Last week, a married couple opened fire in a San Bernardino, Calif., community center, killing 14 and wounding 21. It was yet another gun-fueled massacre in a year that has seen far too many of them — there have been 353 as of this writing, but there will probably be more by the time you read this.
Republicans flooded the scene with rote messages of “thoughts and prayers” for victims, the same statements issued for countless previous mass shootings. Absent from the formulaic responses, though, were any sentiments, at all, that might upset the terrorist enablers at the National Rifle Association.
{mosads}And that’s what the city of San Bernardino was: a victim of terrorism. That was true when the shooters were thought to be white, and that remained true when they turned out to be Muslim.
For all the GOP hysteria about terrorism and the trillions of dollars spent fighting it, the fact remains that far more Americans have died from domestic gun violence than anything al Qaeda or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria could ever realistically dream up.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 406,496 people died from firearms between 2001 and 2013. In that period, the number of people killed overseas from terrorism was 350. The disparity is laughable, yet the GOP’s obsession with covering up the carnage of the weapons industry is not.
Thoughts and prayers didn’t prevent those hundreds of thousands of people from dying, nor will thoughts and prayers prevent the next massacre, or the next, whether in shopping malls, senior centers, colleges or elementary schools.
Republicans just don’t care.
In fact, the GOP’s position on guns is so extreme, the party has repeatedly refused to ban gun sales to people who are on the no-fly list.
Conservatives would rather arm terrorists than try to save lives.
Nobody brought this home better than presidential hopeful Marco Rubio — not exactly the brightest bulb in the GOP’s pack of dunces. Talking about the San Bernardino attacks, the Florida senator said, “I don’t hear anybody talking about bomb control. They put bombs, they left bombs behind on the scene of attack, intending to kill even more people than they did with the guns.”
There is no legal right to own bombs, or to carry bombs (either open or concealed), or to bring bombs into bars, or to buy bombs at Wal-Mart. And those who are legally allowed to operate bombs, such as those in mining or construction operations, face heavy state and federal scrutiny over their use.
As a result, guess what? We don’t have a national epidemic of bomb deaths. We don’t have a daily stream of bomb-related mass murders. We don’t have trauma centers overwhelmed by bomb injuries. And even in San Bernardino, where the terrorists hoped to create additional death via bomb, every single person killed or wounded came as a result of guns.
What’s worse is that law enforcement has tried, for years, to tag explosive materials like fertilizer and black powder in order to better track the perpetrators of bombing attacks such as the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 that killed 168. Yet the NRA, expanding its mandate beyond guns to protect broader terrorism tools, has stood in opposition, and the GOP doesn’t dare stray.
The Republican Party doesn’t just stand in the way of sensible gun control, the kind that could stem a level of killings unseen elsewhere in the developed world.
It actually opposes even more stringent bomb control. But it’s still telling that Rubio would rather talk about bombs that killed no one, rather than the guns that killed and wounded so many.
Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of Daily Kos.