Don’t mess with Sheriff Mitch
by digby
It’s going to be very hard for any primary challenger to get to the right of Mitch McConnell on guns. He sent out this email today:
The gun-grabbers are in full battle mode. And they are serious.
What’s at stake?
There are almost too many schemes to list. But President Obama’s worst center around:
-The Feinstein Gun Ban, which will criminalize firearms by how they look.
-A thinly-veiled national gun registration scheme hidden under the guise of “background checks” to ensure federal government minders gain every bureaucratic tool they need for full-scale confiscation.
-An outright BAN on magazines holding more than 10 rounds.
-And that’s not even close to the end of it.
23 new Executive Orders.
It is almost hard to believe the sheer breadth and brazenness of this attempt to gut our Constitution.
Well, Mitch McConnell is not going to stand aside.
To be honest, I can see this sort of thing coming from the left on certain issues. In fact, I did, during the Bush years. Where we were upset about indefinite detention and habeas corpus and torture, they’re upset about curbs on gun ownership. I guess we all have our own constitutions.
I think am just going to start parroting back to them what they said to me during that time: “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” And I will just point out that domestic gun violence amounts to many, many more deaths than those that happened on 9/11. See for me, this is as scary as terrorism and a lot more common — and I honestly do not believe that having more guns at the ready will fix it:
Just after seven-thirty on the morning of February 27th, a seventeen-year-old boy named T. J. Lane walked into the cafeteria at Chardon High School, about thirty miles outside Cleveland. It was a Monday, and the cafeteria was filled with kids, some eating breakfast, some waiting for buses to drive them to programs at other schools, some packing up for gym class. Lane sat down at an empty table, reached into a bag, and pulled out a .22-calibre pistol. He stood up, raised the gun, and fired. He said not a word.
Russell King, a seventeen-year-old junior, was sitting at a table with another junior, Nate Mueller. King, shot in the head, fell face first onto the table, a pool of blood forming. A bullet grazed Mueller’s ear. “I could see the flame at the end of the gun,” Mueller said later. Daniel Parmertor, a sixteen-year-old snowboarder, was shot in the head. Someone screamed “Duck!” Demetrius Hewlin, sixteen, was also shot in the head, and slid under the table. Joy Rickers, a senior, tried to run; Lane shot her as she fled. Nickolas Walczak, shot in his neck, arm, back, and face, fell to the floor. He began crawling toward the door.
Ever since the shootings at Columbine High School, in a Denver suburb, in 1999, American schools have been preparing for gunmen. Chardon started holding drills in 2007, after the Virginia Tech massacre, when twenty-three-year-old Seung-Hui Cho, a college senior, shot fifty-seven people in Blacksburg.
At Chardon High School, kids ran through the halls screaming “Lockdown!” Some of them hid in the teachers’ lounge; they barricaded the door with a piano. Someone got on the school’s public-address system and gave instructions, but everyone knew what to do. Students ran into classrooms and dived under desks; teachers locked the doors and shut off the lights. Joseph Ricci, a math teacher, heard Walczak, who was still crawling, groaning in the hallway. Ricci opened the door and pulled the boy inside. No one knew if the shooter had more guns, or more rounds. Huddled under desks, students called 911 and texted their parents. One tapped out, “Prayforus.”
I realize that we won’t stop all these events by tightening up the gun laws. We are a gun culture and there are a lot of disturbed and angry people out there. But I think it only makes sense to try to shut down the pump (or, at least, get people to drink from a different well.)