Another day of a mass shooting in the United States of America. Four have been reported dead, so far, at a Apalachee High School in Barrow County, Georgia. The suspect, who is 14 years old, is in custody.
Vice President Kamala Harris said the same thing Democrats always do when the news came in. She called the shooting a “senseless tragedy on top of so many other senseless tragedies.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” she said in New Hampshire, a state with no firearm licensing requirements at all. “So we will of course continue to send our thoughts and prayers to the families and all those who are affected.”
Harris’s running mate, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, said there was “more work to be done.”
Walz has made a big deal about the fact that he used to receive money from the National Rifle Association as a Blue Dog Democrat in Congress before he gave the money away and signed universal background checks and a red flag law as governor.
President Joe Biden, who authored the 1994 ban on assault weapons that expired in 2004, once again tried to appeal to Republicans’ better angels.
“After decades of inaction, Republicans in Congress must finally say ‘enough is enough’ and work with Democrats to pass common-sense gun safety legislation,” he said in a statement not long after Wednesday’s shooting.
But nobody should be under any delusions that anything will fundamentally change when it comes to guns in the United States, at least for the near future.
Here are the cold hard facts: Governor Brian Kemp signed legislation that allowed people in Georgia to purchase a handgun “without having to ask permission from state government,” in his own words. Kemp has now sent condolences to the families of the dead. But he will likely not take any action on gun control, lest he ruin his chances to run for president in 2028.
Representative Mike Collins, who represents the district that Apalachee High School is in, shot a voting machine with a rifle in a recent political ad. That detail hasn’t escaped many gun control advocates in the aftermath of the school shooting. Of course, when former president Donald Trump was shot at a rally a few weeks ago, Collins blamed Joe Biden.
That should give an indication of how far gun legislation will go in a House of Representatives controlled by Representative Mike Johnson, which is to say not far at all.
The Senate will not be much better, either. Yes, Democrats have 51 seats. But two Democrats from states that Donald Trump won twice — Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio — are running for re-election and would likely not want to risk angering rural voters in their states.
Even if all 51 senators in the majority voted on gun legislation, it would still be run aground by the filibuster. Republicans already took a big risk when they voted for a bipartisan gun bill in 2022 after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. They’re extremely unlikely to risk anything so close to a general election.
The future does not look that optimistic after the election, either. If Trump wins the White House again, he likely will enact no gun safety measures. If Harris wins, she will likely have a Republican Senate that will block any gun legislation, even if Democrats control the House.
And a President Harris can forget about executive orders. In June, the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, threw out an ordinance the Trump administration put in place without the approval of Congress to ban bump stocks, a type of device used to make semi-automatic rifles fire faster.
This is the bleak reality of the current political climate. The last time any gun legislation passed — in 2022 — everything had to line up perfectly. Democrats had a trifecta and enough Republicans wanted to pass something.
Those circumstances will likely not exist for some time.
Welcome to another day of mass shootings in America. And they will likely continue for the near future.