49 mass shootings in 45 days. As I write, the 49th was yesterday, following a parade and gathering of thousands (if not a million) of Kansas City Chiefs football fans, a shooter killed at least one and wounded dozens (update as needed). We can add this to the list of America’s nearly 5,000 mass shootings in the past decade, such as in Parkland High School, Uvalde, Florida, and Convent School in Nashville, plus in other locales, such as a bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine and a grocery store in Colorado.
Of course, our ever-helpful House of Representatives seem eager to solve this death-of-citizenry-by-military-weapons. Remember Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert’s Christmas card?–she posed her young children with AR-15 rifles (two boys barely taller than the guns they hold)? And another useful Republican, Representative Thomas Massey of Kentucky, posted a picture of his smiling gun-toting family online, kids’ fingers on triggers.
So what’s another mass shooting to Americans? Shooting military weapons is our way of life. Maybe we should send eager-beaver gun-toters to help Ukraine? (Whoops, oh, that’s right, maybe not, being MAGA, they’d prefer to help Putin.)
Football being the number one event in our nation (why, oh, why?!), perhaps Wednesday’s mass shooting will finally be what it takes to prevent further such occurences. Perhaps it takes a *$*SPORT*$* (Americans’ beloved raison d’etre) to actually get gun legislation passed that thousands of parents, students, and a full 60% of our country have been earnestly wanting and working for for decades.
But I doubt it.
Americans are slow learners. You might say plain stubborn. Perhaps willfully ignorant. Too many Americans don’t like facts. They prefer to put their heads in the sand or their minds in the gutter or their senses up in conspiracy clouds. The fact that guns kill our children seems illusive to many. That guns destroy our way of life just doesn’t seem as important as adherence to the misreading of the second amendment (which clearly originated for Revolutionary militias three centuries ago and not for those craving to blast squirrels to kingdom come).
Better not hold your breath waiting for Congress’s solution to mass shootings, any more than for it’s passing the U.S. budget in a timely fashion, or placing honesty above lying. Mustn’t ask too much of our democracy while we still have it.
Portrait of Gun-Loving America, ?”x?” Never executed. No comment.
Artwork: Portrait of Gun-Loving America, ?”x?” Never executed. No comment.