Posted on 05/26/2022 3:28:03 PM PDT by Ennis85
You've read the newsflash with a sickening knot in your stomach. There has been another school shooting in the US. Then comes the detail. This time, it's a primary school - 14 children and a teacher are dead, then it's updated to 19 children and two teachers. Inevitably, it soon also becomes clear the killer himself is barely out of Childhood, an 18-year-old loner whose birthday present to himself was two automatic rifles and 300 rounds of ammunition. Most gruesomely of all - and apologies in advance, but there's no nice way to say this - the police are seeking DNA samples from parents so that medics can identify the children, because their young bodies have been so badly mutilated it is the only way to be sure of who is who. It is a story we have heard all too often, from Columbine in Colorado to Sandy Hook in Connecticut to Parkland in Florida. This time, it was in Uvalde in Texas, and state senator Ted Cruz was quick off the mark, not to express his abject regret that Texas has made it easier to buy guns than just about any other state, but to accuse the Democrats and the media of 'politicising' the massacre. Sadly, this is unsurprising. Cruz is scheduled to deliver a keynote address at this weekend's National Rifle Association convention in San Antonio, just a couple of hundred kilometres from Uvalde. His suggested solution to prevent shootings is to add more guns into the mix and he called for beefed-up armed security on school campuses. This hoary old canard - the way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to send in a good guy with a gun - bears no scrutiny. Just last week, a security guard who tried to stop a white supremacist slaying black shoppers, in a supermarket in Buffalo, was fatally wounded. Trying to stop a kid with a semi-automatic rifle is never going to end well. The problem, of course, is that for many Americans, guns are part of the country's origin story. They speak of the pioneering frontier spirit, conveniently glossing over the fact that guns killed the vast majority of the Native American population to make way for European settlers as they moved westward from their immigration points on the eastern seaboard. Along the way, the strands that coalesced to produce the embodiment of the mythological American, the man who provided for his family, became not only mixed up but warped too. These were God-fearing people, literally muscular Christians who abhorred vanity and eschewed luxury. Life was about the simplest rituals - family prayer, practical help for those who needed it and, above all, the right to defend it by whatever means necessary. In this, they had the backing of the second amendment to their constitution, ratified in 1791, which granted in perpetuity the right to bear arms. This was understandable in a nascent state that had not long before overthrown its colonial master, and the arms it granted the right to bear were primitive, mostly muskets that could fire a single shot before they had to be reloaded. It would be almost half a century before Samuel Colt invented the six-bullet revolver, leading all the way to the likes of today's Ar-15 semi-automatic rifles that can despatch 30 bullets before they need reloading. Clearly, the founding Fathers never anticipated these developments but their amendment takes no account of this - the only surprise is that the US Supreme Court hasn't ruled that it also allows you to keep a tank in your driveway. Millions of Americans own AR-15s. I know this because some of my cousins have mini-arsenals that include them. Even my widowed aunt, who is in her 80s, has a Glock handgun in her bedside locker - I used to be terrified when I stayed with her. She's at that age where she gets a bit forgetful and I often wondered what might happen if I got up in the middle of the night and she forgot I was staying there. Americans of all faiths and none own guns but there is a special reverence for them among evangelical Christians, who see them as a defence not just against anything that threatens their very ideology, the core pillar of their being. When a black man or woman is shot and killed by the police, there are immediate and organic street protests. We saw it with Rodney King, we saw it with George Floyd. When 19 schoolchildren are shot, what happens? Nothing. Where's the protest? Nowhere to be seen. Why not? Public anger and constructive solutions have no place in the equation when thoughts and prayers are the preferred response. Everything can be excused by God's will. And that's the mistake Europeans make when they express bafflement that Americans refuse to accept greater restrictions on gun ownership. The answer, as it happens, is quite simple. Gun control is not a single, isolated issue for them, but woven into a much wider identity that includes political affiliation, social mores and what church you choose to attends. Uvalde won't change that. The Ar-15 s as American as Mom, a white picket fence and apple pie, and there's no desire to get rid of those either.
Which is a lie.
The vast majority of Natives died as a result of European brought diseases for which they had no immunity.
Apologies for forgetting to paragraph this.
To Phillip Nolan - f*** you and the horse you rode in on!
Lefties only care about children when they can use them for political leverage.
At all other times they are on board with killing them in the womb or out of the womb if it is convenient.
Phillip sounds like he is still baffled about what gender he is. He blew a hole year in headstart and never could pass into kindergarten. What a retard. The gun didn’t kill anyone Phil. The little Mexican did. Deal with it jerk.
Because God Himself doesn't want it to be broken.
Absolutely.
Sadly, a lot of the world - including liberal America - doesn’t get what freedom is all about.
And what it takes to keep it !
These leftists need to be forced to realize that their attempt to make America into a left wing country will never happen.
I hope everyone realizes the comments, speeches, articles, network and local broadcast coverage, celebrity sound bites, protests, beto-in-the-boxes are all on the shelf ready to go.
So much so, the lights dim and the curtain goes up before the bodies have reached room temperature.
Everyone who is part of the production gets a cut of the action.
Joy gets a cut. Whoopie gets a cut. Matthew David McConaughey gets a cut. The head stomper gets a cut.
Well connected Journalism graduates have their names credited to off the shelf articles and they get a cut.
Ah, the Irish. Over 700 years of bad decisions. Why stop now?
We can not co- exist with leftism and leftists. There ideas are demonic.
Shut up Irish Mail...you’ve done enough damage with your Murphys in Connecticut and New Jersey and Daleys in Chicago. F you and your leprechauns too.
Irish anything lecturing on violence is a hoot.
Screw Ireland.
A bunch of commies and boozers.
The Irish prefer bombs to guns.
And bombs do not discriminate between evil and good, thugs and innocent children.
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