Guns, Greens and Gall
The Green Party must reject “common sense solutions” to gun control.
At the Tops Friendly Market on Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo, any remaining bullet holes from May’s mass shooting have surely been spackled and painted over by now. In Uvalde, Texas (where an even more gruesome massacre followed barely a week later), Robb Elementary, once the center of a storied anti-discrimination protest, is to be torn down.
America is back to business as usual, and that means more massacres. The Fourth of July saw yet another mass shooting, this one conducted by an amateur rap musician with an elven, tattooed face. Six people died this time, and dozens more were wounded as the maniac sniped a parade in Highland Park, Illinois from a rooftop. Grandfathers were killed, a toddler was orphaned when the killer took out both his parents, and a nation was left scratching its head once again, wondering: How could such a tragedy have befallen our nation so soon after we passed the first truly “common sense” gun control law written in 30 years??
Of course the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, rushed into existence after the last round of mass murder, was always going to turn out to be a pathetic joke. But who could have guessed that a laughing God would tear gas us with his flatulence this soon after a heartbroken Joe Biden appealed to Heaven itself for a reprieve from these massacres?
The BSCA is a shining exemplar of half-assed legislation that hand-waves the very circumstances that gave birth to it. Although the BSCA mandates enhanced background checks for gun purchasers under 21 (perhaps adding a day or two to their ability to acquire a weapon), broadens the category of domestic abusers who may be denied a weapon, and throws some money at mental health, there is nothing in the law that chastises gun manufacturers or retailers. The semi-automatic AR-15 Crowd Killers preferred by mass shooters are not touched at all by this law, so those weapons of war will continue to roll off the conveyor belts and into the hands of young maniacs who will invariably purchase them over the counter with a wink and a nod from a friendly, licensed gun retailer (as was the case in all three massacres mentioned above).
On gun control, our leadership class is now as empty of solutions as a spent magazine ejected onto the floor of a nursery school, and the public is left spinning in circles, their heads stuffed up their asses as they rationalize these holocausts with imbecilic notions of “self defense” and “liberty” that could have come from a Judge Dredd comic book.
This is where the rootin’ tootin’ six-gun shootin’ conservatives and the profiterole-nibbling liberals of the Middle Class political consensus have finally brought us. Their verdict on gun control, a generation in the crafting, has been delivered, and it is this: Get fucked.
Despite this, a recent confrontation between Joe Brandon and Manuel Oliver (the father of a Parkland victim) confirms that not everyone is willing to take this shafting as the final answer. And this, at last, is where the Green Party comes in.
Small, idealistic, and as tangled up as a box of Christmas tree lights, the Green Party has wandered the outskirts of political legitimacy for over twenty years. The Greens made their first real splash in the 2000 presidential election when their candidate, Ralph Nader, became the scapegoat for Al Gore’s nail-biting loss to George W. Bush. Today the Greens are still called “spoilers” for thwarting Al’s victory, even as Democrats dismiss them as a meaningless nuisance (a contradiction if ever there was one.)
The election of 2000, while taking place early in the Greens national career, has also proven to be their most consequential moment. Although the Democrats still try to fob off their embarrassing missteps on the Greens (they tried half-heartedly to nail Jill Stein to a cross for Hillary’s epic faceplant), the Greens themselves are frequently on the back foot, whether from having their ballot line used as a plaything by mischievous Republicans, or watching their candidate’s campaigns vanish like a piece of flash paper thanks to blatantly partisan meddling.
The Greens, their dedication to eco-socialism and grass roots democracy still intact, remain committed to surviving as a political party even as they play the role of Reek to every Ramsay Bolton in the political establishment. But just as the clock is already ticking down towards the next Buffalo, the next Uvalde, the next Highland Park, so too is time winding down on the Green Party itself.
2024 is bound to be a breaking point for politics in this country in more ways than one. The liberal elite are now broadcasting their buyer’s remorse over Joe Biden at ear-shattering decibels, but so long as inertia remains a law of physics the odds remain that this doddering bag of sawdust will be Team Blue’s candidate against either the tireless Donald Trump, or the execrable Ron DeSantis (who is being hotly promoted by Never Trump conservatives as a palatable American Orbán, one that the Democrats should feel comfortable surrendering to). If worse comes to worst, and the bluntly fascistic GOP conquers Washington again, what faith will the American public retain for boutique, leftist third parties that can’t even hold onto their ballot lines?
However, with the final, worthless compromise on gun control having now been struck, and with more hideous massacres guaranteed to continue arriving in spite of it, the Greens may have found an opportunity to stake a claim to a topic of national concern that the Democrats and Republicans have lost all credibility on.
To do this will require that the Greens leverage their brand (a fairly strong one, as political parties go, and one that the Greens have never taken full advantage of), their principles, their outsider status and their notorious reputation. They must do this not just to serve the needs of the moment but their own needs as well: the need to start grabbing headlines and create the publicity that they don’t have the money to buy, as well as the need to resist their own imminent extinction.
But more importantly, the Greens should take up the cause of mass shootings for the simple reason that they are, at last, the only political party that can. Where the establishment “grown ups” are concerned, all hope is lost, all leadership has been abandoned. It is the Greens or it is nobody. Can a party dedicated to the cause of peace still take itself seriously while operating like Democrats and Republicans, who have made peace with insanity?
The Greens are being called to do what the others will not do. If the Greens embrace this challenge, if they choose the path of actual political power, they will find reserves of support that they did not believe existed. If they forsake this moment, if they will not be roused when circumstances are this dire, then the only thing that will finally rouse them will be seven blasts on a trumpet.
A Green Solution to Mass Shootings
Speaking now as a Green to other Greens, let’s remind ourselves of who it is that is compelling us to take this journey. Let’s remember some of the fallen.
Isn’t this photo just so charming? She was only ten years old, but you can see that she already had an idea of the kind of woman she would like to be, even though her mother was probably still cutting up her hotdogs for her.
A company in Texas donated customized coffins for the children killed in the Uvalde slaughter. They were decorated with cars, Pikachu, Superman… I don’t know if this girl’s family was one of the 19 that took the donors up on their offer, but perhaps her casket is one of the ones pictured here.
Then there is this man, a true hero (unlike Uvalde’s limp-dicked Thin Blue Line) who came face to face with a dragon and drew his sword against it.
This is Aaron Salter, the former police officer and Tops security guard who fired twice on Payton Gendron, only to discover that the armor and weapons of the 18-year old psychopath were proof against any Good Guy with a Gun. He died, and was soon followed by many others, but his family hopes that he delayed Gendron long enough to allow some to flee to safety.
These people are us, and our children, our parents, our husbands and wives. We are the next victims of these massacres. It is only a matter of time.
A Green strategy for ending mass shootings must begin with this first principle: We are in no position to accommodate our opponents. They hold all the cards and will surrender nothing without a fight. The necessary gun control agenda that will actually reduce the frequency of mass shootings (to say nothing of the hundreds of other gun crimes that occur every day in America) will never emerge from polite engagement with Democrats or Republicans. They have completely closed the door on the needed changes, and even the repeated slaughters of schoolrooms full of children have not touched their hearts. We will find no allies among their ranks until we force their hand, and that will mean taking risks… the kind that can get you arrested. Therefor, the Greens will have to consider the rewards as well, and will have to stoke their own appetite for those rewards.
Regardless, it will be a sad joke to begin this process without recognizing this fact: In order to change laws, you must break laws. If the Greens are willing to take a stand on this topic, they had better be willing to deposit money into bail funds and put some lawyers on retainer for the people who will be at the bleeding edge of the movement.
Here then is how the Greens ought to proceed. I will end this screed with step one, and deliver others in subsequent editorials.
Ending “Common Sense”
For far too long the people fighting for gun control have been hamstrung by the notion of “common sense” solutions, solutions that maintain the status quo and threaten no one’s ability to acquire almost any type of weapon, or an unlimited number of them, or enough ammunition to take out a battalion. “Common sense” is the guiding philosophy of politicians when they promote their worthless fixes; “common sense” is the key to ensuring that the NRA or NSSF has at least a 51% stake in all the laws that are meant to regulate their industry. (The NRA was reportedly “deeply involved” in drafting the BSCA.)
Instead, the Greens must exceed “common sense” and seek weak points to which they can apply the force that will break the gun industry’s control of the conversation. Here is one of them:
This is Vintage Firearms, the quaint establishment in Endicott, NY where Payton Gendron purchased his Bushmaster rifle from owner Robert Donald (or one of his clerks), which he then decorated with racial slurs and the names of his heroes (Dylan Roof, Brenton Tarrant) before using it to kill or injure 13 people at Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo. It is from humble, “common sense” stores like this one that America’s maniacs buy their combat weapons, their high capacity magazines, their body armor, and are then set loose on our nation’s shopping centers, elementary schools and parades. These stores are where America arms her terrorists, the places where the massacres really begin — here, not on Discord, not inside the heads of the unbalanced teenagers who buy the guns. The people who sell the weapons are the unaccounted for culprits.
We are told that in America, if a thing can be bought, then someone is within their rights to sell it. Thus, a store is justified in selling a weapon whose only purpose must be terror (an AR-15 or other combat-style rifle has no reasonable use in self-defense or hunting), because responsibility belongs only to the purchaser. Why should the man selling the preferred weapon of mass shooters to a person fitting the exact profile of a mass shooter be expected to second guess the intentions of their customer? The law says they can do this, and so they do.
This hypnosis about the validity of gun rights and gun commerce is the first thing the Greens will have to snap out of. Law or no law, these transactions are what almost every mass shooting you can name hinged upon: a retailer willfully and negligently arming a maniac with a weapon that he has no business selling, even if it his actual business. If we are to end these massacres, then come hell or high water, these transactions must end as well.
At present, no organization or party has the capacity to halt gun sales — they are a protected right. And so this is where the guillotine’s blade typically drops on the imagination of people trying to change our gun laws. Seeing no legal route to interfere with the means by which guns are actually put into the hands of terrorists, advocates for change place their hopes on inconsequential marches, petition drives, Steven Colbert monologues, Palme d’Or -winning documentaries and the occasional left-of-center political candidate whose party has already sold their soul to the gun lobby. All of this forms the matrix of our collective delusion: We dream of the day when these soft-power efforts will bring a critical mass of voters over to our side, and meanwhile the massacres arrive one after the other because this dream is obviously so much liberal wank.
We must recognize this reality and communicate to gun control advocates that they need to shift gears. The public’s consciousness has been raised as high as it will ever go, and the political class can be budged no further using “common sense”. We cannot fight powerful, abstract entities like the gun industry through rhetorical hot air. We must fight that industry exactly where it touches down into reality: the very gun stores upon which the terrorists depend.
One massacre at a time, one gun shop at a time, we must name the villains, call out their businesses, blacken their reputations, disgrace them in the media, and put a spotlight on the criminality of their very trade that no ad campaign or Kid Rock anthem will ever be able to neutralize. We must exact concessions, one by one, from every gun shop owner that ever set a Payton Gendron or a Salvador Ramos loose on an innocent public wielding their merchandise, and when we have proven to voter and politician alike that the unassailable arms industry is capable of being humbled, then we will at last achieve the laws to replace the snotty Kleenex that is the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.
Denying retailers the right — the moral right, then the actual right— to sell terrorists their weapons while washing their hands of the consequences will be the cornerstone of any strategy the Greens adopt to face the hurricane force winds of the Second Amendment that our opponents will unleash against us. Our opponents will make claims (backed up, certainly, by a good deal of Supreme Court precedent and Federalist Society white papers) that the right to keep and bear arms must also include the right to arm our child-butchering maniacs.
The Greens will either say “yes” to this “common sense” interpretation of the Second Amendment, and watch as school children and grandmothers continue to drop like flies, or or we will say “NO”, and dare to write our own verdict into the Constitution.
Jason Yungbluth writes and draws comic books, including one called Weapon Brown.
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