JaxPolitix

Post 1,039

There was a glorious victory parade yesterday in Kansas City in celebration of the Chiefs’ Superbowl LVIII win. The crowd was estimated at a million people, twice the population of the city. There were waves and smiles and cheers and then people began to be shot and they dropped to the ground. As of the time of this writing there were at least 22 reported injured and one dead. Three people have been arrested. All this happened in the presence of over 800 law enforcement people.

Another day in America, another mass shooting. It’s 45 days into the year, we’ve already had 49 mass shootings and a total of 4,925 people are dead from gun violence. We commonly know who the bad guys are soon after a mass shooting, but I think we need to expand our definition.

I wrote here (in the “Innocents” section) about non-Hamas Gazans, commonly referred to as innocent Palestinian civilians. Since Hamas took over government in Gaza in 2006 the innocent Palestinians have stood by watching those hundreds of miles of tunnels be excavated and production equipment, computers and war matériel be loaded into those subterranean factories of death. Out of them have come tens of thousands of rockets that have been unleashed on Israeli civilians. While that carnage has been ongoing, what did those innocent Palestinian civilians do to prevent or stop the killing?

If, as it seems obvious, they did nothing, then they simply cannot be called innocent civilians. At very least they are complicit in those murders, those rapes, those atrocities because of their passivity. Now, here comes the part you’re not going to like.

If that logic holds, then we are not innocent in the shooting of those people in Kansas City, nor of the murders at Sandy Hook or Parkland or Uvalde or Tree of Life or anywhere else. We have allowed our system to be compromised, bastardized, politicized, weaponized and monetized so that any fool, any angry dirt bag, any paranoid or any Rambo wannabee can get his hands on combat weapons and ammunition. He can pick any day when the spirit of murder moves him and then blast away until he runs out of ammunition or the police shoot him down.

WE INNOCENT AMERICANS ALLOWED OUR SYSTEM TO DEVOLVE INTO THIS.

I foolishly thought that 20 little first graders and 7 teachers blasted and butchered into bloody puddles on the floor of Sandy Hook Elementary School would be the event that would bring us to our senses. That shows how naive I am, because as our nation wept and we held our little ones closer, the next mass murderer was on his way, locked and loaded and looking for blood.

AND WE DID NOTHING TO PREVENT HIM FROM MURDERING INNOCENTS.

Yesterday Everytown for Gun Safety opened their email this way:

Six years ago today at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, 17 students and school staff were shot and killed, and 17 more were wounded.

And yesterday marks one year since the deadly mass shooting at Michigan State University, where three students were shot and killed and five others wounded.

And today in Atlanta, four students were shot and wounded after school in the parking lot.

And just hours ago, another community was terrorized by gun violence: At the Super Bowl Championship parade in Kansas City, where at least one person was killed and many wounded.

Once again, everyday moments and celebrations have turned into tragedy.

And once again, entire communities are picking up the pieces from preventable acts of gun violence.

We sit in stupefied silence as the gun lobby threatens, cajoles and bribes our lawmakers and these politicians cower before them. They tell us about the Constitutional right of red blooded Americans to have guns and no tree hugging liberal weenie is going to take their guns from them. And then we reelect those cowardly lawmakers and afterward wring our hands at each of the next massacres, wondering how that could have happened. “Nothing anyone could have done about that,” they tell us with phony, mopey faces.

And they’re right about that because we let it happen. You and I. We sit motionless and inertia wins. That murderous body in motion stays in motion because it isn’t acted upon by an outside force, which should be us.

If we haven’t done anything to make things better to protect our people, if we haven’t put our right to stay alive over the right of gun ownership, then we are about as innocent as those Palestinian civilians who stand by and let Hamas do its murdering.

We seem to have shamed politicians enough that they have abandoned their despicable thoughts and prayers nonsense, but our efforts to make things better have been pitiful. Life isn’t safer for our little kids at their desks in school, wondering if they’re next, or for high schoolers in the halls between classes or for partiers dancing in Las Vegas, or for worshipers in churches and synagogues or for grannies in supermarkets buying milk and bread.

Go ahead – push back if you like – but I think we’re complicit in these murders because, like the Palestinian civilians, we’ve allowed the murders to happen. Those “preventable acts of gun violence,” as Everytown calls them, weren’t prevented because we didn’t prevent them from happening.

Of course, my accusation does not go to the Moms Demand Action folks, the Every Town for Gun Safety people, the March For Our Lives kids from Parkland and the others who are speaking up and demanding the reform that the rest of us are allowing to not happen. We keep voting for those who will not make the laws we all know we need in order to protect little kids sitting at their desks and parade attendees in Kansas City. That’s on us.

• 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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