No 'one door' opens to stop our American carnage
Sen. Ted Cruz and other Republicans suggest schools keep only one door open and guarded as a protection against school shootings. Credit: AP/Michael Wyke
The rhetorical rift further widens between our major parties over gun rights and mass shootings.
One side calls for stemming gun access for people who are too young, or too insane, or too violently indoctrinated to have them. To deflect, the other side defensively insists that only such measures as a military-style hardening of targets such as schools will prevent carnage.
Slogans never crowdsource adult solutions. "Gun control good!" versus "Gun control bad!" thus becomes the useless policy version of a childish “Am not! Are too!” exchange.
The most obvious appeal of the “one door” proposal for all schools, seized upon by Republicans from Sen. Ted Cruz to Rep. Lee Zeldin in the aftermath of the Uvalde horror, is its consistency with party branding.
One gun-guarded entryway for all may resound for parents frightened by what may await their kids in our public schools. Plus it offers a bigger role for private security contractors, a generally GOP-friendly industry, to help deploy guns against guns. Predictably, the talking point won applause last week at the National Rifle Association convention.
If Americans buy into the "one-door" notion en masse, perhaps they can put off worrying about what long-term lessons the kids will learn about their country from living each day in a form of lockdown.
Maybe it could deter some atrocities. But will schools with thousands of staff and students require hours to funnel everyone in each morning? Fire exits would be an obvious challenge. Across America, classes often take place in portable buildings and in multiple buildings on school campuses — presenting massive engineering challenges.
Trying to arm our way out of a random plague of murders suggests other paradoxes. Video of Shari Obrinski of Cleveland’s teachers union went viral when she reacted at a hearing to a proposal to arm her colleagues: "[We] aren't trusted to do curriculum or with the books we choose. But we're supposed to be trusted with a gun in school?”
That's just one in a set of sound bites generated by a single massacre. More important to the politics of it, the timing of the latest mass killings — at the Texas school, the Buffalo supermarket, and on Wednesday, at an Oklahoma hospital — comes at a unique moment in Washington, D.C.
The Supreme Court is widely expected to assert or expand Second Amendment rights in an upcoming decision — related specifically to New York’s gun-licensing system. That means the national GOP that used its power to add to the high court's actively conservative majority is widely expected to claim credit for a Second Amendment victory. That has to provide incentive and tools to resist any Democratic-led crackdown in Congress on high-grade killing machines.
Why would the party leadership want to blur an ideological win by compromising now on guns?
That ruling when it comes could also give Democrats in public office a fresh rhetorical excuse for the rise in heinous crimes on their watch. Right or wrong, that party is as committed to deincarceration, and to dialing back street enforcement, as the Republicans are devoted to liberalizing gun restrictions. Democrats who focus blame for urban violence on gun access will surely step up claims that the other side is tying their hands.
Clearly, no single door to which we now have access opens onto a quick fix for insane violence.
Columnist Dan Janison's opinions are his own.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
