Another Acceptable Massacre
The school year is just getting started, but the annual bloodletting has already begun.
A new school shooting has caused more multiple deaths.
And predictably, more nonsense about the need for armed response and mental health prioritization.
The shooting occurred in my home state of Georgia in the town of Winder in a high school of over eleven hundred students.
Two teachers and two students are dead.
The shooter was a 14-year-old student at the school using, not surprisingly, an AR-15 style weapon.
He had been interviewed last year by local law enforcement after being identified by the FBI as a possible shooting threat.
He denied making the online threats that sparked the FBI interest.
His father said that they he had hunting rifles but that his son did not have unsupervised access.
Today, it no longer matters whether the father, the son, or both were liars because two children went to school and didn’t return home.
Two teachers who went to work didn’t return home, killed by one of their students.
Local Republicans, including Governor Brian Kemp, are sending their thoughts and prayers.
Many of them, including Governor Kemp, are pro-gun enthusiasts who think the answer to preventing school shootings is arming teachers and increasing mental health awareness.
The mental awareness needs to begin with those who think that thoughts and prayers are enough.
Mentally disturbed unarmed people do much less damage than mentally disturbed armed people.
America will only be safer when it adopts stringent gun control laws, particularly concerning semiautomatic weapons like the AR-15 and its progeny.
We can no longer refer to new gun control legislation as “common sense” because too many people do not grasp the logic.
The Second Amendment has been used to provide cover for maniacal murderers, corrupt politicians, and a cynical pro-gun lobby who doesn’t care how many people die from gun violence.
America keeps refusing to do what other countries have done.
It refuses to protect the innocent.
It refuses to regulate handheld weapons of mass destruction.
It refuses to shed the dangerous myth of rugged individualism that persists with the lies that this country was built with and protected with guns.
America was built on principles, vision, and ideas, not the foolish idea that guns naturally make society safer. If that were true, America would be the safest place on earth instead of one of the most dangerous places.
More guns, especially weapons belonging on the battlefield, do not assure freedom.
Instead, they assure us of the freedom to be randomly slaughtered.
In America, the truth is that gun ownership is more sacred than human life, especially among the so-called “pro-life” crowd.
The Second Amendment is our suicide pact.
“Thoughts and prayers” have become our rallying cry.
The blood of innocents is our legacy.