We Actually CAN Prevent This
But a lot of people don't care
The Onion nails it…every time.
They have been doing this same article since 2014, and at an alarming rate might I add, to highlight how ridiculous the United States is on mass shootings. To put the point even more clearly, they don’t change much in the article…pretty much the date and location and the rest is boilerplate at this point.
That, and I cannot say this any more eloquently, sucks. Like really sucks that this country is THAT depraved where an anomaly anywhere else is a literal Wednesday here. Or any day that ends with ‘y’ for that matter.
It is September 5th at 1:20 pm as I say this. That is important because in this country there could be another mass shooting before I finish this draft. This sucks. But as I type, we are yet again dealing with the aftermath of a mass shooting at a school.
Alas the onion, no way to prevent this…
There have been, Sep 5th at now 1:21pm, 384 mass shootings THIS YEAR. For those who didn’t do well in elementary school, that is more shootings (384) than days in a year (365.25) with 22 of them resulting in more than 4 people being killed.
Pausing for those numbers to sink in…
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We have a huge gun problem and unfortunately those with the power to mitigate it have no interest in doing so. There is a well known formula at this point in the US—
Shooting+deaths= thoughts and prayers (R) x Urge for policies (D) + blame x 0 (action)
(all times infinity)
Nothing changes, we move on, another shooting happens and we repeat the same thing. Over and over.
In Georgia, where the current latest shooting happened, law enforcement had looked into the shooter just last year. After being reported for threats of possibly…a school shooting.. he was quizzed and his dad was like ‘yeah we have some guns but I always am around if he has access to them’
I won’t even get into white why they took his word for it with no follow up. It also doesn’t help that THIS is what some of the congressional delegation from Georgia looks like:
Actually, JUST LAST WEEK, the genius in that photo announced another (yes another) raffle where she would be giving away an assault rifle.
Again—the Onion.
Immediately after learning of the shooting, people wanted to know about gun policies in Georgia and what they look like. So I will sum them up here on a post it note:
Further, I’ve worked in political spaces and know the NRA does a lot to KEEP it that way. And yeah yeah yeah I know 2nd Amendment blah blah blah.
When I taught college government classes I often did an exercise where we dissected and debated the 2nd amendment based on basic reading comprehension:
Note the comma after the word militia…
Militia follows the qualifier ‘well regulated’…
I have been reading a long time, and you probably have too, so take those portions as you wish.
We exist in a nonsensical culture that means gun violence has impacted all of us in some way. Personally I can think of MANY instances in my own life. As a kid the person who trained me to be an usher at church, a few years older than me, was killed an hour later on my training Sunday. I literally witnessed the mass shooting in Louisville. That is just two of many examples. And I am NOT unique.
I vividly remember school shooter drills. The different code colors we had to remember to recall if yelled over the intercom. I think blue meant the shooter was in the halls and red was they were outside…idk anymore because we had to do so many and they changed each year as threats changed. Like, they had the realization that one code, if the shooter is a student, they would then KNOW what was happening and we’d be sitting ducks. I forget which code that became, there were too many because heaven forbid we actually do something to lessen the threat.
We need stricter gun laws. We need to ban military designed weapons from non-military personnel. We need safe storage laws. We need to get serious for a second and actually try to save lives.
It says a lot that parents have to send their kids to school not only hoping they get a quality education but that they get to come home when the bell rings. It is even sadder that it feels like the only thing that will change is the date and location, like the article in The Onion.