The Annunciation Catholic School shooting happened just over a year ago. Unsurprisingly, that anniversary has many looking at that event, then at gun control. They seem to think that we need to take steps because of what happened, when those steps have already failed.
But they're going to keep pushing and pretending there's a middle ground on guns.
For example, we have this op-ed from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that tries to make the case.
The response cannot be to shrug and do nothing. Surely, we are better than that.
Yet on the question of access to assault-style rifles, a shrug is essentially what the Minnesota Legislature did in response to the pleas of the Annunciation Catholic Church and School community.
A year ago today, a shooter killed two students, wounded dozens and left countless others terrorized and traumatized. A horrified state, already scarred by deadly school shootings in Red Lake and Cold Spring this century, once again mourned with victims and their families.
Immediately afterward, Gov. Tim Walz pushed for a special session to ban assault-style rifles. But with the Legislature narrowly divided and Republicans unwilling to support such a ban, the special session never happened.
Over the past year, legislators repeatedly heard excruciating accounts from Annunciation parents, students and first responders. Then Minnesota met its Sandy Hook moment with inaction, declining to impede access to assault rifles just as Congress did after 26 students and educators were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.
It wasn’t for lack of trying by the Annunciation parents, who publicly relived the horror of that morning in testimony at the State Capitol last year and earlier this year as they urged legislators to act.
And this is why there can't be a middle ground on guns. Well, it's one more reason, I should say. I'm not giving up my rights even if it makes the entire world a lot less safe, but it doesn't.
Look, I really do feel bad for those parents. I can't imagine what it must be like to lose your child, to see them hurt, or to see them traumatized by a madman.
But what the author, Rochelle Olson, doesn't seem to get is that the reason we're not budging here is that we also know banning so-called assault weapons is only the start.
California banned them. Now they're trying to ban Glocks because people break the law, put illegal conversion devices on them, then use them illegally, and they're holding Glock responsible because it won't change its long-proven design to accommodate a state blaming it for the actions of criminals.
We know that it'll never be just AR-15s.
Even if it were, though, it's still a non-starter because of what the Second Amendment is about. It's about protecting this nation, even from our government if necessary. That's true even when some people seem desperate to tiptoe around that reality. Because of that, the AR-15 isn't just a gun a lot of us like to take out for a day at the range.
It's more than that.
The AR-15 and similar firearms are the modern musket. They're the gun we pull off from over the fireplace (metaphorically, of course) and take to the trumpets of battle, should that be needed. They're the guns that every foreign power would need to take into account should they want to invade.
Throughout the world, there are 60 to 70 million troops among every country on the planet other than the United States. That means if every country in the entire world turned its attention to us for some reason, the United States has about 2 million troops it can call on from the jump.
But it has a civilian population of at least 330 million and a population with an age between 15 and 50 of about 58 to 160 million people...and more than 400 million guns for them.
Many of those are AR-15s.
While it's unlikely we'll ever face such a scenario, it's something that makes the idea of taking on the US unattractive to a foreign invader. Remove that barrier, though, and if China, Russia, and North Korea joined up and decided to come and be rowdy, we'd need them. Those are three of the biggest militaries in the world, and while I like our chances even without civilian involvement, quantity has a quality all its own.
So no, we're not giving up the AR-15s and similar rifles, because that's not the middle ground. That's not a noble compromise.
It's a suicide pact, because I haven't really spent much time talking about domestic tyranny. I could, but I think I made my point.
In short, the answer is, "Not only no, but hell no."
