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**MAY 25, 2022**
Kuttner on TAP
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**** Republicans on the Wrong Side of Public
Outrage
Their opposition to gun laws and assault on women's health should be
center-stage issues.
Here's the bizarre thing about mass gun violence that takes the lives
of schoolchildren and the likely reversal of
**Roe v. Wade**: Public opinion is not with the right. It is
overwhelmingly in favor of banning civilian purchase of assault weapons.
It is overwhelmingly in favor of keeping
**Roe**. And yet a party that espouses these and other extreme views is
on the verge of taking over the country. If we let it.
What can prevent this grim fate is resolute leadership that stands with
most Americans-and also hangs this lunacy around the necks of
Republicans and makes them squirm. In his first statement on the mass
murder, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott noted that the shooter was dead. You can
imagine how much comfort that offers parents.
Other Republicans have offered reassurance by pointing out that the
killer acted alone. No, he did not. He had multiple Republican
accomplices who keep blocking gun control and valorizing guns with
open-carry laws.
They also like to term the Texas shooting a "tragedy." No, it was not.
It was preventable homicide of children. Political allies of abortion
zealots who worry about the alleged rights of the unborn need to look to
the rights of living children.
President Biden was at his best in his statement
on the Texas school shooting. He called out both the gun lobby and the
gun manufacturers. He ridiculed gun nuts who conflate hunting rifles
with assault weapons.
When we passed the assault weapons ban, mass shootings went down. When
the law expired, mass shootings tripled. The idea that an 18-year-old
kid can walk into a gun store and buy two assault weapons is just wrong.
What in God's name do you need an assault weapon for except to kill
someone? Deer aren't running through the forest with Kevlar vests on,
for God's sake. It's just sick.
Biden's expression of appalled sympathy was from the heart. "To lose a
child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away," he said. Biden
has been there.
Maybe the president's first statement on the shooting was not the time
to call out the Republicans who resist even the mildest gun legislation.
But this is no time to temporize for fear of rural voters or pro-gun
Democrats. The vast majority of citizens are sick of this carnage.
Biden needs to follow up by sending Congress legislation that goes
beyond poll-tested "commonsense" measures like background checks and the
extension of existing regulations to gun shows. We need to ban all
military weapons, and to identify the wall-to-wall opposition with
Republicans, and dare them to block it.
Biden is facing political headwinds on inflation and supply shortages.
But on gun control and women's health, public opinion is with him, and
Republicans look like fools. There is nothing shameful about maximizing
the partisan advantage. In a democracy, that's what leadership is all
about.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
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