This morning, seventeen families woke up and remembered, for the first time, that their babies, mothers, fathers weren't coming home. Because they went to school, or to work with kids, and a former student shot them to death. They are not the first seventeen families to wake up to this reality. They won't be the last.
In the only eight years since 27 first graders and their teachers and principal were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, there have been over 200 shootings in schools. 400 people have been shot. At schools. Not by terrorists. Not by drug cartels. Not by immigrants.
That's just at schools. Never mind concerts, bars and churches. Never mind the thousands of women who have been shot by their husbands and boyfriends, while society turned a blind eye to their safety.
And we all say, "there's nothing we could have done." These people are mentally ill. They obtained their weapons legally. We have a constitutional right to bear arms that the government can't invade. All of this, and I mean all of it, is complete horseshit.
This is a unique phenomenon in the world, and happens almost exclusively in America, where we rank #1 in mass shootings. Perhaps it's because only in America are our elected officials bought and sold by the NRA, whose goal it is to make sure any person, no matter what, can have a complete arsenal in their living room. The absurdity of it all is astounding. Loopholes to avoid background checks, loopholes to prevent coordination of information on dangerous individuals, loopholes allowing anyone to modify a weapon to make it capable of mass murder in a heartbeat--and meanwhile our children continue to die in schools. Because evidently, "nothing can be done."
There are about a thousand things that could be done, however. Limit availability of automatic weapons, and outlaw modifications to legal weapons that allow for mass casualties in a matter of seconds. REQUIRE background checks and waiting periods. Make people take a test. Make people purchase equipment to ensure safety. Buy back weapons already on the street. Improve our mental health systems by adding money to them, rather than cutting them in order to pay for corporate tax cuts. Improve our child protective services agencies by paying case workers enough money to live on while withstanding the brutalities of one of the hardest jobs on earth. Invest in security and safety measures at schools. I've been sitting here four minutes, and this is how many ideas have come to mind to someone whose job it ISN'T to focus on keeping constituents--even tiny ones who can't vote--safe.
But for God's sake, if our elected leaders can't have any moral courage at all in the face of CHILDREN DYING, then don't vote for them. Here's another idea, for every dollar they take from the NRA, those representatives should have to talk face to face with the mother of one of those children. After that, every dollar should come with a picture of any one of the crime scenes, or the funerals that follow.
Or just vote them out. If they won't do anything, we have to.