Is public opinion on gun laws shifting?
Dorina Davila, left, from San Antonio, places flowers at a memorial outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Monday, May 30, 2022. In a town as small as Uvalde, even those who didn't lose their own child lost someone. Some say now that closeness is both their blessing and their curse: they can lean on each other to grieve. But every single one of them is grieving. AP Photo/Wong Maye-E
On May 24, 2022, an 18-year-old man with an AR-15 rifle shot and killed 21 people, including two teachers and 19 children, at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. On May 14, 2022, another 18-year-old white man citing racist ideology entered a grocery store in Buffalo, New York with an AR-15 and killed ten Black people. These are the latest in hundreds of mass shootings in the United States in the last 25 years.
Today, we discussed the political tension at the heart of this issue and the reasons why popular support for certain gun control measures has not led to substantive policy change.
GUEST:
John T. Shaw
Director, Paul Simon Public Policy Institute, Southern Illinois University
Re: gun control. 2nd A is framed to protect people from tyranny from government. However, this rhetoric and social construction of this right allows for an atomized tyranny from mass shootings. At what point will politicians understand this? Why is this terror acceptable?
— Erik Zdansky (@erik_zdansky) May 31, 2022
Acknowledge that the gun cult is paid for by a vanishingly small and nearly bankrupt Small Arms industry that spends an astoundingly tiny amount of money to get the amount of influence They Do by threatening that their membership will vote someday someones going to have to realize they are not the threat that they pretend to be. You could also make it phenomenally expensive to buy bullets guns dont work without bullets.
I believe the first step should be to completely outlaw assault rifles but I do not trust republican lawmakers to do anything just like after Sandy Hook.