Enough already! Ban these weapons NOW!

 Another school shooting (the 36^th, so sadly, in 2024 alone, down from 82 a year ago).

Yesterday, four people—two teachers and two fourteen-year-olds—were killed in Winder, Georgia’s Apalachee High School, by a student wielding an AR-style weapon.

Apalachee High in Winder, GA,
is the latest in the long, grim line
of assault-weapon shootings

The killer is a fourteen-year-old boy.

A fourteen-year-old boy who, for some reason, had access to a semi-automatic weapon that can fire up to 60 bullets per minute, bullets that fly at over 3200 feet per second, a terrifying velocity that can cause damage, as one trauma surgeon says, “like a grenade went off (inside the victim’s body).”

That the student obtained such a weapon is a matter for law enforcement (and why he would do such a thing is a matter for mental health experts), but the bigger issue is that such a weapon is available, at all.

There’s no argument, really. AR-style weapons should be banned.

The proof is evidenced by the heinous tally of death and destruction caused by shooters using the AR-style weapons.

That includes this—so horrifyingly—partial list of just some of the school shootings with an AR-style weapon:

Robb Elementary School, Uvalde, TX (2022): 21 killed

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Parkland, FL (2018): 17 killed

Sandy Hook Elementary, Newtown, CT (2012): 26 killed

Student survivors from the 2018 Parkland
 shooting are evacuated from their high school

(The shooting at Sandy Hook—and the loss of those 26 lives—as you may remember, was despicably and falsely championed by many on the right as a “false flag” operation, a  fake and staged event meant to further gun control interests).

And now we add Apalachee (four killed), the deadliest school shooting since six people were killed just last year at The Covenant School in Nashville, TN, by a killer using AR-style weapons.

And that doesn’t even include other mass shootings that used an AR-style weapon, such as in an Aurora, CO, movie theater (2012, 12 killed), a Sutherland Springs, TX, church (2017, 26 killed), a Pittsburgh, PA, synagogue (2018, 11 killed), or a country music festival in Las Vegas (2017, 58 killed).

It used to be you'd remember the sad details of a mass shooting because it was a rare and shocking  event. Now, however, details are lost, place names are often jumbled or forgotten because now--although still shocking--they have, instead, become relatively commonplace.

Don’t scream “SECOND AMENDMENT!” You’d be wasting your breath and exposing your idiocy.

AR-platform weapons (the AR stands for ArmaLite, the company that first made them) are supposedly used primarily for hunting, target-shooting, and personal home protection.

I can’t imagine what sport there is in blasting a deer with a semi-automatic killing machine.

Or, for that matter, what would be the necessity (other than “Because it’s fun?”) of target practice using an AR-style weapon.

GA Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for
some reason, apparently needs an
 assault-style weapon

And, as far as protection is concerned, guns in the home are rarely used for defensive purposes, but more likely used for purposes such as intimidating family members, with some analyses pointing to home protection with such weapons as about only 30 incidents over a 10 year period.

But AR-style weapons are wildly defended by Second Amendment lovers, who think, I guess, that NO weapons should be banned--although one can’t purchase automatic weapons or bazookas, for example.

And the AR-style weapons are not only defended, but they’re celebrated.

The National Rifle Association proudly calls the AR-15 “America’s rifle.”

Members of Congress have sported mini-replicas on their lapels to show support for their access. The pins were distributed by Georgia Representative and gun store owner Andrew Clyde—whose stake in his Clyde Armory store may be as much as $25 million dollars. By the way, the site of yesterday’s school shooting with an AR-style weapon, is about 20 miles from Clyde’s home and gun store.

Even Alabama GOP Rep. Barry Moore and Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert co-sponsored a bill to designate the AR-15 as  our “national gun” (Boebert also owned the now-shuttered gun-themed “Shooters Grill” restaurant in Colorado).

Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert
sure seems to love her assault weapons

To be fair, the vast, vast  majority of gun violence doesn’t come in mass shootings. Nor does it involve schools. Nor does it even include AR-style weapons.

But some of it does.

And it seems as though banning such weapons would be a relatively easy fix.

History suggests the same. Enacting a Biden-as-Senator bill in 1994 to prohibit “the manufacture, transfer, or possession of a semi-automatic assault weapon” (such as AR-style weapons) for ten years, saw “lower average annual rates of both mass shootings and death resulting from such incidents than before the ban’s inception.” A sharp and immediate increase in both started again when the ban ended in 2004.

So, isn’t it enough? Isn’t Apalachee High School or Parkland or Sandy Hook or Uvalde enough?

Or will we—or more specifically, the communities, the families, the schools, the kids—have to simply endure more of these horrific events year after year after year?

Concealed guns for everyone!

Republicans are about to turn back the clock--to 1872, the last time it was lawful to carry concealed weapons in the state (great background here).  That means the stressed guy in the next cubicle, the angry road-rage hothead you just accidentally cut off in traffic, the drunk who's picking fights in the bar could all be packing heat.

And it gets better.  A current Republican-sponsored bill would require no permits, no background checks, and no training. (JS Online article here).  But the bill does have the stringent requirements that someone walking around with a loaded handgun in their Jockeys be at least 21 years old, not a felon, and not have been ruled mentally incompetent.  Thank goodness, huh?

I admit I don't know an awful lot about the issue.  My post was late tonight because I was doing some more research on it.  It seems a lot of the pro-concealed carry argument comes from the seminal Lott-Mustard study of 1997 showing that concealed carry correlates with lowered crime (because, as Lott says, "criminals are uncertain which potential victims can defend themselves").  However, there are studies reviewing the same statistics and coming to the conclusion that concealed carry actually increases crime (one example study here).  Unfortunately, I couldn't find any reputable studies from the last ten years that backed either side. 

To be sure, Wisconsin is one of only two states (along with Illinois) that does not allow concealed carry.  And even Senator Russ Feingold backed a Republican-sponsored proposal in 2009 that would have allowed concealed carry into Wisconsin if it was legal in someone's home state.

But that doesn't make it right.

And they figured that out already back in the days of Billy the Kid..