highly charged issue to the community on both sides. To the pro-lifers, it’s a much too convenient, virtually over-the-counter drug that undermines all their best efforts to make life at abortion clinics a gauntlet to be run only by the bravest women and doctors. To everyone else (60+% of the population), it is an important medication that saves lives, plain and simple. This is really a hot button because it’s about people who are neither doctors nor affected parties who want to impose their ideology on people’s lives in a potentially life and death moment. Hot, hot, hot.
The next big issue in the political hit parade is inflation and the economy. I am convinced that this would not be such a big hot bottom were it not for the strident politicization of it. Both Republicans and Democrats know that election after election, no issue is more consistently at the top of the hot button list than the economy. Sometimes its because unemployment is raging, but that is decidedly not the case this year with a record run of below 4% unemployment numbers. Sometimes its the strength of the dollar, but that’s not the case with the dollar flirting with parity against both the Euro and Sterling. It continues to kick the butt of the Yen even though it always fades against the Uber-conservative Swiss Franc. The point is, the U.S. economy has performed as well or better than the rest of the developed world for the past five years and everyone knows it or feels it. It can be an issue with the stock market, but the stock market just wants to keep going up and up and no one seems to want to attribute it to any politicians. My red friends just like to say the U.S. market is strong and that’s just a given. But inflation has everyone wigging out. If you look at the array of global economies looked at through the lens of inflation, you see a common meaningful bump up due to COVID, with a little bit also caused by the Ukraine War. No one on the right wants to admit that the U.S. has done a better job of wrestling the inflation beast to the mat than the U.S. because that’s not a tactic that wins elections and winning seems to be everything now and that seems to outweigh any form of the truth. Republicans like to say that we will pay for all this fiscal stimulus down the road with higher deficits, but that belies the reality that is etched in historical fact that Republican administrations have caused most of the deficit in the past forty years due to repeated tax cuts that have severely impaired the nations income generation.
And then we finally get to guns and the Second Amendment. These days its a toss-up whether the biggest political football is the First Amendment or the Second Amendment. I almost feel that if James Madison could see how we have all abused his Bill of Rights by interpreting it as we see politically fit moment by moment, he might be sorry that he penned it at all. Trump feels the First Amendment that he wraps himself in should allow him to tell the Big Lie and disparage and threaten the daughter of a judge hearing his case. And, of course, the NRA-funded interpretation of what was intended by our founders by the Second Amendment borders on the absurd. In the same way that the U.S. can and should be comparing itself to the rest of the developed world when it comes to economic measures including inflation, why aren’t we comparing ourselves to that same world when it comes to household ownership of guns and specifically to the way in which guns are allowed to be carried and what types that includes, as well as how people are allowed to come about acquiring guns (Hunter Biden being the exception, who has been caught in the gun control net).
I do not want to rehash the extreme overindulgence in guns that America has allowed itself and how it grossly exceeds that level of ownership in any other part of the world, including totalitarian states like Russia. No one can make sense of it other than to suggest that the hearty strain of individualism that prevails in America requires and justifies that level of gun ownership. There is no talking to gun people no matter what level of atrocities get inflicted upon the population. We have had children regularly slaughtered in schools and public places. Sandy Hook took down twenty 6 and 7 year olds. We have had young people gunned down in nightclubs like the 49 felled at Pulse in Florida. We have had a shooter spray bullets from a Las Vegas hotel down on over 500 victims at a concert, killing 58. Uvalde with its 19 student casualties taught us that we are woefully deficient at protecting our children from the deranged shooters and their automatic weapons.
Today the Supreme Court reversed a ban on “bump stocks”, which turn semi-automatic legal weapons into de facto illegal automatic weapons. They had been banned by federal legislation in 2018 after the Las Vegas mass shooting, but apparently six years is enough for everyone to lose their mind again on the right hand side of SCOTUS. Clarence Thomas promulgated a very technical majority opinion of why bump stocks were mischaracterized as “machine guns”, complete with mechanical drawings. Of course, that ignored the damage the thousands of them that remain in circulation have inflicted. There is simply no legal or moral sense in it. Polls show that 64% of Americans want assault-style weapons banned altogether, as they were between 1994 and 2004. They do not appeal to sportsmen, hunters or target shooters. They only appeal to people who are enough degrees off top dead center to want a fully automatic rifle as the cheapest price, for God knows what purpose other than no good. But let’s not promote gun control because the Second Amendment in its silliest interpretation is sacrosanct, right?