You don’t fuck with the gun nuts
Sure, there’s going to be a big gun deal because Republicans are willing to come to the table this time.
In the wake of deadly mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, Representative Chris Jacobs of New York, a soft-spoken congressman serving his first full term in the House, stunned fellow Republicans by embracing a federal assault weapons ban and limits on high-capacity magazines.
Speaking from his suburban Buffalo district a week ago, about 10 miles from the grocery store where 10 Black residents were slaughtered, Mr. Jacobs framed his risky break from bedrock Republican orthodoxy as bigger than politics: “I can’t in good conscience sit back and say I didn’t try to do something,” he said.
It took only seven days for political forces to catch up with him.
On Friday, facing intense backlash from party leaders, a potential primary from the state party chairman and a forceful dressing down from Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Jacobs announced that he would abandon his re-election campaign.
The episode, which played out as President Biden pleaded with lawmakers in Washington to pass a raft of new laws to address gun violence, may be a portent for proponents of gun control, who had welcomed Mr. Jacobs’s evolution on the issue as a sign that the nation’s latest mass tragedies might break a decades-old logjam in Washington.
It also serves as a crisp encapsulation of just how little deviation on gun policy Republican Party officials and activists are willing to tolerate from their lawmakers, despite broad support for gun safety measures by Americans.
As Chris Hayes said:
An increasingly mainstream message of gun maximalists is that the *reason* to be armed is so that you can use violence or the threat of it to get your way in the political sphere, basically:”People in government need to worry we’ll pump their bodies full of lead if they cross us”
In fact, under a certain (once fringe, now common) reading , that’s the whole *point* of the second amendment. People should be sufficiently armed to be able to murder agents of the state en masse if it comes to that.
This an *obviously* deranged reading of it all, totally incompatible with basic principles of civic life and liberal democracy, but it casts a very long and ominous shadow over our politics right now. One that’s getting longer by the day.
Here’s just one example basically at random, subtly dropped in towards the end of the ad. The second amendment is so people can protect themselves from “intruders or an overly intrusive government.”
Just play out what that means. You have the right to shoot an intruder to your home. And you have to right to…put a bullet in the head of someone from the government who is doing things that are “overly intrusive”
That’s why, of course, as Stevens’ dissent in Heller so persuasively shows, the “well-regulated militia” stuff in the text of the amendment isn’t just throat clearing. The Founders were smart enough not have their new government cede its monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
Originally tweeted by Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) on June 3, 2022.
I think this literal, physical fear of their own voters is a hugely important factor in Republican politics.