Add blind support for 30-round ammunition clips, military assault rifles and ownership of semiautomatic weapons, no-background-check gun shows and “right to carry” laws — including the right to carry in schools — to the list of recent Republican Party suicide notes. And to think: I once belonged to the Republican Party, helped marry it to the religious right as I describe in my book Crazy For God, and I’m white, male, 60-years-old and own a gun. I have a son who served in the Marines in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I’m proud of his service. So I should be a perfect NRA clone, right?
Wrong!
And therein lies the desolation of the Republican Party’s future: They are going to lose many more of their very own through their combination with obstinate extremism and plain stupidity. I mean who wants to defend shooting toddlers as a constitutional right?
Who wants to “own” the pictures of weeping mothers?
The Republican Party does. As if killing themselves with anti-gay marriage homophobia, hatred of Hispanics (masquerading as anti-“illegal” immigrant initiatives) anti-women misogyny (flying under the banner of preventing women from getting contraceptives) and anti-science fundamentalist religion forced into schools wasn’t enough…
… BEHOLD REPUBLICANS WILL NOW OWN EVERY CHILD KILLED BY A GUN.
This is the new Republican Party “winning” platform? Good luck with that!
All that will be left of the Republican Party are the dregs. The rest of us like me are long gone and this post-child-massacre renewed support for murder called “gun rights” is about to drive the few sane moderates from the fold. And to think they had a chance here to rethink their gun rights position and modify it!
Fat chance. The Republicans seem incapable of keeping up with the times. They just passed up a hell-sent chance to moderate their opinions. They passed it up, just as Romney passed up his chance to win women back by not publicly blasting Rush Limbaugh when he called a young woman a “whore” for standing up for her reproductive rights re contraception.
Mark this day as a turning point.
Just as the Republicans now own racism in America (after their irrational and failed and amazing anti-president Obama hyperbole, from the Tea Party to the “birthers”) and just as the Republican Party now owns anti-immigrant legislative initiatives… and just as the Republican Party has alienated just about every thinking educated woman in America… now they cleverly are gearing up to further be seen empowering a mass murder “craze.”
Also by Frank: Mass Killing is Our Idea of Patriotism
As Republicans oppose president Obama’s attempt to rein in the most insane and permissive gun laws in the world – which allow everything from multiple military style types of ammunition to “cop killing” bullets designed to pierce body armor, the “right to carry” laws bordering on the humorous if they weren’t so lethal including the right to carry into churches, schools, public parks and God knows what else – now they have once again sought the lowest common denominator position this time on killing children. And that leaves them vulnerable to excruciating exposure to their well-earned title as today’s political Neanderthals.
While the death of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday appears to have persuaded some Democratic lawmakers to support new gun control measures, there has been little indication that Republicans who control the House — and are in a standoff with Mr. Obama over taxes — are willing to accept such restrictions.
House Democrats urged Speaker John A. Boehner on Wednesday to bring a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines to a vote by Saturday — a step he is highly unlikely to take.
Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, an influential conservative leader, said in a statement that “it is clear that criminals will always find ways to acquire weapons and use them to commit acts of violence.”
“Passing more restrictions on law-abiding citizens will not deter this type of crime, ” he said.
This week, Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa told an Iowa radio station, KSCJ, that… “We all had our cap pistols when I was growing up, and that didn’t seem to cause mass murders in the street.”
The Republicans are going to have to trade in their symbol of the elephant for a new logo: the dinosaur. Maybe the dinosaur should be carrying an assault rifle.
The Republicans have aligned themselves with billionaires against the rest of us. Now they are about to embrace the defending the murder of children and trivializing it with talk of “cap pistols.” That’s the moral equivalant of the talk about rape that derailed the fools running in the last election cycle.
Related: Sandy Hook and the Tearing Asunder of Evangelical Christianity by Joshua D. Ambrosius
Republican “God intended rape” … “We all had cap gun” fools: It’s a trend.
The Old Male White Constituency of Republicans just got smaller. There are many white males, even plenty of uneducated gun owning white males, who love their children more than they love some weirdly stretched loyalty to the Second Amendment or even Fox News.
I say weirdly stretched because no serious student of American history (even old white guys like me) believes that the right to carry an assault weapon in public, or to carry a concealed semiautomatic pistol in a church, or to own vast quantities of military style cop-killing weapons — including grenade launchers — is what our founders had in mind by a well regulated militia.
So the Republicans have once again shown their unerring genius for choosing a lose/lose position.
Republicans will have to get even more used to losing. And those losses will no doubt give some aging white males even more paranoid fact-free “reasons” to cling to their guns and thereby to facilitate the killers of children. This is the price of right wing delusional freedom. It is a kind of “freedom” that looks more like madness with every child being buried this week.
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Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back.
Photo Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images