We Don’t Even Talk About the Guns Anymore -

A day after a gunman killed right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, the internet has been ablaze with recriminations: exhortations from the center and left for both sides to “lower the temperature,” calls from the president and his followers on the right to exact revenge on liberals (despite the perpetrator being unknown and at large).

This is how the mass or particularly high profile shooting routine goes now — a mad dash to unveil the suspect’s identity (sometimes claiming the privacy and reputation of innocents along the way), the better to pin the violence on one political party or the other. It’s worth asserting, as some pundits seem to find it uncouth, that it’s simply true that right-wing extremists have killed far more people and tended to be more violent than their left-wing counterparts in the past few decades.

Still, it’s striking that discussion of guns, the tools virtually always used to carry out this violence, has all but fallen out of the national discourse. Even Democrats hardly bother to bring it up anymore.

I suspect this is the malignant influence of the Supreme Court at work. Even when a Republican administration can be moved to pass a restriction, its shelf life is limited.

In 2017, the Las Vegas music festival shooting was so particularly gruesome that even the Trump administration was roused to action. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) passed the bump stock ban rule, classifying the device as a machine gun and thus, illegal. A few years later, the Supreme Court knocked it down.

The Roberts Court has drastically expanded the Second Amendment — once thought to speak to militias — into an individual right to have firearms in the home. It knocked down New York’s century-old concealed carry law, expanding people’s ability to tote guns in public. (It did draw the line at letting domestic abusers carry firearms — except for Justice Clarence Thomas.)

The gun-friendly Court has made a near-impossible feat Sisyphean. We have a Republican Congress utterly unwilling to pass meaningful legislation to stem the scourge of gun violence, backstopped by a Supreme Court that sees the Second Amendment as untouchable.

It seems like, and currently is, a lost cause. Still, dropping the subject cedes significant ground to the right. The United States is not the only country with hyper-partisanship and an irresponsible, bloodlusty leader. It’s the guns.

— Kate Riga

GOP Rep Wants a Statue of Charlie Kirk

In the wake of the killing of Turning Point USA co-founder and online provocateur Charlie Kirk, some Republicans are pushing for the kind of commemorations often reserved for elected officials, military figures, and civil rights activists. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) — who previously worked for TPUSA — sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) asking him to help create a statute of Kirk for the U.S. Capitol.

“This is not a symbolic gesture, but a permanent testament to his life’s work, his courage, and his sacrifice,” Luna wrote in the letter to Johnson. “It will stand as a reminder that political disagreement must never be answered with violence, and that the fight for truth must carry on.”

Trump ordered that flags be flown at half-staff in the wake of the shooting as well.

— Nicole Lafond

Tales from a Different Democracy

Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil and political and spiritual ally of Donald Trump, was found guilty this afternoon for his own plot to stay in office following his loss in the election.

“The government wanted to remain in power by simply ignoring democracy — and that is what constitutes a coup d’état,” Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes said Tuesday, according to the Washington Post. “The leader of the criminal group made it clear — publicly and in his own words — that he would never accept defeat at the ballot, a democratic loss in the elections, and that he would never abide by the will of the people.”

The conviction rolled out over several days, as justices announced their decisions one by one.

“They acted to hijack the soul of the republic,” said Justice Cármen Lúcia, who cast the third, deciding vote.

Brazil emerged from a military dictatorship in 1985, and prosecutors had argued that conviction of Bolsonaro was necessary to prevent a return to that era.

The former president will be sentenced this week, and faces decades in prison.

— John Light