Three people were detained by police in Kansas City, Missouri, in connection with a mass shooting of 22 people on Wednesday, including eight children and one deceased adult. It happened on a day when Kansas City Chiefs fans turned out in droves to attend a celebratory parade and rally commemorating the Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory. Initial statements by the police point to the violence being criminal conduct versus having its roots in terrorism.
Valentine’s Day originated as a feast day honoring the martyr St. Valentine. In Kansas City, it was a day for at least one more martyr who died because of the love some politicians have for unrestricted guns.
Wednesday was Valentine’s Day, a celebration that originated as a Christian feast day honoring the martyr St. Valentine. In modern times, it’s become a day for expressions of love. In Kansas City, it was a day for at least one more martyr who died because of the love some politicians have for unrestricted guns.
Wednesday was also the 16th anniversary of the mass shooting at Northern Illinois University and the sixth anniversary of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
Even on Valentine’s Day, strong romantic relationships require some boundaries. But certain American politicians’ love affair with guns seems unconstrained, especially in Missouri, where a law adopted in 2017 permits people to carry concealed guns without needing any background check or permit. The result has been dozens more deaths from firearms every year.
In August, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson chastised the mayors of Kansas City and St. Louis, the state’s largest cities, for proposing two new gun safety laws. The first would prohibit the purchase of bullets by those who are 18 and younger without parental consent. The second proposed law would have banned “switches” that convert pistols into fully automatic handguns that can empty an entire magazine with one pull of the trigger. That’s the kind of weapon that could easily be concealed in a large crowd and do maximum damage, like the carnage on Wednesday. Parson didn’t like those prohibitions:
“I think you have to be very careful to stay in your lanes. Cities can’t just go out there and do what they want to do, and when there is a constitutional issue to it, or state legislatures do it, they can’t supersede that. Just like we can’t supersede the federal government,” he said in August. “Whether you like it or not, when the law is passed, you’ve got to obey the law, is the way I look at it, and there are no exceptions.”
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, whom Parson appointed, weighed in as well. He said in a written warning that he would “resist any effort to infringe on the right of the people of Missouri to keep and bear arms.”
There’s more. Missouri also tried to bar the police from enforcing gun laws until the U.S. Supreme Court said that was unconstitutional. It’s no wonder that there’s a correlation between weak gun laws and murder rates in our states, and that Missouri is near the top in homicide rates across the U.S. As the gun safety organization Giffords noted in a social media post Wednesday: “Missouri has everything the gun lobby wants: No universal background checks / No Licensing or training requirement / No extreme risk protection orders / No large capacity magazine ban / No CVI funding / It also has the fourth highest gun death rate in the nation. Gun laws save lives.”
We’re playing pretend about gun safety restrictions.
America’s leaders are not serious about enforcing existing gun laws. The agency responsible for enforcing our gun safety regulations is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. That agency must try, somehow, to enforce gun laws, track guns used in violent crime, inspect gun shops that don’t comply with rules, work gang cases and cases involving other dangerous groups that acquire stolen weapons or other unlawfully obtained weapons. They must do all that and investigate arson and bombings with only about 2,600 special agents. That’s fewer than the number of total employees at the Kansas City Police Department. It’s laughable. We’re playing pretend about gun safety restrictions.
Rest assured, if Donald Trump again wins the presidency or the GOP maintains control of the House, even less will be done to enforce the laws already on the books and keep us safe. Trump told us his stance against gun reform Friday at the NRA’s Great American Outdoor Show in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. “No one will lay a finger on your firearms,” he said. Trump spoke in Iowa last month the same week a mass shooting at a school there left a principal dead. Trump said that deadly shooting was “horrible, so surprising to see it here. But have to get over it, we have to move forward.”
Law enforcement executives must now concede, and the American public must grasp, that the combination of unfettered gun possession, unenforced gun safety laws and the number of stolen guns on the streets are inconsistent with securing a major public special event. No police chief can credibly guarantee the absence of gun violence at a massive event unless everyone passes through a magnetometer, which is neither viable nor desired.
For those who want to return to a time when parades and schools and churches and synagogues weren’t killing fields, those who really want to make America great again — vote for candidates at all levels who are ready to break off the love affair with unrestricted guns. It’s a toxic romance that’s headed over a cliff. It’s time to let it go. Just get over it.