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New Orleans
Full disclosure: Ever since the fateful night in 2011 when a lone gunman, intent on armed robbery, burst in through the inadvertently unlocked front door of my home, I have been a survivor of handgun violence, unable to feel or to move any part of my body below my chest. This has probably rendered me somewhat more sensitive to issues surrounding gun violence than I formerly was.
Even prior to my disabling injury, however, I recognized the folly of allowing civilians to possess what are generically known as assault weapons – the family of firearms, including AK-47s and AR-15s – which were originally designed and manufactured exclusively for use by soldiers in combat. They were not meant for hunting nor for target practice; their sole purpose was to snuff out as many human lives as possible, as quickly as possible.
The unspeakably tragic murders of 19 elementary-school students and two of their teachers in Uvalde, Texas, were unfortunately but the latest (at the time) in a long, sad string of mass murders in which ready access to assault weapons enabled unhinged and/or hate-filled individuals to quickly take the lives of wholesale numbers of innocent human beings. In the Uvalde massacre, it seems likely that law enforcement personnel hesitated to attack the gunman, at least in part because they feared being outgunned by him – a lone assailant wielding an assault weapon.
The carnage wrought by assault weapons is due not only to the rapidity with which they can be fired; the extremely high muzzle velocity with which they can deal death, along with the way their projectiles tumble upon contact with human flesh, also contribute to their lethality. Such bullets are meant to shred the tissues of those whose bodies get in their way – be they enemy soldiers or hapless second graders – in such a nasty fashion that sometimes their victims can only be identified by means of DNA testing. In some cases, a single bullet can take out more than one person, or pierce a wall on its way toward piercing a person.
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz might have been accurate in stating that none of the gun-control legislation currently proposed by Democrats would have prevented the tragedy in Uvalde. However, he conveniently refrained from mentioning that Democrats have deemed it a fool’s errand at present to propose a new federal ban on assault weapons, because their Republican counterparts have already flatly stated their unequivocal opposition to such a ban. That is a brick wall against which Democrats – at least for the time being – have chosen not to beat their heads.
Cruz and his like-minded colleagues’ kowtowing to the National Rifle Association on the issue of assault weapons calls to mind this gem of past NRA sloganeering: “Guns don’t kill; people do.” Where assault weapons are concerned, this monumentally stupid bit of sophistry might be recast along the lines of, “Assault weapons don’t slaughter wholesale numbers of innocent human beings; the people wielding them do.”
WALTER BONAM