Hello and welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host, Brian Boyler.

There's no way around the fact that it's been a very bad few weeks and even few years

for gun violence and the proliferation of firearms in America.

Most recently there were the massacres at Rob Elementary in Uvalde, Texas and at the

grocery store in Buffalo, New York's Black community, those events overshadowed a bunch

of smaller mass shootings like the one in Highland Park, Illinois on the 4th of July.

And you can think of all of them as outgrows of a pandemic-era surge in gun sales, which

was in turn facilitated by the radical jurisprudence of the Supreme Court over many, many years.

So those are just the background conditions for the movement against gun violence.

Instead even when there's good news on the gun front, it's usually in a broader context

of serious setbacks.

Taking just one example, President Biden recently signed a modest but perfectly fine gun

regulation bill into law.

It's the first such bill in decades, no poison pills really, just a kind of one foot in

front of the other improvement of federal law.

The Congress passed that bill in the immediate, immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court literally

just inventing a constitutional right to carry concealed weapons.

Like I think literally on the same day.

And I know it feels like the sporting thing to do is celebrate the passage of that bill

as the kind of cracking of the dam of GOP opposition to gun control.

But honestly, if you gave me a choice between the news status quo or just going back to where

things were in early June before the Supreme Court decision, I'd go back in a heartbeat.

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