Opinion: Military weapons killing our kids | News, Sports, Jobs

photo by: Creators Syndicate

Keith Raffel

The beginning of the school year is indeed the season of glorious end-of-summer weather, learning and new challenges.

It also begins another season of innocent young lives lost to assault rifles.

On Sept. 4, two teachers and two students were gunned down by another student using an AR-15-style rifle at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia.

We’re not talking about typical handguns or hunting rifles here. An AR-15-style weapon is a close relative of the military-issue M16 rifle designed to kill enemy soldiers. Its bullets carry three to four times the energy of a typical 9 mm handgun. A single bullet can explode a victim’s skull. The damage to children is especially devastating.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq war veteran, has asked, “Have you imagined how it would feel when authorities told you that you could not view the body of your murdered child –because there was nothing left of your baby to visually identify?

In the wake of the Sept. 4 shooting, presidential candidate Donald Trump offered only this consolation: “We are going to make it better and heal our world.” Last January, he said people needed to “get over” an Iowa school shooting that left a sixth grader dead. For Trump’s running mate JD Vance, school shootings are a “fact of life.”

What about legislation to protect school children from military-style weapons? Well, last February, Trump pledged to members of the National Rifle Association that “no one will lay a finger on your firearms” if he is elected president and that “every single Biden attack on gun owners and manufacturers will be terminated on my very first week back in office, perhaps my first day.

In contrast, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has promised to work for a ban on the sale of assault weapons. Her running mate Tim Walz tweeted in July, “I’m a veteran, a hunter, and a gun owner. But I’m also a dad. And for many years, I was a teacher. … It’s about keeping our kids safe. I had an A rating from the NRA. Now I get straight F’s. And I sleep just fine.”

In a 6-3 June decision, the Supreme Court overturned a federal ban on using “bump stocks” which enable an AR-15-style weapon to fire continuously when the trigger is held down. Bump stocks were used to fire the over 1,000 rounds that killed 60 people at a 2017 Las Vegas concert. Bump stocks cost a few hundred dollars and are readily available.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the three justices in the minority: “Today’s decision … will have deadly consequences. The majority’s artificially narrow definition hamstrings the Government’s efforts to keep machineguns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter. I respectfully dissent.”

I myself respectfully dissent from the last three words of Sotomayor’s opinion. Why should she “respectfully” dissent from a decision that will cost so many lives? She should have “angrily” or “accusingly” dissented instead.

In addition to the shootings at Apalachee High and the Las Vegas concert, AR-15-style weapons were used at the 2022 Uvalde school shooting (19 students and two teachers murdered), the 2018 Parkland High shooting (14 students and three teachers killed), the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting (49 deaths with the youngest victim aged 18) and the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting (20 students and six teachers killed).

Back in 1993, Congress passed the federal assault weapons ban (the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act) that prohibited the purchase and possession of “certain semiautomatic assault weapons,” including AR-15-style rifles. In 2003-2004, the two years before the ban expired, there were 16 shooting deaths in K-12 schools. In 2021-22, there were 92.

Now, Americans have over 24 million AR-15-style and similar Russian-style semiautomatic rifles. The ease of acquiring them and bump stocks will inevitably lead to more deaths of children and teens in schools, on streets and at concerts. Some, but not all, members of Congress and justices of the Supreme Court have decided that allowing people to purchase and own military-grade weapons outweighs the value of those lives. In my opinion, they are guilty of reckless homicide.

CNN reports that the Georgia school murders on Sept. 4 were “at least the 45th school shooting in 2024.”

It’s time for voters to take action at the ballot box to support candidates who take a stand against this slaughter of our children and fellow Americans by military-grade weapons. Otherwise, morally even if not legally, we will be accomplices in their deaths.

— Keith Raffel is a syndicated columnist with Creators.