Parkland

I was in Parkland two days after the massacre in 2018. I did some interviews with parents, educators, and students at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, all shaken with anger and despair, feelings that in the following months would inspire the energy behind a movement for gun control. It was a movement led by the students themselves, that would sweep the nation and play a critical role in the political shift towards Democrats in the last election.

Like most of the country, I cheered on the dozens of students who boarded the buses to Tallahassee that day to offer their "reasonable" gun control proposals to the state legislature only to be ignored and insulted by state pols.

Now three years later, some of those feelings of grief and anger have returned as I watch video of gun-toting white-supremacist, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene berating anti-gun student leaders and mocking news of the massacre that killed 17 people at MSD and wounded 17 others and still no significant gun laws on the books. 

Rep. Greene is easy to hate unless you're one of the thousands of north Georgia Republicans who elected her. Or one of the MAGA cultists who make up a large chunk of the party's base and who cheer wildly as she promises to protect gun owners from the claws of encroaching "communists" (You know they're everywhere in Georgia). She even suggests that the horrifying school shootings were pre-staged events. 

But Greene isn't the real problem here. The real problem is that in the three years since the MSD massacre, and despite all the student protests, nothing has been done in the way of meaningful federal gun-control legislation and despite his campaign promise to ban assault weapons, nothing on Biden's current agenda indicates it's a priority for Democrats. 

That's because Dems fear losing their working-class base and red-state Republicans are threatening to block enforcement once a bill is passed. Same as it ever was.

This, even in the wake of gun-toting militias storming government buildings and threatening the lives of legislators. Not to mention the horrible rise in the number of shootings in cities like Chicago. 

Federal gun control, including the outlawing of military assault weapons, has been dropped to near the bottom of the Democrats' legislative agenda ever since Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told Attorney General Eric Holder to "shut the fuck up" about the issue a decade ago.

According to Daniel Klaidman’s book, Kill or Capture, Emanuel became enraged after hearing that Holder had given a speech vowing to keep Obama's campaign promise to ban assault weapons.

"The comments roused the powerful gun lobby and its water carriers on Capitol Hill. ‘Senators to Attorney General: Stay Away from Our Guns’ read a press release issued by Senator Max Baucus of Montana -- a Democrat, no less," Klaidman wrote. "Emanuel was furious. He slammed his desk and cursed the attorney general. Holder was only repeating a position Obama had expressed during the campaign, but that was before the White House needed the backing of pro-gun Democrats from red states for their domestic agenda."

"The comments roused the powerful gun lobby and its water carriers on Capitol Hill. ‘Senators to Attorney General: Stay Away from Our Guns’ read a press release issued by Senator Max Baucus of Montana -- a Democrat, no less," Klaidman wrote. "Emanuel was furious. He slammed his desk and cursed the attorney general. Holder was only repeating a position Obama had expressed during the campaign, but that was before the White House needed the backing of pro-gun Democrats from red states for their domestic agenda."

Focusing on Taylor Greene is too easy. She's low-hanging fruit. Now that Dems have taken the White House and there's a Democratic majority in both houses, there's no excuse not to move ahead on this and finally do justice for the murdered Parkland students and the more than 240,000 students who have experienced gun violence at their schools since Columbine in 1999.  

The NRA has gone bankrupt. Public opinion (95% of Democrats) increasingly supports a ban on assault weapons and red-states aren't all that red these days.