Posted on 05/26/2022 4:04:11 PM PDT by Ennis85
Just 10 days after a deadly mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, where a self-described fascist and white supremacist killed 10 Black people in a supermarket, the US must content itself with another horrifying episode of gun violence.
At least 19 children between the ages of five and 11 and two adults have been murdered at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, after an 18-year-old entered the school with a handgun and opened fire.
It’s one of those events where words fail. Every descriptor seems to fall short in describing the wrenching, sickening, icy horror of children being gunned down in a place where they absolutely should feel and be safe. But there are questions we should be asking now – of lawmakers and of the state of Texas.
This is a state where you can openly carry a firearm – including long guns (like rifles) and handguns – in a public place without a licence. Texas does not require background checks for private sales of firearms, and does not restrict NFA weapons – which include machine guns, short-barrelled rifles and shotguns, heavy weapons, explosive ordnance, silencers and “any other weapon” (AOW), such as disguised or improvised firearms.
Abortion, however, is illegal once a fetal heartbeat can be detected. The state will legislate against access to vital healthcare, but it won’t legislate against guns. If you are pregnant, the state forces you to carry your foetus to term, but that baby won’t be protected from shooters in their school.
Which lives have worth in Texas? Not the lives of people who need to end their pregnancy – for a whole host of reasons. Not the lives of kids sitting in a classroom. Legislative powers are keen to protect the unborn – we’ve recently seen calls for Roe v Wade to be overturned by the Supreme Court – but the born come second, seemingly, to the cult of gun worship.
Firearms are now the leading cause of death for children in the US. Those who need or want to terminate a pregnancy are having their lives put at risk by restrictive and draconian laws. All the while, guns revel in a protected status.
On the outside, across the Atlantic, it is very difficult to understand this sort of reasoning. It makes a mockery of the shared values that should bind humanity together.
The governor of Texas, right-wing Greg Abbott says he “mourns this horrific loss” but a tweet from 2015, three years after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Texas, remains undeleted. It reads: “I’m EMBARRASSED: Texas #2 in nation for new gun purchases, behind CALIFORNIA. Let’s pick up the pace Texans. @NRA.”
Abbott and Senator Ted Cruz are still, at the time of writing, expected to attend the National Rifle Association (NRA) convention in Texas this weekend.
In the painful aftermath of the Uvalde shooting, we must not forget that this tragic and sensless loss of life is not a rare occurrence. The US has now endured 199 mass shootings in the first 145 days of 2022. More than one a day. Nearly 10 a week.
When will enough be enough? When will US lawmakers come together and decide that no more lives should be destroyed by gun violence? When will parents be able to send their children to school without the fear that today – this day – could be the one where they don’t come home?
The gunman in Texas has been named as Salvador Romas, an 18-year-old from Uvalde. He was shot and killed by responding police officers. We do not yet have a clear idea of what motivated Romas, but what is certain is that unless America’s obsession with gun ownership is dismantled, the kind of mass shooting he perpetrated will continue to be normalised.
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As long as the second amendment, the right to keep and bear arms, is prioritised above the safety of little kids in a classroom, we will see more abhorrent instances of mass murder.
“Thoughts and prayers”, that most empty of phrases, won’t cut it. Parents and caregivers will wake up today and the next day and the day after that to the knowledge that their children have been taken from them. The ripple effect of gun violence shatters families and communities. It obliterates joy and peace and threatens everything that makes our lives worth living.
From a UK perspective, the idea that virtually any adult can own a gun – that people have the right to possess deadly weapons created for the purpose of killing – is utterly bizarre and grotesque and terrifying.
No one – not a single person – should be gunned down while peacefully living their lives and going about their day, whether in a school or a grocery store or a nightclub or a place of worship. Unless there is a real, tangible, meaningful sea change, where the US gun lobby no longer gets to own this conversation, there will be more Sandy Hooks, more Buffalos, more Virginia Techs, and more Uvaldes.
Why do people say stupid things. Save the children and kill the children in the same breath makes no sense at all.
Would Harriet feel better if they were called late term abortions. “They” can kindly phu cough.
I protect both, they protect neither.
21 more reasons to take your kids out of public schools.
Time to ban “gun-free” zones.
Get with it, man! Children in classrooms serve one purpose: To generate teacher union salaries. And even then, if you can force them to stay home over zoom and not bother the fat purple-haired dumb lazy oaf educrats, so much the better. If the educrats gave a damn about children, they would have security at schools, and not just for the rare psycho. They’d actively keep the dope dealers and gang bangers and chomos out too.
Lets just ask why he went after the children.
He did it to inflict the hardest pain on families.
He never really had one. What party do we associate with that?
The progressive society of eliminating mothers and fathers from all platforms create these mentally ill people.
The left assigns no identity to anything and they run the media. I know what to blame.
Please stay on your side of the Atlantic and we’ll promise to stay on ours.
Especially when the Ukraine goes to hell. You won’t want us violent Americans to mess things up.
Just stupid nonsense. Amazing someone actually wrote this and put their own name to it and released it to the public. Did they actually think this made sense?
The shallowness and fallacy of this author is astounding.
In America a fetus is life and is sacred to some. But isn’t to others and that includes all the way till birth and beyond.
If the abortion industry thought it could make more money shooting newborns, don’t think it wouldn’t do it.
The question for this author is this. Is there a big difference between murdering a newborn and a 5yr old? The difference being, of course, that the left supports killing the newborn and we don’t support killing the 5yr old.
A quick numerical comparison proves that the Author is a complete idiot.
If you go on facebook, especially the news pages, the progressive liberal elite are in full force and frothing at the mouth like rabid dogs about “gun control.” But silent on weekend shootings in Chicago, “right to kill” on abortion, and so on. They are demented, evil, disgusting pigs that are even an insult to even bottom feeders.
“They” can kindly phu cough."
This piece was written by a morally retarded person who has been diagnosed with a serious mental illness. From her Wikipedia page: “Williamson was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.” It shows.
When ones like Ms. Williamson and Piers Morgan and other British commentators and journalists lecture about firearms laws and ownership in the United States, it is obvious that they failed to consult important reading on the subject by ones like Joyce Lee Malcom or David Kopel or Colin Greenwood and others (let alone John Lott) concerning the United Kingdom itself on this subject. That makes, rather unsurprisingly, their remarks that even more ignorant and shallow when they do not understand the history and culture of the subject in their own native land and that ones like Malcolm and Greenwood in particular would seriously contradict their deeply held assumptions.
It never does with those who wear their heart on their sleeve rather than thinking things through. They are basically children.
Stupid premise.
Probably because fetuses can’t run and get away, BIATCH!!!
Use it as needed.
Another ditzy, baby-killing broad that can’t keep her big mouth shut.
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