SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
nra
How the Corrupt Supreme Court Helped Create the US Gun Violence Crisis
Melissa Hortman was a strong advocate of gun control laws. Charlie Kirk opposed them. Both are dead by gunfire, along with hundreds of children and adults so far this year.
Sep 12, 2025
“I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”—Charlie Kirk
Republican Charlie Kirk is dead. So is former Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark.
Two clearly political assassinations in the past four months.
And a new study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association’s journal Pediatrics suggests that most of the deaths from the more than 250 mass shootings in America so far this year could also be classified as resulting from politics.
How did we get here, and what do we do?
In 2008, the in-the-National Rifle Association’s (NRA)-pocket Republican Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia did much the same thing that Sam Alito would later do with his Dobbs anti-abortion ruling: He reached back hundreds of years to look for a definition at the time the Second Amendment was written for how people then viewed the phrase “bear arms” and then twisted it beyond recognition.
The result was the corrupt Heller decision, as I lay out in The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, which unleashed a new wave of guns on an unsuspecting America.
It was followed two years later by McDonald v Chicago, another NRA-purchased, all-Republican decision striking down Chicago’s gun control laws and forcing cities and blue states to accept more weapons whether their people—through their elected officials—wanted that tsunami of guns in their communities or not.
As Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his dissent in McDonald:
Although the Court’s decision in this case might be seen as a mere adjunct to its decision in Heller, the consequences could prove far more destructive—quite literally—to our Nation’s communities and to our constitutional structure.
As we saw Wednesday with the right’s new martyr, and have been seeing in the daily toll of gun deaths that America—alone among all other nations in the world—suffers from, Stevens was prescient.
We are literally the only country in the world that is experiencing this magnitude of gun crisis. Half of the guns in civilian hands in the entire world are here in the United States, so it shouldn’t surprise anybody that the leading cause of childhood death in the US is bullets and political assassinations have become routine.
The study in Pediatrics looked at child gun deaths in America before and after the 2010 McDonald decision. What they found is shocking.
Hopefully the assassination of a far-right “gun rights” icon will cause at least a few Republicans to break with their party’s fealty to the weapons industry.
That decision caused two major changes in gun laws across America. The first was that nearly every red state loosened their gun laws, sometimes in the extreme, even allowing open carry of semiautomatic weapons of war without any permit or regulation. Most blue states, on the other hand, looked for and found ways around the decision to actually tighten their gun control laws.
The result was astonishing. Between 2011 and 2023, the study period, red states that had loosened their gun laws saw 7,453 more children killed by firearms than the pre-McDonald statistical trends would have predicted had the Republicans on the court not further loosened gun laws.
In blue states that maintained or strengthened their gun laws, though, child gun deaths remained the same as before McDonald and Heller, and, to quote the study:
“Four states (California, Maryland, New York, and Rhode Island) had decreased pediatric firearm mortality after McDonald v Chicago, all of which were in the strict firearms law group.” (emphasis added)
Melissa Hortman was a strong advocate of gun control laws. Charlie Kirk opposed them. Both are dead by gunfire, along with hundreds of children and adults so far this year.
When Hortman was murdered by a politically-inspired right-wing thug, some conservatives on X and other platforms celebrated.
Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, for example, tweeted, “This is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way,” along with a picture of the shooter. An hour later, again showing the suspect’s picture, Sen. Lee wrote: “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” apparently trying to humorously reference Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and his advocacy for gun control.
Yesterday, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, some liberals were posting the equivalent of “good riddance” to social media platforms, some making Lee’s obscene posts seem tame.
Both are reprehensible.
Instead, let’s take this moment to reflect on how the NRA’s work over the past decades—often funded and supported by Vladimir Putin’s Russia (where gun control is rigid)—killed both of them. And tens of thousands of children and adults over the years.
This week NPR reported that school shootings have spawned a $4 billion industry selling everything from bulletproof backpacks to “panic buttons, bullet-resistant whiteboards, facial recognition technology, training simulators, body armor, guns, and tasers.” They note:
Tom McDermott, with the metal detector manufacturer CEIA USA, says schools used to be a small fraction of their US business. Now they’re the majority.
"It’s not right. We need to solve this problem. It’s good for business, but we don't need to be selling to schools," McDermott says.
Sarah McNeeley, a sales manager with SAM Medical, is selling trauma kits, which include tourniquets, clotting agents, and chest seals. She says their customers are traditionally EMTs, fire departments, and military medics, but increasingly, school districts.
It’s insane that America’s answer to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court and the NRA flooding our country with deadly weapons is to create a multibillion-dollar industry to stop bullets or ameliorate their damage in our public schools.
The vast majority of Americans want rational gun control laws instead of this Wild West insanity. Every other developed country in the world has them; not a single one forces their children through the trauma of active shooter drills or subjects them to metal detectors and requires them to occasionally come face-to-face with murderous psychopaths armed to the teeth.
It’s way past time for our politicians to wake the hell up, and hopefully the assassination of a far-right “gun rights” icon will cause at least a few Republicans to break with their party’s fealty to the weapons industry and join with Democrats to Make America Safe Again.
Keep ReadingShow Less
I'm Too Young to Vote, But Not Too Young to Die From Gun Violence
I’m using my voice to urge you and every other eligible voter, to please vote for gun violence prevention candidates in this upcoming election. Please vote for my life and future.
Nov 04, 2024
It’s official; the Republican Vice Presidential nominee declared school shootings “a fact of life.” That’s what JD Vance said at a rally in Arizona when asked about the recent shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, right after he told the crowd “We don’t have to like the reality that we live in, but it is the reality we live in.”
As a high school student, I’m terrified to know that the fate of students like me might soon be left in the hands of candidates who have accepted that we will always have to live in fear and whose only plan is to bring more guns into our schools. These reactive approaches only put students at greater risk and fail to address the root causes of the gun violence epidemic. High schoolers like me deserve more than that, don’t we?
I was 14 years old when I realized that school was not safe. I was riding the bus to school the day after the Uvalde shooting, where an 18-year-old killed 19 children and two teachers with an assault rifle in a Texas elementary school. My friend turned to me with concern in his eyes and asked, “You know what to do if this happens here, right?” I did know. Like most other kids in America, I’d been preparing for a school shooting since I was in elementary school. Lock the door. Cover the window. Hide as far away as possible—in a closet, or under a desk. Don’t let yourself become a target. Locate the first aid kit in case one of us is shot. Stop the bleeding. Wait for help.
So no, gun violence does not have to be a fact of life, and we refuse to accept it. We won’t “just get over it,” as Trump said after a school shooting in Perry, Iowa.
I’ve been preparing for a school shooting since I was five. While kids in other countries were at recess, I was huddled with my classmates in a corner being told to stay quiet and not move as people banged on the classroom door. They used to tell us we were practicing in case a bear got into the school, and I thought that was the most terrifying thing in the world—a bear in our school hallways. But now I know that the truth is far scarier––and far more likely. That day as a 14-year-old riding the bus to school, I realized that the real danger wasn’t some distant threat, but the “fact of life” that anyone could easily access a firearm and kill us. From then on, I became cautious about who I opened the door for at school. And I began to fear for my life every time my principal went over the speakers to announce a lockdown.
And I’ve done more than change my mindset—I’ve taken action. Two days after the Uvalde shooting, I helped students at my school lead a walkout to remember the victims and call for gun safety legislation. Since that first protest, I’ve devoted my time in high school to gun violence prevention, working with March For Our Lives, a youth-led gun violence prevention movement. To JD Vance and anyone who thinks similarly, let me tell you from the young people of America: we do not accept being killed by guns in our classrooms and in our communities as a “fact of life.” Our “fact of life” is that the time we’re meant to spend on school and with friends is instead spent doing what politicians should be doing for us: fighting for a future free of gun violence.
So no, gun violence does not have to be a fact of life, and we refuse to accept it. We won’t “just get over it,” as Trump said after a school shooting in Perry, Iowa. Instead, we will change these so-called facts of life. We will fight for a country where a 14-year-old can’t access an assault rifle from his dad, as in the recent Apalachee High School shooting. We will fight for a country where students like those at Apalachee will never have to drag their teacher’s dying body across the floor and use their clothes to try to stop his bleeding. And we will fight for a country where teachers and students won’t lose their lives simply for attending school.
In 2025, when the next mass shooting happens––statistically about twice a day in America––we will either have a president who tells us to “get over it,” or a president who demands, “We have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country once and for all.” I want the latter. I want lawmakers who are determined to do what it takes to help students like me feel safe at school. I want an administration that keeps military-grade assault rifles out of the hands of dangerous civilians and will pass safe storage laws so that no one can access someone else's gun to hurt themselves or others.
But right now, what I want doesn’t matter. I’m not old enough to vote yet, and neither is the majority of young people and students who bear the brunt of the gun violence epidemic. So instead, I’m using my voice to urge you and every other eligible voter, to please vote for gun violence prevention candidates in this upcoming election. Please vote for my life and future. As Vice-President Harris reminded us, “It doesn’t have to be this way."Keep ReadingShow Less
My Best Friend Died By Firearm Suicide; Here’s Why I Advocate for Stronger Gun Safety Laws
With just one month until election day, it’s time for American voters to come together and elect leaders who will fight to protect our communities from gun violence.
Oct 05, 2024
Warning: This piece discusses suicide, gun violence, and mental health. If you or someone you know is in crisis, please call or text 988, or visit 988lifeline.org/chat to chat with a counselor from the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Last year, I received a text that would change my life forever. I was told that my close friend, Jordan, had died by firearm suicide. Calls from classmates came crashing in and emails from my school flooded my inbox. A wave of shock rushed over me and it felt like time had frozen, even as I watched the world continue on.
My school held an assembly to honor Jordan’s memory, but it all became a blur between the tears, hugs, tissues, and funeral.
Jordan holds a special place in my heart. Not only because we were on the same lacrosse team, but because she was a shining light and a good friend. She was always there for me when I needed her, but little did I know Jordan was battling a thunderstorm on the inside.
Amidst all my grief, there was a part of me that was also angry because politicians sent their condolences, but no action was taken. I wanted something to change.
There are thousands of students and young people just like me across the country who are committed to creating a future free from gun violence.
The tragedy of this story isn’t just about Jordan; it’s the fact that her story is not unique. When there are over 3,000 young people who die by gun suicide in an average year, something has to change. Stronger gun safety measures, like secure storage requirements, in our country can save lives and prevent more friends and families from feeling the pain I’ve felt.
Firearm suicide has a deadly and devastating impact on my generation. Over the past decade, gun suicide rates for young people have increased faster than any other age group, reaching a near-record high. When it comes to attempted suicide, guns are especially deadly. We have to do more to reduce easy access to guns in a moment of crisis since the majority of people who survive a suicide attempt don’t go on to attempt again.
Those statistics should be a wake-up call for every gun owner, politician, and person in the United States on why it’s so important to prevent firearm access for someone contemplating suicide. That’s where laws like secure storage requirements come in.
Secure storage is the practice of gun owners making their homes and communities safer by storing their guns securely. This means storing a firearm unloaded, locked, and separate from ammunition. Research shows that most firearm suicides attempted by youth occur at home, and households that securely store guns and ammunition reduce this risk by 78% comapared to those that don’t.
There is a direct correlation between securely storing a gun at home and saving a life from firearm suicide. That’s why we need lawmakers at every level of government to increase awareness around secure storage practices and pass laws that require gun owners to store their guns securely.
With just one month until election day, it’s time for American voters to come together and elect leaders who will fight to protect our communities from gun violence. From electing Vice President Harris and Governor Walz at the top of the ticket to voting for gun sense candidates down ballot, these are the candidates that are fighting to end gun violence while the other side is doing absolutely nothing.
Even in the face of tragedy, I still have hope. Firearm suicide, just like all forms of gun violence, is preventable.
After the loss of my best friend, I felt devastated and I wanted to find a community that shared my similar experiences. I soon discovered Students Demand Action, the nation's largest youth-led gun prevention group, and started a chapter at my school. Since then, I have been actively involved in fighting for gun violence prevention in California, and I’m just getting started.
We should all be aware of the warning signs and how to help when someone is in crisis. Whether it’s having a private conversation to let someone know you’re there for them or sharing mental health resources, that one step could save a life.
There are thousands of students and young people just like me across the country who are committed to creating a future free from gun violence. Guns are the leading cause of death for my generation, meaning youth firearm suicide is just one piece of a much larger puzzle. When guns are accessible to anyone, anywhere, at any time—no one is safe.
But even in the face of tragedy, I still have hope. Firearm suicide, just like all forms of gun violence, is preventable. Joining Students Demand Action allowed me to turn my pain into purpose and together, we can end America’s gun violence epidemic by creating a future for our generation that’s free from gun violence.Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular