Will Bunch: AR-15 lapel pin is a perfect symbol for a GOP that's become a death cult

[Nevilledog]

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/republicans-ar-15-lapel-pin-clyde-santos-20230205.html

No paywall
https://archive.is/PGL42

The backward walk of devolution that is the modern Republican Party, and the near-death experience of American governing, can be best told through the story of two adjacent Long Island congressional districts that, over the course of one generation, sent two radically different kinds of human beings to Capitol Hill.

In 1993, a stunning act of violence turned an everyday citizen into a political activist who tried to change the world for the better — by getting elected to Congress. Carolyn McCarthy was shocked when her husband was murdered and her son wounded when a rage-addled madman boarded a Long Island Rail Road commuter train and began firing a Ruger 9mm pistol, killing six and wounding 19. A nurse by training, she ran for Congress in New York’s 4th Congressional District as a Democrat three years later and won an upset victory, largely on her promise to Long Islanders that she would be “the fiercest gun-control advocate.”

McCarthy’s storyline had an almost Frank Capra-esque feel, albeit tinged with sadness. But her tenure overlapped with the rise of a far-right Republican Party that fetishized firearms ownership and thus ensured there would be no Jimmy Stewart-style satisfying ending to her crusade for justice for the gun attack on her family. In fact, McCarthy was a House member in 2004 when her colleagues allowed a ban on assault weapons to expire, triggering a rise in mass shootings like the one that shattered that LIRR commuter car.

She retired in 2014, eight years before voters next door in New York’s 3rd Congressional District, covering Long Island’s North Shore and parts of Queens, elected a GOP grifter and con man who called himself George Santos. While McCarthy had gone to Washington to get something done on guns, the cash-strapped Santos reportedly confided to friends he wanted to cash in on the lucrative congressional pension and free health care.

*snip*

[Blue Owl]

1. The party of killing

[moondust]

2. Mass Murder Caucus

[Irish_Dem]

3. The GOP is also the death to democracy cult.

[eShirl]

4. I thought it was a brand label for the NRA