The Guns are the Problem, Greg. It's the Guns.

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

It was just a week ago yesterday that I used this space for a posting entitled "Texas, Bloody Texas" which detailed a mass shooting in the small town of Cleveland, Texas, fifty miles from Houston.  In that blood-soaked crime a deranged individual shot and killed five of his neighbors because one of the neighbors had asked him to quit firing his AR-15 into the Texas night sky so that his baby could get some sleep.

Writing about gun crime in Texas does not take a great deal of research or time because shooting mayhem occurs literally almost every day in the Lone Star state.  Texas IS the nation's shooting gallery!  Texas, like most GOP-controlled states, goes out of its way to protect the "rights" of gun-owners and guns, often at the direct expense of public safety.

A couple of days ago there was a story in the press about a gun incident in Texas that also caught my interest.  There were no deaths in this incident,  but the circumstances were so unusual that it bears repeating.  That shooting also happened a week ago yesterday.  An 18-year-old baseball player for Texas A&M University (Texarkana) was shot and seriously wounded while standing in his team's dugout during a baseball game.  The shooter wasn't an angry fan, but rather it was someone beyond the ballpark who was firing a gun in the neighborhood, and one of his shots tore into the ballpark - and into the dugout - and into the player.

Stray bullets happen, especially in a shooting gallery.

There was, of course, another mass shooting in Texas yesterday evening at an outlet mall in the city of Allen, near Dallas.  Nine people were killed and seven wounded.  The shooter, a thirty-something single male who lived with his parents and who neighbors described as always behaving strangely, showed up at the mall covered in body armor and dressed in black with multiple weapons and ammo magazines.  An armed policeman who happened to be nearby managed to kill the shooter fairly quickly, but with automatic weaponry the shooter still was able to kill and wound a substantial number of people very quickly.

The stories and videos coming from the shooting in Allen, Texas, are horrendous.  Some of the victims were children.

Some of the victims were children . . . concentrate on that Governor Greg Abbott.  While you and the other political leaders of Texas fight so valiantly to protect Texas children from books which contain ideas that make you uncomfortable, or from exposure to lifestyles that don't match your own, you do essentially nothing to protect the lives of children from guns.  

Books don't kill people, and neither do pronouns.  The guns are the problem, Greg.  It's the goddamned guns!