The Republican War on America Oct. 19, 2025 Dr. Roger Ray
I woke to the news one day last month that Russia had carried out their largest ever drone attack on Ukraine while I was sleeping. Five people were killed, and dozens were injured in this insane war which has been going on for more than 3 years without any end in sight. I have spoken and written about this illegal war and the many war crimes committed by Russia over the past years but what struck me on this fall Monday morning was that the death toll was about the same as the domestic death toll in just one of America’s most violent cities.
There were five people killed and eighteen wounded in shootings in Chicago over the weekend. And folks, in spite of how Trump has targeted Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. for his dog and pony show military invasions, these are not the most violent cities in America. Across the nation, more than 300 people are shot every day, about 125 of those people will die. And even if you estimate that half of those deaths were suicides you still have 15,000 Americans being murdered every year – not by foreign invasion – not by drones flying across our borders with Mexico or Canada – this is a domestic war, a civil war, with a casualty count that goes up every single year.
I am horrified by the daily reports of the Russian war on Ukraine, as well as by the way that Israel has carried out its war on Gaza for two years, but because our domestic war on ourselves has been a relentless constant in our lives, we refuse to be shocked by the senseless bloodshed that takes place in our own cities, neighborhoods, and homes.
We have passively come to accept this as being normal but, please, hear me, THIS IS NOT NORMAL! This doesn’t happen in any other country. Listen, my career as a public speaker is coming to an end this year. I have very few opportunities left for me speak truth to power, but I can’t hang up my microphone without one more time begging you to not accept Amreica’s gun related death toll to be anything approximating normal. It is a moral flaw that continues only because of public apathy.
Even if you take out suicides and accidental shootings, the United States has 32 times the rate of gun murders as Great Britian and France. Japan has so few that they don’t even register and we have six times as many as our gun loving neighbor to the north. Other developed democracies have gun laws that work and still, we have refused to even consider taking the steps taken in other western democracies. This is not normal, it is not acceptable, it is, in fact, inexplicable…. Trust me, I have been questioned repeatedly on this topic when I have given lectures around Great Britian . . . America’s gun laws are a travesty that cannot be excused or explained in any rational way.
A clear majority of Americans favor more strict gun laws but that fact points to a weakness in our democracy.
We do not have a majority rule democracy. Our system of government allows for political donations can give a minority an exaggerated amount of influence in how laws are written. The NRA is nowhere near as powerful as they were before their recent financial scandals but they still swing a heavy bat in elections and gun manufacturers and, if I may say it this way, the gun loving lunatic fringe continue to have disproportionate influence.
Still, after all of these years, why can’t the majority of Americans not have their way in this matter? Our 24 hour news cycle tends to give our voting public a very short memory. We tend to care about what is in the news today and to forget about what was in the news last week.
So, it is most likely that we will take action in the wake of a mass murder that dominates the news. Now, it must be said that the overwhelming majority of gun murders in the country are not mass murders but, as I observed in the opening of this message, individual murders in major cities may add up to five or ten per city every weekend but those incidents get lost in the background noise of a country awash in weapons and violence.
But consider our reaction to the most horrific mass murders in the country. The largest to date was the 2017 attack on the Harvest music festival in Las Vegas. A lone gunman, from the vantage point of 32ndfloor hotel room. The heavily armed murderer fired semi-automatic weapons enhanced by a simple device called a “bump stock” which allowed him to fire thousands of rounds in mere minutes. 60 people were killed, more than 800 were wounded. It was a random, senseless act of violence which inspired people to demand action. As always, there were those who wanted to restrict access to semi-automatic rifles, to large capacity ammunition clips, but, in the end, the response was a very tepid outlawing of the bump stock . . . not much more than a symbolic gesture but, at least, it was something. It went into effect in December of 2018 but it was ruled as being unconstitutional by rogue and irresponsible Supreme Court in 2024.
Don’t beat yourself up about it if you didn’t know that the bump stock ban had been overturned. That’s how the news cycle works. Seven years after the largest mass shooting in American history, the story no longer merited airtime when the Republican majority Supreme Court did what they almost always do. . . . they rule in favor of political money and against democracy. . . if that seems strong, I invite you to prove me wrong.
There was no federal reaction to the Pulse Nightclub shooting but in the state of Florida there were several attempts at enacting state gun law reform, all of which were defeated by Republican majorities.
In 1981, Jim Brady, the press secretary for President Ronald Regan, was shot during an assassination attempt against the president. Brady survived but was permanently paralyzed. He and his wife took this tragedy and turned it into their lifelong cause to limit access to lethal weapons which, after a dozen years and multiple failures, the Brady Bill was finally signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1993. The bill included a background check, a five day waiting period between purchase and possession, and a ban on assault rifles. It is still partially in force but the ban on assault rifles was written to sunset in 10 years and, of course, it was allowed to sunset. Also, the five day waiting period was dropped when we developed an instant police background check method so, at least there is still that. However, that only applies to gun sellers. If you are selling a gun at a swap meet or gun show, it doesn’t apply.
A few years ago I was seated at a table in a coffee shop next to three young lawyers who were bemoaning their lack of paying clients in their law practice. One of them volunteered that he made much more money selling AR-15s on line than he did from practicing law. That is, he could buy an AR-15 because he could pass the police background check and sell it to someone who could not pass a police background check online for more than the retail price. This is, of course, illegal but evidently difficult to regulate. Which, of course, makes the Brady Bill effectively moot and it makes me wonder what they are teaching in law school these days.
Cities like New York and Chicago have strict gun laws but, unfortunately, American cities are not surrounded by a moat or a boarder wall so their laws are almost entirely ineffective. What has been proven to work in Australia, France, Great Britian, and most of the western world, are gun laws that restrict the kind of guns that can be sold, the volume of ammunition, and the means of storage. It might be impossible to get the United States down to a Japan or England rate of gun deaths measured on your fingers but we should certainly be able to get it down under 10,000 a year.
We have between 45,000 and 48,000 deaths from gun shot wounds every year. My own experience breaks down similar to our national averages. In my 45 years in ministry, I have lost 5 church members to guns. Two were instances of domestic violence, and 3 were suicides. Statistically, you are most likely to die from a self inflicted wound and the second most likely person to kill you is your spouse. Which makes you wonder about the people who think they are keeping guns for self defense. The real reason America has such a tragic record of gun violence is not because we are inherently more violent, it certainly isn’t because of kids playing video games, it isn’t violent movies, or that we have more mental health issues than other western democracies.
It is because we are a nation awash in guns. We have about 300 million people in this country but we have about 500 million guns, which means most people can have more than one but the truth is that half of us don’t have any so the other half of us are stock piling guns like we’re expecting a zombie apocalypse.
Here in Florida, where I live, it is best to assume that any body of water, small or large, probably has an alligator in it, and it is safe to assume that any rude driver who is yelling and shaking a fist at you, also probably has a loaded gun handy. You don’t know how anything with a small reptilian brain is going to act and I’m not specifically talking about alligators.
The latest twist on gun violence has been the Republican reaction to the tragic murder of one of their podcast influencers, Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk was an entirely uneducated young man who got a lot of attention and made millions of dollars by saying very controversial and, I’ll say it, astonishingly stupid things. But he should not have been murdered. The fact that he was murdered shouldn’t result in statues being raised in his honor nor having city streets named for him. He was a right wing racist, misogynist, and homophobe and dying from bullet doesn’t make him a hero. It makes him a victim of our national disease of gun violence.
But Republicans have tried to portray his death as the result of left wing fanaticism and encouragement of political violence. That is simply not true. There are three times as many right wing lunatics committing political violence as there are left wingers and the people who encourage such violence often live in or work in the White House, so let’s get real.
It’s not video games, movies, LGBTQ activists, transphobic pod casters, or political jargon that is getting people killed, it is 500 million guns in a nation of 300 million people. There will always be people who have mental health issues, personal grievance, or some revenge or attention motive, that is true in every culture, religion, and race in the world. Our problem is an almost entirely unrestricted access to very lethal weapons which can be fire accurately at rather great distances at a speed which causes horrific and lethal damage.
And folks, this is not a both sides are guilty issue. I may have only 5 sermons left in my 45 year long career and I want to say this clearly and I hope that you remember it: If it had been up to Democrats, our gun laws in the USA would be like the gun laws that work in every other western democracy. The idiocy of our gun laws is 100% the responsibility of elected Republicans in both state and federal positions. The only way for America to come to some sanity about gun laws is to stop electing Republicans. Nothing else will work.
Now, I have a lot of issues with Democrats, and I would hate to see one party become dominant for long. I would love to see Republicans change to become more patriotic and sane representatives, but right now, The Republican Party is waging war on the American people and they are killing about 50,000 people every year and wounding another 100,000 and that has to stop.
Look, the number of people killed in Gaza each of the past two years is about the same as the number of Americans who died from gunshot wounds in America’s Republican war on Americans. No one would dispute the fact that Israel has been carrying out a War against the Gaza strip for the past two years, right? Those 45,000 people were not dying of Covid every year. It was a war. And in the United States, Republican with their crazy and irresponsible laws have cause the same number of deaths among Americans. It is a war. So stop voting for the jerks who are killing us.
This is so obvious that I shouldn’t have to say it, and you certainly can’t say it is a controversial thing to say unless you thing that 45,000 Americans need to die every year to defend the gun fetish of unstable and dangerous people.
Let’s make America great again by allowing our school children to grow up, and allowing church goers, movie goers, and mall shoppers to make it home safely.
