This appalling murder can help us confront the scourge of gun violence

Republican Charlie Kirk is dead. So is former Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark.

Two clearly political assassinations in the past four months.

And a new study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association’s journal, Pediatrics, suggests that most of the deaths from the more than 250 mass shootings in America so far this year could also be classified as resulting from politics.

How did we get here, and what do we do?

In 2008, the in-the-NRA’s-pocket Republican Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia did much the same thing that Sam Alito would later do with his Dobbs anti-abortion ruling: he reached back hundreds of years to look for a definition at the time the Second Amendment was written for how people then viewed the phrase “bear arms” and then twisted it beyond recognition.

The result was the corrupt Heller decision, as I lay out in The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, which unleashed a new wave of guns on an unsuspecting America.

It was followed two years later by McDonald v Chicago, another NRA-purchased all-Republican decision striking down Chicago’s gun control laws and forcing cities and Blue states to accept more weapons whether their people — through their elected officials — wanted that tsunami of guns in their communities or not.

As Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his dissent:

“Although the Court’s decision in this case might be seen as a mere adjunct to its decision in Heller, the consequences could prove far more destructive — quite literally — to our Nation’s communities and to our constitutional structure.”

As we saw yesterday with the right’s new martyr, and have been seeing in the daily toll of gun deaths that America suffers from — alone among all other nations in the world — Stevens was prescient.

We are literally the only country in the world that is experiencing this magnitude of gun crisis. Half of the guns in civilian hands in the entire world are here in the United States, so it shouldn’t surprise anybody that the leading cause of childhood death in the US is bullets and political assassinations have become routine.

The study in Pediatricslooked at child gun deaths in America before and after the 2010 McDonald decision. What they found is shocking.

That decision caused two major changes in gun laws across America. The first was that nearly every red state loosened their gun laws, sometimes in the extreme, even allowing open carry of semiautomatic weapons of war without any permit or regulation. Most blue states, on the other hand, looked for and found ways around the decision to actually tighten their gun control laws.

The result was astonishing. Between 2011 and 2023, the study period, red states that had loosened their gun laws saw 7,453 more children killed by firearms than the pre-McDonald statistical trends would have predicted had the Republicans on the Court not further loosened gun laws.

In blue states that maintained or strengthened their gun laws, though, child gun deaths remained the same as before McDonald and Heller, and, to quote the study:

“Four states (California, Maryland, New York, and Rhode Island) had decreased pediatric firearm mortality after McDonald v Chicago, all of which were in the strict firearms law group.”

Melissa Hortman was a strong advocate of gun control laws. Charlie Kirk opposed them. Both are dead by gunfire, along with hundreds of children and adults this year.

When Hortman was murdered by a politically-inspired rightwing thug, some conservatives on X and other platforms celebrated.

Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee, for example, tweeted: “This is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way,” along with a picture of the shooter. An hour later, again showing the suspect’s picture, Senator Lee wrote: “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” apparently trying to humorously reference Minnesota’s Democratic Governor Tim Walz and his advocacy for gun control.

Yesterday, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, some liberals were posting the equivalent of “good riddance” to social media platforms, some making Lee’s obscene posts seem tame.

Both are reprehensible.

Instead, let’s take this moment to reflect on how the NRA’s work over the past decades — often funded and supported by Vladimir Putin’s Russia (where gun control is rigid) — killed both of them. And tens of thousands of children and adults over the years.

This week NPR reported that school shootings have spawned a $4 billion industry selling everything from bulletproof backpacks to “panic buttons, bullet-resistant whiteboards, facial recognition technology, training simulators, body armor, guns and tasers.”

They note:

“Tom McDermott, with the metal detector manufacturer CEIA USA, says schools used to be a small fraction of their U.S. business. Now they’re the majority.

“‘It’s not right. We need to solve this problem. It’s good for business, but we don't need to be selling to schools,’ McDermott says.

“Sarah McNeeley, a sales manager with SAM Medical, is selling trauma kits, which include tourniquets, clotting agents and chest seals. She says their customers are traditionally EMTs, fire departments and military medics, but increasingly, school districts.”

It’s insane that America’s answer to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court and the NRA flooding our country with deadly weapons is to create a multi-billion-dollar industry to stop bullets or ameliorate their damage in our public schools.

The vast majority of Americans want rational gun control laws instead of this Wild West insanity. Every other developed country in the world has them; not a single one forces their children through the trauma of active shooter drills or subjects them to metal detectors and requires them to occasionally come face-to-face with murderous psychopaths armed to the teeth.

It’s way past time for our politicians to wake the hell up, and hopefully the assassination of a far-right “gun rights” icon will cause at least a few Republicans to break with their party’s fealty to the weapons industry and join with Democrats to Make America Safe Again.