To be clear, in the wake of this nation's most recent AR-15-assisted school murders, third graders in Neosho, Missouri, did not decide to hold a fundraising raffle awarding an AR-15 assault rifle to some lucky town citizen.
It was the adults that did that. The third graders are selling the raffle tickets because the adults around them decided that for them.
The raffle was launched before the shooting, but Levi Patterson, the coach of the team in Neosho for boys 9 and younger, told The Kansas City Star he plans to continue with the fundraiser. [...]
The weapon was donated as a prize by a team father and co-founder of Neosho gun manufacturer Black Rain Ordnance Inc., which is currently pitching a Spec15 AR pistol on its Facebook page.
Nine-year-olds did not suddenly decide to hold a baseball fundraiser featuring an assault rifle responsible for murdering hundreds of schoolchildren and other Americans in recent years. But when the currency of your community is deadly weapons, deadly weapons it will be.
Patterson said “our hearts break” for the victims of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. But he added that gun raffles “have been going on for years. Evil has and will always exist.”
Patterson said none of the children on his team will be forced to sell raffle tickets for the weapon if they’re uncomfortable doing so.
That's fortunate. There may be a child or two in America who, after watching news coverage of a school very much like their own being turned into a killing field by yet another of the various Americans who woke up one morning and decided that somebody around them needed murdering, in accordance with the core NRA principle that every American be allowed to decide who needs murdering on any given morning—there may be a child or two in America who, after watching news coverage of a horrific murder at a school that looks very much like their own, shudders at handing out fliers asking the adults of their community to try their hand at winning the same weapon. It is good that they can opt out, even if the children of America have absolutely no say themselves in whether their schools, movie theaters, or own living rooms become the sites of their own necessary-for-the-good-of-us-all executions.
At least we are not monsters, here. And who knows? Perhaps the winner of that raffle will be one of the adults who has an idea of who might need killing in their town. Maybe it will be one of the guns we hear about on the news, some future day. Maybe that weapon, too, will become famous.
Republican candidates have long used AR-15 raffles themselves; the latest was just this weekend, and no, they did not delay the raffle after the Parkland mass shooting because why would they.
The NRA has been enormously effective in their campaigns declaring that every American has the right to someday decide that somebody else in their midst, or a dozen others, or 50, deserves on some particular morning to be murdered. What was once a group for sporting and hunting enthusiasts now features constant speeches, videos, and other commentaries declaring that the right to murder other Americans, whether they be neighbors or strangers or officers of the government, based on your own judgment that they need murdering is absolutely inviolate; it shall not be abridged. They have declared it to be the price of freedom; they have declared that so long as the threat of overwhelming domestic terrorism hangs over the rest of the population's head, the government will never lean too heavily on their constituency of someday-murderers.
And so children grow up in this nation handing out fliers for the weapons that are used to regularly murder their peers. This is not something that happens in any other nation. It is something horrifying, in other nations. And yet they are as free as we are—unless you count freedom as the right to decide, yourself, who to murder. They do not. But we, whose idea of freedom now includes bulletproof backpacks, armed schoolyard guards, and regular drills teaching our children where to hide and how to be very, very quiet, do.