Latest School Shooting Too Close to Home
The madness is getting closer. You have enough school shootings–and this was the eighth in the still very young year of 2018–eventually you’re going to be touched.
I was working on Valentine’s Day, which means I shouldn’t have been taking a side trip to CNN, but with the daily train wreck in Washington, it’s hard not to check in from time to time to see if the world is any closer to blowing up. So I checked the headlines and saw something like “Shots Fired in Florida School.” The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School–I know that name. Location Parkland, and I’m sure that’s in Broward County.
Yes it was. We are now on the map of insanity. Right away I began calculating who I know that lives up near Boca, and the likelihood they’d have children at Douglas. So far I’m untouched, probably two whole degrees of separation instead of one. But it’s closer than I’ve been before.
For the rest of the afternoon, I checked the site periodically, unnerved by the report of “numerous fatalities.” Just before leaving for a meeting at 5:30, I saw “2 Confirmed Dead,” and actually felt a little upbeat. Think of that: cheery news that only two lives were snuffed out. Of course when I got back a little after 10:00, that number had ballooned to 17 teachers and students, and the incident was being tagged as one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history. I went to bed knowing that 17 families were shock and tears because of family members who will never come home from school. A dozen more would be sitting anxiously in hospital waiting rooms to learn if a loved one will have lifelong disabilities.
And they’ve got something else in store for them. It won’t take long for the denial machine to begin spewing out its garbage. It won’t take long for the hate mail to arrive, simultaneously claiming the murders never took place while threatening to murder the rest of their family. Why not? The gun-loving fanatics resorted to such tactics after the Sandy Hook massacre. And it took only days after the Las Vegas massacre–58 dead, more than 500 wounded–for the conspiracy nuts to start spreading rumors that it was a hoax.
President Trump is already heading off the gun-control activists by pointing to the shooter’s mental instability. And he is right. Nikolas Cruz threw out plenty of red flags, two of which was forwarded to the FBI. But even then, what could have been done, other than assigning a patrolman to dog Cruz’s steps every minute of the day? They certainly couldn’t take away his AR-15 style firearm, which, according to the Huffington Post, is the weapon of choice for American massacres because it is “designed to kill as efficiently as possible,” getting off as many as 45 rounds per minute. Why couldn’t they take it away? Because last year Trump signed a bill repealing an Obama-era law that restricts the rights of people with mental illness to purchase guns.
So, the Cruz kid was all legal and above-board, and don’t anyone DARE challenge his Second Amendment rights until he actually uses them to murder 17 people. At that point, it is permitted to wring your hands–but not too much lest the deniers come out of the woodwork and accuse the grieving survivors of threatening their rights to amass their large arsenals.
Yes, the madness keeps getting closer. I said two degrees of separation, but there was another incident that makes it only one. A couple years back, someone who hates liberals decided to take out a Unitarian-Universalist church. He was only able to kill two before being tackled, but it was enough for our own UU church to discuss safety precautions. And when I recently noted that one of our members hadn’t been around for a while, I learned that he dropped out, fearing that our strong stand in support of the Black Lives Matters movement would make us a target of violence. So just the fear cost us a member.
When will it get close enough to be too close even for the National Rifle Association and their bought-and-paid-for politicians? I thought when the Las Vegas shooter took aim at a country music concert, that it might be enough to make even the NRA cringe, since country music kind of goes with good old boy mentality. The thought that they might actually have been at the concert: surely that should be enough to make even NRA members agree that the bump stock, which is used to turn a gun into an automatic killing machine, really ought to be taken off the market. You’d think.
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I returned from a rally on Saturday more determined than ever to fight this scourge, and thinking this time we might have a chance. There was not just grief on display; there was rage at the state and federal politicians who value their NRA campaign contributions over the lives of their constituents. There is a movement to get legislation passed in the state to ban assault weapons, and I hope Congress can be shamed into doing the same on the national level. Of course, the politicians say, and are already saying, that now is not time to discuss this, which is the same thing they have said after every mass murder since the Columbine massacre 19 years ago.
I saw the fury unleashed by the Douglas High School survivors. They’re not going to take “shut up” for an answer.
Finally, another thing the pols always say is that gun control would not necessarily have stopped Cruz if he was so determined to go on a killing spree. You can kill with a pistol, or a knife, or a car, or a baseball bat. True. But only assault weapon like Cruz’s AR-15 makes it so easy to kill so many is so short a time. As a case in point, watch this video of a would-be massacre using the kind of weapon that was around when the Second Amendment was written.