by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
I returned to the United States after two years of living and working abroad on July 14th, 2012. I was anxious to reestablish my working life back in Phoenix and to see how much that sprawling city, and indeed the whole country, had changed during my absence. It only took a few days for me to learn that things, from a social perspective, were no better, and in fact, were probably worse than ever.
I had been back in the states just six days when a horrendous mass shooting took place at a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado. A mentally disturbed young man had literally pushed his way into the crowded theatre where people had gathered for a midnight showing of the latest Batman movie. He marched onto the stage if front of the screen, dressed in full camouflage and carrying multiple weapons - a bold move that most of those seated in the theatre assumed was connected with the show they were about to see. Then he tossed some teargas grenades into the audience and began shooting - spraying the audience with automatic fire. Before the assault and panic ended, twelve were dead and 70 others were injured - 58 of them by gunfire. At that time the victim count (82) was the largest number of any mass shooting in United States history.
Welcome home, Pa Rock.
But this is America, and our potential for senseless violence and carnage literally knows no limits.
On December 14th of that same year - ten years ago today - a shooting occurred that rocked the very moral core of the country, one that Barack Obama described as "the darkest day of my presidency." That was the day that another mentally disturbed young man kicked the security door in at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and proceeded to gun down twenty first-graders - each of whom was shot multiple times. Six adults including teachers and the school's principal also died that day, as well as the shooter who killed himself at the scene and had earlier killed his mother at their home.
Surely, sane people reasoned, this horrendous blasphemy on the soul of our country - twenty dead little children - would finally result in some serious legislation to control the spread of guns, and particularly automatic weapons, in twenty-first century America. A bill was introduced in Congress to ban the sale of certain types of automatic weapons as well as large-capacity magazines, but even though the measure was favored by the public, it failed in the US Senate by a vote of 40-60. Another bill was introduced to require criminal background checks for gun sales over the internet and at gun shows, but that failed 54-46 in the Senate because it could not gain 60 votes to meet the filibuster special majority. A separate bill to limit gun magazines (ammunition feeding devices) to ten rounds also failed in the Senate by the same margin.
The National Rifle Association encouraged "thoughts and prayers" and stressed a need for more armed guards in schools. More cops and more guards, that would solve the problem. Since Sandy Hook we have witnessed a school shooting in Parkland, Florida, where seventeen people - mostly students - died at the hands of a young, mentally impaired male while the school's resource officer (security guard) hid, and a school shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, where the school employed multiple police officers, all of whom stood idly by in a hallway for over an hour while the young, mentally unstable male shooter killed nineteen fourth-graders and two of their teachers. Some of those ten-year-old kids were shot so many times that DNA analysis had to be employed to determine their identities.
Some, like the NRA, say that more armed officers is the answer, when clearly it isn't. Others say that the real problem is the mental health of the shooters. They talk mental health while many states are busy rolling back mental health coverage almost as fast as they roll back gun restrictions.
The genesis of the problem is guns and literally everybody knows it, but no one has the courage to risk their political lives fighting the NRA and the nation's arms industry. There is no legitimate need for private citizens to own automatic or semi-automatic weapons, and until this madness is reined in, the bloody bodies of young dead children will continue to pile up - like the NRA cash donations to our political leaders continues to pile up.
The right to own a high-powered gun in America is far more important than the rights of small children to go to school in peace and safety.
We all know it, and we all own it, and nothing will ever change.
Goddamn the society that allows children to die on the altar of the gun industry!
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