Suddenly the Wrong People are being Killed

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Last spring a classroom of fourth-graders of Hispanic descent were gunned down so brutally and savagely in Uvalde, Texas, the only way some could be identified was through DNA samples.   The Republic of Texas responded by doing absolutely nothing:  Too bad, so sad, guns make people safer so get over it!  And that rush to inaction has pretty much been the NRA-driven political response to school shootings and mass killings for the past four decades.

But this past week there was an official government response to a school shooting in Tennessee that might be a harbinger of things to come.   

Yesterday Tennessee's Republican governor, Bill Lee, signed an executive order that strengthened the state's background check program for gun purchases, and Governor Lee encouraged his state lawmakers to pass a "red flag" law that would prohibit dangerous people from owning guns.  The governor's call to action comes after a deadly shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville last month in which three nine-year-olds and three adults were killed.  The resulting political maelstrom from that shooting also precipitated a crisis in the Tennessee state legislature in which three representatives led a demonstration for stronger gun laws inside of the Capitol building - and the two who were black wound up being expelled from the Tennessee House - bringing embarrassment to those remaining House members who had enough class to be embarrassed!

Governor Lee had been a friend of one of the three adults killed in that shooting, a woman who was working at the school as a substitute teacher that day and who was to have had dinner with the governor's wife the evening of the shooting.  This shooting took place in the rarified air of a private school, one focused on the teachings of Jesus, and one in which the state's governor had a connection.  It wasn't just a random school shooting of poor kids and teachers in a public school - it was personal.

The deadly Nashville shooting occurred on Monday, March 27.  The following Sunday, April 2, one of the hosts of this year's Country Music Awards in Nashville called out gun violence in America and dedicated that evening's show to the victims of the Covenant School shooting.  Pressure was clearly building on the governor and legislature to act.  The citizens of Tennessee, and even its stars, were not going to allow the continuation of business as usual.

This time it was different.  The wrong people were starting to get killed.

Two days ago a mass shooting occurred in a board room of a prominent bank in Louisville, Kentucky, a shooting where a disgruntled employee showed up with a semi-automatic rifle that he had just purchased a few days earlier and opened fire on a meeting of bank employees and executives.   One of the bank bosses who was killed that morning was a personal friend of Kentucky's governor, Andy Beshear, and was also a personal friend of Florida's US Senator Rick Scott.  

Again, the Louisville victims were not ordinary citizens - or children without political clout.  Clearly they were all somebody whose deaths could force an intransigent government to act - whether it wanted to or not.

There is probably a lot of angst at NRA headquarters of late as it's extremely well armed legions of death and "good guys with guns" begin messing about in areas where they shouldn't be messing.  Now that it is beginning to get personal for those with the power, maybe we will finally begin to see some commonsense gun reform prevail.

The price of inaction has suddenly gone up!