“I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance said after the school shooting in Georgia last week. “But if you’re, if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets.” His solution to prevent them from walking through the front door and killing “a bunch of children.” Bolster school security.
Now let’s look at the facts Vance and other Republicans don’t like, but will never admit.
First, it’s obvious from his full statement that he didn’t mean we need to accept school shootings themselves as a fact of life. He was referring to how easy it is for perpetrators to bring their murder weapons into schools. And although he doesn’t want the school his children attend to have added security, he also doesn’t want “these psychos” going “after our kids.”
“We don’t have to like the reality we live in,” he concluded, but “we got to deal with it.”
That view of reality is confined by facts he didn’t acknowledge. Regardless of what solution Republicans propose, they refuse to consider expanding background checks for gun purchases. Or banning semi-automatic weapons like the one used in this and other mass shootings. Even raising the age to purchase them from 18 to 21 is off the table.
Which all point to the main fact Republicans can’t admit. They’re afraid of America’s gun lobby.
That’s exactly what President Donald Trump told them during a White House meeting after the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida. He said it made no sense that an 18-year-old could purchase a semi-automatic weapon but not a handgun. He asked Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) if a bipartisan bill he helped prepare would raise the age to 21. His answer was no.
“You know why,” Trump replied. “You’re afraid of the NRA.”
But by the end of the day, he backed away from insisting that provision be part of the bill. Or as Fox News commentator Geraldo Rivera put it in a tweet, the president who many claim to be a fighter “blinked in face of ferocious opposition from #NRA.”
Trump’s quick retreat also undermined the bravado he expressed a few days earlier. After reports revealed the armed officer on duty in Parkland didn’t go into the school to defend the students, he told a group of governors “I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon.”
Although, he added “You never know until you’re tested.”
On that point, he was right.
As I wrote in February regarding a school security measure Sen. Shelly Hughes (R-Palmer) sponsored, the shooting in Parkland and Uvalde, Texas, should serve as forever reminders that armed police officers at the school or arriving in response to an active shooter won’t necessarily have the courage to stop them.
Another fact Vance’s limited view of reality ignores is most places of worship, grocery stores, theaters and other public places where parents take their children are easy targets for mass murderers too.
The Table Mesa King Soopers in Boulder, Colorado, is probably one of the rare exceptions. Three years ago, a lone gunman killed 10 people there. The first two victims were gunned down in the parking lot which I had left just 15 minutes earlier. They added armed security when it reopened the following year.
Like Fred Meyer, King Soopers is part of Kroger’s nationwide chain of grocery stores. Any crazed gunman — it’s almost always a man — can figure out what little security they have is focused on shoplifting. Republicans aren’t about to suggest doing more unless the NRA promoted it.
Thanks to whistleblowers who exposed financial fraud and corruption in the NRA, it’s not as powerful a lobby today. But fear of its voting membership has been baked into Republican DNA for three decades. Indeed, it may have mutated into their fear of standing up to Trump while he was in office and again after it became evident that he would coast to the party’s nomination for the presidency.
And a party frozen by fear isn’t capable of crafting legislation to protect our children from the scourge of gun violence in America.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector. Columns, My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire. Have something to say? Here’s how to submit a My Turn or letter.
