Posted on 05/26/2022 3:55:41 PM PDT by Ennis85
Sadness, of course. Who could not feel heartbroken when looking at the scenes from Robb Elementary School? Horror, obviously, that this could happen at a primary school in the middle of the day, the most vulnerable mown down in broad daylight, 90 miles west of San Antonio, with at least one of their teachers. Others are injured, who knows who badly. But then comes the exasperation, the weary helplessness, and – in truth – the sheer anger. How can this be happening once again in America?
How can another community become irrevocably torn apart by such senseless violence, barely a week or so, after 10 Black people were shot and killed in Buffalo, New York. When will this insanity be stopped? In 2020, the most recent year for which there are figures available, there were 19,384 gun murders, the most since at least 1968. In addition, another 24,000 people people who killed themselves with firearms, bringing to a total of 44,000 Americans who lost their lives to gun violence, according to the statistics from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. (A slim, silver lining in the data, is that while the total of killings is up, the number per 100,000 is down.) Each of the deaths is an individual tragedy, and the circumstances unique. Yet, in the vast majority of these murders, there is one thing that links them: that if America had common-sense gun regulation, they would not have occurred. Who knows what led the gunman – said to be an 18-year-old male – to open fire on the youngsters at Uvalde with a handgun and a rifle. Uncofirmed reports said that the night before, he had attacked his grandmother. We do know what inspired the alleged gunman who opened fire earlier this month at a supermarket in Buffalo to act – racist bigotry. He was also able to legally get his hands on a weapon, a Bushmaster XM-15 semi-automatic rifle, for around $1,000. An alarm raised by the shooter’s high school when he said that his post-graduation ambitions included “murder/suicide,” was not sufficient under the state’s “red flag” law to stop the purchases. And bear in mind, New York’s gun laws are some of the strictest.
The United States is the not the only place with racist, or angry, or deluded or otherwise-motivated people, looking for a fight, or to settle a score, real or imagined. But it is the only place where mass shootings are a weekly or daily occurrence. It is the only place where repeated efforts to try and regulate the sale of guns have been systematically blocked. Other countries, including Australia and Britain, have suffered such incidents, but those incidents – most notably the 1996 primary school shooting at Dunblane, Scotland, led to decisive – and united action. And even when a president is desperate to take action against guns, as Barack Obama was after the shootings at Sandy Hook, Conntecticut, in 2012 ,they run into road blocks, either in the form of Republicans in Congress, the National Rifle Association and other gun lobbyists, people like Donald Trump who tells his supporters that Democrats want to take your guns, or even Joe Manchin, who has refused to support broader gun control and disengenously blames people with mental health issues. Or they run into the claptrap and hogwash about a “good guy with a gun” being the best and only protection to a bad guy with a gun.
In my time in the US, I’ve covered at least four major mass shootings – Virginia Tech in 2007, the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in 2015, the Pulse Nightclub Shooting in Orlando in 2016 ,and the attack at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, in 2019. (In 2015, Obama delivered a eulogy and sang Amazing Grace, at a memorial for the Black churchgoers killed in Charleston.) Then, as now, there was demand for change. But nothing did. Just as little changed when a gunman killed 60 people is Las Vegas in 2107, or attacked Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in February 2018. Massive credit then to the likes of David Hogg and Winter BreeAnne and Shannon Watts, gun control advocates who manage to find the energy to push for change, amid the horror, just just of the repeated violence, but of the constant sense of deja vu, of a record stuck on repeat, of a screen saver that does not change no matter how often you try and refresh the page.
And zero credit, to the likes of Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, who who has fought every gun control measure possible, and who in 2021 signed into law legislation that allowed Texans to carry handguns without a permit. “Today, I signed documents that instill freedom in the Lone Star State,” he said to cheers. So when on Tuesday he offered his regrets and prayers, and claimed to be mourning “this horrific loss” and we urged “Texans to come together,” then one might be forgiven for telling him that his words fall flat and cold. And when the White House says Joe Biden is going to address the nation, perhaps he ought to take the night off and pause and reflect.
Perhaps Americans, and all of those living here, need to feel angry and ashamed and appalled that this has happened again, on our watch, and that another 21 people are dead. And then the best of us, the activists who somehow find it in them to get up day after day – after days like this – can make use of that intensity to press their cause.
And how many school shootings had been taking place before that?
There is no amount of reality that will get in the way of the Left’s agenda.
Why the heck can’t we kick leftists out of the country, is what I want to know.
How many armed people were in that school besides the shooter? None. What was done about the person who was clearly mentally ill? Nothing. There is your answer.
Hey Andrew, move to Venezuela. We won’t miss you.
Hmmmm! 100k+ ODs last year. Cops just busted two females on I-10 the other day with 500,000 caps of fentynel and handgun and cash in AZ. B on b killings? Time to start calling THEM baby killers. BUTT, gun lobby.
Leftist policies and the 20 strikes and you’re out and identity politics also Covid lockdowns and CRT and I could go on and on about why this won’t end.
We aren’t allowed to rid ourselves of Democrats.
Because Nuts
I remember we could go to school with rifles on gunracks in the rear windows of our pickups, and we had rifle practice after school.
Maybe we need to bring that back
Agreed. There was almost no violent crime in the U.K. in the many years before the first modern gun controls were introduced in 1967 when police permits for shotguns were introduced (this done by Home Secretary Roy Jenkins as an attempt to divert public attention away from calls to bring back the death penalty following the high profile murders of two British police officers). As more legislation was created and passed in years like 1967 and 1996 in that country, firearms related and violent crime increased. The illegal trade of handguns from Eastern Europe and domestic clandestine manufacture continues unabated there.
We talk too much about it. We are encouraging copycats.
If we had common sense laws on the freedom of speech we wouldn’t have to read thoughtless juvenile screeds like this one.
ok
I think the trans thing actually isn’t true, that its someone else?
In the US today, over 50-million gun owners did not shoot anyone.
Someone else just told me that too. That website gives no sources either. crap. I hate fake news.
Because you Nazis can confiscate every gun in America and the killer kids will keep on killing.
If we could ban democrap voters we could end the violence. Democraps do the violence.
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