The War the United States Will Not Fight

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

We, as a nation, will get righteously indignant over stories of war atrocities on foreign shores, especially if those stories contain tales of dead children, and we will rush arms, equipment, and all manner of support to those we regard as allies.  But let dead children pile up on our own shores, and those we largely ignore.

Twenty dead first graders - first graders, damnit! - little kids six-and-seven-years-old - scattered across their bloodied classroom floors in Newtown, Connecticut, and as a nation we manage little more than a polite "tsk-tsk."   A few years later nineteen fourth-graders (10-year-olds!) shot and killed in their classroom in Uvalde, Texas. "Ho, hum," the nation replied.

In both cases the shooters were young men who had access to automatic weaponry.

Now, last night, another young man with an automatic weapon opened fire in two public venues Lewiston, Maine, and killed sixteen to twenty-two individuals (and possibly more), and injured fifty or sixty others.  Some of his victims were undoubtedly children.  

Last night's reported shooter was a firearm's instructor who had received his training from the US military, and he was, of course, firing an automatic weapon.  The shooter had been hospitalized with mental health issues for two weeks this past summer, and he reportedly said that he has been hearing voices.    But none of that mental health history interfered with his constitutional "right" to carry automatic weaponry.  Maine has no restrictions on the open-carrying of firearms, nor does the state have any of those pesky red-flag laws that allow authorities to temporarily remove guns from people who are in some sort of mental or emotional distress.

The shooters (and the guns) have the rights, the dead people have the funerals.

Gun violence is a war on civilization - and it is a war that our government will not fight, at least not here at home.   We will spend and fight like hell to protect other people's children - and we should - but when it comes to protecting our own, the priority shifts and suddenly we are all about making it as easy as possible for Americans to own and stockpile guns.

Our children should be our priority - not guns.

Anything less is just political bullshit.