On Wednesday, I went to the Kentucky capitol for the first time in 2025.
It is so long since I’ve been there (September, I think) that as I was driving into Frankfort and belting out Guns ’N Roses “Welcome to the Jungle” from the Appetite for Destruction album, I missed my turn and had to wind my way back.
I spent the day there with Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America for our annual day of advocacy (photo above) where we meet with lawmakers to discuss the growing epidemic of gun violence and ask them to do something — anything — about it.
Having done this for a few years now, it is clear that the most important minutes in these morning meetings and at the afternoon rally occur when survivors who have lost children and other loved ones courageously tell their stories.
You will not forget the mother describing what it felt like when she was not allowed to touch her deceased 19 yr old son’s hair or kiss him on the forehead one last time because his body was now a crime scene. You will not forget the woman describing her elderly mother, shot in the chest in front of her home, and what it was like to do CPR while 911 rang and rang with no answer. You will not forget the man who, when he was 17, witnessed his classmate shoot his teacher in the head, after which the shooter held his classroom hostage for almost half an hour while counting how many bullets he had left.
The reverberations of gun violence in families and communities are incalculable.
And yet.
Virtually all of our GOP legislators here in Kentucky refuse to support bills to (1) make it harder for mentally unstable people to have access to firearms, and (2) require safe storage of guns and ammunition.
Why? Because the political price is just too high.
Our system is so damned broken.
In addition to meeting with lawmakers to talk about gun violence, I also visited with legislators I haven’t seen in awhile, Republicans with whom I disagree on just about everything policy-wise but have developed a relationship with. We talked privately about what’s happening at the capitol this session.
Two conversations stand out:
One lawmaker told me a long story about a bill that passed last session and how their fellow GOP lawmaker lied to them in negotiations, adding, “But hey, I’m a nobody around here.”
Imagine being a member of the GOP supermajority in the Kentucky legislature and still feeling like a nobody.
Another lawmaker said it was their understanding that a few good gun bills had been assigned to committees. When I pushed back that this happens every year, and that these bills remain buried in the basements of these committees because the committee chairs don’t have the power to call the bills for so much as a discussion without House or Senate leadership approval, they just nodded, grinned, and sighed. That’s the way it works, they said.
I tell you these 2 stories because they describe the utter dysfunction of the supermajority power structure in our legislature.
We citizens send spend our time and money electing 138 lawmakers to send to our state capitol to represent us, but the reality is that we are represented by two men: Senate President Robert Stivers and House Leader David Osborne.
The representatives and senators we send either do the grunt work for them or are ignored.
We are approaching the end of a short-year session in the Kentucky legislature. Thus far, leadership’s top priorities appear to be reducing the income tax again (which will mostly help the rich), allowing coal companies to pollute our water, eliminating DEI (code for boosting white supremacy) in our schools, weakening safety precautions for coal miners, and filing bills yet again to hurt vulnerable transgender people.
Because this is what will keep getting them re-elected.
They count on the fact that we are all exhausted and distracted enough by the circus going on in Washington D.C. that we will not care enough to notice.
Is there plenty to be concerned about on a national level? Yes. And I’m as distracted by it all as anyone.
Meanwhile, here at home, our representatives (even in the supermajority!) don’t feel like they have a say while a handful of those at the top of the Kentucky legislature — where the money is — giddily pick our pockets while not doing a damn thing to make Kentuckians safer, smarter, healthier, or more financially secure.
I was listening to and belting out “Welcome to the Jungle” on my way into Frankfort this week because this has become my routine.
The song mirrors, in both sound and language, what it feels like to pull into the Kentucky capitol parking lot, look at that big building where the laws are made, and prepare to stomach the rot of our so-called legislative process.
“Welcome to the jungle, it gets worse here every day
You learn to live like an animal in the jungle where we play
If you got hunger for what you see, you'll take it eventually
You can have everything you want but you better not take it from me”
--30--
