Twenty people in El Paso, and then late last night, 9 more people killed in Ohio at another mass shooting, 29 total. In other words, a plane crash’s worth in one day. We are not counting the numbers dead in the other two mass shootings from last week. (Who can keep up?). We are not counting the numbers hurt, people whose lives will never be the same, we’re not counting them because we consider them “lucky.”
When planes fall out of the sky an entire department, the NTSB, a department created to deal with crashes, launches into action. They will put an entire plane back together, salvage parts from under the ocean, to discover the cause, in order to make flying safe. Yet when it is gun violence, Republicans prevent the CDC – a department created to study lots of things that kill – from studying it at all.
I am at a loss as to what to say.
Nine people were killed last night after we went to sleep and they will not likely be the biggest story of the day because it is eclipsed by the sheer volume reached earlier in the day. I warned of copycat killings yesterday. But in today’s America, who knows if this was a copycat or a regularly scheduled mass shooting?
How sick are the Republicans willing to let this become? Will they await the death of their own families before they acknowledge that something be done? Yesterday I was using the collective “we” as bearing blame. This morning, I’ve stopped, because president Obama tried all he could to initiate something, some sort of control, and Republicans prevented it.
Did you ever see Obama cry as President? I did, several times. But each time he cried, that I noted at least, it was due to remembering the deaths at Sandy Hook, tears of tragedy and fury. He had to hold the families grieving their babies, killed by an assault rifle. How many Republicans will launch into action to hold the families from yesterday? How many held the families then? I do not know. Perhaps some. But then they all voted against gun reform.
The killing in Ohio involved the use of a “long gun,” which is cop-speak for “assault rifle.” We know this because a real rifle would take far too long and be far too heavy to shoot 25 people (16 were injured). The killing in El Paso involved an assault rifle. The killing in Las Vegas involved multiple assault rifles. The killing in Parkland, Sandy Hook, they all involved assault weapons.
What will it have to take to ban assault rifles?
We would dearly love to think that today will change everything. But I wrote the same thing a year and a half ago about Parkland. If shooting over 20 students at a nigh school, more children, changed nothing, why would two isolated events yesterday do anything?
Why would we do anything in America?
Meanwhile, the Boeing 737-Max still sits grounded. Plane crashes can be prevented, the theory goes. But in America, nothing can be done about gun violence.
Or so the theory goes.
“But I wrote the same thing a year and a half ago about Parkland. If shooting over 20 students at a nigh school, more children, changed nothing, why would two isolated events yesterday do anything?”
Don’t forget that it wasn’t all that long ago that a CHURCH in TEXAS was the site of a mass shooting (the Sutherland Springs First Baptist Church in Nov 2017) and nothing was done after that either. Well, nothing but a bunch of right-wing nutjobs in the State Legislature avoiding any responsibility in stemming future shootings by hiding behind the 2nd Amendment–just as the National GOP does every single time.
I caught some news and Gov Abbott was apparently asked about what he planned to do to stop future incidents (I confess, I couldn’t hear the question clearly) but Abbott IMO blew up at the reporter, raging that there were still possible victims and they were his focus at the moment and that now wasn’t the right time to be talking politics. IOW, the same old GOP song-and-dance: When a mass shooting happens, it’s NEVER the time to deal with it because everyone’s emotions are too raw, and people won’t be thinking clearly. So, they let time pass and then fall back on the 2nd Amendment as though it were personally delivered by God to Moses on Mt Sinai.
It is nearly impossible to keep up. Sick.
Indeed, what will it take to end the ban on self-defense that is a common factor in almost all of these travesties? Ohio got stopped cold because armed people were close by. But citizens should not have to hope for there to be police on every corner.
A good piece, Jason, and I think it well expresses the sadness, frustration, and fury we all feel. As the white population decreases daily, it scares the shit out of me that these people will become more and more scared, and go to even crazier lengths in their attempts at genocide (because let’s call it what it is). I never thought I’d be happy I couldn’t have children but I am. But I worry about my niece and her boys all the time. I worry about my husband too, I have an illness that will take me out in not too long a time, but he is a very healthy 60 year old and I’m scared for him too. I guess I need to take him to the range for some practice, I was the shooter in the family lol! I hate it but we’re both the kind that we won’t start anything but damn if we won’t do everything we can to finish it.
Here’s what it will take: Voting OUT every Republican in every office at every level, in every election from here to the foreseeable future. Voting DEM and supporting Dem candidates every chance you get. This is not a “both-sides” issue, not when one party consistently blocks every solution and every bill put forward by the other party. Not when one party is at best complicit and more likely actively spread the hate and vitriol, while the other part seeks solutions and promotes tolerance and unity.
I’ll never skip any chance to say it: It’s the Republicans who are stained with this bloodshed. They must be utterly crushed at the ballot box, every time, until that party exists no more.