This is controversial.
On MSNBC right now, they are showing very clear video footage of the gunman walking through the school. Indeed, they have video of the shooter shooting through the glass in the front doors, allowing her/him to get inside the school. I don’t know whether the police have video of the shots fired. I don’t know if they have video of the adults and children being killed. I’m sure there are pictures of dead children and adults.
The single last thing you want to see and the single last thing I want to see is anyone gunned down, especially nine-year-olds. But it’s time to release the footage. If this country is going to do anything to fix this problem, we need to face it head-on. The people who sell these guns and the people who legislate to whom the guns can be sold while also passing legislation that provides the gun manufacturers complete immunity from lawsuits must be forced to watch the inevitable end result.
This is the guy who is the congressman for this district. Their gun fetish is a great thing – indeed, an entry-level requirement to be a Republican politician. Maybe they’d separate themselves from guns a bit if babies literally cut in half by assault rifles, weapons of war, firing heavy bullets at speeds that… cut children in half.
People say, “Pictures dishonor the lives of the victims.” In my mind, the United States is at the point where it’s the only way we can now honor the victims. Because otherwise, all we see is the same thing every fcking time, same old, same old. Lots of yellow tape, crying kids, parents, and cops going in and out. We have sanitized school shootings! Something that people would normally believe to be impossible. THAT dishonors the victims… just more yellow tape, more tears, just another school shooting.
This is the result of SANITIZATION. The family above and below, Rep. Andy Ogles, the congressman for this district, don’t know what those guns do when pointed at students, or people at night clubs, or at a concert. Force them to look at dead children. Force them to WATCH children being cut down. You won’t see this Christmas card again.
In the early 1960s, the civil rights movement was having trouble really getting anywhere with Birmingham’s public safety officer, Bull Connor, hosing down protesters, using dogs, and then the troops in Selma, beating heads. It took television video for the rest of the country to erupt in a fury (Despite the fact that the rest of the country was almost as racist). Television pictures turned the tide.
Now, we’re fighting a war for our kids. Does anyone think that this is the last school shooting of this school year? Even though it’s Spring Break here? Little time left? The only way to get these legislators who stand with their guns for CHRISTMAS CARDS is to force them to see what those guns actually do! Maybe then the guns won’t make “pretty” Christmas cards. Maybe then they outlaw assault rifles. Maybe then they allow gun manufacturers to be sued.
We have tried everything else. It is time to show the damage, and it will be awful. But it IS awful. Some kids saw what happened, and some adults did. The police and EMTs that have to deal with remains “see” what happened. Americans need to “see” it, and then maybe the pontificating, the “thoughts and prayers” will sound almost demonic—time to show the damage they cause.
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[email protected], @JasonMiciak SUBSTACK: PEOPLE WILL DIE, TRUMP ORDERS HIS ARMY INTO ACTION FOR INDICTMENTS
This may be the only thing that disabuses them of the romantic notion they attach to guns.
If you are a parent, grandparent, beloved aunt/uncle, whatever, and you love your children, etc., you have exactly one way to minimize the possibility (soon to be probability I’m sure) said children are not put thru this meat grinder: vote every fucking ‘pube out of office. Get every magat pol out of every state house. Rid yourselves of every idiot governor more than willing to put your children on the sacrificial altar of an unrestrained second amendment (but who will bust their own balls, and kill women and girls, to save some protoplasm F.F.S.). The s.c. isn’t going to save your kids-uncle tom, the vagina, beer bong, gorsuch and alito could give two fucks about your children, not when they’re busy setting up an american taliban.
This is on the voters of this country: ALL OF THEM. Every one of these deaths over the decades-children, churchgoers, shoppers, concert attenders, etc. – these deaths are on us for not doing enough to take state legislatures and congress out of the hands of people who have no business being a part of those governing bodies.
Anyone who doesn’t vote in the upcoming election (s) to vote these terrorists out of office and keep the new ones from getting into office might as well put bullets into your beloved families’ heads because if you don’t, someone else will until we rein in the idiots, morons, terrorists. It IS that simple.
This would be the quickest way to do that. Or one of the quickest ways.
Well said, Spike. The only way to rid ourselves of this plague of Republicans is to vote them out of office. That means ANY
Republican!! In politics today there is not a good Republican.
They have besmirched the whole fucking party. When drump was voted in….every one of them needed to be voted out. The party is so stupid that they deserve to be disbanded. A party that turns from law and order to fascism and dictatorship needs to be put out of business and shut down for the safety of our country and freedom. Let them use their guns to kill each other. Good riddance!
I agree. It’s long past time to do this, especially since their are children among the victims. Yes, families might object and given this is a “Christian” school there’s a better than even chance it’s full of parents and other adults who are all-in on the GOP and gun culture. People who will literally “sacrifice” their children’s memories for the cause. Of the gun fetishist’s warped view of the second amendment.
Your mention of Bull Connor struck home with me. I was just old enough to start remembering some things and have a very early memory in life of that news footage. And later on the footage of Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge as well as the March to Montgomery. For that we were specifically looking in the crowd for the face of our own preacher from the Presbyterian church I grew up in – “Pope” as he was called (his name was Lee Pope Ward) was still youngish and idealistic and like so many other ministers answered Dr. King’s call to head down there.
Shocking the public is for some things a tragically necessary thing to do.
I’m gonna go jarhead now. As we got going in WWII there was already a lot of fighting and dying taking place against both the Germans and Japanese. In the “Twin Offensive” strategy McCarthur moved up the western Pacific and Nimitz sent his forces into the central Pacific in what became called “island hopping”, taking Japanese airstrips and small bases. The Tarawa Atoll would prove to be a particularly gruesome battle, in part because of poor planning and execution by the Navy (which the Marines doing the landing depended on to get them to shore to fight, and to suppress resistance via Naval gunnery and air attacks. The other was the strategic importance of the airstrip on Betio was such that one of Japan’s most elite units and it’s commander garrisoned it and it was armed to the teeth. In fact it’s where Japan placed those huge coastal guns captured when they took Singapore.
As I said, the whole invasion itself was a mess, from poor intelligence and the Navy blowing off locals (including some British who were intimately familiar with Tarawa) to the pre-bombardment timetable falling apart to the ignoring of what the actual tides would be – landing craft couldn’t make it over the reef because they weren’t covered by enough water. The grunts had to wade ashore in almost chest deep water for eight hundred to a thousand yards against insanely prepared, experienced defenders. Despite the horrendous casulaties the Marines won the battle.
Back in Washington, after considerable debate the War Department went along with the Navy and Marines and released some photos of the aftermath of the battle, which included dead Marines and Japanese. They believed it was necessary to shock the public into just what the war was like for those doing the fighting, which in turn would make the public more understanding of the need for all the increasing rationing, and measures being taken to ramp up manufacturing. There was a huge outcry, and some of the reaction from families of the dead was particularly so.
The pictures, especially by today’s standards weren’t all that gruesome – none showed Marines torn to shreds, missing limbs or with intestines hanging out etc. Still, it shocked the public. But in the bigger picture it established that the whole thing wasn’t some glorious event in faraway places where a show of American might would cause the enemy to back down. No, it made the public understand this was going to be a long, brutal fight both in the Pacific and in the European theater. It would take years. And cost a lost, both in lives and treasure. But the public understood and the public support to defeat the Nazis and the Japansese (who it turned out had their own versions of brutal prisoner/concentration camps and their own versions of say Dr. Mengele) were defeated.
Sometimes shocking, gruesome visual evidence is what it takes. Never having had children, but in a former line of work working with people who had children die and sometimes violently I know the impact is profound. More than I, or even other parents who haven’t lost children can understand. I’m sure showing footage would for some be an outrage, or even more crushing a blow than the actual burying of their child. But if that’s what it takes to shock the public into demanding true, meaningful action, to re-instill some measure of shame into politicians (mostly but not all GOP) then that’s what it takes.
Again, I know. I never had kids. However, unlike damned near everyone who’s read this I HAVE arranged burials of people including teenagers who have died from gun violence. I HAVE seen bodies on slabs that needed to be prepared for burial, including some so badly damaged that a closed-casket visitation and funeral was a foregone conclusion.
It’s an ugly thing to behold, an assault on both the senses but on one’s own sense of humanity. While nothing can be the same as actually looking at or handling one of those shattered human beings, photos of what happened to them, raw and unedited and even video of it happening is the next “best” thing.
I find myself thinking we really have no choice anymore if we want to make real inroad on solving the gun problem in this country.
How about the primal scream that comes out of the parent when they hear it’s their child that was murdered?! Deadline White House yesterday – a state senator was on. She was in the hospital and there when the parent heard. Her face showed it. She will never be the same either.
I agree with everyone’s moral outrage and suggestions. The GOP has unofficially declared war on our children. Hell, even Boo Radley stopped a racist from murdering innocent children! I was in the fifth grade when Kennedy was killed in ’63. The nation went from hope to grief. Now, more than ever, we need to find hope in the midst of our grief. We don’t need the hope of distraction as the Beatles became in Feb ’64, as joyous and wonderful as it was. That was shattered by the killings of Dr.King and Bobby Kennedy in ’68, & Altamont in ’69, along with Vietnam and Nixon. We need a grassroots uprising that fundamentally shocks the system itself into doing what the founders intended. A system of government BY and FOR the people. We need to drive these fascists and hypocrites back into their collective holes and create laws of equality and justice. Therefore, we need to be willing to do whatever it takes to shock the nation’s conscience, comfort be damned. Not one of the poor souls connected to any child lost to gun violence will ever have comfort again. We should be willing to hold them in our hearts and be willing to sacrifice comfort for truth, no matter how ugly. The truth will only set us free if we are willing to look at a room full of blown apart kids. Maybe then we’ll develop into zealots for life, ALL life. If so, the space for death cults will shrink to nothing, and people like Trump will either be dead, in jail, or hiding out. They certainly won’t be making laws making the slaughter of children fine and dandy.
Unlike Uvalde Tx, had police go in rather fast, and still six got killed. Maybe dumbass morally crippled Abbott could have used over a billion (?) $ to train (and replace) local police. By law police don’t have to die to protect and serve. Then wth are they doing as LEOs?
They should use AI to replicate one of the Christmas Card families being gunned down with an AR 15. Do it with narration, charts of the increase in deaths from these murder machines since the Republicans killed the ban (as well as people) and in slow motion and actual speed with plenty of color. Some should be killed and some just wounded with a description of what the wounded will endure for the rest of their life.
Mamie Till knew the ONLY way to begin the change was to SHOW the world what was done to her baby. IT. IS. TIME. TO. SHOW. THE. CARNAGE. AGAIN.
Think the a$$wipes will remove their AR15 LAPEL PINS?
There’s more agreement today as well, check out the Washington Post article showing what happened to 2 victims, still graphics but effective.
https://apple.news/AX1baQZ_bSm667CvvgvrlrA
THIS murder of innocents is the RW/NRA FAILURE to do their JOB, for their Constituents! This MUST be stopped NOW! RW must ACT now! This cannot be TOLERATED any longer! Gun REFORM NOW, or WE the people will start a Civil suit against those, who have FAILED to do what’s right for the people!
The parents of one Sandy Hook victim demanded that their son have an open casket viewing with no attempt to.disguise the ghastly injuries inflicted on their child. As I recall, one hand was destroyed and that was the least of the injuries. It was in Connecticut so.some action was taken.
That representative would say that some people refuse to get vaxxed for polio under very limited circumstances, so why bother requiring it for the other 95%. He needs to see the bodies in the morgue before they are made slightly !ore presentable at the viewing. If it had been my loved one,I would call.his office and demand he attend. When he inevitably refused,,I would hold a press conference. invite him.to attend,,and inform the world what a moronic coward he is And when he campaigned for reelection I would have been at every appearance holding up blown cup photographs of my loved one’s body,,and shame him I to.justify I g his stance.