When I was a kid Memorial Day wasn’t all about drinking beer by a lake, or overt shows of patriotism (though my dad was a WWII veteran) or honoring our war dead, or backyard bar-b-qs or watching the baseball game, it was about decorating the graves of those in our family who had gone into the ground before us and visiting those who were still above it, but whom we saw only on occasion.
Mom and dad would cram us seven kids, or some iteration thereof (I think occasionally some of the older progeny would be allowed to beg off), into our old green Buick 4 door and take a blue highway south out of Springfield and drive an hour or back into our ancestral climes in the rural Ozarks.
We’d stop and meet up with a couple of mom’s brothers sequestered in shacks down in the boontoolies, and drive to two or three lonesome quiet, strangely beautiful, but stark sunlit cemeteries, where this or that grandpa or ma or great aunt was planted; and at one or another mom would break out our packed lunch; at each dad would shoot pictures of the headstones and of his brood standing by them, and by each other, to commemorate our yearly sojourn.
Ah, shooting pictures. Simpler times.
NBC News reports that there were at least fourteen mass-shootings over this past holiday weekend, and that of course doesn’t include the horror in Uvalde, Texas last Tuesday or the insane spate of violence across the country yesterday:
“According to the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks shootings in the United States, there were at least 14 “mass shootings” in the country over the weekend, from early Saturday to late Monday.
The archive defines a mass shooting as an incident in which “four or more people are shot or killed, not including the shooter.”
At least nine people were killed in the shootings, with more than 60 injured, according to the organization’s data.
A preliminary count found that gun violence — not just mass shootings — left at least 156 people dead and 412 injured from 5 p.m. ET Friday to 5 a.m. Tuesday, the archive said.”
And even as the victims of this violence are bleeding out, the NRA and their Allies in the Republican Party are blaming television, video games, locks or the lack of them, doors, social mores, and most unbelievably, women for this phenomenon of toxic, predominantly male, existential angst mixed with a thoroughly unhealthy attraction for shooty things fueled murders:
“The Uvalde police’s story has changed so often that the journalists who keep track of the shifting narrative deserve hazard pay. It’s gotten so bad that the Uvalde police have stopped cooperating with the state investigation into the failures that led to cops standing outside the classroom while children locked in with an active shooter kept calling 911 and begging for help. The false story of the careless teacher looks now like yet another attempt to deflect blame from the cops. Scapegoating a school teacher is a particularly low move considering that it appears that the two teachers who died that day were among the few adults who had the courage to attempt to protect the children…
Before the bodies were even cold, in their effort to talk about anything but guns, Republican pundits and politicians zeroed right in on victim-blaming school staff for mass shootings. Most teachers are women, giving the Republican propaganda machine an opportunity to characterize schools as weak and feminine places supposedly in need of even more male protection. On Fox News, there was lots of chatter about schools being “soft” targets in need of “armed security agents” and other manly man figures to shield the women and children inside.
The underlying theory is that the “problem” is letting those college-educated women who teach school have too much control over what happens in classrooms.“
Will this “blame anything but the guns” narrative be allowed to prevail yet again? If so we will only gain yet more deadly harvests of souls, and insure it will always be “mourning in America.”
And not even the comfort of mom’s potato salad to mitigate it.
Are the idiots at Fox News THAT clueless? Did they miss the fact that the school actually did have MALE security guards–who did NOTHING? Did they miss the fact that MOSTLY MALE police force did practically nothing, except harass parents urging those mostly male cops to do their damned job and save the kids?
Not clueless, evil.
They didn’t miss it, they sure as shooting don’t want to admit it either.
They KNOW it. The entire effing right wing KNOWS it. They. Don’t. Care. That doesn’t play into their narrative they are PAID to push to deliberately divide this country to make us fail and fall into their fascism.
Has anyone noticed that public schools have been targeted? Why not $30,000 ones? If some of the elite private ones had been might we see action?
It will take a Christian or expensive private school and one of their own kids dying to get them to change qq and even then it will.only be the parent of that dead kid.
Guns matter more to.them than people. They will.blame everything and everyone except guns. No 18 year-old should have one. Raise the age to 25. .
The Upside shooter wasn’t graduating with his class. He had probably Bern in trouble before. We know he was a victim.of bullying. Why wasn’t he in counseling at school.and privately?