reflectivepundit

First the Post-Massacre Playbook; Then the Do-Nothing Nation

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Not all of the ten victims of the Buffalo mass shooting were buried, when an 18-year-old gunman killed at least nineteen children and two of their teachers in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Since lethal incidents like those in Buffalo and Uvalde have become as American as apple pie, they are by now followed automatically by the same post-massacre playbook: Flags are flown at half-mast, solemn prayer are services are held, make-shift memorials are established and buried under mountains of flowers, calls to pray for the victims and their families are issued, prominent people visit the venues of grief, shock and anger are expressed.

While the last chapter of the playbook is still open in the aftermath of Buffalo, the first chapter is now devoted to the events in Uvalde. Yes, our hearts and souls hurt. Yes, we are praying for the victims and survivors. Yes, we are angry that within two weeks two 18-year-old adolescents killed a total of thirty-one human beings. And, yes, we are frustrated that both killed with assault weapons, weapons of war, semi-automatic rifles that allowed them to kill a multitude of persons in record time.

The gun lobby and their supporters have a standard slogan: Guns do not kill—people do. What a tragic joke! For the idea that reasonable people with guns can stop crazy people with guns was once again disproven in Buffalo and in Uvalde: In the first case, bullets from the gun of a guard in Tops Friendly Market could not stop the mass-shooter because the latter wore body armor. In the second case, two police officers encountered the shooter before he entered the school but, again, their shots were deflected by perpetrator’s body armor.

No other country in the world makes it as easy as this country to purchase assault weapons and magazines that guarantee the largest number of people killed in the shortest possible time. In the United States, the number of handguns is significantly larger than the total population size. And no other country has as many mass shootings and people killed by handguns than the United States.

Again and again, public figures and regular people will say in response to catastrophic shootings, “This is not what we are!”

Unfortunately, this is what we are.

Going Back to the Middle Ages to Overturn Roe v. Wade

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Every woman and every man appalled by the prospect of stark limitations to or prohibition of abortion rights as spelled out in the leaked draft of Justice Alito’s radical opinion should read the document. While news reports and commentary following the release of the draft by POLITICO summarize the opinion and the actual consequences of the expected majority ruling, the details in Alito’s arguments and justifications are interesting. Most of all his claim that the Court must be “guided by the history and tradition that map the essential components of our Nation's concept of ordered liberty…”

For history and tradition Alito does not merely rely on the U.S. Constitution and the fact that the Founders’ document does not spell out abortion rights. He relies on and cites from English Common Law in sketching the long history of males condemning abortion as punishable murder. Here are some examples from Alito’s and most likely soon the Court majority’s opinion:

• Henry de Bracton's 13th-century treatise explained that if a person has “struck a pregnant woman, or has given her poison, whereby he has caused an abortion, if the foetus be already formed and animated, and particularly if it be animated, he commits homicide.

• Sir Edward Coke's 17th-century treatise likewise asserted that abortion of a quick child was “murder” if the “childe be born alive” and a “great misprision” if the “childe dieth in her body.”

• In 1732, for example, Eleanor Beare was convicted of “destroying the Foetus in the Womb” of another woman and “there-by causing her to miscarry." For that crime and another “misdemeanor,” Beare was sentenced to two days in the pillory and three years’ imprisonment.

Noting that the American colonies followed the lead of English Common Alito writes that “the few cases available from the early colonial period corroborate that abortion was a crime.”

So, if you do not like the coming overturning of Roe v. Wade, its, history, stupid—English Common Law and the failure of the Founding Fathers to grant abortion rights in the Constitution.

Following the news about Alito’s draft opinion last night, there were spontaneous protests in front of the Supreme Court and elsewhere. It was not surprising to see not only women but also men defending the nearly 50-year-old Roe v. Wade decision.

Addressing women, Alito writes, “Our decision returns the issue of abortion to those legislative bodies, and it allows women on both sides of the abortion issue to seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office. Women are not without electoral or political power.”

On this point, Alito is right.

Pro Choice women have electoral and political power—and so do Pro Choice men. They and others who could have their established rights repealed by the New Far Right in the near future have still the opportunity to use the ballot to counter the reactionary forces.

The next, most important battle ground will be the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, and the White House. If all three institutions are controlled by the GOP following the 2024 elections, federal legislation along Alito’s opinion will follow. Not only with respect to abortion rights.