After Louisville shooting, it’s time to get out our bullhorns. We’re sick of gun deaths. | Opinion
Have we had enough yet?
Exactly two weeks after a deranged shooter killed six people in Nashville, three of them precious, innocent children, a deranged shooter killed four people in Louisville (the shooter also died), and sent eight more to the hospital.
There have been 131 mass shootings — defined as more than four people dead or injured — THIS YEAR alone, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Almost 10,000 people have died from guns since Jan. 1.
Today made 132. The archive updated its numbers as police gave their final reports.
A tsunami of “thoughts and prayers” from politicians will now roll down, hoping to drown us in distraction from the fact that they could stop this if they wanted to.
If we made them.
How many dead bodies ripped apart by bullets are enough? Does this have to go on until every family in America has lost someone to gun violence? Maybe that could be a high enough threshold for the insane death cult started by the National Rifle Association and upheld by so many of our elected officials.
So when will we have had enough? America, the great and good superpower, looks less and less exceptional on every front, but most of all it’s because any public or private space can at any minute turn into a shooting gallery. Why is that ok with so many people?
Kentucky’s own politicians spent most of this past session freaking out about threats to our children from “liberal grooming,” whatever that means, while ignoring the single biggest threat to their lives.
Sen. Karen Berg, D-Louisville was one of the rare dissenters. On Monday she tweeted: “It is time to address common sense gun legislation. KY requires all guns confiscated in the state to be resold on the open market. Will not even discuss red flag laws in the legislature. No office of gun safety. Thoughts and prayers are not enough! It is past time for action.”
Firearms are now the leading cause of death for children. How can that even be?
A death cult
We don’t yet know much about the motives of the Louisville shooting. But it doesn’t matter.
It’s the guns.
It’s not about anything else, not mental illness, not gender identity, not politics, not social media.
It’s the guns. Right now, we have almost 400 million weapons in this country. That’s more guns than people.
Americans want more common sense gun control measures, like better background checks, but the corrupt figures at the NRA have too much power over our politicians. When two Black representatives in Tennessee took to the House floor with a bullhorn to bring attention to this fact, the GOP majority expelled them.
But once again, gerrymandered political districts do not represent the will of the people, who are sick of seeing people, children, die for nothing but a perverted misunderstanding of our founding fathers. If they could see us now, they would be horrified. How could so many people given so much be so incredibly stupid, and pig-headed not to save themselves and their children?
Maybe there is simply no number of dead bodies that are too many for some twisted sense of freedumb and entitlement that we have.
This column is what we call an evergreen, in that the same one has to be written over and over again. After Uvalde, when 19 children were slaughtered in an elementary school, I wrote: “We can stop this. But it takes enough of us to overcome our torpor, our hopelessness, our inertia, our willingness to believe the lies of the NRA and their worthless ilk. We don’t have to be gaslit anymore to believe a good guy with a gun is better than no guns. (Good guys with guns were on the scene at Uvalde and couldn’t stop the shooter.)“
I also quoted the heroic Shannon Watts, one of the founders of Moms Demand Action, a gun control group. Mass shootings are not acts of nature, like a hurricane, she pointed out. “They’re man-made acts of inaction, of cowardice, of corruption by all lawmakers who refuse to pass laws PROVEN BY DATA to stop preventable, senseless shootings like in Uvalde.”
This one is closer to home. We can do something. We have to do something. I’ve had enough. Have you?
Here’s the site for Moms Demand Action in Ky: https://www.facebook.com/MomsDemandActionKY/.
