What’s wrong with this picture? That’s the first thing I thought when I saw this video and you’ll see why. The person who is making sense and telling the truth is the one that’s being shown the door.
The person with first hand knowledge, who literally watched the slaughter of his classmates and attended their funerals is the “problem” in the room, the one that needs to be removed.
By removing the one man telling the truth that we all need to hear, the fat cat NRA-bought members of the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee resumed their business. Their “business,” they made very clear, with their Shall Not Be Infringed signs, is to maintain the whack-a-mole gun culture that is killing our children.
The guns in Parkland, Buffalo, El Paso, didn't come from Mexico. They came from the US, and the shooters were inspired by racist, anti-black, anti-immigrant manifestos that rhyme with GOP talking points. pic.twitter.com/0D4QbHvu1t
— David Hogg ☮️ (@davidhogg111) July 20, 2022
Here’s Hogg with some clarification and context. He’s talking about Arizona’s Andy Biggs.
We have a duty to interrupt white nationalists when they spew harmful rhetoric. We have to, they’re using the same talking points as mass shooter manifestos.
Here’s my reflections and some context. https://t.co/lrz8RMBc84 pic.twitter.com/dTb6YpDLZO
— David Hogg ☮️ (@davidhogg111) July 20, 2022
Hogg didn’t last more than 30 seconds in the room, as the Committee worked on the “Equal Access to Justice for Victims of Gun Violence Act” and the “Assault Weapons Ban of 2021.”
Jim Clyburn, the House Majority Whip was present and he noted that today’s hearing marks the tenth anniversary of the 2012 Aurora, Colorado mass shooting (not the 1993 Aurora, Colorado mass shooting) that left 12 people dead and another 70 injured.
And let me personalize the 1993 shooting. Let me bring it home to you. It took place at a Chuck E. Cheese. One of my oldest and dearest friends, a friend of over 50 years now, lost his niece there. Here’s a link to the details. She’s the 17-year-old who pleaded for her life on her knees and the perpetrator shot her in the head. This fact came out at trial. My friend told me that the night the cops came to his sister’s house to tell her the horrible news that they had “cleaned up that part of it.” The shooter’s motive was that he had been fired from Chuck E. Cheese and this was his revenge.
My friend’s sister, a gal about my age, has never recovered from this. Maybe I’ll write him and see how she is now. We haven’t spoken of this matter in several years now. And of course we began speaking of it because of the Parkland shooting, but now there’s one shooting a day or more, so instant death in a public place has lost its shock value.
I share this with you because if one of these shooting tragedies hasn’t yet hurt your family or your circle of friends, it will. It will. Simply because there is so much of it. This country is out of control. We are all being held hostage by the gun lobby and the MAGA crazies. And it’s got nothing to do with the Second Amendment and protecting the home. I’m all for that. I’m not for lunatics having easy access to assault rifles and semi-automatics.
I keep posting this, but it is a fact.
The LEADING CAUSE OF DEATH FOR CHILDREN IN THE USA IS GUNSHOT.
In no other country is this true, including the war zones of Yemen and Ukraine. How can the wealthiest country that has ever existed allow this to happen to their children, their very future?
How? By allowing corporate money into government. By allowing that money to buy politicians. The gun lobby’s just one example and definitely the most repugnant but there are many others which are destroying the American democracy.
Reading about this ejection in a previous PZ article, I wasn’t surprised to find that David was objecting to remarks by my Unrepresentative, Andy Biggs. It matches with my experiences writing to Biggs and expressing my views. He’s a brick wall to me.