State Sen. Bill Eigel spoke the truth.
The St. Charles County Republican, a self-described member of the “conservative caucus†in the Missouri Legislature, was testifying in the House on Monday for his bill. It’s a bad bill, one that seeks to punish those who decry police brutality. The bill would criminalize the very act of exercising one’s First Amendment rights, but never mind that for a moment. Focus on what Eigel said:
“There is no right that you or I have that can come at the expense of the physical safety of our fellow citizens,†Eigel said.
A few hours after Eigel spoke those words, an armed gunman walked into a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, and killed 10 people,
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The country’s latest mass shooting came just days after another gunman went on a killing spree in Atlanta that killed eight, including six Asian American women. The was less than a week old before a weary nation turned back west, to the state that has a long record of mass shootings, from Columbine to the Aurora movie theater, and now, a Boulder grocery store.
Every mass shooting has its own motivations — mental health problems, hate, bigotry, domestic violence — but all share a common thread: the nation’s obsession with guns.
The truth about Eigel’s statement is that it should apply to the gun debate, and it used to, but to many Republicans of his ilk, the Second Amendment is the exception that proves the rule. No “expense of the physical safety of our fellow citizens†is enough to limit, in any way, the right of Americans to own weapons of war, particularly the semi-automatic rifles that are so often at the heart of such shootings.
The Boulder shooting rekindled thoughts of the first mass shooting I ever covered as a journalist, in 1995. It, too, was at a grocery store in Colorado.
Albert Petrosky walked into an Albertson’s in my hometown of Littleton, wearing body armor and carrying a .50-caliber assault weapon, as well as other firearms. his estranged wife, the store manager and Sgt. Timothy Mossbrucker, a police officer from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department, the first to arrive at the scene.
More than a quarter-century later, history repeats itself, with Boulder police Officer Eric Talley losing his life. He leaves behind seven children. Mossbrucker had six. His wife was pregnant with his youngest son when he died.
After every shooting, the debate is the same. First, it’s too soon. Then it’s a mental health problem. Then, when Democrats propose legislation to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, it’s a violation of the Second Amendment, because for too many Republicans, there is nothing — not children slaughtered at a school, Asian Americans killed at their workplace, Jews killed at a synagogue, or police officers killed at a grocery store — that will stand in the way of them owning weapons of mass murder, just as they have convinced themselves the Founding Fathers intended.
In the days before the Atlanta shooting, Democrats in the U.S. House, with some Republican support, to bring some simple sanity to America’s gun obsession. One bill would expand background checks and another would fix the “Charleston loophole†that allowed an otherwise ineligible gun owner to murder nine African American worshippers at a South Carolina church in 2015.
The House bills are minimalistic attempts to limit mass carnage, and yet Republicans in the Senate, for now, appear poised to block these popular pieces of legislation from passing. The same party that is currently on a destructive path to limit voting rights to protect their hold on power, will do nothing to limit the alleged right of mass shooters to buy any weapon of mass destruction they can get their hands on, in the only country in the world where mass shootings are seemingly a weekly occurrence.
Dead kids. Dead civilians. Dead worshippers. Dead cops.
All had their right to life extinguished by a political ethic that says the right to own a gun — any kind of gun — is worth more than the ever-growing list of lives lost in a gun-crazed nation.