Why would anyone fight to own an AR-15?

By the time you watch this, the school shooting in Nashville will almost certainly be off the front pages. There will almost certainly have been another mass shooting somewhere in America. We’re already at well over 100 and it’s only April. So at this point, it’s just basic math. 

Here’s something that I discovered while sifting through the articles about the person who entered the private school and killed three 9 year olds and three educators using multiple legally purchased firearms from Nashville area stores. 

Republican lawmakers in the state of Tennessee are currently putting forward legislation to make gun acquisition even easier. Tennessee already has some of the nation’s most permissive gun laws. It also has one of the nation’s highest rates of gun deaths, including murder, suicides and accidents. States with more restrictive gun laws have fewer gun related deaths. Senator John Stevens and Representative Rusty Grills, for example, are co-sponsoring a bill to drop the legal carrying age from 21 to 18. Senator Paul Bailey and Representative Ryan Williams are sponsoring a bill to allow faculty and staff at schools to carry concealed handguns on school grounds with a permit. They want more guns in school settings. 

Now, these legislators temporarily paused the voting schedule for these bills because they accurately perceived that the day following yet another school shooting wasn’t the time to fight for increasingly lax gun laws. That didn’t stop it. They’re just waiting for the news cycle to turn its eyes elsewhere. 

What continues to confound me, what I truly do not understand, is why anybody, anywhere is fighting to have AR-15 rifles out and about in our communities. AR-15 rifles are, as we all know by now, pretty unique. Their bullets don’t just enter and exit the body. They leave a trail of destruction through tissue that is oftentimes not survivable even with immediate medical intervention. They are designed not just to wound, they are designed to destroy. They are made to kill. The Washington Post put up a very hard-to-read, but very important article on exactly what happens when bullets from an AR-15 enter the body, and you should read it. What they do is they blow it apart. What is the possible reason for allowing these to remain in circulation? Why? What do you need one for? I remember learning about Sandy Hook on the news. I was home with my one year old. I didn’t know what to do so I took him to the playground and I remember it was cold out so the tears were freezing on my cheeks. I pushed him on the swing and I thought about how this was the most horrible thing that had ever happened. It had to be. It was and it wasn’t. I say this often but these Republican legislators — the same ones, by the way, creating a moral panic over sexual education and hotly debating whether to ban Maya Angelou from curriculums — they do not care about our children. They don’t care. Being a parent can feel impossible these days. Being a teacher, I imagine the same. And as for how all our children are handling this, well, I leave you with this. insert Instagram image. Take care of each other and don’t stop making noise.