It’s a horrible, horrible situation, and we’re not going to fix it.

There you have it: with that disposable line to reporters on the steps of the Capitol, Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett summed up the willful impotence of the Republican parties against an epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings that sets this country apart from just about any other.

Six of Burchett’s compatriots, three 9-year-olds and three adults about his age, had just been slaughtered at a private Presbyterian school in Nashville by the latest assassin brandishing assault weapons. The congressman said we

can not

solve the problem of withdrawals. But won’t apply so well to Republicans. As might be expected, they have stuck to their two-pronged gun-killing agenda: thoughts and prayers. (Perversely, Republican Representative Barry Moore of Alabama has a different idea. His bill, which he unveiled at a gun store, would designate the AR-15 as the United States’ national weapon.)

Can’t, won’t it be Congress

can

do something and once

did

doing something with a demonstrably good but short-lived effect. In 1994, a Democratic-controlled Congress and President Clinton banned mass murderers’ weapon of choice, military-style assault rifles, along with the high-capacity magazines that so horribly increase the weapons’ lethality.

It should try that again, as President Biden has urged for the umpteenth time. That a Republican-majority House insists it can’t or won’t act is all the more reason to put national pressure on Congress to try.

The assault weapons ban that went into effect three decades ago was a personal victory for then freshman California senator Dianne Feinstein, who was motivated by a 1993 attack on a San Francisco law firm that killed eight people, and by the 1989 shootings at a Stockton schoolyard that killed five children and wounded 27, plus a teacher.

But to garner enough votes at the time, proponents had to compromise by exempting the assault rifles and American magazines

already

possessed.

at the time.

And unfortunately, they also had to agree that the ban would expire after 10 years unless a future Congress and President renewed it. Which in 2004 a Republican-controlled Congress and President George W. Bush refused to do.

Yet the country’s 10-year experiment with a limited ban on assault weapons and magazines has given us the evidence to argue today that such action works. During the federal prohibition period, there were 70% fewer deaths from mass shootings, a 2019 review of evidence found.

And here’s what’s happened to military-style assault weapons since the U.S. ban was lifted: record sales and record kills.

Gunmakers manufactured and marketed AR-15s like never before, making it the best-selling rifle in the United States. Along with the gun lobby and their Republican cheerleaders, they capitalized on a post-9/11 fascination with the kind of tricked-out long guns used by American troops. They fueled fears after the election of Barack Obama that the first black president would confiscate their firearms. And they toyed with gun owners (toxic) masculinity, with one manufacturer promoting sales of its AR-15, the model used by the Sandy Hook Elementary School assassin, first graders, this way: Consider your man card reissued.

It’s sickening. And it must stop.

After the destruction of those 20 graders and six of their school guardians in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, many of us had some hope that federal action would follow. Instead, a proposed ban on assault weapons, as production and sales grew, died in the Senate, opposed by every Republican but one and more than a few swing-state Democrats. Of the 17 deadliest US shootings since Sandy Hook, 12 have been carried out with assault weapons,

according to the post, just like in the case of the Covenant School murders.

Assault weapons should be the pariahs of the arms industry; polls consistently show that most Americans want to ban them. Unlike bullets from typical handguns, the blast effect of an AR-15 shot fans out into a victim’s body, pulverizing tissue and leaving gaping holes as it exits. In other words, just as the military originally intended, the guns are almost guaranteed killers. The Washington Post, in new series on the AR-15, and with the permission of the victims’ families, uses animation to show the unsurvivable wounds

six 6

year-old Noah Pozner of Sandy Hook and 15-year-old Peter Wang of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in 2018.

Yet the guns have only become more popular, iconic even for millions. Some Republicans in Congress wear mini AR-15 pins on their lapels. And the number of real assault weapons has jumped from an estimated 1.5 million at the time of prohibition in 1994 to a whopping 20 million today, according to the Post.

Of course, that staggering number is a real problem if the gun is ever banned. But aside from confiscating US AR-15s, a near-impossible task, a law prohibiting future sales and imports should include a provision for the government to buy guns and magazines from owners, as Biden has suggested.

Another big problem is the Supreme Court full of Republicans. In a decision last June, the six conservative justices expanded gun rights so broadly that the president of a far-right group described it as a

four 4

-ton wrecking ball against limits on firearms. Justice Brett

m

. Kavanaugh, for whose confirmation the National Rifle Assn. spent millions, once took offense at using the phrase assault weapon, much to the delight of the gun lobbies.

But just as the opposition of Republicans in Congress shouldn’t be a deterrent to advocating a national assault weapons ban, neither should the prejudices of the high courts stop those in favor.

Leave it to Republicans like Burchett to claim they are powerless.

@jackiekcalmes