Again and Again
Charlton Heston giving his “cold dead hands” speech at the NRA convention in 2000. Since then over 32,000 more children have cold, dead hands due to gunfire.
Three little children showed up for third grade on Monday. Now they’re dead.
We have a school shooting every 3 days.
We have a mass shooting twice every 3 days.
The biggest cause of death of children under 18 is not auto collisions. It isn’t any disease. It is gunfire.
We have enough firearms in private hands for every man, woman and child to possess 1.3 guns. And yes, that calculation includes newborns and toddlers not even able to lift a gun, as well as our mentally ill and those who see themselves as victims and are permanently pissed off.
Yes, we really are Number 1.
You know the comparisons to all the rest of the developed nations in the world, so you know that we’re number one in all the awful and insane ways.
Our police are the ones who are first to the scene of our massacres. They see the bodies of little kids that are ripped apart by bullets designed for warfare – bullets designed to rip apart as may bodies as possible as fast as possible. They’re the ones who have to risk their own lives to stop gunmen on the hunt for more victims. Sometimes those blue clad bodies are included in the count of the massacred.
We say that Blue Lives Matter, but we keep on creating new crime scenes and sending our men and women in blue to deal with them. If you really care about Blue Lives, ask one of the cops who showed up at Sandy Hook or Parkland and now Nashville about their worst moment ever. Ask them about the ache in their hearts that won’t go away. Ask them about their regular nightmares of little kids with mangled bodies, real visions that haunt them and won’t go away. Ask them about the stupidity of right wing manipulation of the Second Amendment to mean anyone, sane or crazy, is allowed to have as many tools of death as they can afford to buy or steal.
Don’t let anyone get away with telling you that Blue Lives Matter and in the same breath say that it’s okay for their angry brother-in-law to have an arsenal. Don’t let them say that it’s okay for miserable, crazy Uncle Bubba to carry a loaded Glock and wave it at whoever cuts him off in traffic.
And don’t let anyone get away with telling you that we love our kids and our concert goers and our church and temple attendees and our fellows walking down the sidewalk. Don’t let them tell you that we love our students on college campuses and grannies in the supermarket or Walmart or our veterans or any of the nearly 10,000 Americans killed by gunfire so far this year – and it isn’t even April yet. Our behavior says otherwise.
Our behavior says that we love our guns more than we love our kids.
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Question Of the Day
If we actually did love one another, if we actually cared about one another, we’d want to stop this butchery, so what would we be doing to stop it?
Hint: We know what to do. And look here and here, too. And see Peter Frampton’s answer at the bottom of this post.
Confession Of the Day
I’m despairingly sick at heart that our brutal truth allows me to write this post.
And I’m livid once again that instead of sending us gun safety legislation, our cowardly, selfish politicians (fact check: nearly all Republicans) are once again sending us nothing more than thoughts and prayers and a distracting sideshow. They’re doing their verbal dance of death, blaming windows, doors, gays, mental health, insufficient guns and more. They never address the core issue: We have hundreds of millions of guns and easy accessibility to them.
The hard liners proclaim their squishy, gelatinous solutions, saying we need more people to have and carry guns. They declare that bad guys won’t follow our rules, so there’s no point in creating new safety laws. They screech their absolutist Second Amendment nonsense, even as killers are murdering our kids.
Little kids are being put into half-size, soul tormenting caskets. If you ever see one, you’ll never be the same.
Three little children showed up for third grade on Monday. Now they’re dead.
Click the pic
Nicole Hockley is the CEO and founder of Sandy Hook Promise. Her 7-year-old son Dylan was one of the 26 murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012. He would be 18 years old now, ready to walk across the stage and accept his high school diploma. But there won’t be a diploma for Dylan.
The caption above reads, “Gov. Bill Lee is flanked by Republican members of the state legislature Wed., June 2, 2021 during a ceremonial bill signing of his permitless carry legislation. Natalie Allison, The Tennessean.” Click the pic.
Shannon Watts is the founder of Moms Demand Action. She thinks kids should be safe in school and that you should be safe on the street, in a movie theater or in a store.
Regarding our knowing what to do about this horrific murdering of our people, have a look at Peter Frampton’s post.
This cure was no one-off. The same cure worked in Australia in 1995. We know what to do, but we’ve lacked the will to do it. We can change that.
Try this simple 3-step process:
- Defeat the Congressional gun lobby babies and the gun coddlers. Replace them with reform candidates dedicated to stopping the carnage. Not reducing it. Stopping it.
- Demand that Congress pass the sweeping laws we all know we need. Even the majority of gun owners acknowledge we need them.
- Give law enforcement the tools and the funding to enforce our new safety laws.
And be clear that We the People – that’s you and I – must support all of that. Actively.
Today is a good day to be the light.
______________________________
- Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
- Fire the bastards!
- The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.
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JA
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
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