Local opinion: Ciscomani's dangerous double talk on public safety

On July 13, our nation witnessed yet another stunning act of political violence when a gunman opened fire with an AR style gun at former President Donald Trump, wounding him and killing one person.

Immediately, I’m back to January 8, 2011, when I witnessed my Congresswoman Gabby Giffords shot and wounded, along with 12 others as we all stood on a grocery store sidewalk. Six people were murdered that morning, including a nine-year-old little girl.

Both shootings were horrific. And in both cases, it was heartening to see our leaders put aside their political differences and denounce political violence. My current Representative Juan Ciscomani included. He responded almost immediately to July’s assassination attempt with prayers for the former President and the innocent bystanders impacted.

Unfortunately, thoughts and prayers do ABSOLUTELY nothing to fix our crisis of gun violence.

I speak from experience. Thirteen-plus years since I witnessed my public official nearly killed by a gun on a Tucson street, and currently one Arizonan’s life is ended by a gun every seven hours. And while the likes of Representative Ciscomani talk a big game about public safety, they absolutely refuse to support any common-sense measures that will actually stop the killing.

Consider Ciscomani after the 2023 Covenant School shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, which killed three children and three adults. He immediately blamed mental health issues for the murders – despite the fact that America has similar rates of mental illness when compared to other high-income countries but with a gun homicide rate that is a staggering 26 times higher than those other countries similar to ours. Even more outrageous, Ciscomani, just two months later voted to repeal President Biden’s restrictions on the very same deadly firearm device that made the Covenant school shooting so deadly. His actions follow the hypocritical standard playbook for gun-lobby-backed public officials: Offer prayers, say it’s too early to talk about solutions, distance themselves from the real issue of easy gun access, and then vote to make their communities less safe.

Ciscomani’s hypocrisy is like the Energizer Bunny, it just keeps going and going and going. He’s a member of the Republican Study Committee that supported reducing funds for Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS). COPS funding has been essential for decades, providing more than $20 billion to more than 13,000 police departments nationwide and adding more than 160,000 officers to focus on community policing. Just this month, Ciscomani voted for an appropriations bill that defunds law enforcement programs and the FBI. As the LA Times put it: ‘Republicans like Ciscomani “can’t be pro-cop and pro-public safety while backing a proposal that undermines local law enforcement’s ability to police crime.” Facts really do matter, especially when lives are at stake.

Also very concerning to me, Ciscomani founded the Arizona chapter of the Patriot Academy, a far-right extremist organization that opposes separation of church and state, seeks to rewrite the Constitution, and offers children as young as 11 years old firearms training with extremist propaganda!

Clearly — while Ciscomani may talk big about the importance of public safety — his actual actions do nothing but make us less safe. On a recent chance encounter with him, I suggested that his extreme right-to-life stance should include the 100+ a day people a day that are killed with firearms. His response? Crickets!

On behalf of this community, I say, Ciscomani, stop the hypocrisy. We don’t need our Representative expressing useless thoughts and prayers for Arizonans with every additional horrible act of gun violence – we need them to ACT, to vote to prevent it. Sept. 4, another school shooting in Georgia where two students and two teachers were murdered and nine students were wounded with an AR style rifle and there is no response from him that I could find (at the time of writing this). Not even one useless thought or one useless prayer.

Is it too early to vote for a new Representative? I think not. It’s the perfect time to vote for a new Representative.

Patricia Maisch was a witness to one of Tucson’s Mass Shootings. Long time resident recently retired from our HVAC Business.