Is mass murder the price of freedom?
Just days after a teenage gunman murdered 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, nearly half of Republican voters told pollsters that mass murders were “unfortunately, something we have to accept as part of a free society.”
Break that down.
Forty-four percent of GOP voters say that “we have to accept” the slaughter of children on a more or less regular basis, because they are the collateral damage of living in a free society.
Don’t slide past that poll number, because it gives us a glimpse of how broken our discourse has become, when weapons become fetishes of manhood and guns designed to blow human beings are embraced as symbols of “freedom.”
There is no confusion or misunderstanding here, because the wording of the question was clear and blunt ("Do you feel that mass shootings are___"), and the memories of the murders in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York, were still fresh. Media reports were still showing images of the victims and scenes of mourning.
The result is shocking, but it shouldn’t be surprising. For years, despite the rising death toll, the gun lobby has continued to insist that guns were the foundation of the nation’s liberty — and none more than the deadliest of semi-automatic weapons.
Just days after the massacre of fourth graders in Uvalde, the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre declared, “We know there can be no freedom, no security, no safety without the right of the law-abiding to bear arms for self-defense.”
And if that means that millions of Americans have to surrender other rights, including their right to life, and the freedom to live and move about without fear, that’s all right, as long as the nation is awash in firearms.
This is now the GOP orthodoxy, but it is still worth noting that this is a bizarre twist for the “law and order” party, and one that claims to be “pro-life.”
Consider that conservative Republicans never argued that we ought to “accept” attacks from Islamic terrorists as the price of freedom. They certainly do not think that urban violence or street crime is the acceptable price of living in an open, tolerant society.
They have never hesitated to support legislation that limits the rights of violent criminals; or to strip other national security threats of various civil liberties. (See the Patriot Act.) Conservatives continue to insist that we prioritize the right to life — include the rights of unborn children — over other personal freedoms.
But the polarities of our politics are reversed when it comes to mass murder by domestic gunmen.
When a person armed with a gun walks into a synagogue, a grocery store, a nightclub, or a classroom filled with terrified children, the party of the mailed fist transforms itself into a champion of absolutist personal freedom.
The “right to life party” becomes a party of depraved indifference to human life.
This is not a new position for talking heads on the right.
In 2017, after a gunman murdered more than that 50 people in Las Vegas, former Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly declared that the carnage was "the price of freedom.”
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