Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp stood before television cameras Wednesday night and said the cowardly words we always hear from Republican officials in such moments. Hours after two students and two teachers had been killed in a school shooting, allegedly committed by a 14-year-old boy with an AR-15-style semi-automatic weapon, Kemp declared: “Today is not the day for politics or policy.”
Really? Then what might work better for the governor’s busy schedule?
Actually, his record makes it clear what date he has in mind for that discussion: never.
From what we know so far, the horrific slayings at Apalachee High School in Winder have everything to do with the politics and policy of gun safety. Thoughts and prayers did not prevent the needless deaths of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53. Thoughts and prayers did not keep a student from using a weapon of war to commit this atrocity.
But popular, common-sense gun laws might have prevented this tragedy. And this is precisely the moment when we should be debating and implementing those policies — before some other American community joins the mournful list that includes Newtown, Connecticut; Parkland, Florida; Uvalde, Texas; and so many others. The list to which Winder is now added.
How did an adolescent boy get his hands on a weapon based on a design for U.S. soldiers to use in combat? The FBI said sheriff’s deputies interviewed the suspect and his father last year, when the boy was only 13, to follow up on anonymous online tips about threats of a school shooting. The father said there were hunting guns in the house, according to the FBI, but that his son did not have unsupervised access to them. No action was taken.
Authorities have not said where the boy could have gotten the weapon. But if it turns out to have been at home, Kemp and the Republican-controlled state Legislature should immediately pass a “safe storage” bill requiring firearms to be kept under lock and key. Such laws, thus far adopted by 26 states, have been found to have widespread public support, according to the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. One was proposed by a Democrat last year in the Georgia state Legislature, but Kemp and his party refused to move it forward.
Twenty-one states and Washington, D.C., have “red flag” laws that allow authorities to seek court orders to temporarily confiscate weapons from people at serious risk of harming themselves or others. Having to visit a home to investigate the threat of a school shooting sounds serious to me. Even Florida and Texas — bastions of gun rights — have red flag laws. Georgia does not.
Wherever the rifle came from, a majority of Americans — 61%, according to a Fox News poll — support a ban on assault weapons. They were prohibited from 1994 to 2004, and the Second Amendment survived just fine. But the ban was allowed to expire, and Republicans in Congress have blocked any attempt to renew it.
Georgia authorities were quick to announce Wednesday that the suspect will stand trial as an adult. But he is not, in fact, an adult; he is 14 years old. The state has the power to impose as much Old Testament wrath as it chooses. But there were actual adults involved in the chain of events that put that gun in the suspect’s hands inside the halls of that high school. Adults manufactured the rifle, sold it, bought it, obtained ammunition for it and allowed it to come into the possession of a barely post-pubescent kid who allegedly used it to commit mass murder. If none of those adults is held accountable, then treating the suspect with performative toughness will be a hollow exercise.
All of these are questions of “politics or policy.” Kemp campaigned for governor on a promise to expand access to firearms, and he has delivered, signing into law a bill allowing Georgians to carry handguns in public without a license or any background check. In one campaign ad that was supposed to be funny, Kemp sat with a shotgun in his lap, with the gun pointed in the direction of a teenage boy who supposedly wanted to date one of Kemp’s daughters. Har har.
Of our two major political parties, only one — the GOP — panders to the National Rifle Association and the most extreme Second Amendment absolutists by refusing even to consider modest gun safety measures that have majority support, even among gun owners. And there is a straight line between this Republican pandering and tragedies like the killings at Apalachee High.
It is unconscionable, and infuriating, that the Republican Party cannot find room on its calendar to talk about saving precious young lives.
About the Author
