The New York Daily News cover is a furious indictment of Republican lawmakers, who predictably turn to ‘God,’ the purportedly omnipotent Abrahamic deity figure who has never been seen, while eschewing any meaningful, or just any, gun law reform, even as everyone sees 30,000 Americans killed by guns each year. That’s more than 1.5 million gun deaths since 1968—more than the total number of Americans killed in all wars; more than the population of cities like San Francisco, Phoenix, Dallas and San Diego.
The Daily News, among too many others to list here, has had enough.
“As latest batch of innocent Americans are left dying in pools of blood, cowards who could truly end gun scourge continue to hide behind meaningless platitudes,” Thursday’s cover seethes. An accompanying article blasts the current field of Republican presidential candidates who “offer prayers, not solutions” in the face of an epidemic in which America averages more than a mass shooting per day.
Here’s a sampling of leading Republicans’ reactions to Wednesday’s gun massacre at a social services center serving disabled people in San Bernardino, California, which left 14 people dead and at least 17 wounded:
Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, Ben Carson, Donald Trump, Mike Huckabee, John Kasich and Reince Priebus are among other leading GOP figures who invoked ‘God in Heaven’ following the San Bernardino massacre, while refusing to even consider any earthly measures that could reduce the frequency and severity of America’s daily mass shootings.
Some from the more progressive side of the aisle were having none of it.
To be fair, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) also invoked ‘God’ upon hearing the tragic news out of San Bernardino:
But Murphy has been a staunch gun control advocate ever since the December 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, in which 26 people—including 20 very young children—were shot dead with legally-purchased guns in his Connecticut district. On Wednesday, he took to Twitter and took to task those who turn their heads upward toward mythical deities in the sky while ignoring the very real and ceaseless slaughter soaking the ground blood-red below their feet.
The three Democratic presidential candidates also called for action in the real world, not retreat into the spiritual world:
The only advanced nation which experiences daily—strike that, even regular; no, strike that, even rare—gun massacres is the only nation which enshrines the absurd “right” to own pistols, shotguns, automatic rifles, submachine guns, machine guns, flamethrowers, grenade launchers, anti-tank guns and other horrific weapons of war as a blessing from ‘God.’
Of course, there probably is no ‘God.’ There’s certainly no empirical evidence to support the existence of this never-seen deity. What there is, however, is plenty of evidence that societies that control guns control gun violence. And then there are the 30,000-plus Americans killed each year by bullets fired from guns fired by Americans exercising their ‘God’-given rights. These victims are real. They do exist. Perhaps we should focus our energies at preventing more needless deaths instead—or at the very least, in accompaniment with—offering meaningless prayers.
