Republished with permission from Florida Phoenix, by Barrington Salmon

If anyone doubted the downward spiral of our country, one look at the U.S. Supreme Court would disabuse them of the notion.

For the past two, three years, “The Leonard Leo Six”—as MSNBC political commentator and “The Reidout” host Joy Reid describes them—have taken a flame thrower to the rights and freedoms of women, African Americans, and other constituencies, shattered the country’s judicial infrastructure, and tossed out decades-long precedent and settled law.

During the recently concluded term, in a fusillade of decisions, the conservative supermajority eviscerated the regulatory powers of the federal government; continued its barely concealed hostility towards African Americans and voting rights; undermined reproductive justice and abortion care; and made it more difficult to charge Jan. 6 rioters with attempted obstruction of the electoral vote count.

In a June 14 ruling, the high court struck down a 2018 ban on bump stocks despite public outrage and the devastating implications for Americans. The arch-conservative Republican bloc gave its blessing to anyone with access to an AR-15-style rifle to use bump stocks—if they so choose—to enable the weapon to fire 400 to 800 rounds a minute. The justices are indifferent about sanctioning more shedding of the blood of innocents by heavily armed, evil, or mentally unstable individuals.

This is America.

America is a vast, beautiful, diverse country of 336 million people held at gunpoint by a tiny minority of irresponsible Republicans and their allies. Those in Congress and state legislatures have stubbornly refused to seriously consider commonsense gun safety legislation that could stem the slaughter.

Somewhere along the way, America—as in politicians, policymakers, the political class, and our supposed leaders—lost the script.

Packing Heat

Case in point. Gov. Ron DeSantis.

In response to the U.S. Supreme Court decision, U.S. Surgeon General Vice Admiral Dr. Vivek H. Murthy declared that gun violence constitutes a public health crisis. In his 39-page report, Murthy said that gun violence has “become the leading cause of death for children and adolescents since 2020, surpassing motor vehicle crashes, cancer, drug overdoses, and poisoning.”

In 2022, 48,204 people in the United States died from firearm-related injuries, including suicides, homicides, and unintentional deaths. That’s 8,000 more lost lives than in 2019 and more than 16,000 lost since 2010, according to reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Among Murthy’s policy prescriptions are universal background checks, expanding purchaser-licensing laws, banning assault weapons and large-capacity magazines for civilian use, and creating safer conditions in public places related to firearm use and carry.

DeSantis doesn’t care and pushed back almost immediately: “We will not comply. Florida will always reject the Biden Administration’s unconstitutional power-grabs,” he said on Twitter/X recently.

“During COVID, unelected bureaucrats used ‘public health’ as a pretext to deprive citizens of their rights—and I signed legislation to protect Floridians from government overreach. Now, Biden’s Surgeon General is attempting to violate the Second Amendment through the ‘public health’ bureaucracy.

Novelist Stephen King lamented in a 2023 New York Times opinion piece that he had no hope of anything changing because “Americans love guns and appear willing to pay the price in blood.”

King, reacting to a mass shooting that killed 18 people, added that “[t]here is no solution to the gun problem and little more to write, because Americans are addicted to firearms. … Americans love their guns and no suffering, no slaughter, can loosen their grip.”

To King’s point, America endured 656 mass shootings last year.

The Statistics

That was up from 647 mass shootings in 2022 but down from a record 689 in 2021, Axios has reported. The story cited data from the Gun Violence Archive showing that 2023 saw an 8% to 10% overall decrease in deaths and injuries from gun violence. There were 42,987 deaths by gun last year. That’s down from 47,430 the previous year.

The data also tallied a figure often overlooked—survivors—indicating that 36,366 people were injured by guns in 2023, down from 38,578 injuries in 2022.

The overall increase in U.S. gun deaths since the beginning of the pandemic includes an especially stark rise in such fatalities among children and teens under age 18, from 1,732 in 2019 to 2,590 in 2021.

It’s easy to assume that an Ivy League-trained chief executive could connect the dots and understand the devastating consequences of unfettered access to guns. Instead, DeSantis has chosen to sign into law a bill that allows Floridians to carry guns without a permit or and without a modicum of training. Of course, the policy has won praise from rightwing activists who view any firearm-related regulation as a violation of their second amendment right to bear arms.

In the past, Florida law required anyone seeking to carry a concealed gun to complete safety training and undergo a detailed background check, but Republicans moved to do away with those requirements.

The governor signed the bill under cover of darkness, probably because he knows it’s deeply unpopular.

According to The Guardian, surveys indicate that Florida residents broadly oppose permitless carry. A poll conducted by the University of North Florida’s Public Opinion Research Lab showed 77% of Florida voters, including 62% of Republicans, do not support the law.

‘The War Is Lost’

Brynn Tannehill, a former naval officer, a defense research scientist, and a blogger on LGBTQ issues, despairs that the war on guns is lost.

She writes in The New Republic that we have more unregistered guns in this country—more than 400 million—than those in the possession of the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, and police departments combined. And Republicans want more. Tannehill likens the gun violence crisis as “Sisyphus with a boulder that rolls downhill and crushes him over and over for eternity.”

Tannehill adds: “That’s something that people who support gun control measures need to understand: The war is lost.”

With the courts stacked and gerrymandering giving Republicans safe seats, little will change, Tannehill notes.

“In reality, mass shootings will only become more and more common over the next few years as Republicans have decided that the only solution to gun violence is adding as many guns as possible to the mix,” she adds.

“Short of a national divorce, there is nothing that can be done at this point,” Tannehill concludes.

A ‘Way Out’?

Yet there are others, like Vanderbilt University professor Jonathan Metzl, who offer a way out. A gun-policy scholar, sociologist, and physician, he argues it’s not enough to pursue traditional legislative approaches like Murtha prescribes—America’s policymakers and public must address white gun owners’ fears of losing their racial majority status as well as their distrust in government and belief that having an arsenal means autonomy and security, Metzl argues in Time magazine.

“The ideologies driving expansive gun rights aspire, not just to sell specific products, but to gain power and wield influence in increasingly undemocratic ways. And a health framework that emphasizes threats to human bodies offers little counter to threats to the American body politic as a result,” he wrote.

Metzl argues for undermining coded appeals to white racial resentments and fear of crime by investing in “civic infrastructure”—“Fixing streetlights, creating parks and green space, jobs programs, and rebuilding civic infrastructure, public safety, and community resiliency can reduce gun crime at rates that supersede those produced by gun laws alone.”

Will it work? We’ll only know if we apply what we’ve learned and commit to making this new approach work. If not, we will be trapped in the dystopian world described by Stephen King and Brynn Tannehill, which really is no living at all.