‘Sick and tired’ of our country’s inability to control gun violence | Opinion

My heart has been hurting and my eyes have been tearing up since I learned of the Texas school shooting. I am a mother, grandmother, great grandmother, and was a teacher for 28 years.

I cannot begin to imagine the pain, heartbreak, grief, and anger the parents and families of the slain children and teachers must be feeling. This happened within a week of the murders of mostly elderly Buffalo, New York, residents in a grocery store by an unhinged 18 year-old with assault weapons.

I thought for sure, after the Newtown, Connecticut massacre of kindergarteners, first and second graders, their principal and teachers, that finally Congress would act to ban assault-style weapons and approve universal background checks that nine out of every 10 Americans support. It did not.

Mitch McConnell, Republican Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate, would not even allow the bill to come to the floor for debate and a vote. And though Democrats have a Senate majority now only because Vice President Harris can break the 50-50 tie vote between Democrats and Republicans, they must bring the bill to the floor for a vote and force Republicans and conservative Democrats to publicly show where they stand.

We cannot control what happens in other states, but voters can control what happens here in Florida. The media and Floridians in this mid-term election season must force Sen. Marco Rubio to answer some hard questions.

Why?! Why has he refused, since the Newtown Connecticut and Parkland Florida school shootings, to demand and pass gun safety laws in the Senate? Make him explain, as he seeks another six-year term as a U.S. Senator, why he votes against the right to life for children gunned down in schools while voting to hold women and young girls hostage to giving birth to their rapist’s baby.

This has nothing to do with the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The “right to keep and bear arms” is in the same sentence with “a well-regulated militia” enshrined in the Constitution by the framers in 1791 when there were no police forces, and they could not have even imagined laws allowing any mentally ill, angry, criminal, or racist American to massacre innocents with military style assault weapons.

Make Marco Rubio answer for the way he has conspired through his refusal to act to stop the deaths of these victims of gun violence.

Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature must be held to account for putting more and more guns in the hands of people who should not have them, while approving Stand Your Ground laws that give approval to murder unarmed young people like Trayvon Martin.

I am sick and tired of being sick and tired of the U.S. being the capital of the world in mass murders of its own citizens. Sadly, in a country as divided as we are by hate and racism, we can expect more if we do not finally demand that the people we elect do something different.

Dorothy Inman Johnson is a former mayor of Tallahassee and a former educator.

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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: ‘Sick and tired’ of our country’s inability to control gun violence | Opinion