The Shooting. James Boice

These are the people whose quote-unquote values and principles we accommodate over the lives of our children, with regard to gun violence, these are the people we still allow to stand in the way of progress, of moving America forward into a time of gun-free sanity when our children can go to school and swing on the monkey bars and go to church and shop at the mall without the risk of bullets fired from an assault weapon ripping their little bodies apart.

      She says cunt up and down the East Coast, back and forth throughout the Midwest, through the South, to the blackest-tie-est bluest-blood-est billionaire fund-raiser crowds in Washington, to the humblest churches of the Adirondacks, and her message resonates, town by town, state by state, year by year, vote by vote, because she is great at what she does and because her enemies prefer to be the kind of bullying man-children to not only call successful, effective women cunts but to also carry semiautomatic rifles into fast-food restaurants during lunchtime, and you can feel when someone is right and the country feels that about her. And in every town, night after night, as she is leaving the stage, they are pulling handfuls of cash to stuff into her coffers, they are going home and voting in their local and national elections how she demands, booting out this NRA puppet in favor of this gun-sense hero. Her work is visibly altering the landscape of Congress and state legislatures and the culture.

      Anti-American, freedom-hating, gun-grabbing CUNT. Yeah, baby, say it—say my name. If they want to clear rooms, including the one that matters most and is hardest to find—the room of popular mainstream public opinion—she is not going to stop them. Because where else will the crowds go but to her? And they are always welcome. I’ll receive you with open arms, she says. One arm might not open very wide—she laughs—but it’s open.

      Her arm. As what will happen in America to a strident woman of color, a shrill, emasculating harridan, a nagging, shrieking harpy threatening to pry from big, strong white men the gruesome things they feel entitled to only because no one has had the guts to try to take them away before, they have fired at her on four occasions. Four shootings, twenty-seven shots in total, hitting her just once—in Tucson, in the shoulder. She was in town to appear with Gabby Giffords in victory outside the local franchise of the national sporting goods chain she and Gabby had convinced under threat of boycott to stop selling ammunition. The hollow-point .380 fired from a white male’s semiautomatic pistol as See-You-Next-Tuesday shook hands in the parking lot shattered the bones of her shoulder and shredded the cartilage, giving her a permanent John McCain-like limited mobility to her arm that works in her favor the same way it did for him—by reminding everyone that she is heroic and a leader and has lost and survived more than they and therefore should be listened to, should be followed. Yet still she travels with no security detail. Never has. Just her aides—women all—and attorneys, with a little gaggle of disciples trotting after to keep up. She does not even wear a Kevlar vest. They shoot at her because she is the man they swore would never come, a brilliant, cutthroat, Machiavellian anti-gun political force of nature capable of using fear to motivate her followers into hysterical action the same way the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, a man she studies and idolizes, does to motivate his.

      For forty years the NRA has kicked anti-gun ass all over Washington and maintained the status quo of senseless gun violence. How? Money. Yes NRA members show up at rallies at the drop of a hat when asked, yes they vote as instructed in large enough numbers to influence party platforms, but most important they send in cashola when LaPierre shrieks for it. In America, your vote is not your vote—your money is your vote. And NRA members pay up. Because they care more than the other side does.

      Or did, until the turning point: the aftermath of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary was the first wave of a cultural change, but the tsunami was the elementary school massacre in Ohio that killed sixty-three children, including her Michelle, as the nation watched—the killer, as you will never forget, live-streaming the carnage from his wearable camera. Screaming, dying children being executed in their pink sweatpants and Velcro shoes—this is what we had become, this was our country. The footage of that was the Pearl Harbor moment. There was no more hiding from it—this is what guns meant. They were no longer a symbol of liberty and self-sufficiency and had not been for a long, long time—this is what our beloved guns do to human beings, in real life. This is what they do to the bodies of children, in real life. You could not pretend that firearms, in real life—especially our new, modern, War on Terror-inspired weapons, once removed from movies and video games—represented anything but dismemberment, ripped-off skull chunks, little boy and girl brains, jawbones left dangling, gaping holes in eye sockets of six-year-olds. Through it all, LaPierre stayed on point. This is the fault, he said, of laws preventing teachers from carrying firearms in the classroom. We are funding a program to give all teachers training in use of firearms. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, he said, is a good guy with a gun.

      Before the massacre, See-You-Next-Tuesday had been a constitutional law professor at Ohio State and an appeals court judge. She had never been active in politics, taking pride in her neutrality on the bench. But when she watched LaPierre’s press conference (she watched it online, did not see it live as she was busy at the time at the cemetery burying Michelle), she realized that nobody else was going to do anything about gun violence in this country and reluctantly entered the arena. She was not yet another mourning mother toting her dead kid’s picture around the halls of the state house and Congress, begging for someone to do something. She was not interested in cooperating with the etiquette of the system or reaching across the aisle. These had resulted in nothing after Newtown, she remembered, but more heartbreak and insult and humiliating defeat—no meaningful change. She was not there to work with the other side, or to compromise, or to bow down to the Second Amendment. She was there for war. Revenge. To destroy LaPierre, castrate the NRA, and win the war. Quickly she emerged as a reluctant spokesperson for a new kind of anti-gun movement. She said, The NRA is right—we do have too many gun laws that do not work, so let’s not make any more of those. No, let’s cut the crap, pry their guns from their cold dead hands once and for all, and say enough is enough with the deadly Second Amendment that is getting our children slaughtered on a mass scale! ("Cut the crap" became her "You betcha"—a rallying cry for one side, something to mock and sneer at for the other.) It took a war to free their slaves, she began saying at rallies and speeches, and it will take a war to get their guns. Are you ready for it? Because I am! But I can’t do it alone.

      And America finally was ready for it—or beginning to be.

      How she saw we could take their guns: money. Turn bullets into money. Tax the ammo. Tax the shit out of it. And when you’re done taxing the shit out of it? Tax it again! Let them have as many guns as they want—and we have no choice at this point, do we, with more than 300 million guns out there—but if they want anything for their guns to fire, they have to pay for the damage they cause everybody else. It’s social responsibility—if they’re going to fuck us, at least buy us dinner, and if they’re going to shoot us, at least foot the hospital bill. She frames it thus: Listen, what do we need more: bullets and death and incompetent fat white guys armed to the teeth with military weapons they do not know how to use right—or do we want money for schools and health care and jobs and all the other things our states never have money for? Which do we need more? That was effective, that bullets vs. schools campaign, which took off from those old Mac vs. PC ads. The donations poured in; she used them to establish her organization, Repeal the Second Amendment. The RSA.

      The Brady Campaign was too pussyfooted, broken down and depressed, so traumatized after the NRA abusing it for thirty years that it considered the most minor, loophole-fucked, symbolic legislation to be a historic victory, signaling change that never came. Everytown for Gun Safety, in her view, was NYC billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s smug, unintentionally hilarious self-humiliation vehicle that resulted in nothing because it came from the same place as his Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which was a place of total, astounding ignorance about the things it sought to control, which voters sensed and therefore tuned out off the bat. Because America wants guns. That is what the others have missed. They do not need guns explained to them. They know about them and they know they are dangerous and they want them, they feel safe with them, even if they do get more of them killed than any war, any terror group. See-You-Next-Tuesday, however, being smarter than Bloomberg and the others, takes