It's Time to Take the Gloves Off for Gun Control
It is an abdication of duty to ignore the slaughter of American children.
Largely, I believe outrage to be an emotion unbefitting of actually accomplishing policy solutions. It’s easy to criticize from the outside, particularly in our echo chambers of decidedly liberal cities in decidedly liberal states. Landmark legislation like the Affordable Care Act, which has given nearly fifty million otherwise uninsured Americans quality healthcare, could have easily been abandoned as “not going far enough.” The Inflation Reduction Act was watered down from almost two trillion dollars to around eight hundred billion. It could have been left to whither by the Biden administration. The losses were real—like expansions in child care and universal pre-K—but the Democratic Party was still able to give this country the infrastructure support it deserved. This is a part of a healthy democracy, even if I fundamentally disagree with many of the complaints against both of the previous bills.
What is also fundamental to a democracy, or any society, is safety. The first lines of our Constitution pledge to “insure domestic Tranquility.” Our founders understood that safety is fundamental to a functioning society. It is embedded in our innate rights—woven into the foundation of a more perfect Union. Our founders gave us a mission, and it is time to act.
I’m not going to remind you of the hundreds of children whose blood stains our schools. I am not going to recite the thousands of children who live in fear of violence after watching their friends summarily executed. I am not going to play you the footage of the Uvalde children screaming in terror as they are gunned down, door to door, child to child. There is no reason to do this because, unless there is some other purpose I cannot discern, it has failed to change the trajectory of this issue. It has failed because the party that claims family values has never valued families—not when they need food on their table, a roof over their head, or a child safely learning at school. It’s simply noise to the modern right—disregarded the moment they can aim snipers at college students or slash funding for our public schools.
What matters is what the Democratic Party does now. The nation has become desensitized to these national tragedies—these bloody stains on Old Glory—because, in large part, the Democratic Party has approached the issue with technocratic solutions. We have repeated the same lines—lines that should, in a fairer world, move any American with an ounce of pride for their country or empathy in their soul. You’ve heard them before: “thoughts and prayers are not enough,” and a litany of others that were powerful back then and hollow right now. There is only so long that you can say that well wishes do not suffice before you become the same as the right—going through the motions of mourning.
Instead, the first step to real action is taking out the politics and pulling in the emotion. These are children—the future of our country, the most precious thing that America has. American children should have the best education in the world and the most fulfilling lives. They should have anything and everything they wish for, because they are children of the greatest country in the history of the world. There is no news cycle too long when it comes to a seven-year-old girl dying via a piece of shrapnel torn through her lung. There are no screams too loud or tears too many. We need to see it from our leaders, like Matthew McConaughey who was both willing to express his raw emotions and unwilling to relinquish or ignore the crisis at hand.
More than sixty percent of Americans agree that it is too easy to legally obtain a gun in our country. We know that the agreement is there, but we lack the ability to adequately portray the stakes. In 2024, gun control was one of the lowest issues of importance for American voters, ranking below abortion, climate change, and racial inequality; the latter two did not meet even twenty percent of Republicans. To raise the issue, all we need to do is tell the truth. Children are dying, we will not close our mouths until it ends, and we will bring it up to every CNN anchor, MSNBC panelist, or New York Times journalist until this country wakes up.
When we do return to power, and with a mandate from the American people for real gun control, our first priority should be the strongest and most robust gun reform legislation that this country has ever seen—for our children. As mentioned previously, the legislative process can, and usually does, dramatically change a bill from conception to passage. While the exact policies can change, we need to be clear that there is no diluting the sanctity of the family in American life. There is no replacement for a murdered child—so there can be no replacement for ironclad, family-first legislation.
First, any bill will need to dramatically raise federal excise taxes on guns and ammunition, a budgetary power that can be passed via budget reconciliation and avoid a filibuster. We need to make it harder for deranged and unstable individuals to amass war chests of weapons and stockpiles of ammo—which our decades old rate of around ten percent miserably fails to do. In addition, certain high-capacity magazines and semi-automatic weapons must be subject to a meticulous and unforgiving expansion of registration requirements, a power reserved to the federal government under a tax-stamp regime.
Second, we need to be willing to make the Republican Party go on the record, time after time, for the blood of our American children they have on their hands. Any legislation dealing with school-safety grants—over three billion dollars annually—must include provisions for universal background checks, licensing standards, and safe-storage laws. Or, as the Republican Party will have to explain, our schools will be left unguarded against the attacks of individuals propelled by their noxious nightmare of America. If the MAGA movement is willing to bend, twist, and contort the rules of this country to implode American greatness, then we can use it to give children a safe space to learn.
In that same light, the next Democratic administration needs to be more willing to withhold state grant funding if a given state does not accord the children of this country the rights their founding fathers gave them. If these state governments would prefer to, like their Republican colleagues in Washington, exchange the lives of children and the funding of schools so that a few sensitive adults can live in violent matrimony, so be it. That is the choice they will make—on the record. Again, and again, and again.
There are certain issues that I believe some moderate Republicans can be persuaded to support. No more important is limiting and regulating the sale and production of so-called “ghost gun” frames and receivers. In 2022 alone, ATF officers confiscated over twenty thousand of these firearms, with tens of thousands more outside the bounds of law enforcement. These are flatly outside the bounds of any sane society and should be treated as such. With the power of our talented intelligence agencies, and with a massive expansion targeted toward collection, the federal government can track, locate, and confiscate these plastic weapons of war and prosecute those that sell them.
We also need to, finally, permanently reinstate the Federal Assault Weapons Ban—this time without the grandfathering exception that allowed pre-ban items to remain. No American needs a magazine over ten rounds unless they are planning to murder their fellow countrymen. If you want to use these weapons, you can sign up for the armed forces and serve your country. If not, you aren’t deserving of this awesome power. Dancing around this basic fact, and pandering to the pathetic whining of a handful of staunchly conservative gun-nuts, makes both sides of this issue seem equal when they aren’t. We are protecting our children’s liberty under the authority of our Constitution. They are pretending that three hundred pounds and an assault rifle could protect against a police state.
This is just the foundation of what needs to be a broader reorientation for the Democratic Party away from hypothetical social issues of moral clarity and toward the protection of the American family. I write that not as an analogy for the white nuclear family of the 1950s, as most hyper-online conservatives do, but as a truly literal embodiment of what it means to raise children in this country. It does not, and should not, matter who raises a child if that child goes to sleep safe, healthy, and happy. It should not matter where a child lives if they want a quality education and a safe school. If Texas fails to do it, then the Federal Government will instead—for our children.
We are all the sons and daughters of the greatest experiment in world history. Our forefathers have tasked us with achieving domestic tranquility, and it is our heavy responsibility to realize that vision. Otherwise, the vacuous mass of apathy will consume American society whole—and our children will keep taking their last bloody breaths in the classroom.
I say this as someone with dreams of high political office—who knows that the things I write now may someday be used against me by an ominous voice and eerie music. I say it because I know that this country will come together in protection of the family, but only if we are willing to have the bravery it takes to make the case. That is what leadership, the United States of America, and our children demand.
