School Shooting #18 on Day #45

Image: usatoday.com

This Entire Fucking Country is Mentally Ill!

So there was yet another school shooting. The eighteenth this year, I believe, and the year is only 45 days old.

Again we hear the nightmare stories of children hearing and watching and feeling their friends get murdered in the next classroom, in front of them, on top of them…

Again we see the distraught parents of murdered children and wounded children and again we watch them crying, begging, screaming for change.

Again we hear the news anchors go over all the recent school shootings. Again we hear the insane statistics of American mass shootings compared to the practically non-existent  mass shootings — and shootings in general — in other industrialized countries. Again the pundits ask what it’s going to take for politicians to do something.

Again all we we hear Republicans say is “…this tragic event blah blah blah … our hearts and minds are with blah blah blah…thoughts and prayers blah blah blah!

Again we hear them say that now’s not the time to talk about gun control, that talking about gun control is a knee-jerk reaction, that we don’t want to infringe on citizens’ second-amendment rights. Blah blah fucking blah!

And Trump, who was in such a hurry to undo everything Obama accomplished, including measures to prevent mentally ill people from purchasing guns, signed his executive order to that effect a year ago and then held it up for the world to see: Look Mommy, I signed my name! We now hear Trump say that the young man who murdered these kids was mentally ill, and that we need to do something about the mentally ill. And in that deranged dreamy voice he uses when he thinks he’s reading something real deep off the teleprompter, Trump, of all people, says that we must answer hate with love and that we must answer cruelty with kindness. Blah blah fucking, FUCKING blah!

We hear the family who hosted the shooter in the months before the massacre say that he was a polite young man, perfectly normal. But he had an AR 15! There was nothing to indicate that he would do such a thing. BUT HE HAD A FUCKING AR 15! No mentally stable civilian needs an AR 15! What is wrong with people?!?

Again, in the coming days we’ll hear gun nuts on social media say that AR 15s don’t kill people, people kill people. Blah blah blah! Anyone with a pulse will again point out that murdering a lot of children within minutes is a whole lot easier and a whole lot harder for someone else to stop if you have an AR 15 than if you have, say, a paring knife.

As the saying goes: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

If you continue to let the NRA literally dictate policy on Capitol Hill, every politician who accepts campaign contributions from the NRA will continue to claim that now is not the time to talk about gun restrictions. If you continue to allow the sale of semi-automatic weapons, people will continue to carry out mass murder with semi-automatic weapons. If you continue to do nothing but have thoughts and prayers, nothing is going to change, because there is no bearded wizard in the sky who will fix this with a magic wand! The guns are real, the children murdered are real, the teachers murdered are real, the grieving families are real, and the country needs real solutions, real votes for politicians who support real gun control, not more of the same fucking prayers!