Are They At an Advantage, Or Is It a Disadvantage?

The Tennessee legislature skulked out of session without dealing with a proposed gun control bill.  And part of the imagined impetus they might have had to deal with it was yet another school shooting, this time in Tennessee.  But for the legislature, this event wasn't reason enough to, you know, fucking do something!

I have no idea who are the members of the Tennessee legislature, apart from the three who got themselves famous a few months ago, by demanding gun control legislation.  And in response to this demand, the legislature threw out two of them (the two young African-American male ones, not the somewhat older Caucasian female one).  The vacated seats had to be filled, and the districts involved enthusiastically re-elected the two guys who had just been ejected.  So, maybe the legislature was in part embarrassed about this failed attempt to suppress elected representatives and initiatives that were important to their constituencies.  Maybe that's why Plan B was to skulk away without taking up the proposed bill.

Gun violence, including against school children, just doesn't seem to look like a problem to groups like the Tennessee legislature.  And maybe the fact that it doesn't look like a problem is the problem.  Maybe they don't see the problem other people see, and for which those other people are agitating for a solution, because they weren't the legislators' children who were shot and killed.

I don't want the children of Caucasian, right wing, Tennessee legislators to be shot and killed.  I don't want anyone to be shot and killed.  And I'm very sure that Caucasian, right wing, Tennessee legislators don't want their own children to be shot and killed.  But they seem to be unable to recognize that the shooting injuries and deaths of other children, who are not theirs, is the same thing as the shooting injuries and deaths of children who are theirs.  They're at the advantage, or disadvantage, of not being the parents of children who were injured or killed by someone with a gun.  The problem, for those of us who think these shootings are a problem, is just not in focus for them.

The legislators have another way to look at it, and it might, in a sense, help them gain some perspective.  They could realize that they represent the whole state, and not just themselves and their families.  It doesn't appear they adopt that perspective.  "They don't care" is a harsh way to summarize their inaction, but they don't leave much of an alternative.

Of course, if they were part of this conversation, they would sort of without doubt cite the "Second Amendment," which they would say, as Marco Rubio says, says "...the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed."  And half of the Amendment -- the second half, that depends on the first half -- does say that.  But the Amendment is not about guns.  It never mentions them.  It's about "Arms," and "Arms" are for the purpose of being an effective member of a militia.  That's the condition the first half of the Amendment very clearly states.  We don't have common public militias any more, and all of the "Arms" that would be necessary to be an effective member of a militia today, for the expressed purposes of militias, are illegal.  By making them illegal, we have informally or indirectly repealed the "Second Amendment."

And the Tennessee legislature could listen to one of its own citizens, who grew up around guns, and handled and used them, and became an emergency room doctor, and calculated that gun use that nobody wants is 42 times more common than gun use that people might generally want, or accept.

The Tennessee legislature had compelling reasons to pass the proposed bill, but their advantage, or disadvantage, prevented them from recognizing the propriety and essential importance of it.

Who knows what would have gotten their attention?  Federal Representative Steve Scalise was shot while playing softball, and that didn't lead him to change his mind about guns in society.  Of course, he just got a leg injury, from which he recovered, and the shooting didn't result in his burying one of his children.  So, maybe he, too, was at an advantage, or a disadvantage.

'24 might be interesting.