The overwhelming majority of Americans, including gun owners, are sick of gun violence. They support gun control of various kinds. After the massacre of 20 elementary school children and six educators at the Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Connecticut, people thought that Congress would act to ban assault weapons or to demand restrictions on guns. But nothing happened. After the massacre at the Majory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, people thought that Congress would act to stem the slaughter. But nothing happened.

Now a sort of public apathy has descended, even after the massacre of ten shoppers at the Tops grocery store in Buffalo, even after the slaughter of fourth-grade children and their teachers in Uvalde, Texas.

Nothing will happen, the public believes, because the Republican Party is owned by the National Rifle Association, which contributes about $70 million per election cycle to its allies.

Nothing will happen, they say, because there are 400 million+ guns already in circulation, and no amount of gun control will eliminate them.

But there is a solution. It is breathtakingly simple. It depends on the boldness of one person.

That one person actually could be any one of about fifty people with the resources to carry out the plan.

But for the sake of argument, let me arbitrarily choose just one of them: McKenzie Scott. (It might just as well be Michael Bloomberg or some other billionaire.)

Ms. Scott, you are a person who has shown by your frequent gifts to worthy organizations that you care about the future of our nation. You care about people. You care about justice and kindness and vulnerable people. You say you want to keep giving your money away until it is all gone.

Here is a worthy enterprise.

First, replace the NRA as the most important donor to the Republican Party. But only on the condition that those who take your money agree to strong and comprehensive gun control. Offer millions of dollars to every Republican member of Congress who agrees to vote to ban the purchase and criminalize the sale of military weapons to civilians. If the NRA controls fifty Republican senators with only $70 million, surely you could spend $500 million and buy most of their votes, which would save thousands of lives every year. A good deal for America at a bargain price for you. Even $1 billion a year might break the NRA stranglehold on the Republicans in Congress. You don’t need to win the votes of 50 Republican senators. Fifteen would be enough to break a filibuster.

Second, start a national buyback program for the most dangerous weapons: AR15s, Bushmasters, automatic and semi-automatic weapons and any other military-grade weapons. Be generous. Buy them for 10 times the purchase price. Buy other types of weapons, other than hunting rifles and single-shot pistols. Buy up as many of the 400 million guns in private possession as possible. Destroy them.

Third, use your vast resources to fund gun control lobbyists in every state that does not have gun control and make the same offer to pro-gun state legislators that you do to members of Congress. Buy their votes.

If this sounds cynical, who cares?

McKenzie Scott (or Michael Bloomberg) could spend a billion or two and dramatically reduce gun violence, simply by buying the votes of Republicans and buying back unusually lethal weapons. Their assets have a way of growing no matter how much they spend. When you have $40-65 billion, spending a billion or so to eliminate America’s gun culture is a bargain.

Any one of these billionaires could lift the curse of gun violence from our land, with the expenditure of one or two of their many billions.

This would be a great gift to America.

If this plan doesn’t work, then here is an alternative: organize nationally for a complete and total ban on the sale or possession of assault weapons, and any guns other than hunting rifles and single-shot handguns. Civilians should not be able to purchase military-grade weapons. We had a ban on the purchase or sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004. It included many exemptions. It did not buy back the weapons already purchased. We should do it again with far more ambitious goals.

My first choice: ban and criminalize the purchase, sale, or manufacture of assault weapons. Let the hunters keep their single-shot guns. No one should own a military grade weapon but the military. The Founders did not write the Second Amendment to protect killers but to protect a well-organized militia.

No more massacres in schools, churches, synagogues, mosques, shopping centers, music festivals or anywhere else.

Steven Singer is a teacher in Pennsylvania. He blogs at Gadfly on the Wall.

He writes:

I drove my daughter to school today.

She thanked me for the ride, I wished her a good day, and she toddled off to the middle school doors.

Her khaki pants needed ironing, her pony tail was coming loose and she hefted her backpack onto her shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

All I could do was smile wistfully.

Parents and guardians know that feeling – a little piece of your heart walking away from you.

Imagine what the parents of the 19 children who were killed yesterday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, might have felt.

I wonder if the parents of the two adults killed in the shooting gave a thought to their grown children during what may have seemed like just another busy day at the end of the academic year.

We’re all so preoccupied. We tend to forget that every goodbye could be our last.

This marks the 27th school shooting with injuries or deaths so far in 2022.

It comes just 10 days after a shooting at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., where 10 people were killed.

There’s hardly enough time anymore to mourn one disaster before the next one hits.

One would think we would have done something about these tragedies by now.

After all, they aren’t unpredictable. They aren’t inevitable. They’re man-made.

There have been 119 school shootings since 2018, according to Education Week, a publication that has been tracking such events for the last four years.

This only includes incidents that happen on K-12 school property or on a school bus or during a school sponsored event when classes are in session.

If we broaden our definition, there is much more gun violence in our communities every day.

According to The Gun Violence Archive, an independent data collection organization, there have been 212 mass shootings so far this year.

There were 693 mass shootings last year, 611 the year before and 417 the year before that.

Why don’t we do anything about this?

In Scotland 26 years ago, a gunman killed 16 kids and a teacher in Dunblane Primary School. The United Kingdom (UK) responded by enacting tight gun control legislation. There hasn’t been a school shooting in the UK since.

After 51 worshippers were killed in mass shootings at Christchurch and Canterbury in New Zealand in 2019, the government outlawed most military style semiautomatic weapons, assault rifles like AK15’s, and initiated a buyback program. There hasn’t been a mass shooting there since.

In Australia, following a 1996 mass shooting in which 35 people were killed in Tasmania, Australian states and territories banned several types of firearms and bought back hundreds of thousands of banned weapons from their owners. Gun homicides, suicides, and mass shootings are now much less common in the country.

This is not hard.

The rest of the world has cracked the code. Just not us.

Not the U.S.

PLEASE OPEN THE LINK AND READ THE REST OF THIS COMPELLING ARTICLE.

Mercedes Schneider reports that the National Rifle Association, which owns the Republican Party, issued a pathetic statement about something that happened somewhere that caused some real problems that cannot be mentioned. The NRA feels bad that this terrible thing happened. Since they plan to hold their annual meeting in Houston in a few days, it is embarrassing that this awful bad thing happened someplace not too far away to nameless people.

In the face of massive parent and teacher and student opposition, the state board of education in Massachusetts deferred a decision about a takeover of the school district.

State Education Commissioner Jeffrey Riley hammered Boston Public Schools for its “bloated” central office and “unconscionable” transportation failures in his first public comments Tuesday on a new state review of the district, but held off on recommending any takeover of city schools, saying he remains “hopeful and optimistic” that the state and city can reach agreement on a plan for urgent improvement.

Addressing the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education at its monthly meeting, as dozens of people protested outside and dozens more were turned away from the packed meeting room, Riley said he will give Mayor Michelle Wu a chance to respond to his initial proposal for next steps. Details of that plan have not been released to the public...

For now at least, the state’s approach appears to be gentler than some had feared. Board members — who would need to vote to approve a state receivership — appeared in no hurry to call the question. Several acknowledged the passionate opposition to receivership voiced by students, parents, teachers and elected officials who testified at the meeting, and some expressed doubt that a full state takeover could work in the face of such aversion...

Josiehanna Colon, a student at New Mission High School who testified Tuesday, said she has felt the impact of state oversight. Too much of her education has been centered around standardized testing, she said; further intervention would likely bring more emphasis on tests and less diverse curriculum. “I’m angry that our voices may be ignored,” she said, “and that again and again we care about a test score instead of a child.”

The meeting, which lasted more than four hours and included a detailed presentation on the contents of the report as well as lengthy public testimony, was originally scheduled to take place in the auditorium at Wellesley High School, which seats 700 people. Leaders in the suburban district asked state officials to move the gathering elsewhere after learning that attendance would be high and protests could be held, potentially disrupting their school day.

Relocated to a government building in Boston, the much smaller meeting room could not accommodate all attendees, dozens of whom sat on the floor in a hallway outside the room, watching the livestreamed meeting on their cellphones. Several parents in attendance said they were denied the opportunity to speak at the meeting after submitting formal requests; two speakers chose to split their time with others who were shut out.

The fact that state takeovers have a dismal record of failure was apparently never considered. If at first you don’t succeed, fail, fail again.

The state of Massachusetts appears ready to take control of the Boston Public Schools at its meeting tomorrow, despite the fact that state takeovers have failed everywhere. The state does not have a special reservoir of knowledge that is lacking at the local level, and if they did, they could provide it without taking control of the school district and ending local control.

This morning, as a seeming prelude to takeover, the state released a “blistering” report about the condition of BPS.

Boston Public Schools is largely stuck in “entrenched dysfunction” and its failure to achieve systemwide change on a number of fronts is causing thousands of students to languish in their classrooms, even as school district leaders have taken initial steps to help remedy some of the problems, according to a blistering state review released Monday.

”The district has failed to effectively serve its most vulnerable students, carry out basic operational functions, and address systemic barriers to providing an equitable, quality education,” the review states. “The problems facing BPS are abundantly clear.”

And the report makes the case that state Commissioner Jeffrey Riley and the state Board of Elementary and Education will take action, although the report doesn’t state what specific steps will be taken. The state education board is scheduled to discuss the report’s findings at its monthly meeting Tuesday...

The new review paints a devastating portrait of the state of BPS, but gives outgoing Superintendent Brenda Cassellius and the school system credit for launching several new district-wide initiatives that show promising signs for boosting student achievement.

Among them: Raising high school graduation standards to align with entry requirements to the state’s public universities, adopting a new literacy curriculum and higher-quality instructional materials, and expanding the diversity of its teaching staff. But full implementation has not been realized yet, and the report raised concerns that the efforts could be thwarted by the district’s lack of a strategic approach to training staff and setting clear expectations and deadlines for schools to embrace the changes.

Despite these improvements, takeover is on the horizon.

The Boston Teachers Union plans a rally tomorrow to protest the state takeover:

As announced last week– we are attending the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) meeting tomorrow to say NO to receivership! 

BESE just announced a location change for this meeting. The meeting will now be at 1 Ashburton Pl, Boston, MA 02108 (NOT Wellesley HS). We will meet in front of the State House at 8am and walk over to the meeting together.

You can drive and meet us there but parking is limited and expensive in that area. You can also take the T to Park Street. Or we’ll still have two buses leaving at 7:30am:

• Boston Teachers Union in Dorchester (180 Mt. Vernon St. 02125. Be sure you go to the address in Dorchester, not downtown). Lots of free parking.
• St. Stephen’s Youth Programs in the South End (419 Shawmut Ave, 02119). Limited parking.

If you haven’t already, RSVP here if you can join us.

If you can’t join in person, you can watch the livestream of the meeting at https://livestream.com/accounts/22459134 and take action here. Follow the conversation on Twitter by following the hashtag #OurCityOurSchools. 

Tomorrow BESE will hear from students, parents, and educators united against state takeover! 

We used to have two rational, credible political parties in this country. Politics stopped at the water’s edge. People at the extremes were disappointed, but both parties respected civility, played by the rules, and respected the Constitution.

Dana Milbank warns us that the Republican Party has slipped off the edge into the muck of extremismism. Trump was the pied Piper, but he was preceded by other zealots like Newt Gingrich. And it has only gotten worse.

He writes:

This past weekend’s massacre in Buffalo has put a deserved spotlight on Elise Stefanik, Tucker Carlson, Newt Gingrich, Matt Gaetz, J.D. Vance and others trafficking in the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.

But the problem goes well beyond the rhetoric of a few Republican officials and opinion leaders. Elected Republicans haven’t merely inspired far-right extremists. They have become far-right extremists.

A new report shows just how extensively the two groups have intertwined.

The study, released on Friday by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a decades-old group that tracks right-wing extremism, found that more than 1 in 5 Republican state legislators in the United States were affiliated with far-right groups. The IREHR (which conducted a similar study with the NAACP in 2010 on racism within the tea party) cross-referenced the personal, campaign and official Facebook profiles of all 7,383 state legislators in the United States during the 2021-22 legislative period with thousands of far-right Facebook groups. The researchers found that 875 legislators — all but three of them Republicans — were members of one or more of 789 far-right Facebook groups. That works out to 22 percent of all Republican state legislators….

The far-right groups range from new iterations of the tea party and certain antiabortion and Second Amendment groups to white nationalists, neo-Confederates and sovereign citizen entities that claim to be exempt from U.S. law. The IREHR largely excluded from its list membership in historically mainstream conservative groups such as the National Rifle Association and in pro-Trump and MAGA groups, focusing instead on more radical groups defined by nationalism or antidemocratic purposes.

I worry for the future of our democracy. I don’t think—as some do—that we are on the verge of a civil war. Only one side would be armed. But January 6 might be a harbinger of worse to come.