If you watched John Oliver on Sunday October 16th his main story was about Transgendered Children and their rights which are increasingly being removed and even the very word or subject is being banned in many schools across the country as this issue has become the new social media ## of late in the endless sparring between the right and left. It is of course nuts as social media is a cesspool of misinformation and histrionics that are fueled by the culture wars as established by the two political parties serving in Congress. The New York Times did an excellent breakdown of how they use social media to encourage and enrage their followers to incite discord and as we know now, violence. Words apparently can lead to hurt.
I found this article in the Washington Post and with that I am sorry that this little girl is involved at all. She is a survivor and will go through immense struggles coping with this and in turn adding pressure to somehow be the spokesperson to bring change does little to help her process and try to live her life as a CHILD should in the best of circumstances and these certainly are not the best in any stretch of the imagination.
Uvalde was a failure by the Adults not in the room. The Adults in the room died trying to save lives, only one survived and he will have many years of rehab from the injuries both physical and mental as he works toward recovery. Children have no need to be involved but they are now largely thanks to David Hogg who along with other Survivors of Parkland decided to take on the role of Activists and push forward with Gun Safety and Legislation to regulate guns. They are still pushing forward but now many have taken a back seat. David still is on social media but I can see cracks in the rage and anger and with that he is at Harvard and should be focused on the now and the end game and at that point move into a larger role, but to spend his entire College Years on this issue is to me a point that has been made.
The Court Case in Florida is over and the Parents are still processing their grief and anger and as we also know as more and more shootings have occurred in schools, at parks, at grocery stores, at parades and in homes little has changed with regards to Gun regulations and safety, in fact gun restrictions have loosened. And we are now putting all of this on children. I watched the families in the Court over Alex Jones and his bullshit regarding Sandy Hook, a shooting that was well over a decade ago. I watched the families during the Florida trial and now we have another coming in Michigan and more to follow. This will never end well. Yes the shooter will be found guilty and regardless of the penalty it doesn’t change a thing; Children and adults died by a GUN, held by a hand who managed to have legal access to one. That is the real problem and the only solution, getting guns off our streets. Start by not playing with them as children. That might help. Stop filming movies and video games that don’t actually depict the real violence found at the end of a bullet and start showing the actual crime scene photos. Some of the children were so badly mangled their parents were sent DNA kits in which to assist in identifying remains and now Texas wants that for all children in all schools in the State. The message there? You decide.
And with that I close with a Biblical verse, yes irony but that is the point that many of these shootings happen in quote/unquote Bible belt, Free Rights and Love God and Guns country. So they should be more than familiar with this citation:
2 He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them.
3 And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
4 Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
5 And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.
6 “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.
To counter the trope peddled by the NRA, “A good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun.” These morons watched way to many a Western in their day to believe that shit. First of all you would have to be a hell of marksman to shoot out a AK15 toting asshole with enough ammo to take out a classroom plus of students and teachers. As the fucktard in Texas had and this is from CBS news:
The gunman in Uvalde carried more ammunition into Robb Elementary School than a U.S. soldier carries into combat.
A U.S. soldier would take 210 rounds into combat.
The suspect had purchased 1,657 total rounds of ammunition – 315 rounds were found inside the school, said Steven McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
A law enforcement source told CBS News that the amount of ammunition that the suspect brought with him is more than what an average U.S. soldier would go into basic combat with, apparently planning on a massive gun battle.
And why do you think that the Cops stood outside for 40 minutes as they sure as hell, despite both training and a law mandating they get he fuck in there to diffuse the situation. But hey a Border Patrol guy grabbed a rife from the Barber he was at getting his hair cut when his wife called and said there is a shooter. As both his daughter and wife were inside he boogied his ass in and started rescuing those trapped inside. Did he take out the shooter with the Barber’s rife? Fuck no, but a trained colleague of his did. So there you go.
Now the story will continue to evolve but we have more than massive evidence that in mass shootings Police inside as well the intended victims are often collateral damage when the shooting by law enforcement begins. This happened in the Thousand Oaks Broderline Bar shooting. And similar questions have been raised in other shootings of this scale, including the Pulse shooting. But there are many stories of friendly fire killing Police during gun battles as in San Diego and Las Vegas. And again this is from supposed experts who are required to train and maintain their skills. They seem to have zero problem killing innocents so this is always not an issue in those circumstances but when it is mass killer, there seems to be a problem there.
And with this the standard responses are given and there once again nothing will be done. We have resigned ourselves to this Kabuki Theater as if that is the only thing we can do and frankly will in a country plagued by mass shootings for decades. And with that add the numerous assassinations, homicides and random gun violence that plagues this country in ways Covid could never have. And if you validate your reasoning behind owning a gun as protecting your family then you must be able to fly at the speed of air through the time like a Marvel hero to make it to the Church, the Mall, the School, the Concert or the Walmart in which to rescue them. Funny that the parents in Uvalde were armed and ready and tackled by Police to not. I cannot find a single story where some good guy with a gun rescued other good guys using a gun. Using a chair, their bare hands, talked out of it, or some other instrument that has no bullets yes. Ask the Waffle House shooter how he was taken out. The Church Shooter in Antioch or in California a few weeks ago? Not with guns. So when I hear that comment I roll my eyes until I am near blind.
The attendees at the NRA Convention are not allowed to bring guns, irony or oxymoron? And with that plenty of morons are there defending if not demonstrating why of all they people should not have a gun.
What they needed to see was the actual crime scene photos, the Coroner Examination photos and of course the Funeral Parlors efforts to disguise the damage to the flesh from said guns and ammo that today are way beyond the guns that the Founders permitted the colonies to possess. A reason largely behind not the war against Britain but against Natives and Slaves that could possible rise up and do harm. There is your reasoning behind why to have guns. Again where are you using said guns you need to protect yourself. Oh yeah on the road.
This weekend closes with a total of 11 mass shootings in total. Well it’s Memorial Day so what better way to remember than a killing after a BBQ. Booze and guns the American Tradition.
U.S. marks Memorial Day weekend with at least 11 mass shootings
Since the Uvalde, Tex., elementary school tragedy, there have been at least 14 other shootings that had at least four victims
By Annabelle Timsit The Washington Post
May 30, 2022
After a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., that claimed the lives of 19 children and two teachers last week, many politicians, public figures and gun-control advocates said the U.S. government should ensure mass shootings could not happen again.
But mass shootings have already happened again — and again. At least 14 mass shootings have taken place across the United States since Tuesday, from California to Arizona to Tennessee.
This Memorial Day weekend alone — spanning Saturday, Sunday and the federal holiday on Monday — there have been at least 11 mass shootings.
These incidents, gleaned from local news reports and police statements, meet the threshold for mass shootings as defined by the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research organization.
GVA defines a mass shooting as one in which “four or more people are shot or killed, not including the shooter.” Several of those shootings occurred at parties, and one at a Memorial Day event.
At least seven people have been killed and 49 injured in the mass shootings over the holiday weekend, according to GVA and local news sources. Since the Uvalde shooting last Tuesday, at least10 people have been killed and 61 injured in mass shootings.
Brian Stelter, chief media correspondent and news anchor at CNN, interrupted a broadcast Sunday about the response to the mass shooting in Uvalde to tell viewers about another — in Tennessee.
“Mass killings like Buffalo and Uvalde become national news, but many mass shootings do not. They just end up being local stories,” Stelter said, in a clip that has been viewed over 334,000 times on Twitter.
On Saturday evening, six teenagers were injured by gunfire in Chattanooga, Tenn., in what Mayor Tim Kelly said was probably “an altercation between other teenagers.”e
The victims, who were between the ages of 13 and 15, were transported to a hospital, and two had life-threatening injuries, according to the Chattanooga Police Department.
Kelly said he was “heartbroken” for the families of the victims and “angry” about political inaction on gun laws during a news conference following the shooting.
The Chattanooga shooting was one of at least five mass shootings that took place on Saturday alone, according to GVA.
Authorities said one person was killed and seven people were injured, including a minor. The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation said a suspect turned himself in and was in custody.
Meanwhile, one person died and three others were injured during a shooting at a party in Merced County, Calif., the sheriff’s office said. One victim was still in “critical condition” Sunday afternoon.
The latest apparent mass shooting occurred in the early hours of Monday in Port Richmond, Pa. Two people died and two others were injured during a shooting at a party, according to preliminary statements from law enforcement. The victims ranged in age from 14 to 21, and police told FOX 29 Philadelphia they found 47 shell casings at the scene.
The incident was not listed in the GVA database as of early Monday, but appears to meet the standards for a mass shooting.
It was the city’s “2nd DOUBLE HOMICIDE scene in two hours,” according to Steve Keeley, a reporter for FOX 29 Philadelphia,after a father and his 9-year-old son were shot inside their car in Philadelphia on Sunday evening, law enforcement said.
The grim litany of mass shootings began even before the official start of the holiday weekend, when police in Anniston, Ala., said gunfire erupted after a graduation party attended by more than 150 young adults and teenagers as young as 14. Six people were injured by gunfire.
And on Friday afternoon in Michigan, officers in Mecosta County found three children under the age of 10 and a woman dead of “what appeared to be gunshot sounds” when they responded to a report of a man with a gun and shots fired at a private residence. They also found a man with a gunshot wound to the head, who was taken to a hospital. Relatives told a local news outlet that the children were siblings and were 3, 4 and 6 years old, and that the woman was their mother.
In the aftermath of the Uvalde shooting, many local leaders and community representatives issued emotional pleas for action. As The Washington Post has reported, it’s unlikely that Congress will be able to pass gun-control measures.
The irony that tomorrow is Memorial Day where we are to honor those who served and gave up their lives in defense of their country is not lost. The last funeral for the Tops Grocery shooting was held yesterday. The ones from Uvalde have yet to begin and with that we have a long week ahead in which to do what we do best, absolutely fucking nothing.
This weekend I actually had an encounter when I mentioned the shooting, they said, “I heard about that.” With that I wanted to begin screaming and rolling on the floor as if I was having a seizure. I did not but I wanted to. I just said, “Yes another mass shooting and its just TERRIBLE and so what are your plans for the weekend?” Seriously I could not believe the bullshit coming out of my mouth and then I went on with my day and stopped and bought a bottle of Bourbon and one of white Wine as frankly I could not decide which would go down better. Then I turned on two of George Carlin comedy specials, We are all diseased, filmed at the Beacon Theater in New York in 1999. Then I watched what was his last, It’s Bad for ya, filmed in 2008, just four months prior to his fatal heart attack. His voice and his strong opinions have shaped both the right and the left in determining what is considered an argument for or against the positions of either. The right has used him to frame their small government, anti vaxx policies and We are all diseased seems to play into that belief when you take some of his comments out of context. The left have used him to remind those that Police brutality is not new and one that has been a problem for decades. See how each can cherry pick the version they like best, like Mom did right? I did think diseased was highly prescient in much of what comes to fruition in today’s America. Little did he know that in a few years Terrorists would take planes down with nothing more than box cutters, and that a plague would descend on America and with that the idea of vaccines and health and paranoia would all coalesce into a nightmare which oddly Police Brutality and Violence would enable us to come together for a minute. And yes he even discusses school shootings with what? An AK 47. Funny, not funny? But again I would not have the audacity to presume what Mr. Carlin would say today as he would be 85 and maybe a dedicated Fox News watcher. If that is what happens when you hit your dotage I am going to get moving and doing so I can end it all before then.
And today is Sunday, a beautiful day in the neighborhood, and it brings me to another iconic figure, Mr. Robinson, and I wonder how he would process this rising tide of violence in our streets and in our schools and at our places of worship, businesses, or in our homes. Does that make you wonder what kind of neighborhood you live in?
I am beyond angry today and still will continue my quest on my own as I have no idea what or where to go to find the kind of support I need to move through this. We are at the day four where we all move on and away and yet for those who have been directly touched by this they never do. So for them where they go is apparently into despair for life as here we are 10 years after Sandy Hook and I cannot name one meaningful measure or law directly aimed at reducing this kind of violence. So I share with you the below article that confirms this that we are at the moving on space and time allowed to grieve, be angry and that is until the next or until it happens to you.
How long are Americans sad and angry about mass shootings? Four days.
To harness emotions into action like gun legislation, we have to act fast
Perspective by Patrick SharkeyPatrick Sharkey is the William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of “Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence.”
May 26, 2022 THE WASHINGTON POST
Americans woke up on Wednesday morning feeling some combination of deep sadness and intense anger. The feeling was shared throughout the country. Americans are grieving. This is not a hunch from watching the interviews in Uvalde, Tex., or talking with friends, family and colleagues about the horror of an 18-year-old’s bursting into an elementary school there and killing 19 children and two teachers. I have seen it in the data.
As overwhelming as the feeling is now, the available evidence suggests that it will fade into the background within about four days. This means we have four days in which to act on it. Four days to take steps that might help prevent the next Uvalde or Sandy Hook or Parkland or Columbine massacre before we move on, before we return to the immediate concerns of our own lives — and before the urge to take on an intractable problem loses the emotion that can fuel momentum.
I came to this conclusion after working with a unique daily survey conducted by Gallup. Nearly every single day from 2008 through 2017, Gallup interviewed a national sample of Americans, asking them their opinions and perceptions about a variety of issues. Gallup also asked about their emotions on a given day: Had they felt happy or sad the day before? Were they angry or smiling? Trends in the data show a remarkably consistent pattern. Almost every day, between 10 percent and 25 percent of Americans reported feeling sadness the previous day. What immediately stands out when these feelings are plotted onto a graph is the tall, anomalous spike in the middle — on Dec. 15, 2012, to be precise. That day, nearly 40 percent of respondents reported feeling sadness the previous day, more than double the percentage on a typical day. The number of respondents who said they felt angry was less dramatic but still significant: 20 percent, vs. 12 percent on a typical day. One day earlier, on Dec. 14, a young man had entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and killed 20 children and six adults before killing himself.
The poll respondents were not primed to think about the massacre that had taken place in Newtown and give their opinion of the incident. They were simply asked whether they felt angry or sad or happy the day before the interview.
The survey’s value is the window it opens into the way this kind of event weighs on our minds, the collective process of grieving that we all went through then — and are going through again, right now.
Crucially, the survey also reveals when these events fade in importance from our minds. The troubling reality is that it doesn’t take long. Days after the Sandy Hook mass shooting, Americans’ reports of sadness and anger returned to their normal levels. This doesn’t mean we forgot about the shooting or no longer cared. It just means that we returned to our lives, that the horror of what had happened had moved away from the forefront of our consciousness even as the sadness and anger lingered in the background.
In a study published last year, Yinzhi Shen and I gathered data on all mass shootings from 2008 through 2016 to test whether Sandy Hook was an anomaly. We found that it was, in the sense that it affected the emotions of the entire country. But other than Sandy Hook’s reach, the pattern I noticed afterward was replicated when we used more refined methods to identify the causal impact of all mass shootings on the emotions of Americans. We found that the most horrific mass shootings with the most victims generate the largest impact on Americans’ emotions, and that the effect of mass shootings is felt most acutely in the cities and towns in which they occur, then fades quickly as the geographic distance between the incident and the survey respondent widens. We found that respondents who identify as Democrats have a larger emotional response to mass shootings than those who identify as Republicans — but, critically, Republicans also report higher levels of sadness and anger in the aftermath of mass shootings, even if their response is more muted than that of Democrats.
But the impact of mass shootings on the emotions of respondents lasts for only a few days, and then it is gone, indistinguishable from the longer time trend. This isn’t true for everyone, of course — the groups that have mobilized against gun violence in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, Parkland and other tragedies have done heroic work, facing off against the full force of the gun lobby. But the survey finding may provide a hint about why these episodes of uniquely American horror have not translated into widespread changes in legislation designed to prevent the next mass shooting or the thousands of “routine” shootings that destroy American lives, families and communities every year. Research has shown that mass shootings lead to an increase in the number of gun-related bills introduced at the state level, but with few exceptions, they tend not to lead to the passage of legislation designed to confront gun violence. In fact, the sick reality of our gun politics has led to the opposite: In Republican-controlled state legislatures, mass shootings are associated with a large increase in legislation designed to loosen gun restrictions.
To be clear, there is no evidence of a causal connection between Americans’ emotional response to this kind of incident and the behavior of state or federal legislators. But the pattern of policy responses to mass shootings suggests a link. In the days after the latest mass shooting, politicians express their outrage, their thoughts and prayers, and some put forth new proposals to finally confront the problem with meaningful legislation. A few days pass, and the raw emotions we are all feeling dissipate, even if we’re reluctant to admit it. As the attention of the nation shifts, that legislation stalls, and the organized, well-funded forces that favor guns over children’s lives flex their muscles.
For those who would turn the painful emotions of this moment into action, they have four days. There are models for ways that states can create basic requirements to make it harder for violent people to acquire guns. And, yes, formidable forces have mobilized to make sure these models don’t spread beyond states such as Massachusetts and Connecticut. But the anger and sadness most of America is feeling right now can be a driving force behind political and social movements for change. The right tells us that now is not the time to politicize the latest mass shooting. If policymakers want to harness these emotions and turn them into policy, however, they have only a couple more days to act.
Below are articles and opinion pieces on the subject of Gun Violence. I put them there for you to have both perspective and greater insight into the issues surrounding guns and the violence they perpetuate.
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Bags packed for a long overdue vacation, I saw the first reports: “Latest mass shooting” does not narrow it down as much as one would like, and that is exactly the problem.
Three days ago, I would have been talking about the murder of 10 people in a Buffalo grocery store. Today, I am talking about the 19 dead students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas — one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history. The adjectives are shorthand for our sins.
Two weeks ago, politicians decried peaceful protests at the homes of Supreme Court justices as unseemly and dangerous. It took Congress mere days from the leak of a draft opinion to pass a law granting justices additional security. A few hours after the shooting, Texas Republicans suggested arming teachers at schools. It is the kind of unserious proposal that young children offer for solving world hunger. “Just drop a big wheel of cheese from the sky!”
Not to make light of teachers, but mine used to fuss in the hallways about dragging the multimedia cart from room to room. It is hard to imagine my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Sims, armed. She wore orthopedic shoes and often lost her markers in her short cropped Afro.
Teachers with guns is a fantasy, no matter whom you cast as Mrs. Sims. Trained police officers in Uvalde were no match because the shooter had comparable weaponry. We may as well send in wheels of cheese.
What we do instead is hope, the grisliest kind of hope. We hope, in some twisted way, that the next victims will be worthy enough for us to care about. If not high school students, then maybe the elderly. If not the elderly, then maybe the very young. If not the very young, then maybe one of their own. From Columbine to Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church to Sandy Hook, no one has mattered enough.
The problem is not one of caring. Even the people with whom I vehemently disagree probably care. I concede that. The problem is what they care about more and how little it matters how much the rest of us care.
We post pictures of the dead and the bereaved. We do this because we cannot or will not accept that others know the same facts that we know but care less about them than we do. In these moments, we struggle to make the other side care. Parents know that children are murdered. Religious faithful know that the elderly are murdered in church. Politicians know that their constituents live in fear of being gunned down. But other things matter more to them. Winning an argument. Owning a gun. Making money. Never having to think of distasteful things. And winning more arguments. Theirs is a challenge for a priest, not politics.
We also ignore what sociologists would call the material basis of emotions. Emotions are not politically neutral experiences; they emerge not from the ether but from the earth, the very foundation of our dirty, delicious, embodied lives. I’m reminded of research looking at the relationship between racial identity and empathy. In a study that measured levels of empathy among white Americans watching a white police officer shoot an unarmed Black man, the more that viewers identified as white, the less empathy they had for the victim. Commitment to membership in the racial majority can shape our emotional response to human tragedy. You see a similar relationship as it relates to all kinds of other violence. This is not an empathy gap but an inequality gap. People care as much as their material reality allows them to care.
As for the rest of us who care marginally more about murdered people than we do about winning an argument or owning a gun or being sad, the challenge is harder. We actually want the politics of hope, even safety, but we cannot secure it. We cannot bring about the world we want to live in through voting, through boycotting, by suing. Anne Helen Petersen writes in her newsletter: “Collective and individual action feel impotent. The idea of representative democracy comes to feel like a farce.”
She is right. It feels like a farce because it is a farce. Petersen names the risk: a legitimacy crisis brought about because our political system no longer convinces those it rules that it deserves to rule. The political analyst Elie Mystal put it even more sharply: “All the people who care to stop school shootings already vote for politicians who also care, and all the people who don’t care either vote GOP or don’t vote at all. It’s all baked in. And the people who don’t care have shown that carnage doesn’t change their minds.” It does not change our minds.
I keep thinking about something else, something related to legitimacy: the crisis not just of how we vote but of citizenship. I’ve written about the consumer-citizen. She expresses her political beliefs through her consumer practices. As consumer-citizens, we have been conditioned to believe that if our votes don’t matter, our donations will. And if our donations don’t do it, then we can simply call the manager or email political liaisons. Citizenship looks like leaving a Yelp review for the representative who was elected in your gerrymandered district.
None of it is enough. Citizen-consumers are ill equipped for the electoral politics we have. That politics is bigger than our preferences. Big donors, both corporate and supranational, have more say than the majority. The issue isn’t that voters don’t care about gun control but that caring is all we seem able to do.
I do not know what will change our model of citizenship. But I do know that the tools we developed as citizen-consumers are obsolete and we make new guns every day.
America’s Gun Problem
More guns in the U.S. mean more deaths.
Prayers at Robb Elementary School.Credit…Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York Times
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In every country, people get into arguments, hold racist views or suffer from mental health issues. But in the U.S., it is easier for those people to pick up a gun and shoot someone.
That reality is what allowed an 18-year-old to obtain an assault rifle and kill 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school classroom in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday. And it is what makes the U.S. a global outlier when it comes to gun violence, with more gun deaths than any of its peers.
This chart, looking at public shootings in which four or more people were killed, shows how much the U.S. stands out:
Number of mass shootings
Developed countries, 1998-2019
101
United States
8
France
5
Germany
4
Canada
3
Finland
2
Belgium
2
Czech Republic
2
Italy
2
Netherlands
2
Switzerland
1
Australia
1
Austria
1
Croatia
1
Lithuania
1
New Zealand
1
Norway
1
Slovakia
1
United Kingdom
Source: Jason R. Silva, William Paterson University
By The New York Times
In today’s newsletter, I want to walk through three ways to think about America’s gun problem.
The number of guns
Where there are more guns, there are more gun deaths. Studies have found this to be true at the state and national level. It is true for homicides, suicides, mass shootings and even police shootings.
It is an intuitive idea: If guns are more available, people will use them more often. If you replaced “guns” in that sentence with another noun, it would be so obvious as to be banal.
Stricter gun laws appear to help. They are associated with fewer gun deaths, in both a domestic and global context, while looser gun laws are linked with more gun deaths.
Gun ownership and homicide rates in developed countries
4 gun homicides per 100,000 people
United States
3
2
France
1
Belgium
Canada
Portugal
Spain
Germany
25
50
75
100
125
Australia
Guns per 100 people
Ownership rates are for 2017 and homicide rates are for 2018.
Source: Small Arms Survey
By The New York Times
But federal laws are lax. Other developed countries typically require at least a license to own a gun, if they allow someone to get a firearm at all. In the U.S., even a background check is not always required to buy a gun — a result of poor enforcement and legal loopholes.
Reducing mass shootings
The U.S. is always going to have more guns, and consequently more deaths, than other rich countries. Given the Second Amendment, mixed public opinion and a closely divided federal government, lawmakers face sharp limits on how far they can go
But since America’s gun laws are so weak, there is a lot of room to improve — and at least cut some gun deaths.
To reduce mass shootings, experts have several ideas:
More thorough background checks might stop some gunmen, like those in the church shootings in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 and in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in 2017.
“Red flag” laws allow law enforcement officials to confiscate guns from people who display warning signs of violence, like threatening their peers or family members. The laws might have applied to the gunman in the Parkland, Fla., school shooting in 2018.
Assault weapon bans would restrict or prohibit access to the kinds of rifles shooters often use. A ban could at least make mass shootings less deadly by pushing gunmen toward less effective weapons, some experts argue.
But it is hard to say exactly how much impact these measures would have, because little good research exists on the effects of gun policies on mass shootings. One unanswered question is whether a determined gunman would find a way to bypass the laws: If he can’t use an assault rifle, would he resort to a handgun or shotgun? That could make the shooting less deadly, but not stop it altogether.
The bigger problem
Most shootings in America never appear in national headlines. The majority of gun deaths in 2021 were suicides. Nearly half were homicides that occurred outside mass shootings; they are more typical acts of violence on streets and in homes (and most involve handguns). Mass shootings were responsible for less than 2 percent of last year’s gun deaths.
Stricter gun laws could also reduce the more common gun deaths. It all comes down to the same problem: More guns equal more gun deaths, whether a gang shootout in California, a suicide in Wyoming or a school shooting in Texas.
The latest on the shooting
Details of the attack are still emerging. The gunman got into the school despite an armed security officer, and remained there for more than an hour before a tactical team entered and killed him.
Officials have not released the names of the victims, but some of the children’s families have come forward. They loved to dance, play with Play-Doh and joke with friends. Read about their lives.
Australia, Britain and other countries tightened their gun laws after mass shootings. Amanda Taub explains why the U.S. is different. In those countries, restrictions led to less gun violence, Max Fisher writes.
Changing America’s gun culture — not its gun laws — is the bigger challenge, Graeme Wood argues in The Atlantic.
We need to confront mental instability, social isolation and other cultural problems driving young men to violence, Kaylee McGhee White argues in The Washington Examiner.
In the U.S., Backlash to Civil Rights Era Made Guns a Political Third Rail
Other countries changed course after massacres. But American political protection for guns is unique, and has become inseparable from conservative credentials.
A gunman attacked Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday.Credit…Christopher Lee for The New York Times
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I am a mother of two young children, and I wish I could say that the pain that parents in Uvalde, Texas, feel this morning is unimaginable to me. But the truth is it that although I have never experienced it directly, I have had to imagine that pain many times.
I imagined it when I arrived one day to pick up my older daughter, then not even 2 years old, from day care in Washington, D.C., and found that they were conducting an active shooter drill with the babies and toddlers.
Her teachers explained that they were training the children to hide in a small dark room and not make a sound, so that if one day the worst happened, the shooter might not realize they were there. I imagined how useless silence and a locked door would be against someone who had set out to murder young children. I imagined the life-destroying grief that would follow.
By then I already had practice at the imagining. A few years earlier, when my husband, then a teacher in a public school, texted me that they were locked down because of a reported shooting in the building, I imagined him being killed, or being helpless to save his students. I imagined our life together shattering.
And just as thousands of children in America are doubtless doing today, I had imagined that pain when I was still a child myself. After the Columbine massacre, my classmates and I talked about the fact that our tall urban school building had only two staircases, two main exits, and how that meant a mass murderer would just have to pull a fire alarm and then wait at the door for half of the school to be ushered into the sight of his gun. Though I kept up a shallow teenage bravado during the conversation, I imagined my sister and I going to different exits. I imagined only one of us making it out.
From Opinion: The Texas School Shooting
Commentary from Times Opinion on the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
Nicholas Kristof, former Times Opinion columnist: Gun policy is complicated and politically vexing, and it won’t make everyone safe. But it could reduce gun deaths.
In all of those instances, the disaster I imagined never came to pass. I was more fortunate than the families in Uvalde, in Sandy Hook, or in Parkland.
But there is still a cost to living in a country where children are taught that school is a place where they might be trapped and murdered; to living in a country where being a schoolteacher means making a Secret Service-style commitment to hurl oneself in front of a speeding bullet. The imagining, the fear, is a cost in and of itself.
I don’t live in the United States right now. Today my older daughter goes to a primary school that does not have any active-shooter drills, and is not learning that her school is a place where she needs to fear being killed. My younger daughter’s day care never taught her to hide silently in a dark room so that a shooter would not find her. They do not have to wonder if their school will be the next one after Uvalde. I do not have to soothe the fear that would bring. They get a little more innocence as children. I get a little more peace as their mom.
That is a benefit that most Americans cannot access, because of choices that American governments have made.
Other countries, as many, many articles will doubtlessly point out this week, have made different choices.
After the Dunblane Massacre in Scotland in 1996, in which a gunman killed 16 primary-school pupils and a teacher, the British government banned handguns. After the Port Arthur Massacre in Australia that same year, the Australian government introduced stringent gun laws, including a ban on most semiautomatic and automatic weapons as well as licensing and purchasing restrictions. After the Utoya massacre in Norway in 2011, the government banned semiautomatic firearms, persevering with the legislation despite years of opposition from a well-organized hunters’ lobby. After the Christchurch shootings in 2019, New Zealand’s government passed stringent new restrictions on gun ownership and announced a buyback program.
Bullet holes in the windows of Dunblane Primary School in Scotland a day after the shooting in which 16 young students and their teacher were killed in 1996.Credit…David Giles/Press Association, via Associated Press
Fatal American exceptionalism
The United States is different. Recent years have brought many mass shootings, including those of schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn., and Parkland, Fla., but essentially no new gun control legislation. And like so many other things about modern American politics, the reasons are rooted in the political backlash to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and particularly to desegregation.
“The modern quest for gun control and the gun rights movement it triggered were born in the shadow of Brown,” Reva Siegel, a constitutional scholar at Yale Law School, wrote in a 2008 article in the Harvard Law Review. She was referring to Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the landmark Supreme Court ruling in 1954. “Directly and indirectly, conflicts over civil rights have shaped modern understandings of the Second Amendment.”
Desegregation sparked a reactionary backlash among white voters, particularly in the south, who saw it as overreach by the Supreme Court and federal government. That backlash, with the help of conservative political strategists, coalesced into a multi-issue political movement. Promises to protect the traditional family from the perceived threat of feminism drew in white women. And influential conservative lawyers framed the Second Amendment as a source of individual “counterrights” that conservatives could seek protection for in the courts — a counterbalance to progressive groups’ litigation on segregation and other issues.
That turned gun control into a highly salient political issue for American conservatives in a way that sets the United States apart from other wealthy nations. The gun control laws in the United Kingdom, Australia and Norway were all passed by conservative governments. Although they faced some opposition to the new measures, particularly from hunters’ groups, it did not line up with a broader political movement the way gun rights did in the United States.
In the United States, by contrast, the issue is so salient, and so partisan, that embracing gun rights is practically a requirement for Republican politicians trying to prove their conservative bona fides to voters. Taking an extreme pro-gun position can be a way for candidates to stand out in crowded primary fields. Supporting gun control, by contrast, would make a Republican vulnerable to a primary challenge from the right, which helps explain why they so rarely take that position.
And even if that political landscape were to shift, there would still be the matter of the courts. As the right took up the issue of gun rights in politics, conservative lawyers gave the Second Amendment new attention in law reviews and courtrooms, Adam Winkler, a constitutional law scholar at U.C.L.A., wrote in the book “Gunfight: the Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America.”
The Federalist Society pushed for nominations of conservative judges, slowly reshaping the judicial branch into a conservative institution that enshrined a broad Second Amendment right for individuals to own guns. Unless Supreme Court precedents like District of Columbia v. Heller get overturned, it would be difficult for the government to enact broad gun control measures.
Shootings like the one in Texas last night are enough to draw attention to the power and momentum of the pro-gun movement. But changing it would be the work of decades. Even if politicians work diligently, there will be more mass shootings before that happens. In the meantime, parents and children across the United States will imagine the pain that families in Texas are feeling today, and wonder if they might be next.
“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
In response to this Washington Post article: Good people do bad things when they do nothing. For some nutty reason it was featured and nearly 900 people liked it. That was a first as mostly I receive hate and with that there were some negative comments, but one was that the truth does hurt. And men have a hard time being hurt. Oh those feelers and all. Well that explains the idiot who responded here about a post that I should get back on my meds. When I tracked him his blog is a of course a Covid conspiratorial one and he is blocked so I move on. This is the new American male, oh wait the same American Male that always existed – armed and dangerous.
Anyone who is walking around now utterly disengaged and uninformed should go back into Covid quarantine. I can assure you had this happened in the nascent days like George Floyd’s murder we would still be on the streets. But nope we got shits to do.
Guns kill. We have the most deaths per guns than any equitable country in the world so what does that it tell you? We got a lot of guns, and many are used in Suicides by White Males so they are definitely armed and dangerous, to themselves. And with that we also have a mean culture and particularly abusive one to males. Which explains the rising suicide rate and almost all are utterly preventable as this article in the Guardian demonstrates. Let me examine this example in the article:
Evan Seyfried, 40, a Kroger employee for nearly 20 years in Milford, Ohio, died by suicide on 9 March 2021, after experiencing months of harassment, bullying and abuse in the workplace, according to a lawsuit against Kroger filed by his family in 2021 that is still pending in court.
“No one was helping him. They didn’t want to be the target,” said Murphy. “There are these people now who have called me, crying their eyes out, feeling like they could have saved his life because they didn’t do anything.”
According to the lawsuit, Seyfried began experiencing bullying and harassment from his store manager for wearing a face mask at work and turning down her sexual advances. Then the bullying turned into sabotaging his department, intimidation, threats and surveillance. The harassment continued despite reports and complaints made with Kroger and the local union.
So he was sexually harassed at work by a woman superior, by colleagues and likely customers given the time frame and with that despite efforts to properly channel his complaints, he chose to end it by KILLING HIMSELF.
Moving on. Or not. I have written about my suicidal thoughts when that Administrator abused me at Ferris High School, by my second encounter with her I was in a better place and laughed and have never returned. That discussion with the Suicide Hotline actually helped me a great deal as she mentioned the issue of control. And yes I can control where I go to school and have since and for the better.
But with this the predominant amount of shooters are young males under 25. This is explained in an excellent theory by Rudolf Steiner, The Seven Stages of Life. I have found this a very useful in understanding childhood development. And this is the key to understanding how these young men became sociopaths: The third seven years (14-21 years old) is associated with Venus, during which time the higher mind of the adolescent takes root, and the psychic development can be disturbed by the strong impulses of puberty. The next three seven-year segments are associated with the Sun (21-42 years old), and the elements of sentient soul, intellectual soul, and consciousness soul.
Now again this is a social psychological tool and yet I have found little otherwise to contradict much of what is said about these salient seven year periods.
AGES 21 TO 28. Play That Turns Toward Responsibility
In the early and middle 20s, we gain a modicum of control over our emotions and start to integrate our rational faculties, which give us greater control over our actions. During these years, most people are healthy, full of energy, and lusting for life. Meanwhile, our physical powers are peaking. It’s common for young people to feel a certain invincibility and even arrogance. People at this age are often possessed by wild enthusiasm, independence, and recklessness. They take risks, play hard, and often make mistakes.
These are the years that young men are sent off to war. Despite the horrors of war, many young men enlist for the fighting, always believing that they will not be among the ones who are killed.
Over time, the abandon of the early and mid-20s gives way to the growing maturity that slowly takes hold as we enter the later 20s and start looking at the approaching milestone of 30 years of age. As we approach 30, we begin to feel the need to become a responsible adult.
Indeed, the events coincide with those feelings and needs. People marry and have children during this time. Young men have to grow up, get steady jobs, early a living, and provide for their wives and babies. For many, the wild years pass away. Responsibility starts to tie us down.
The compensation, Steiner said, is that we begin to experience the first signs of our talents and special abilities. We awaken to vocations that we feel a special attraction to and, for some, even love. Our mythological flights of fantasy and arrogance are passing. We are landing in life, and just beginning to become more practical.
We are also learning to think about people other than ourselves. We are being stretched to see life in broader and more selfless terms.
The centaur, or the mythological beast that was half human and half horse, best characterizes this period, Steiner said. The human is emerging from the base, animal instincts. We are still driven by our animal impulses, but we are learning to cope with them, as the higher human faculties become more available to our us.
Times have changed and with that the reality we are delaying much of these expectations are again pushing against the clock of our own development. We have accelerated sexual activity via the use of technology and with the ability to communicate our most secret desires, fears and ambitions anonymously has enabled many of the shooters of late to in fact share, detail, plan and actually stream them to the viewers that either share his beliefs or are simply curious folk who really don’t believe it will happen until it does. And that is where I go to most people: Until it happens to you.
The whack job in Texas was 18 he was still in the puberty development phase and it comes to light when reviewing his social media presence, a sick assortment of violence and threats. And along that line another Psychotherapist view, Eric Erickson and his theory of psychosocial development. This stage occurs during adolescence between the ages of approximately 12 and 18. During this stage, adolescents explore their independence and develop a sense of self – Ego Identity.
As they transition from childhood to adulthood, teens may begin to feel confused or insecure about themselves and how they fit into society. As they seek to establish a sense of self, teens may experiment with different roles, activities, and behaviors. According to Erikson, this is important to the process of forming a strong identity and developing a sense of direction in life. It is the conscious sense of self that we develop through social interaction, which is constantly changing due to new experiences and information we acquire in our daily interactions with others.
And this is where social media comes into play here that can really fuck a head up. We have seen adults fall down the spiral of false stories and other bizarre tales, Q’Anon is one and there are many other conspiracy theories that fill the internet hole which many subscribe. So a young man already confused can easily find an audience or a narrator that can give him the misinformation he needs that can be the catalyst to destruction. And this kid was no different, the history of being bullied, a Mother who is batshit from what I can tell reading her current statements, and then his exchanges on social media demonstrate a boy deeply troubled and in need of help. And he found it on a site called, Yubo. The article from The Post goes onto explain his bizarre rants and statements which sadly were also ignored and thought of as bullshit as many on the site seem immune or unclear of how they too are victims of abuse. We have turned a generation utterly incapable of empathy and emotion. One girl told The Post she first saw Ramos in a Yubo panel telling someone, “Shut up before I shoot you,” but figured it was harmless because “kids joke around like that.” This will not end so we need to do something to at least prevent more carnage.
When you do nothing or say nothing you become a part of the problem.
A nut fuck Covid denier hit up the blog here and wrote a comment about my Man’s Man entry, telling me “Get back your meds. Seriously” Really I do? I was on meds? What meds? When? Why? Where or who distributed said meds? In other words I hurt his teeny weeny penis and with that the best he could do in between writing his Covid denial blog was that. Hey thanks for playing!
I have been verbally bashed all day for my posts at WaPo discussing the most recent shooting. Again this is a pearl clutching, prayer baiting and hand wringing moment. Then it goes it finger pointing, blame seeking and denial. We are moving quickly to that as the day wears on and with 19 children dead I think that is expected. What will not happen will be any meaningful change with regards to the issue of guns and controlling them. Monitoring our personal data, knowing every move we make and take, not a problem. Thanks high tech! But even delaying a gun purchase well that is a right enshrined in the Constitution, the privacy thing as we are learning no it is not.
This is the 2nd Amendment in its originalist context and form: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Okay as the writers of the Constitution were in the middle of defending the right to our own Country and Democracy they were referring to a what we could say today, a Vigilante group. Or a small group of individuals deputized to protect their city or state from insurrectionists. Or could be just talking about making sure Guns were available and considered legal to own to protect the Country from the English or some other Country from invading. The type of guns they did not mention as there were only one kind – Muskets. With that hey I am all for anyone owning a musket, an AK-15 not so much. It did not exist and they were the original composers of the document, psychics that could foresee guns becoming fully automatic and adaptable to kill many and near and close range with bullets that explode and destroy upon contact, not really in their wheelhouse. So maybe Alioto could summon his psychic to channel a convo with one of the Founding Fathers to clear that one up. I have a couple of names if he needs them.
So as I continue to rally and when posed questions or verbally abused I respond, and then crickets. Just like a man who after he spittoons his jizz into you he is one and done. Oh today I am sick of it all. Name three women who have been mass shooters? No? How about one. And I am the first to come after women but in this one I cannot.
And then this news: Joe Garcia, the husband of Irma Garcia, one of two teachers shot and killed in Uvalde, TX on Tuesday, has reportedly suffered a fatal heart attack. Joe and Irma were high school sweethearts and married 24 years. They leave behind four children. In other words, now more children who suffer at the hands of the shooter. Again no name there let’s be consistent.
So if you really want to hurt me, well sticks and stones may break some bones but an AK-15 can do a fuck lot of damage. Continue with the abuse your words mean nothing as I have learned here we do fuck all nothing. Although Senator Murphy from Connecticut (a founding State btw) is demanding all voices to rise.
Senator Chris Murphy has called for a “popular uprising of citizens” to pressure Republicans to support gun laws following the Uvalde massacre.
Speaking at a press conference Wednesday morning on Capitol Hill, alongside fellow Democratic lawmakers and activists from Everytown for Gun Safety, the Connecticut senator said he would be talking with Republican lawmakers in the coming days to try to pass compromise legislation:
We’re going to extend a hand of partnership to those who have been sitting on the sidelines, to those who have chosen to side with the gun lobby… to try to find a path forward to makes our streets safer, to make our schools safer.
[We hope] we will be facilitated in finding that common ground by a popular uprising of citizens who are going to make clear: if you don’t do the right thing here, you aren’t coming back here.
It has to stop it must stop. And here is an interesting story about a gun and a murder. You decide. Trigger warning… pun intended.
The only trial that really matters
How to Murder Your Husband writer found guilty of murdering husband
Portland jury finds Nancy Crampton Brophy guilty of killing chef Daniel Brophy in June 2018
Oliver Holmes the Guardian Thu 26 May 2022
A jury in the US city of Portland, Oregon, has convicted a self-published romance novelist who wrote an essay titled How to Murder Your Husband of fatally shooting her husband.
The 12-person jury found Nancy Crampton Brophy, 71, guilty of second-degree murder on Wednesday after deliberating for two days over Daniel Brophy’s death, according to reports.
Brophy, a 63-year-old chef, was killed on 2 June 2018 as he prepared for work at the Oregon Culinary Institute in south-west Portland.
Crampton Brophy showed no visible reaction to the verdict in the crowded Multnomah county courtroom. Lisa Maxfield, one of her lawyers, said the defence team would appeal against the decision.
Its opening reads: “As a romantic suspense writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about murder and, consequently, about police procedure. After all, if the murder is supposed to set me free, I certainly don’t want to spend any time in jail. And let me say clearly for the record, I don’t like jumpsuits and orange isn’t my color.”
The blogpost went on to detail motives – financial, “lying, cheating bastard”, abuser – and a discussion of possible methods. Knives were “personal and close up. Blood everywhere”, while poison, “considered a woman’s weapon”, was too easy to trace, Crampton Brophy wrote. Guns were “loud, messy, require some skill”.
The circuit judge Christopher Ramras had excluded the essay from the trial, noting it had been published several years ago. Jurors were not allowed to consider it in their judgment. A prosecutor, however, alluded to the essay’s themes without naming it after Crampton Brophy took the stand.
Prosecutors told jurors Crampton Brophy was motivated by money problems and a life insurance policy.
However, Crampton Brophy said she had no reason to kill her husband and their financial problems had largely been solved by cashing in a portion of Brophy’s retirement savings plan.
She owned the same make and model of gun used to kill her husband and was seen on surveillance footage driving to and from the culinary institute, court exhibits and testimony showed.
Prosecutors alleged Crampton Brophy had bought a “ghost gun”, an untraceable firearm kit, and swapped parts with a shop-bought handgun.
Police have never found the gun that killed Brophy.
Defence lawyers said the gun parts were the inspiration for an idea Crampton Brophy’s had for a new book and suggested someone else might have killed Brophy during a botched robbery.
Crampton Brophy testified that her presence near the culinary school on the day of her husband’s death was mere coincidence and that she had parked in the area to work on her writing.
Crampton Brophy has been in custody since her arrest in September 2018. She will be sentenced on 13 June.
“I find it is easier to wish people dead than to actually kill them,” Crampton Brophy wrote in her 2011 post. “I don’t want to worry about blood and brains splattered on my walls. And really, I’m not good at remembering lies. But the thing I know about murder is that every one of us have it in him/her when pushed far enough.”
I am an Atheist so the bullshit “thoughts and prayers” is just that bullshit. Someone said today to me that they were glad the Police shot and killed the Texas mass murderer as all he had to do was repent and be allowed to enter Heaven.. WHAT THE FLYING FUCK? Uh right now I know that a white kid who killed 13 black people in Buffalo was de-escalated and talked into turning over his weapon and yet for 45 mins or so a Brown kid who killed all Brown people was barricaded in a room with dead Teachers and Children before it was breached and he was shot to death. He will never serve time, he will never face actual Justice and the victim’s families will never learn why he targeted that school and killed their children or their children’s Teachers. Repent, fuck that I don’t care about that fake place, I care to understand the reasoning behind all of it. What prompted another 18 year old boy to act on his rage towards those who did nothing to him but just be alive.
Meanwhile while families outside were panicking and trying to find out what was going on inside the Police did what they do best, rough up Brown people and stand around.
Dear fucking god, not now. And of course Texas is not exactly innocent in these deaths. Tuesday’s shooting was the eighth mass shooting in 13 years in Texas, a state where the Republican-dominated leadership has repeatedly loosened gun laws. Top state officials again quickly signaled that the deaths in Uvalde would not likely lead to stricter gun control in the state and instead pushed for arming more teachers and adding police to school campuses.
Let me understand something here we are back to the arming Teachers and upping Security. Well the Security Guard did open fire and failed to stop it, so now what add the Military to the schoolyard? I see. And again the cries for mental health are flying free. There was however little done in the years prior as numerous cries for help from a drug addicted Mother, a Grandmother overwhelmed with caring for her own Daughter in distress and a Grandson who was clearly troubled and angry. And the ability to walk into a store the day he turned 18 and buy a military grade weapon along with extensive ammo and then just get in a car, drive to a school, a grocery store or to a mall or a movie theater or a church or anywhere people gather and open fire. Mental health is the issue or the ability and accessibility to purchase guns without question. To work in a public school you need to be fingerprinted and cleared by the FBI, to drive a car you need to attain a license which needs to be renewed, you need to pass not one but two tests, have insurance. To buy a gun, cash is fine.
Add to the list of Teacher’s daily responsibilities is become an armed marksman and human shield. No thanks. And with that I have said it repeatedly that this is not about Racism, Asian or BLM or any of the reasons that one takes a gun and shoots up a public forum and kills people nor is it solely a mental health issue, it is a GUN ISSUE. And with that we do fuck all nothing. And in comment I made to the article below, I hold US accountable. All of us for doing fuck all nothing. I said, “Good people do bad things when they do nothing.” I know so many good people clutching pearls and throwing stones at Republicans. But they never go into the Republican offices, nor take to the streets the way they do about all the other cultural issues in the same way when it comes to guns. Nope, guns are the tools and the weapons that are used to inflict both pain and protection. We have enabled the Police to use them discriminatory on largely Black and Brown people who have done nothing. And when it is a mass shooting once again show the power of that prejudice in that situation by letting one white child face the appropriate panel of Justice and the brown child to not. We need to hear him, we need to listen to him and then we can learn from him on what we need to do IN ADDITION to controlling guns.
Want to shoot people? Head to the Ukraine or Russia, they are committing war crimes right now. Have at it you fucking pieces of shit.
Americans are the biggest baddest motherfucking scaredy cats ever. They live if not wallow in fear. When I commented that the absurd remark “Stay Safe” was repeated throughout Covid, I was of course verbally abused as they said 1M died thanks to not wearing masks and vaccinations. Okay well we were up to close to that prior to the whole masking/vaccination thing and it was more about a failure in our medical system for decades leading up to it. An overwhelming poor response by an Administration that did not care nor have any plans to handle a pandemic let alone much of anything. But getting hysterical over my comment once again validates my belief that we have two camps in operation at the moment – the FEARFUL and the GRIEVING. As they overlap on the Venn Diagram to include rage, anger, and depression they enable many to delve into their own despairs and look for ways to absolve or relieve it. And we have crazy assaults, shootings, suicides, drugs and other behaviors that have led us to where we are and once again turning to law and law enforcement to fix it. Yeah that has worked out well hasn’t it? We don’t hold any of them accountable on a daily basis nor find those will do so. We just clutch pearls, have thoughts, have prayers and then worry about if we have to go back to the office or if someone has covid. Fuck you.
Own your fucking evil. Own it and then do something. Organize a march, write every motherfucker in Congress, do something. In the two years since George Floyd died did anything change? No, so clearly you are not doing enough. Do more. I have said I was out in the Reproductive Rights, the BLM movement and Asian Hate as I suspected what came to fruition, FUCK ALL NOTHING. But this is one I do have so I am going to start by asking hard questions of anyone and everyone. What the fuck are you doing? I already know the answer. FUCK ALL NOTHING.
The article below I reprint as the Author is right. We are all responsible. All of us.
Hyman Rickover once said that “In our system of society, no authority exists to tell us what is good and desirable. We are each free to seek what we think is good in our own way. The danger is that where men compromise truth and let decency slip, they eventually end up with neither. A free society can survive only through men and women of integrity.”
Opinion You. This is your fault.
By Christine Emba Columnist |
May 26, 2022 The Washington Post
On Tuesday, a gunman targeted a fourth-grade classroom at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., killing 21 people, 19 of them children. On May 14, a gunman shot and killed 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo. On April 12, a gunman shot 10 people in a Brooklyn, N.Y. subway station. We’re 145 days into the year and there have already been 213 mass shootings in the United States.
The problem is them, over there; it’s their fault that the kids keep getting killed.
Follow Christine Emba’s opinionsFollow
Wrong. The problem is you.
Way back in 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) was castigated for saying that some Americans “cling to guns,” and for suggesting that this was unreasonable or unhealthy. The evidence — which is to say the pileup of bodies year after year — suggests he was correct.
But other politicians, seeing the backlash, learned what not to say. They learned not to point fingers, because they knew that they, too, would be accused of hating freedom, loving tyranny, overreaching in pursuit of control. They understood that they would be shouted down and then perhaps voted out.
They learned not to say the obvious: These mass shootings aren’t acts of God. The status quo is bad. Our lack of action on guns is killing people, and someone is to blame.
But who?
You. It’s your fault.
You, the gun-obsessed minority who lord over our politics and prevent change from being made. You, who mumble “thoughts and prayers” but balk at action.
You, the constitutional absolutist who believes that “the right to bear arms” — written in the late 1700s, when a state-of-the-art weapon was the flintlock musket — should be expanded to include modern-day, high-capacity automatic rifles, at the cost of children’s lives.
You, the “shooting hobbyist” or “gun enthusiast” who advocates against gun control because you think anything that makes your weekend amusement even the slightest bit more difficult to participate in is not to be borne.
You, the performative patriot who believes that background checks, age limitations, training requirements — any reasonable regulations that could help keep people safe — are insufferable limitations on your freedom.
You, the sophist who says “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” as if those people aren’t killing others using guns, as if it isn’t obvious that the havoc they wreak would be much reduced had they not been given easy access to weapons of mass murder.
You, the pundit who sneers that your opponents “don’t want a solution” and then refuses to provide your own, preferring to use a tragedy to build your brand.
You, who would rather forget about the children murdered and the families broken, because if we thought about them too much you’d feel bad and might have to give something up.
Lest I be accused of being one-sided, let’s not stop the finger-pointing there. If it’s a “you” problem, it’s an “us” problem, too — the United States and its culture writ large, right and left included.
A country that defines itself by its freedom — and has, over decades, fetishized a misguided ideal of “liberty” that values the individual over everyone and everything else.
A country that touts its dynamism yet dithers, its leaders wringing their hands and offering empty platitudes — “we have to find solutions,” “we must take action” — as if the solutions aren’t obvious, as if the actions one could take haven’t been modeled for us by other countries for decades.
A country that exports democracy but whose politicians pretend that their jobs are meaningless, who believe that when it comes to gun control, “legislation doesn’t work” — despite the fact that they were elected to write it.
It’s easy to find excuses for why this keeps happening. We’ve done it for decades. But the comforting fictions have worn thin, to the point of transparency.
It’s time to stop feigning helplessness. To stop pretending we are the ones under attack. To stop gaslighting the real victims, who have already suffered tragedy enough.
It’s time to admit that we — we Americans, and the rationalizations we tolerate — are to blame. Only then can we shoulder the responsibility to act.
And I mean here, right now. Another, yet another mass shooting in a school. This one is different as this is a Child of Color who went to his school to do harm. It is rare as only a couple of shooters I am recalling right now were. The one I do was in Marysville where the shooter and victims were Native Americans. So these kind of shooting are outliers in most of them, so again the right wing fuckwits will go “See those Immigrants!! Uh no fuckers, no. The only parallel was the decline in mental health, lack of available help and of course the big one – ACCESS TO GUNS. As we seem to believe, this was his act of revenge and his act of hate towards those he felt wronged him. Of course NONE of the victims were the actual ones who wronged him but fuck that shit. He has a gun and he is going do what needs to be done.
The same right to life fuckwits who are sure that all beings fertilized in utero that are not theirs have a right to life and with that the responsibility ends there. Education, health care, family leave, decent affordable housing and decent wages, well like the gunman, fuck that shit. Give the man and gun and he will go a shooting, isnt’ that the Biblical verse? Fuck that shit too.
Read, look and remember… well for the next 48 hours as either you will move onto the next or there will be another shooting. And remember, no, not thoughts and prayers; fuck that shit.
What we know about the victims of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas
By Moriah Balingit, Beth Reinhard, María Luisa Paúl, Holly Bailey, and Karina Elwood
May 25, 2022 The Washington Post
A veteran educator whose dedication to a student with Down syndrome left a lasting impression. A jubilant 10-year-old whose dancing and joking lit up his family’s home. A fourth grader who had just made the honor roll.
The names of those slain by a gunman at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., on Tuesday — including at least 19 children and two teachers — were only beginning to emerge in the hours afterward, as the grief-stricken community of 16,000 about 80 miles west of San Antonio tried to process what happened. Just days before summer vacation, an 18-year-old opened fire in a classroom, unleashing carnage not seen at a U.S. school in nearly a decade.
Here is what we know so far about the victims of the attack.
Eva Mireles, 44
Eva Mireles. (Courtesy of Lydia Martinez Delgado)
Mireles, an educator for 17 years, taught fourth graders at Robb Elementary School, according to her aunt, Lydia Martinez Delgado, who confirmed her niece was among those slain. Delgado said her nephew, Ruben Ruiz, was a police officer with the Uvalde school district and was married to Mireles. The couple’s daughter recently graduated from college, Delgado said.
Delgado said Mireles was cheerful and active, and recalled a time she got up before sunrise with other relatives for a hike during a family gathering. “She did all she could to live a long life, and here it was cut short,” Delgado said in a phone interview early Wednesday.
Audrey Garcia said she will never forget the attention Mireles paid to her daughter Gabby, now 23, when she was in third grade.
“My daughter has Down syndrome, and she was one of the first students at that time to be included in a regular classroom,” said Garcia, who now lives in San Antonio. “Ms. Mireles always went above and beyond. She never saw Gabby as having less potential than any of the other students.”
On Tuesday, Garcia posted a photo on Twitter of her daughter and Mireles that she said demonstrated the teacher’s dedication. Garcia said she last heard from Mireles about two years ago, after a local television station did a story on her daughter’s graduation from high school and her new jewelry business. Mireles would often reach out around Christmas, Garcia said, because Gabby had given her an ornament as a gift.
“She would say that she always thought about Gabby when she put up her Christmas tree,” Garcia said. “After all those years, she still cared about Gabby as a student. I just want everyone to know what kind of person she was and what kind of educator she was. I don’t want her to be forgotten.”
— Moriah Balingit and Beth Reinhard
Xavier Lopez, 10
Xavier Lopez. (Courtesy of Felicha Martinez)
The Lopez household was teeming with children’s laughter and music — and its source, more often than not, was 10-year-old Xavier cracking a joke or dancing cumbia.
But the giggles and grooving sounds that once filled the air were replaced Tuesday by the pain of a life cut short, Xavier’s family said. The fourth grader at Robb Elementary School was among those slain during Tuesday’s shooting rampage, his mother, Felicha Martinez, told The Washington Post.
“He was funny, never serious and his smile,” Martinez said, her voice breaking. “That smile I will never forget. It would always cheer anyone up.”
Xavier “was so full of life,” she said, and a bright light for the family. Never one to shy away from the camera, he would sway his hips, wave his arms and energetically dance in the house with his brothers — moments of glee that Martinez readily captured on her TikTok account.
In school, Xavier had a penchant for sports — favoring soccer and baseball — but also a great interest in art, his favorite subject, Martinez said.
“He loved any activity in which he could be creative and especially get to draw,” Martinez said.
Just a few days shy of completing his last year of elementary school, Xavier was counting the days until he would officially move up the academic ladder into Flores Middle School in Uvalde. “He really couldn’t wait to go to middle school,” his mother said.
His dreams seemed so close on Tuesday at Robb Elementary School’s honor roll ceremony. Martinez was there to cheer him on as Xavier’s name was called to receive his certificate.
Mere hours before the tragedy, Martinez snapped a photo of Xavier. She told him she was proud and that she loved him, before hugging him goodbye. She said she did not imagine that would be the last moment she would share with her “mama’s boy.”
— María Luisa Paúl
Jose Flores, 10
Jose Flores. (Courtesy of Christopher Salazar)
Jose, 10, was a fourth grader at Robb Elementary School who loved to play baseball, according to his uncle Christopher Salazar, who confirmed his nephew’s death.
“He was a very happy little boy. He loved both his parents … and loved to laugh and have fun,” Salazar said.
He said his nephew, who had two brothers and a sister, “loved going to school.” On Tuesday, hours before the shooting, Jose had received an award for making the honor roll.
“He was very smart,” Salazar said. “He wasn’t a kid who would look for trouble.”
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