Suspected I-75 shooter easily purchased a weapon of war

Senseless gun violence is as American as apple pie. (Getty Images)

One of the everyday pleasures of living on the edge of the Daniel Boone National Forest in London or my hometown of Morehead is being surrounded by woods and hills.

Unless a sniper is loose in them.

I’m writing this as schools have been closed for two days and law enforcement continues to search part of the national forest for Joseph Couch, 32, an ex-Army Reserve private. Couch is charged with taking a position on a ledge overlooking Interstate 75 a few hours before dusk Saturday and opening fire on vehicles below.

Thankfully, miraculously, no one was killed but five people were injured and 12 vehicles struck by gunfire. A major north-south corridor was shut down for hours.

During the nail-biting uncertainty as we awaited — dreaded — a body count, Republican state lawmakers from the southern Kentucky area issued a statement. The “senseless act of violence,” they said, “does not reflect the values of this community, our Commonwealth, or its people.”

I think what they meant is that a place full of bighearted people shouldn’t be judged by the actions of one heavily armed whacked-out individual.

But let’s be real: The ease with which Couch bought a weapon of war that he turned on innocent people clearly reflects the political values of those lawmakers and others in Frankfort and Washington who steadfastly put protecting easy access to firearms above protecting people.

Republicans in Kentucky’s legislative supermajority don’t just value guns over people, they’ve sanctified their devotion. Two of the lawmakers who issued the statement, Rep. Josh Bray of Mount Vernon and Sen. Brandon Storm of London, sponsored legislation to make Kentucky a “Second Amendment sanctuary,” which it became during last year’s session.

(One of their goals was to hamstring the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, whose agents, nonetheless, responded to the I-75 emergency.)

I probably don’t need to point out that this is not the kind of sanctuary you want when bullets shatter the windows of your moving car.

It’s not the kind of sanctuary that shields you when a shooter starts taking out shoppers at a supermarket or at a country music concert or a Monday morning staff meeting at a Louisville bank . There’s no sanctuary for children and teachers even in our fortified schools.

Senseless gun violence is as American as apple pie. Nowhere else outside of war zones are people randomly mowed down by semi-automatic weapons or caught in crossfire.

It does not have to be this way.

We know it doesn’t have to be this way because Congress with bipartisan support in 1994 banned the sale of some semi-automatic weapons including AR-15s. Congress acted in response to mass shootings, including one in 1989 at a Louisville printing plant that killed eight people and injured 12.

The ban did nothing to decrease the number of semi-automatic weapons already in private hands and lasted only 10 years because Congress refused to renew it. A decade wasn’t long enough to definitively measure the ban’s long-term effects, according to researchers.

But data does show an almost immediate – and steep – rise in mass shooting deaths in the years after the assault weapons ban expired. (Congress did ban something: federal funding for firearms-related research in 1996, anticipating, perhaps, that more knowledge would produce more demand for sane gun laws.)

We can definitively say that if an assault-weapons ban had been in place Saturday Joseph Couch could not have legally purchased an AR-15 rifle. Couch, who was charged with threatening a neighbor with an AR-type weapon earlier this year and has a DUI on his record, also purchased 1,000 rounds of ammunition.

He texted his ex-wife shortly before the shooting began. “I’m going to kill a lot of people” and “myself afterwards. ”

Thankfully, Couch failed in the first part of his self-avowed mission. If he succeeds in the second part, we may not know for sure until some poor hunter or hiker stumbles across the remains. That uncertainty gives Couch a sickening kind of power over people who can’t help but be nagged by the possibility that he could still take a position and open fire again.

They won’t really be alone, though. In Kentucky where the Republican supermajority only ever loosens gun laws and in a nation where even the Supreme Court is in thrall to the firearms lobby, all of us might as well be living at the foot of a hill with someone wandering around up top, armed and wanting to randomly kill a lot of people.