Stirring emotions, shooting blanks: Mixed feelings about the House gun-control protest sit-in

It’s hard to remember that feeling deeply moved and disgusted all at once is not only possible, but occasionally healthy. That’s how I felt last week during the longest sit-in by politicians in American congressional history.

Starting Wednesday morning and stretching 26 hours, Democratic representatives occupied the House floor; at the height of the sit-in, there were more than 80 of them. The sit-in came after the Senate rejected four gun-control-related bills, and the House’s Republican leadership blocked votes on two more: One expanding background checks and funding mass-shooting research, the other to block people on the federal terror watchlist from buying guns.

There was much to find grotesque in the proceedings. House Speaker Paul Ryan mocked the Democrats for engaging in a disgraceful “publicity stunt.” He then pushed through a bill on Zika virus care that included riders targeting Planned Parenthood and granting protections to corporations to dump pesticides in American waterways.

Without debate, and almost a year to the day after the Emanuel AME Church shooting in Charleston, Republicans held a vote that undid a previous compromise prohibiting displays of the Confederate flag at VA cemeteries.

But House Democrats didn’t come out looking so hot either. Although representatives insisted the sit-in wasn’t about “partisan politics” (which drew laughs from Capitol Hill reporters), it was a virtual impossibility either bill would have passed if a vote had happened.

The short-term dividends, particularly on the second bill, seemed more about finding a way to hammer Republicans for being “soft on terror” — rhetoric senators voiced on Monday. It’s a cheap slam that rings trite since ISIS has had no problems getting its hands on American-made weapons thanks to foreign policy failures for which both parties are responsible.

Add to it the hypocrisy of Democrats relying on a watchlist they’ve heavily critiqued for years to do an end-run around due process .

In policy terms, it was hard not to see the missed opportunities.

Funding for gun violence research is essential, and a majority of Americans, including NRA members, support background checks. But bundling those propositions with a push to expand a flawed government watchlist only confirmed the worst fears of potentially sympathetic Republican voters — and precluded support from civil-liberties-conscious Americans across the political spectrum.

Why couldn’t Democrats focus their passion on demanding funding for neglected programs like Ceasefire, which have been consistently proven to slash gun violence rates in inner-city America, and which even the NRA has hinted it might support? Why not demand funding for trauma centers in places like Chicago, where a daily toll of gun violence is made lethal without access to emergency care? Why not demand changes to laws that give domestic abusers — who kill far more Americans than terrorists ever have — easy access to guns?

And yet: There was real power in the sit-in, from Congresswoman Norma Torres, who described working as a 911 operator and listening to an 11-year-old girl get shot to death; to Congresswoman Debbie Dingell, who recounted terrifying abuse at the hands of her gun-toting father; to representative after representative who told the tales of loved ones, colleagues and constituents whose lives were cut short by bullets. Even captured on tiny phone cameras after the majority gaveled the House out of session, the emotions were raw, the horror real.

For a few hours at least, the flow of Washington business as usual was interrupted, and heartbreaking stories that normally get drowned out were actually heard.

Call it spectacle, fine — but there’s spectacle in everything Washington does. And it was more than that. Call it politics, sure. But it wasn’t just that either. This was politics in the realest sense — the arena where matters of life and death play out, where the reality that we are a nation of people living and dying together is center stage.

Where do we go from here?

The proximate cause for the sit-in was, of course, the Orlando shooting, the largest mass shooting by a single perpetrator in American history. And yet Americans are shot every day. Over the course of the sit-in itself, across the country, from Portland to San Diego to Atlanta to Pittsburgh, 24 people were shot to death. Two shootings in New York left one person dead and two injured.

Raising awareness about gun violence, especially after the nation suffers horrendous, high-profile carnage, is crucial. But transforming outrage and despair into legislation that will actually save lives on a daily basis is imperative.

At its best, the sit-in movingly suggested that such change may be possible. But policies that are more about optics instead of substantive change, that take us down an ugly road we know too well, are worse than useless. We owe one another more than that.

Blanchfield is a freelance journalist and academic.