Call it a political stunt, if you like.
Call it a political stunt, if you like.
But to dismiss the sit-in by House Democrats this week is to dismiss the genuine anguish and frustration among those who advocate sensible gun regulation. It is to dismiss the harm done to America, and Americans, by the gun lobby and the proliferation of firearms it has encouraged. And it is to dismiss the sense of despair growing, in many quarters, at the U.S. government’s unwillingness or inability to take even common-sense steps, measures supported by most Americans, to keep guns out of dangerous hands.
This, in the wake of the Orlando shooting. This, after the San Bernardino shooting, claiming 14 lives. This, after nine African-Americans were shot in a Charleston, S.C., church. This, four years after the Sandy Hook massacre, claiming the lives of 20 first-grade children. This, after an epidemic of gun violence that’s swept American cities, such as Detroit, where 298 people were murdered in 2014.
When is it enough? That’s the question House Democrats asked.
Led by civil rights icon U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia — a Freedom Rider who marched at Selma and still bears the scars he took from physical abuse — Democrats took the floor Wednesday, with the intention of forcing House Speaker Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, to bring a set of gun regulations to the floor for a vote. Causing “good trouble,” as the congressman says.
As the day waned, more Democrats joined, including allies from the U.S. Senate.
Just after midnight, U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell of Michigan stepped up to the podium, and in a sometimes-breaking voice, articulated the conflict at the heart of the nation’s gun debate with poignant clarity.
Her husband, former U.S. Rep John Dingell, also a Democrat, is a responsible gun owner and former NRA board member. But Debbie Dingell has had a different kind of experience with guns, one she rarely speaks of: “I lived in a house with a man that should not have had a gun. I know what it’s like to see a gun pointed at you and wonder if you are going to live.”
Why, Dingell asked, don’t gun control measures even merit debate?
Dingell acknowledged the tension between gun regulation and protection of the American right to gun ownership, and to due process.
But these tensions should start a conversation, she said. Not stop it.
The gun bills in question aren’t revolutionary: Preventing individuals on the government’s no-fly list — in theory, suspected terrorists — from buying weapons, and expanding background checks, including closing the so-called gun-show loophole.
And there’s more we could do: Allow the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study gun violence, something for which the U.S. Congress has previously blocked funding. Allow the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives sufficient funding to do its job — ensuring that the American gun trade complies with American law, and keeping firearms out of criminals’ hands.
In starkest terms, the House Democrats failed. The protest ended Thursday afternoon. No vote was taken. And had one been called, Democrats surely would not have prevailed.
But perhaps the clearest takeaway is this: The Democratic minority refused to be silent, exercising another constitutional right — the right to peaceably assemble, to petition the government for redress of wrongs — and they did it over gun control.
Something, it seems, has changed.
— Detroit Free Press