SUNDAY, MAY 29 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A27BY BEN SAMUELSU
ntil Friday, I was a U.S. House
candidate, seeking to represent
Missouri’s 2nd Congressional Dis-
trict. Running as a middle-of-the-
road Democrat, inspired by the notion of
public service, I have spent most of the past
year meeting with voters, talking to advoca-
cy groups and raising money. My experi-
ence having worked for a Democratic may-
or and a Republican governor is useful for
this once-purple district, and I was the
leading Democratic candidate in the race.
I withdrew not because an aggressive
gerrymander shifted the 2nd District from
a toss-up to a safely Republican seat — I
knew the headwinds going in — but because
I was literally drawn out of my district.
In every iteration of Missouri’s map —
and there were many divergent options on
the table — my house in the St. Louis
suburbs was evicted from the 2nd District,
sometimes by half a block, sometimes by
three.
The absurdities of Missouri’s redistrict-
ing process were myriad: a state senator
drawing a new congressional district for
his incumbent cousin; a months-long fili-
buster by Missouri’s seven-member Con-
servative Caucus, three of whom are run-
ning for Congress and held up the redis-
tricting process to draw themselves better
maps; a Democrat who voted in favor of the
new map — one of very few to do so — that
just so happens to make his primary chal-
lenge against Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) much
stronger.
Sadly, this is nothing new: During redis-
tricting 10 years ago, Missouri’s maps were
carved around the house of a political
megadonor who wanted to be represented
by a Republican rather than a Democrat.
These days, no one even bothers to give
lip service to what’s best for the more than
750,000 constituents in these districts. This
problem is not limited to Missouri. In red
states such as Texas and Florida, and blue
states such as Illinois and New York, legisla-
tors are drawing hyperpartisan districts —
focusing not on voters but on what’s best for
themselves or an ally, or what’s worst for a
political foe. Incumbents are protected
from tough reelections and from facing one
another in primaries. Decisions are made
with little time for legal challenges.
Consider: Illinois, a blue state, will have
17 congressional seats at the start of 2023.
Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma, all reli-
ably red these days, will together have
17 congressional seats at the start of 2023. In
these 34 House races, exactly one is a
toss-up in 2022 — not exactly encouraging if
you think competition is healthy.
These political power grabs must be met
with practical solutions both to prevent
candidates from being maneuvered out of
races and, critically, to ensure that we all
have a shot at voting in elections that
matter, rather than in districts designed to
produce predetermined outcomes. Absent
healthy political competition, we end up
with more lopsided and extreme govern-
ment and representatives.
Of course, neither party wants to be the
first mover and possibly diminish its own
power, especially not when primaries de-
cide the overwhelming majority of elec-
tions in Congress. Absent federal action, the
only path forward is bilateral disarmament
and bipartisan agreement. I have worked
enough with governors in both parties to
recognize that they tend to be more practi-
cal than other elected officials because they
actually have to govern. If states were to
work together to prevent electoral abuses,
and pass similar legislation predicated
upon other states doing the same, no one
would get a partisan leg up and voters
everywhere would benefit.
The tipping point might be reached not
through altruism but the pain that follows
overreach — specifically, from “dummy-
manders,” in which a party spreads its votes
too thin and gets hit hard in a wave election.
If governors and legislatures see gerryman-
ders backfire in the next decade, they might
be willing to negotiate — if not to avoid the
outcome then at least to avoid the blame.
Some Democrats already worry that, if 2022
ends up being a wave election for Republi-
cans, Illinois will get hit especially hard.
Meanwhile, the public must be educated
about these power grabs and what happens
behind the scenes to pressure candidates to
drop out. Reps. Jim Cooper, a Democrat
from Nashville, and John Katko, a Republi-
can from Upstate New York, are both cen-
trists forced into retirement because they
were gerrymandered out of their seats
despite consistently running well ahead of
the top of the ticket. Voters want more
pragmatists, but state legislatures are mak-
ing it harder to elect them. People on both
sides of the aisle need to bring attention to
this antidemocracy trend.
Running for office is, at its core, an act of
optimism: the belief that you not only can
win but also make a difference. It can be
hard to maintain that optimism, especially
when you are the small-scale target of
legislative pettiness. But our diverse nation
needs diverse leaders committed to their
communities. We also need young people to
vote and to be willing to run for office.
For now, my run comes to an end. But
other work needs to begin — work to ensure
that millions of Missourians, and Ameri-
cans everywhere, don’t have their congres-
sional representation determined by naked
partisanship and state legislators who want
to advance their own careers or help their
friends at the expense of everyone else.The writer, a Democrat, was running to represent
Missouri’s 2nd Congressional District in the U.S.
House of Representatives.Gerrymanderedout of mydistrict. Votersdeserve better.Come next Friday, the 500th day
of his presidency, Joe Biden,
gazing from the Oval Office
toward flags surrounding the
Washington Monument, might or might
not think: Sadly, the flags still have only
50 stars, not 52 or even 51. Statehood for
the District of Columbia, and even for
Puerto Rico, were, it is difficult to
remember, important progressive aspi-
rations long ago, when Biden’s presiden-
cy was young.
These measures were to be made
possible by ending the Senate filibuster.
This would also make possible the
federal seizure from the states of the
constitutional responsibility for con-
ducting elections. Article 1, Section 4:
“The Times, Places and Manner of
holding Elections for Senators and Rep-
resentatives, shall be prescribed in each
State by the Legislature thereof.” But
progress, progressives have been learn-
ing for nearly 500 days, takes patience.
Or as Henry A. Kissinger once said, “The
illegal we do immediately, the unconsti-
tutional takes a little longer.”
Progressives’ Trumpian conviction
that elections are ripe for rigging was
fueled by their indignation about what
they called Georgia’s new “voter sup-
pression” law. It was the subject, in
January, of perhaps the most unpresi-
dential speech in living memory, Biden’s
Atlanta eruption in which he asserted
that if you disagree with him about
Georgia — “Jim Crow 2.0” — you are a
compound of Jefferson Davis, George
Wallace and Bull Connor. Well.
If the Georgia law’s purpose is voter
suppression, it is failing spectacularly:
More than 857,000 unsuppressed Geor-
gians voted early before Tuesday’s pri-
maries, about triple the number who
voted early in the 2018 primaries.
Welcome to the “Through the Look-
ing Glass” world of unfalsifiable beliefs:
Time was, obsessives about the John
F. Kennedy assassination said that the
complete absence of evidence of a con-
spiracy proved the conspiracy’s diaboli-
cal thoroughness. Today’s voter-
s uppression obsessives say the surge of
Georgians voting proves the law’s wick-
edness, because it energized voters.
Biden has had the experience com-
mon to presidents: Presidents do not
control their agendas; the world gets a
vote. When Harold Macmillan, Britain’s
prime minister, 1957-1963, was asked
what most troubled him, he reportedly
replied, “Events, my dear boy, events.”
Pesky things, those. George W. Bush
began by aiming to be a bipartisan
education president, collaborating with
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy on “No Child
Left Behind” to banish “the soft bigotry
of low expectations,” etc. Things went
swimmingly through his 234th day as
president, which was Sept. 10, 2001.
Perhaps the most important of
Biden’s 500 days was Feb. 24, when
Russian President Vladimir Putin in-
vaded Ukraine, setting in motion mo-
mentous events, substantially influ-
enced by Biden’s deft diplomacy. These
events are pulling Germany toward a
world role commensurate with its geo-
political potential, and they are bringing
NATO, through Finland’s coming mem-
bership, to about 833 miles of Russia’s
border.
Unfortunately for Biden, what Ameri-
cans usually want in foreign policy is as
little of it as possible, so his stunning
achievement in the Ukraine crisis —
reviving the concept of “the West” — will
pay scant dividends. Similarly, a tight
labor market is the best anti-poverty
program, and a downward distributor of
wealth — but not when inflation more
than erases wage gains.
The war’s disruption of global energy
markets has underscored the incoher-
ence of Biden’s fossil fuel objectives:
lower supplies and lower prices. He has
used maximum rhetorical shrillness,
warning that fossil fuels pose an “exis-
tential” threat to Earth — the end of all
flora and fauna, including us bipeds. He
has combined such words with actions
that mock them: Using the Strategic
Petroleum Reserve to tweak — or to
seem to be trying to tweak — the price of
gasoline, while asking some unsavory
regimes (Saudi Arabia, Venezuela) to
pump more oil.
A lifeless planet is a secondary terror.
Biden’s promised “transition away
from” oil will perhaps resume when
motorists simmer down. The public
might understandably conclude that
Biden is least serious when using his
most alarmist words.
When you’re hot, you’re hot, and
when you’re not, infant formula disap-
pears. Panicked parents, deprived ba-
bies? What next? The Wall Street Jour-
nal reports: “During the past 80 years,
the Fed has never lowered inflation as
much as it is setting out to do now — by
4 percentage points — without causing
recession.”
Four consecutive presidents while in
office have experienced their parties’
losses of the Senate and House. Biden
could become the fifth, and could man-
age this in just 24 months.
If he seeks reelection, he will need an
opponent so ghastly that voters can
respond as the New York Sun did with
its five-word 1904 endorsement of Presi-
dent Theodore Roosevelt’s reelection:
“THEODORE! With all thy faults.”GEORGE F. WILLThe Bidenpresidentialscorecardat 500 days“We don’t need another
hero,” sang the great
Tina Turner in a mega-
hit from 1985. But we
could have used one on Tuesday in
Uvalde, Tex.
I say this as an ordinary person whose
courage under fire has never been tested
and — I fervently hope — never will be. I
am in no position to judge the law
enforcement officers who stood outside
an elementary school while a killer was
inside for over an hour.
Still, it’s important to look unsenti-
mentally at the timid response in Uval-
de, which was not so different from the
police response at Columbine High
School in 1999, or at Marjory Stoneman
Douglas High School in 2018, or at any
number of chaotic and dangerous
scenes created by murderous narcis-
sists who write their pain in the blood of
innocents.
The brand of heroism that enables
someone to advance on a gunman is
more rare than Hollywood would have
us believe. Military historian John Kee-
gan, in his 1978 masterpiece “The Face
of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Water-
loo, and the Somme,” explored the often
decisive element of fear in warfare — a
topic frequently hushed up. “The ma-
jority” of soldiers “are unwilling to take
extraordinary risks and do not aspire to
a hero’s role,” he wrote. This would not
have been news to Brig. Gen. William
“Bull” Nelson of the Union Army at the
Battle of Shiloh in 1862: Leading a
group of reinforcements toward the
front, he paused to deploy his guns and
threaten to shoot men fleeing the battle.
Most people do not want to die a
violent death or even suffer a painful
wound. Moreover, most do not want tokill or maim. Rare is the story of a
soldier charging enemy guns on his first
day in battle. That sort of valor must be
learned over time and is not without
cost.
Lt. Audie Murphy’s fearless one-man
stand against six German tanks and a
wall of infantry came less than four
months before the Nazi surrender in
World War II, and he later suffered from
post-traumatic stress disorder. Lt. Dan-
iel K. Inouye’s solo charge against three
enemy machine guns — in which he
knocked out all three, at the price of his
arm — came mere days before the end.
At least as common, and probably
much more so, is the perfectly human
mix of revulsion and panic that, accord-
ing to historian Ernest B. Furgurson,
led many soldiers of the Civil War to
reload their muskets before they had
fired the previous round, going through
the motions of battle without commit-
ting themselves to the grim work of
death.
Keegan noted various rituals, com-
mon to armies through the ages, that
readied troops for battle, from religious
rites to rations of liquor and doses of
drugs. The strongest thing those law-
men in Uvalde had consumed before
they arrived at Robb Elementary was
probably a cup of coffee.
The milling cops outside the school
are a strong reply to those who say the
solution to mass shootings is to have
more people with guns in our schools
and churches, our concert venues and
grocery stores. Judging from the videos
posted to social media by confounded
onlookers, there was no shortage of
guns in Uvalde — only a shortage of
officers willing to run inside and at-
tempt to shoot a young man who wasshooting back at them.
“If they proceeded any further not
knowing where the suspect was at, they
could’ve been shot,” Texas Department
of Public Safety spokesman Chris Oliva-
rez explained on CNN. “They could’ve
been killed.”
Realistically, how confident can we
be that schoolteachers, lunchroom
cooks, church ushers or produce stock-
ers will be any better prepared to draw
down and do battle than those trained
professionals in Uvalde? After all, the
mass killers have every advantage:
They have their weapons, they have the
element of surprise, and they’ve decid-
ed they’re ready to die, an empowering
frame of mind.
A strategy for curing the epidemic of
mass shootings that depends on the
presence of a calm, collected, gun-
slinging hero in every classroom and
pew is doomed to fail. Such people are
rare — even among graduates of police
and military training.
We must instead keep trying to un-
ravel the deadly tangle of cheap fame
and alienated young men. It has been
heartening to see major news organiza-
tions avoid overuse of the Uvalde killer’s
name and picture. That’s a baby step in
the right direction. Still, for a dead-
ender steeped in the too-American be-
lief that infamy is better than anonym-
ity, havoc is a path to the spotlight. And
that’s a problem.
We close today as we began, with
Tina Turner and the theme song from
“Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.” Dys-
topia seems appropriate, and the ques-
tion she sings rarely more apt: “And I
wonder when we are ever gonna
change. Living under the fear, till noth-
ing else remains.”DAVID VON DREHLEGuns kill people. They don’tturn people into heroes.DARIO LOPEZ-MILLS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Law enforcement personnel outside Robb Elementary School following the attack on Tuesday.Americans are fed up — and
they’re not going to take it
a nymore.
You’ve seen it over and over. A
misfit outlier, using a gun he should
never have had, mows down everyday
people going about their business. The
dead bodies this time — from a grocery
store and an elementary school — were
mostly children and the elderly.
The first shattering event, a massacre
at a Buffalo grocery store, claimed
10 lives. The store was the “village water-
ing hole,” according to one resident. The
dead included a journalist who often
wrote about gun violence.
Next: An 18-year-old killed 21 people,
19 children and two teachers, at an el-
ementary school in Uvalde, Tex. But first,
he warmed up his trigger finger by blast-
ing his grandmother in the face. Yes, of
course he had mental problems. Anyone
who takes an assault rifle to a public place
intent on killing can be found somewhere
in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders.
If my reading of social media is cor-
rect, public outrage seems finally to have
reached a crescendo that might lead to
change. People are angrier than ever
about the growing violence and lack of
action. One can stand the sight of only so
many dead children. Since the first K-12
school mass shooting in Stockton, Calif.,
in 1989, we’ve had front-row seats to
13 more massacres. But those are just the
spectacular ones. Since 1970, there have
been at least 188 school shootings, ac-
cording to a New York Times analysis of
data from the K-12 School Shooting Da-
tabase. We’ve become a nation fluent in
the shocked rhetoric of pain and loss.
“Thoughts and prayers,” a hollow expres-
sion of condolence from overuse, may as
well be “ham ’n’ cheese.” The names of
our slaughterhouses have become as fa-
miliar as one-name celebrities: Colum-bine, Sandy Hook, Parkland — and now
Uvalde.
And nothing ever happens. A few pub-
lic figures engage in performance out-
rage. Democrat Beto O’Rourke, now run-
ning for Texas governor, tried to com-
mandeer a news conference as Gov. Greg
Abbott (R) and others were delivering
updates on the massacre.
Beto, baby, timing is everything, and
yours was way off.
President Biden strained his vocal
cords as he asked, “When in God’s name
will we do what we all know in our gut
needs to be done?” No kidding. As inef-
fective as such strutting and fretting has
proved to be, he was expressing what
most are feeling right now. When exactly
did we lose our minds? Will this time be
any different?
Maybe. Several things can be done that
could reduce the bloodshed: deeper
background checks; “red-flag” laws al-
lowing law enforcement officers with a
court order to seize guns from someone
considered a danger to themselves or
others; closing gun show loopholes; and
maybe banning kids from buying assault
weapons. All of these would help.
And all are iffy at best, though several
Republicans, including Sens. Lindsey
O. Graham (S.C.), Marco Rubio (Fla.) and
Rick Scott (Fla.) have indicated they
could lean toward red-flag legislation.
This is hardly a demonstration of politi-
cal courage, but it’s more than nothing —
and seems the measure that could do the
most good.
More than half of Americans want
some reasonable reforms. A vast majori-
ty, including 69 percent of NRA mem-
bers, support universal background
checks. Instead, we get only tiny, incre-
mental tweaks here and there.
When grade-school children are vul-
nerable to mass murderers, what’s the
point of government?A few pieces of legislation are winding
their way through Congress, but the
evenly split Senate poses a challenge. A
supermajority of 60 votes would be re-
quired to overcome a filibuster. At a
different time, Republicans might feel
emboldened to hold their ground. But in
the wake of these two carnivals of vio-
lence, even they sense the winds are
shifting.
Republicans need some time on this
Memorial Day weekend in front of the
mirror. Between their support for the
Supreme Court’s possible reversal of
abortion rights and their inaction on the
slaughter of children with weapons that
ought to be banned, they’re on shaky
ground.
As a first step, we should change the
name of the mission from gun control to
gun safety, as pollster Frank Luntz has
suggested. “Control” is a trigger for resis-
tance when safety is what we’re really
talking about. Words matter. Maybe
some people could be more open to com-
promise and change if they weren’t im-
mediately put on the defensive.
The predictable constitutional argu-
ments, meanwhile, have become offen-
sive. Yes, the Founding Fathers were con-
cerned about another British invasion,
and made it possible for early colonists to
arm themselves in defense of their coun-
try. But those who wrote the Second
Amendment in the 18th century could
not have envisioned how their perfectly
reasonable intentions would be distorted
235 years later — or how 18-year-olds
would be able to buy and carry assault
weapons meant for a modern battlefield
into grade-school classrooms.
There’s a galaxy of difference between
a musket and an AR-15. It’s time to re-
move these instruments of mass murder
from the marketplace once and for all.
We might not stop the next massacre,
but we can stop making it so easy.KATHLEEN PARKERAn AR-15 is not a colonial musket