Audrey Hale was a law-abiding citizen.
Until she wasn’t.
Hale, apparently a transgender person who reportedly went by the name of Aiden, legally purchased seven guns over the past few years, including a pair of assault-style rifles, one of which was a Lead Star Arms Grunt 10.5, and a 9mm pistol, which Hale used to mow down three children and three members of the staff at the Covenant Church School in Nashville on Monday.
Authorities acknowledged that Hale, killed by police during the assault, had no prior arrest record so no red flags were raised in the background check. In that way, Hale mimicked another previously law-abiding citizen, Stephen Paddock, who opened fire on a crowd attending a country music festival in Las Vegas in 2017, killing 60 and wounding more than 400 and also didn’t have a police record.
The Hale barrage was one of 125 mass shootings, and counting, that have occurred nationwide this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Governments, both federal and in many states, did nothing after the Paddock atrocity and you can bet neither the United States Congress nor the good ol’ boy legislature in Tennessee will take the necessary steps to curb the never-ending gun violence that has seized the nation by the throat.
So it goes.
Mass shooting incidents, like the one in Nashville, distinctive this time only because three nine-year-old kids were cut down, have become so commonplace that elected officials aren’t even bothering to offer the insipid “thoughts and prayers” reaction anymore. Rep. Andy Barr, R-Lexington, was the only member of the delegation to take note of the lunacy via Twitter, writing, “As a father, my heart aches for the parents and students who suffered a terrible tragedy today in Nashville. I am grateful that law enforcement acted swiftly and decisively.”
No doubt the dead nine-year-olds are grateful as well.
Less than three months into 2023, the U.S. has experienced more than 4,200 homicides – a total comparable to the population of Crescent Springs. An estimated 20,138 Americans died as a result of firearms, excluding suicides, last year. And in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation reached a 28-year high with 47,286 firearms deaths.
Congratulations, America. You earned it. USA! USA!
John Yarmuth, of Louisville, who retired earlier this year after serving 16 years as the Democratic congressman from the Third District, called out his colleagues on Twitter after the shooting, stating his “blood boils at the craven politicians who refuse to address the plague of gun violence in our country.”
Yarmuth was particularly vexed by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-SomewhereorotherLewisCounty, the biggest gun nut in Congress – remember the Christmas photo of our boy Tommy and his family holding an arsenal of weapons in front of the tree? – asserting, “Your sacred guns took six innocent lives today. Where is your humanity? Do you give a crap? Nothing in your history suggests you do.”
He didn’t spare the rod with the other GOP members of the Commonwealth’s delegation – Rep. Morgan McGarvey, of Louisville, Yarmuth’s successor, is the only Democrat – ripping Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, of Louisville, and those who have pledged allegiance not to the American flag but to the National Rifle Association and its campaign donations. Yarmuth asked, “What’s in your heart right now? Do you truly hurt for the victims, or is this just another public relations issue you have to finesse?”
“Those of us, and we are a substantial majority, who think we need to do much more to prevent senseless massacres like today’s, have to name names, get in their faces, and demand action. We cannot let them slide.”
Ending, he said, “They have blood on their hands.”
Responses to Yarmuth’s claims, mostly from anonymous posters who don’t carry the courage of their convictions, thus permitting them to rant stupidly, used mostly old, refuted boilerplate, primarily having to do with the rights of, you guessed it, “law-abiding citizens” like, apparently, Audrey Hale and Stephen Paddock.
“There is not one single law that you could enact that would stop this. Not one!!,” stated one poster, oneTermAndy1. “Quit pandering to voters. The only thing that will ever stop this is ending the negative rhetoric and start creating a society full of 2 parent families and law-abiding productive members of society.”
Some amateur psychiatrists blamed presumably all gun violence on “mental health” issues, corrupting Hale’s status as transgender as a jumping off point.
“Sir. You started out strong,” retorted @realmotorgod0. “But make no mistake it’s a mental health crisis not a gun violence crisis. Politicians need to focus on mental illness. And get their heads out their asses, work together and get our country back on track.”
No one, of course, cites a reputable study proving that transgender folks are more prone to violence than cis males or females. But that was a common refrain throughout. The Highviëwan hit a daily double, citing mental health and the right to self-protection.
“I could give a rat’s ass about the NRA,” he wrote. “The actions of a f—-d up individual have no bearing on my rights to protect me and mine.”
“Way to go on,” posted jamesspeaksthetruth. “The bodies are not in the ground yet, but you are slobbering like a dog. So now you speak up. What has been going on in DC and Chicago for years? Yet nothing from you. guns, knives, cars, drugs, etc, do not kill. People kill. Mental illness kills.”
There were more refrains, obviously, some accusing Yarmuth and others of putting the onus on guns instead of the shooter – neither he nor anyone else claim Hale isn’t culpable. And the cite the radical and dangerous Second Amendment position staked out by a degraded Supreme Court that holds gun restrictions that aren’t analogues to laws passed in the 1700s when the nation was new – before the Tommy gun or the AK-47 or any weapon with the sole purpose of killing another human being was extent – are unconstitutional.
It was McConnell who set the stage for this. Thank him.
The justices have the beginnings of an idea. Let’s look back to the past – the late 1990s and early 2000s, when semi-automatic weapons were banned and the murder rate fell. Then let’s ban bump stocks and high-capacity magazines and ditch the senseless open-carry laws. Then go from there.
It was originally Albert Einstein who said it, and it has been repeated so frequently over the years that it has become something of a cliché — Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The nation has been operating under lax to non-existent gun control laws for years now. The result, as Judge Flatt said in the great film Nobody’s Fool, “You know my feelings about arming morons: you arm one, you’ve got to arm them all, otherwise it wouldn’t be good sport.”
One thing is obvious – what this nation is doing regarding firearms at this point in history is not working. We’ve armed morons and every Tom, Dick, and Harry imaginable. Einstein made the entire, insane mess very plain. Isn’t it time the United States tried something else? Something that works?
Your perspective is one based on this fallacy:
Firearms are the cause of violence.
You are using a correlation attempting to prove causation and the only way you can have even a modicum of success in that “Don Quixote Adventure” is to appeal to the very warranted emotions in the wake of the senseless violence. The killer used weapons to display her sickness.
Speaking of senseless. Your illogical notion that “we’ve armed morons and every Tom Dick and Harry” tells of your big government approach to issues. Your unstated assumption is that the government doesn’t just allow, but doles out fire arms. And the next logical conclusion according to your misguided crusade is to use the government to “fix” the situation.
The default according to the founding documents of our great Republic is: citizens possess weapons of war to keep an authoritarian government at bay. The presence of guns ownership has always been, but the amount of mental illness in our society has increased dramatically. This increase of ill mental health during an increase of violence is also a correlation, but a much stronger one that more soundly assists sober minds in attempting to dissect the violence.
Until we find the cause of this senseless killing, we aren’t going to be able to prescribe an effective regiment of care.