America has been the scene of another mass shooting.
All the familiar phrases are being uttered:
“We didn’t think it could happen here.”
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.”
“We need to enact sensible gun control legislation.”
My home state of Georgia’s lieutenant governor is encouraging legislation to pay teachers to undergo firearm training.
This is what passes for a solution to our carnage and destruction.
Our country continues to permit empty, soulless creatures devoid of sanity and logic to kill men, women, children.
They die and will continue to die because our country believes that it is better to allow needless killing to safeguard rights and freedom.
They are safeguarding rights and freedoms all right.
The right to live in fear.
The right to become another statistic.
The right to be killed at churches, schools, grocery stores, bowling alleys, restaurants, malls – anywhere and everywhere.
The freedom to be victimized by maniacs who find courage in killing and satisfaction in bloodshed.
The freedom to experience public paranoia, never being sure when or where these lunatics will strike.
The freedom to be murdered because of our country’s acceptance of myth and legend.
America still foolishly buys into a nonexistent exceptionalism that says we are tamed our “wilderness” with guns, and they are essential to our survival.
This country maintains that our so-called pioneer spirit demands that we allow anyone the right to own handheld weapons of mass destruction, and that no matter how many deaths these weapons cause, we must stay the course because we will be less free, less American.
I and many others would rather run the risk of living less free, less American, if it means that we could die of other reasons besides being butchered by an AR-15.
Soon, there won’t be a person left in the US who won’t have been touched by a needless gun death.
All because we value cold, life-ending steel more than human life.