The anniversaries of mass casualty events in our great country seem to occur weekly and, in fact, almost do.  An incredibly sad state of affairs.

Our friends at Wikipedia provide a likely partial chronology to help us to keep track of these tragedies that truly set the US apart from the rest of the world’s leading industrialized democracies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States).  Simply overwhelming in their tragedy and grief.

To me, all of these terrible anniversaries are opportunities to generate real and impactful action on the gun safety front, to make our country safer and saner in an effort to try to delay the coming of the next inevitable event.  Each anniversary carries with it confirmation that “thoughts and prayers” are just the gun lobby’s and its political acolytes’ meaningless and diversionary smokescreen.  They seem coldly to believe that dehumanizing such events helps obscure the huge human, social and economic costs that result.

We missed such an opportunity with the 24th anniversary of the Columbine killings on April 20, 1999.  That day is now a generation in the past; millions of young Americans have since grown up in its painful shadow, made all the more intense by many similar school killing events that have occurred around the US in the intervening years and decades. 

Just think about it, Columbine was more than a generation ago and so many more mass school shootings have occurred since.

The fifth anniversary of the October 1, 2017 Las Vegas horror was another wasted opportunity to energize action and serious debate.  In that incredible 10 minute event, some 58 innocent people were murdered and another 600 wounded, many seriously.  The excruciating detail of the police investigation could not offer a more damning indictment of the gun lobby, the NRA and the sycophantic gun lobby politicians and media operatives who, as usual, argued for “thoughts and prayers” and again asserted that it was “not the time” to tackle gun safety seriously.

The Las Vegas Police Department’s investigation report should be required reading for all Americans.  Everyone should see the details of the wanton violence and shooting of that deadly ten minutes, with the perpetrator armed with almost 20 assault weapons and 6,000 rounds of ammo, 1,057 shell casings found on site, and another 20 firearms in his home.  In what sane world or country can any of this be justified or allowed?

This link takes you directly to the bitter truth of that violent day, the LVPD police report (https://www.lvmpd.com/en-us/Documents/1-October-FIT-Criminal-Investigative-Report-FINAL_080318.pdf#page65).   For more direct emotional impact we have PBS and other videos documenting the chaos and pain of those ten minutes and their tumultuous aftermath: https://www.pbs.org/video/ricochet-an-american-trauma-o7vg3v  and   https://youtu.be/ZxvMunFjbxg.  Please take the time to read the report and to watch the videos, it will motivate you to take on the gun safety challenge with even greater commitment.

And now we have May staring us in the face. 

The one year anniversaries of Buffalo and Uvalde loom, both incredibly damning of the dark and brutal nature of gun violence, its perpetrators and facilitators. But May also includes so many more horrible and bloody days in recent years:  ten killed in San Jose CA and seven in Colorado Springs in 2021, thirteen killed in Virginia Beach in 2019, ten killed at Santa Fe HS in Texas in 2018, nine in a Waco bar shootout in 2015, and all against a blood stained backdrop of daily murders and assaults, by criminals and by formerly law abiding but nonetheless legal gun owners in all parts of the country.

What should the anniversary message(s) be for each event and every year.  There are several crucial points of departure, all necessary to complement and strengthen the valuable and life-saving work of our many national, state, and local gun safety organizations.

Among these critical points:

Pressing law enforcement and police leaders to stand up publicly and to work effectively to support and promote common sense gun safety measures.

• For their part, law enforcement recognizes the challenges of our present age, working to devise imaginative new approaches as part of their “21st Century Policing” initiatives.

• The very clear majority of Americans support such measures:  effective and timely background checks, limits on magazine capacities, red flag laws to prevent suicide and deadly shooting sprees if/when possible, and a ban on new sales of assault style weapons like the AR 15 and others similar high intensity killing machines. 

• The police leadership owes it to their rank and file, with over sixty police officers dying by assailant firearms each year, rank and file nervousness in the face of perpetual threat of gun violence from an armed citizenry fosters deadly police mistakes, and an officially estimated 100,000 serving officers have been identified with PTSD as a result of their police work.

A stepped up national communications effort to set the historical record straight on the 27 word Second Amendment and explicitly challenge the contorted historical underpinnings of the Supreme Court rulings in Heller (2008) and Bruen (2022):

• Undoing this damage to the country’s constitution and society stability will take decades and generations.  The start must be made now, with commitment and energy from major newspapers and leading responsible media actors playing a crucial role in establishing a national, non-partisan discussion of the Second Amendment’s tragic and costly impact on 21st century America.

• Both SCOTUS rulings cavalierly dismiss the Amendment’s “well regulated” militia foundation in order to justify universal and unrestricted access to arms throughout today’s society and public spaces. 

• Most dangerous in both rulings is the tacit but unjustified support the SCOTUS rulings give to the manipulated rallying cry of the gun lobby, the bogus and non-existent right to “constitutional carry”, a phrase that should be challenged relentlessly and everywhere. 

This will require the engagement of our nation’s leading historians and experts on the Constitutional Convention and the first two National Congresses, which created the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

• The Second Congress elaborated on the First Congress’s Bill of Rights reference to arms by specifically legislating the need for militiamen to provide a “good musket or firelock”, thus giving the lie to the assertion of Justice Scalia in Heller that any discussion of the Second Amendment meaning of “arms” was frivolous  (https://asecondamendmentfor21stcenturyamerica.org/blog/originalist-founding-fathers-were-crystal-clear-about-the-arms-of-second-amendmentnbsp-a-good-musket-or-firelock-not-a-word-about-ar15s). 

•  Unfortunately, the country’s leading History Associations failed to engage in Bruen, although they did so with clarity and intellectual force in the concurrent case of Dobbs involving women’s reproductive rights.

• The two SCOTUS rulings that disingenuously expanded gun rights to include unrestricted self defense in public places rest on false history, and the country would be well served to have at least the historical record set straight so that the flaws in the two rulings will become all the more evident and make them more difficult to sustain.

• The gun lobby’s false narrative is replete with piecemeal references and quotations from superfluous actors and individuals and conscientiously ignores the clear debates of the authoritative and law-making first two Congresses which wrote the Bill of Rights’ Second Amendment (enacted December 15, 1791) and the clearly linked 1792 Militia Act of May 8, 1792, which specified the arms required for a “well regulated militia”.

The nation’s legal establishment can make a meaningful contribution to a sensible national debate on gun violence and gun safety. 

•  The American Bar Association’s amicus curiae brief in Bruen is a useful building block. 

•  Leading law schools also need to step up to the challenge, to set higher standards of jurisprudence and ethics for the comportment and work in the legal community, including with respect to the Supreme Court and its justices. 

•  Both Justice Scalia’s and Justice Thomas’s associations merit greater scrutiny given their known affinity for gun lobby positions and their decisive roles in facilitating the country’s lurch toward open and unrestricted concealed carry, including of weapons of war.

And lastly, as a point of departure, the nation and the gun lobby must be continually reminded of the huge societal, economic and human cost of gun violence in the United States today. 

•  The bizarre assertion that the 44,000 deaths each year from firearms is the “price of liberty” must not be allowed to go unchallenged, and should be demonstrated repeatedly and convincingly that such a price is too high when a threat to “liberty” related to traditional use firearms is not at all an issue. 

•  Authoritative studies put the economic and health related costs of gun violence in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually, along with the grief and mourning of millions of family members and friends of thousands of innocent victims each year.

• Gun safety measures are fully consistent with the Constitution and US historical traditions, and the long process of re-establishing this truth must begin and be sustained in the face of the two politicized Supreme Court rulings of Heller and Bruen.

So let’s step up the gun safety and historical truth game in the face of the anniversaries of the May mass casualty events and the daily carnage that has become America’s hallmark. 

Let’s continue the great work on gun safety in state legislatures and nationally in the Congress. 

Let’s press the gun lobby and its political acolytes among elected officials on the history and the text, and push back on their four word “shall not be infringed” sound bite at every turn.

The innocent victims of Uvalde and Buffalo deserve no less, just as the innocent victims of future mass casualty events and of the daily drumbeat of gun violence will deserve no less.

Let’s work together across the board to make America safer from gun violence, and thus stronger and more secure as a nation in a fraught and dangerous world.