The Myth of the "Good Guy With A Gun"

MAYHEM IN AMERICA

 

Free Fire Zone. 

UPDATE (February 15, 2024): Are we there yet? Have we reached the point where more guns in more hands, and more people with military-style firepower at the tips of their trigger fingers makes us all safer? 

Makes it easier to protect those we love?

 

Once again this week, we have vivid proof that in the United States of America, we are all at risk when we step out in public. During the Vietnam War, “free fire zones” were designated as areas where American forces had permission to open fire, and ask questions later, if they felt threatened. Today, from sea to shining sea, our country has become a “free fire zone.” 

Two days ago, a shooter armed with an AR-15 showed up at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston and started shooting. A 57-year-old man was hit in the leg, but two off-duty officers, providing security, killed the gunwoman. This was Texas where all gun laws (such as automatic background checks on all sales) are considered steps down a straight path to tyranny. So the shooter, who had a history of schizophrenia, was allowed to own military-grade weaponry.

 

Yesterday, of course, we had a shooting at the end of a parade celebrating the third Super Bowl title for the Kansas City Chiefs in the last five years. Once again, one of the shooters is said to have been armed with a “huge assault rifle.” Lisa Lopez-Galvan, who was attending with her son, a Chiefs fan, was shot down and killed. This afternoon, four adults remain in critical condition.

 

A man who was shot at the Chiefs’ victory celebration yesterday, along with his wife and son, says his family saw someone spinning in a circle and spraying bullets into the crowd.

 

Jacob Gooch from Leavenworth, Kansas, told CBS News about his terrifying ordeal: His 13-year-old son was shot in his foot and still has a bullet lodged there; his wife was shot in the calf, which the bullet passed straight through, while he was shot in the ankle and suffered a couple of broken bones.

 

Nine children, ranging in ages from six to fifteen, were hit by gunfire. An unknown number remain in critical condition.Neither Dana Brady, nor her 14-year-old daughter were hit, as they ran for their lives. But mom admitted to a reporter later that she and her children had discussed just this kind of situation – if gunfire erupted at school. Holy f**k. This is where we are in America today. At school, her children knew the key in an active shooter situation was, “To turn off our phones and stay silent.” 

Next lesson: What to do when shooting erupts at a parade. 

Or in church. 

* 

Mass shootings have become so commonplace in this country, that yesterday’s shooting outside an Atlanta high school, that left four more kids bleeding, hardly made a ripple on the news. 

And, as Homer might explain, guns draw men’s hands, or women’s, and they choose to use them.

Expect more bloodshed soon.

UPDATE (October 26, 2023): More guns! More bloodshed! More carnage in America. We could update this post every week. 

Daily, in fact. 

Today, we have another killing spree to report, after police responding to a 911 call in Clinton, North Carolina discover five bodies, one woman and four men, inside a home.

 

And that killing will hardly be noticed. Today, the news is focused on the Wednesday night massacre in Lewiston, Maine. Once again, a man with an AR-15-style weapon wipes out a bunch of innocent victims, this time at a bowling alley, and later a bar. The shooter kills 18, so far, and leaves 13 more wounded. In the bowling alley, one 10-year-old girl is lucky – and only grazed in the leg by a bullet. 

The shooter is still at large when I update this post on Thursday afternoon. At one point today, 50,000 people in Maine were under lockdown, as police combed an area where they thought the killer might be.

So far, there have been 44 mass shooting events in this country – this month! 

(“Mass shootings,” for these purposes, are defined as shootings where four or more are killed and wounded.) 

 

UPDATE (October 15, 2023): In Morganton, North Carolina, a pastor at the River Valley Baptist Church leaves a gun unsecured in his car. His three-year-old finds it and shoots his two-year-old brother in the head. The younger boy was airlifted to the nearest hospital, but dad did say the bullet did not strike his son in the brain, and he was able to talk and still move. 

So, yay for guns! 

September 25. Then we had the case of the Texas man who shot a neighbor through his apartment door, after the man tried to unlock that door by mistake. The victim was only wounded – the problem simply being that he was trying to unlock the right apartment #, but he was on the wrong floor. 

Same day: In DeLeon, Florida, a 78-year-old shoots and kills his neighbor who is trimming trees along their property line. 

September 18: You can be killed in America for all kinds of reasons, in all kinds of places, with people who have ready access to guns. In Florida, for example, an angry ex-tenant shot and killed his former landlord, and wounded the former landlord’s brother, after he was refused a full refund on his rent deposit. It as all a fight over $400; and the shooter hadn’t paid rent for two months. 

Meanwhile, “intimate partner homicides” in this country were up 22%, from 2018 to 2022. A spouse or dating partner is now shot and killed every twelve hours in the United States, which only proves that everyone in a relationship should own an AR-15 if they really want to be safe.

 

UPDATE (August 29, 2023): This is America, where almost anyone, including racist nuts, can get almost any kind of gun.  In Jacksonville, Florida, a white supremacist buys an assault rifle, posts a 27-page screed online, paints Nazi symbols on his weapon, and goes hunting for African Americans. He is turned away from a black college and settles on a Dollar Store as a target. Before the “good guys” have any chance, he shoots and kills three victims, forts up inside when cops arrive, and kills himself. 

Police had been dispatched to the shooter’s residence on a domestic violence call in 2017, and he had been “held during a mental health crisis.” Authorities note that the shooter was “lucid” throughout the attack, wore a bulletproof vest and even allowed white patrons to leave the store alive. 

The obvious question: Is this nation lucid, where guns are concerned? 

At 2 a.m. that same day, a college sophomore in Columbia, South Carolina, was shot dead. Nicholas Donofrio had just moved into a new house, off campus, and in the dark apparently mistook another house for the place he was living. In America the homeowner had to have a gun because the more guns we have the safer we all are. And South Carolina had to have a “stand your ground law” because we should always be ready to shoot first if we feel threatened, and so the 20-year-old was dead in a pool of blood on the front porch. 

Monday, yet another campus, this time at the University of North Carolina, was rocked by gunfire. A suspect is in custody, but police are still “searching for both the weapon and the motive.” 

Motives don’t kill. Guns do. 

A faculty member is dead and the campus spent hours on lockdown, with students even jumping out of the second story of one building, and fleeing to safety. If there is safety in this bloody nation. 

Red states, blue states, red small towns, blue big cities, gunfire continued to punctuate both day and night. In Greenwood, Indiana, police are looking for an “armed and dangerous individual,” after Shawn M. Moran was found shot dead in his garage. Should have had a gun, should have “stood his ground,” for sure. The suspect in his death is his 22-year-old son, who did have a weapon. 

Here in Cincinnati, you can pick and choose your neighborhood and focus on the most recent shootings. One person was wounded in Winton Hills on Monday, another left bleeding at the Super Laundry in Paddock Hills later that day (should have had a gun tucked in with his dirty socks, fabric  softener and detergent), and two more were wounded early Tuesday in – again – Walnut Hills. 

As always, there was blood everywhere in America, to end last week and begin this. In Chapmanville, W. Va., a suspected murder-suicide left husband and wife dead. A shooting in Mansfield, Ohio left four persons bleeding, including one who would die. There was a shooting at a high school football game in Oklahoma, that left one spectator in critical condition, and there was a fourth-inning shooting, at a Chicago White Sox games that left two female fans bleeding in the bleachers. In Boston, multiple weapons were recovered, and a Caribbean Festival was spoiled, after gunfire erupted, and “at least seven people” were struck by fire. Finally, in Tennessee, a four-year-old is dead after she wakes her mother from a nap. Mom told police  she was teaching the child a “firearms safety lesson” when the weapon discharged. Guilty or not, the woman has been charged with murder, and Evangaline Gunter will never meet her kindergarten teacher.

Evangaline.

UPDATE (July 22, 2023): IF YOU PLAN a birthday party in a park in Houston, Texas, be sure to have candles for the cake, matches, and cool napkins. 

 

“Several people produced firearms.” 

Also, bring guns – because the more guns in America, the safer we all will be. Police say that some kind of altercation occurred on Saturday afternoon, at Margaret Jenkins Park. “Several people produced firearms and began shooting. Autumn Vallian, 21, five months pregnant, was killed. Four others were wounded, including two shooters. One victim was only grazed by a bullet and did not go to the hospital.

___ 

 

UPDATE (7/10/23): YESTERDAY, a man riding a scooter through the streets of New York City opened fire at random, killing one person, and wounding three. 

Today, while driving his wife to work, Zane Jones flipped the bird to a driver who nearly crashed into his minivan. This was Texas, however, where everyone can have a gun, and the other driver fired several shots at Mr. Jones. He was unharmed, but one bullet struck his wife, Paola, in the head. She died a few hours later at the hospital. And the shooter has not yet been found.

___ 

UPDATE (July 8, 2023): We could update this post daily in modern America, hourly in fact. There’s always more blood going to be shed. And Republicans are never going to lift so much as a battle dressing to stem the flood. 

Seven.

 And what July Fourth in modern America would be complete without a mass shooting or two? Or twenty-two. Over the long weekend, gunfire erupted in at least seventeen states, leaving twenty dead and a hundred other Americans, of all races, creeds, colors, genders, sizes, shapes, and ages, wounded. 

In Philadelphia, a shooter armed with an AR-15 style rifle, wearing body armor, and concerned about “the loss of freedoms,” roamed a main street, randomly shooting other Americans. (Five killed, four wounded).

 

In May, [the suspect] shared posts from pro-gun groups supporting former President Donald Trump and the Second Amendment. In June, he shared a mocking video of a speech by President Joe Biden and added his view that Biden was trying to “take our arms.”

 

He posted on the same day, “The only thing more terrifying than blindness is being the only one who can see.”

 

We don’t post the names of killers, or alleged killers; but according to right-wingers, every killing in a “Democrat-run city” is the Democrats’ fault. 

Whereas the mayor of Philadelphia says “ghost gun” confiscations in his city have increased 300% in the last three years. These guns can be bought in kits, online, with no background check required, just as the NRA has always wanted – and Republicans have always wanted, ever since they knew the NRA and gun companies would give them fat campaign donations, and help keep them in office.

 

Other mass shootings occurred in Fort Worth, Texas, where gunmen opened fire on hundreds gathered for a block party (three dead, eight wounded), Fort Lauderdale, Florida (five wounded), Shreveport, Louisiana (four dead, seven injured), Truman, Minnesota (four wounded), Saint Ann, Missouri (likely a domestic violence incident, with three killed, and one child wounded), and Wichita, Kansas (nine wounded when a gunman opened fire in a nightclub). 

That’s seven examples. You can look up the other fifteen yourself. Anyway, “thoughts and prayers,” as the gun lovers like to say. 

Finally, it’s not a “mass shooting,” but it’s a typical story in America today. In Tampa, Florida, a July 4 argument over jet skis ends in gunfire (one person dead, a 7-year-old boy, one wounded). 

The shooter is on the loose – “proving” once again that more guns make us all safer – and isn’t Florida’s “permitless carry” law, which went into effect just three days before, the perfect answer to all the violence in that state and every other bloody corner of this land. 

The boy was killed when his grandfather tried to put him in his truck for safety, and covered his head with a hand. A bullet passed through grandpa’s hand and killed the child, Yitzian Torres Garcia. 

Seven. 

 

UPDATE (June 2, 2023): More guns continue to make us less safe when a gas station owner in South Carolina shoots and kills 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton. He believes the boy has shoplifted several bottles of water. 

According to police, the deceased hadn’t shoplifted…any. 

In related news, the National Rifle Association – which doesn’t want the government to be able to take any guns away – has a new solution. Fearing that “red flag” laws might be used to take away guns from perfectly harmless Americans, the NRA, instead, is pushing Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee to focus on laws that allow the state to commit people without their permission if they pose “a substantial likelihood of serious harm” due to a “mental illness or serious emotional disturbance.” 

But making them pass a background before getting the gun, or taking the gun away when they are first identified as a potential threat – and not locking them up unnecessarily? Ooooo no. That would be the end of the Second Amendment.

 

UPDATE (5/28/23): A recent story about schools in Grand Rapids, Michigan and elsewhere banning backpacks sent me on a quest for more information. In Grand Rapids, four guns had been turned up in schools this year – most recently, a loaded pistol in a third grader’s backpack. 

 

Fewer backpacks, more armed guards at our schools. 

The same story noted that the DeSoto Independent School District in Texas was one of several other districts across the country banning backpacks for safety reasons. So I did an internet search to see what was going on in the Lonestar State. At first, I didn’t find what I was looking for – the recent story. I did learn that a seventh grader brought a gun to a school (twice) in a similarly named DeSoto district in Missouri in 2021. And you had two guns in a kid’s car, at DeSoto High in Kansas, in May 2022. Finally, I found the Texas story. Backpacks were indeed banned, starting on April 24, as a preemptive measure. “I think when you look at the activity around school safety, just in general across the country,” said a spokesperson for the DeSoto Independent School District, “there is genuine concern around how do we keep schools safe.”  

And, as always, one story about guns led to links to several others: a fatal shooting at a park in Lewisville, Texas. 

And there were four dead and wounded after a shooting at a strip club, Temptations Cabaret, in Aledo, Tx. 

And then you had the story, also from Texas, where lawmakers have just passed a bill that will require that an armed security officer be posted at every school in the state. Because, really, more guns in America are working great to keep all of us – even the children we love – safer. Like when we go to the park for a job, or go out for a drink and gawk at the scantily-clad ladies. 

So: Texas will cover its 8,997 elementary schools, and its 4,494 middle schools. It will put guards at 3,729 high schools. And I assume at 840 public charter schools. I imagine the 11,738 private schools in Texas will have to pay for their guards themselves. And since we can’t do anything else about guns in Texas, let alone America, because even the most minor change to gun control laws means, ipso facto, that the commies want to take away all our 400 million guns and melt them down and beat them into chains, and march all patriotic Americans off to some gulag,  I guess we should post guards at all the pre-schools in Texas, too. That would be another 14,943 facilities. 

 

UPDATE (5/27/23): This gun-related story was so absurd, I thought it deserved an update all of its own. 

 

Who ate the last Hot Pocket? 

Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy from eating the last Hot Pocket. A Kentucky man got angry when his roommate did, an argument ensued, and the hungry roommate got his gun. When the satiated roommate tried to leave the apartment, the famished fellow shot the bad guy “in the ass.” 

This incident – thankfully not fatal – is so typical of the gun problem in America that I thought it deserved its own update.

UPDATE (May 21, 2023): Finally, a story about guns in America with a happy ending! Sort of. A three-year-old finds a loaded pistol at home, picks it up, and fires by mistake. The bullet wounds two. 

 

Stop a bullet with a book about gays or gender? 

No. Wait. This is a good story. Considering this is America. Where the good toddler with a gun stops a bad guy… 

One of the persons wounded is a suspect in a murder investigation. When he goes to Urgent Care to get patched up, a little digging reveals his identity. Doctors staunch the bleeding. And the suspect is arrested. 

See: More guns in more hands in more places every day do make us safer and if every child could have a gun and fire it by mistake, the sky’s the limit, safety-wise. Mom was wounded too, but hey, this is America. 

What else made us safer this month? How about the 15-year-old with the AR-15? You know this is going to be good. What teen doesn’t need to be able to get his/her/they** hands on an assault rifle. 

And ammo. 

And take the gun and ammo to school – some of that ammo being hidden in the young person’s lunch box. You know like a kid brings a PB&J sandwich and a few Oreo cookies. The scene: Bostrom High School, Phoenix, Arizona. Maybe the conspiracy nuts, like Alex Jones, will claim this was another “hoax,” a government set up, like Sandy Hook Elementary School. Or Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green will mock other teens at Bostrom High who were scared – like she mocked a survivor of the Parkland, Florida school slaughter. She called one survivor an “idiot” and said everything he said about the massacre was “scripted,” and it was all a con job.

George Mason and gun control?

 

Did you know Arizona prohibits minors from owning guns unless parents give permission? Well, screw that. Did the Founding Fathers ever say minors could not own guns? They DID NOT. In fact, Massachusetts, in colonial days, beginning in 1636, required males, ages 16 to 60 to join the militia. 

All the better to kill a few Indians. 

Okay. Sure. Get picky. The colony of Virginia banned gun ownership by blacks in 1640. In 1712, the statute was revised, and Negroes, Mulattos and Indians were all banned from owning firearms. 

Even better, in 1792, Virginia excluded blacks from joining…the militia. Virginia! Home of Founding Fathers like George Washington, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson. Also George Mason! 

(Look him up – he’s the father of the Bill of Rights.)

 

We know Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, both Floridians who want to be our next president, love the Second Amendment more than they love Oreos for lunch. In the good old days, when America was still great, Florida didn’t mess around. When the state was still in diapers, homes of slaves and free blacks could be searched for guns, and if found the guns could be confiscated. In 1828, a free black person could carry a gun, but only with court permission. 

Well, ignore all of that. Today we need more and more guns – to protect us from more and more people with more and more guns. 

Do you go to a birthday party, for example, without your pistol? Not if you understand the Second Amendment. In Birmingham, Alabama this past week an argument over who got to cut the cake, or who led off with the “Happy Birthday” song, ended with four persons shot. One dead. Three wounded. 

 

**Above we used the formula: “he/she/they” to describe an unspecified person. But in America today, Republicans are doing all they can to keep us safe from pronouns. No referring to a transgender person as “they.” Also, in Florida, all guns must now be legal, but you will not say be allowed to say “gay.” 

Books about gay children and gay parents, and gender will be banned. Even though a child with a good thick book about gays, or a transgender kid might be able to stop a bullet in school, if he or she or “they” held it up at just the right time.

UPDATE (5/10/23): No sense arguing about gun control anymore. Republicans aren’t budging. 

Time for a new approach to the problem, one GOP gun lovers will love: Body armor for toddlers. 

You are taking your family to the mall to exchange clothing gifts your six-year-old son received for his birthday. All family members don body armor, including size “three-years” for your youngest son. Add Kevlar helmets. Mom, put your Glock in your purse. Dad, insert a 30-round magazine in your AR-15. 

Now, when a neo-Nazi crackpot pulls up in the parking lot, jumps out of his car, and opens fire without warning, you’ll have a chance to return fire. 

In recent days, a mass shooting at a mall in Allen, Texas does leave a family of four drenched in blood, with only the six-year-old surviving. Victims include Kyu Song Cho, 37, his wife Cindy Cho, 35, and their 3-year-old son, James. William Cho, alone, survives the massacre. 

In all, the neo-Nazi kills eight, including a mall security guard, and wounds seven. The killer had been discharged from the U.S. Army in 2008, having failed even to complete training, due to mental health issues. But this was America – in particular, Texas – and the more guns the merrier. The shooter was wearing body armor, including a patch that read RWDS, short for “Right Wing Death Squad.” 

And he had the favorite gun of all mass murderers: the AR-15.

 

So, William is an orphan, and sure to suffer years of torment at the memory. The security guard had a gun, but he couldn’t stop the bad guy. 

And, of course, our politicians can’t lift a finger to help. Today, there was a shooting inside a hospital in Virginia. One person dead. Two days ago: a shooting at a rapid transit station in Dallas left three victims bleeding, one of whom died. This past Sunday, it was a good guy with a gun, St. Croix County Sheriff’s Deputy Kaitie Leising , 29, shot dead after she tried to question a possible drunk driver. 

“We will miss her infectious smile and personality,” another police officer explained in the wake of the tragedy. 

The day before that there was a mass shooting at a party near a college campus, in Chico, California. A 17-year-old girl was killed. Five other partygoers were wounded. Those five were ages 17, 18, 19, 20 and 21. 

And we might as well throw in the incident in a Fort Lauderdale Walmart, where one employee tried to stop another from attack a third employee, a female. And the attacker shot the good Samaritan. 

The solution again: Body armor. Body armor for parties. (And make it sexy, ladies. Body armor for nurses and doctors and patients at hospitals. Body armor for police stopping…out wait, we have that. 

Body armor for every American, everywhere.

Finally, for today: Body armor for McDonald’s workers. On May 4, in Moultrie, Georgia, a 26-year-old killed his 74-year-old grandmother, his 50-year-old mother, and then drove across town to cut down the 41-year-old manager at a local McDonald’s. Then the young man shot himself. 

Four more lives wasted. And it goes on and on and on. Republicans? What are they worried about? They want to make sure kids don’t read books about gay people in school, not even gay kids reading about people like themselves. 

That’s our latest update. We will, of course, have another soon.

 

UPDATE (May 1, 2023): We could update this post hourly in America. We could discuss gun violence endlessly. So let’s try to make a few simple points once more. Maybe someday we can convince a few Republicans to support sensible gun reforms.

“Iron itself can draw men’s hands,” Homer wrote – in the days when swords were the weapon of choice during arguments and other kinds of combat. If a person carried a sword, in times of danger – and imagined danger – in times of fear – of anger – or when moved by hate – that person naturally reached for the sword.

So, in American, in recent days, we see this again and again. Two food delivery workers for Instacartturn up the wrong driveway in Southwest Ranches, Florida. A well-armed homeowner, more and more like so many of our citizens, perceives he’s under threat. Maybe the workers plan to whack him with a can of corn. He opens fire – luckily only putting a few holes in their auto.

Not so lucky: four girls go looking for a friend’s house in rural Hebron, N.Y. They too find the wrong driveway. The homeowner steps out on his porch, sees them turn around, and fires two shots at their car, killing Kaylin Gillis, 20.

Just two days earlier, a young man in Kansas City, Ralph Yarl, 16, rings the doorbell at the right house number, but on 115th Street, when he goes to pick up his younger siblings. An 84-year-old man, living at the same address on 115th Terrace Street, opens the door and opens fire.

Yarl is badly wounded.

(“Iron draws the feeble hand.”)

The toll is endless – the inaction of our lawmakers also. That is: Republican lawmakers who love their guns and their gun lobby campaign donations, more than their constituents. In Antioch, Illinois, one neighbor gets mad at another, in some way related to the use of a leaf blower – and shoots the man tiding up his lawn dead. In Elgin, Texas, four cheerleaders who are making a carpool drop off, commit another harmless mistake. One hops into a car she thinks is hers in a supermarket parking lot. A man is seated in the passenger, and the girl realizes her mistake, and quickly exits. She retreats to the car of her friends, the man follows, some type of altercation follows, and the man fires into the vehicle. Two girls are wounded, including Payton Washington, whose condition is critical. At a Sweet-16 birthday party in Dadeville, Alabama even more blood is spilled. The unwrapping of presents comes to a halt when gunfire erupts.

Four dead. Twenty injured.

Gun lovers will soon argue that the Second Amendment protects the right to shoot at people if at a party you are denied a second piece of birthday cake.

And so it goes. Gun massacres: A man in West Bath, Maine kills both his parents, and starts shooting people on a highway at random. Four dead, three wounded. Gun accidents: A San Antonio, Texas toddler knocks a pistol off a shelf and when it hits the ground it goes off, the bullet striking the child in the head. Another senseless death in America. And a school shooting to add to the mix: A 14-year-old Knoxville, Tennessee boy, rummaging in his book bag, accidently cause a gun he’s hiding to fire, the bullet “merely” grazing the teacher. Kids being almost murdered. A basketball game in Gastonia, N.C. end in tragedy, when a group of youngsters let a ball roll into a neighbor’s yard. A 26-year-old chases the children down the street, wounds a 6-year-old, and cuts down both the girl’s parents.

And the shooter in Maine had a previous gun felony conviction in Florida, five years ago, and should not have been allowed to possess any firearms.

Finally, we have the essence of our problem. In Texas, late at night, a man is firing his AR-15 in his front yard. Exercising his Second Amendment rights, I suppose. His neighbor asks him to desist. A baby is trying to sleep.

But iron draws the hand again. This time a crazy hand.

The man with the AR-15 storms into his neighbor’s home and starts shooting everyone he can find. Five are killed, including Daniel Enrique Laso, a 9-year-old boy. Two of the dead were mothers, who died shielding their small children with their bodies.

Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.

Isn’t that what the gun lovers all say?

As for Governor Greg Abbott, he captures the heart and soul of the GOP response to all the endless bloodshed. He announces that a $50,000 reward is being offered for apprehension of the suspect who “killed 5 illegal immigrants Friday.”

See? Not Abbott’s fault – all this bloodshed in his own state. It’s just a few illegal immigrants. No big deal, really.

Guess Daniel Enrique and his relatives were the problem all along.

F**king GOP!

On Saturday, April 29, a college baseball player for Texas A&M was stuck by a stray bullet while standing in the outfield during a game in Texarkana, smack dab right there in Gov. Abbott’s state.

The player, Matthew Delaney is partially paralyzed and in critical condition, as a result. But sure. More guns in more hands make all of us safer. 

UPDATE (3/27/23): What’s the use? We know that Republicans are going to block each and every attempt to get a handle on gun violence in America. In fact, they’re going to keep making it easier for every man, woman, and child in America to get their hands on guns, until we’re all shooting it out over parking spaces at the grocery.

They’re not going to do anything, save speak in platitudes.

Today, March 27, 2023, a woman walks into Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. She’s heavily armed and kills three students and three staff members. The victims: 9-year-olds Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney, 61-year-old Cynthia Peak, 60-year-old Katherine Koonce, and 61-year-old Mike Hill. The killer is carrying two f**king assault style weapons.

And a f**king handgun.

This is not to be confused with the mass shooting (two dead, five wounded) in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the dark hours of Sunday, March 26.

Or the one at an off-campus house party in Macomb, Illinois (one killed, ten injured), which exploded on March 25.

This still not the shooting you might have heard about, on March 22, when a student at a  high school in Denver pulled a gun during a search and shot and wounded two school employees. One victim was said to be in stable condition, the other was critical.

The shooter, 17, soon escaped; but he was later found dead, almost surely a result of suicide.

(He had been expelled from another high school in Aurora, Colorado, the year before, because he brought a gun to school there too.)

And don’t mix it up with the shooting that left five dead – including three more children – apparently the result of a domestic dispute. That was in Sumter, South Carolina, on March 20.

Really, this post may prove to be immortal. Nothing can be done because the gun absolutists believe that anything that is done, no matter how minimal, means the government really plans to take ALL their guns away. 

So, let the flow of blood continue….

*

NEWS FLASH: REP. BARRY MOORE (R-AL.) ANNOUNCED ON FEBRUARY 22, THAT HE WOULD BE SPONSORING LEGISLATION TO MAKE THE AR-15 THE “NATIONAL GUN OF AMERICA.”

MOORE REVEALED HIS PLAN DURING A VISIT TO THE FAMILY FIREARMS STORE IN TROY, ALABAMA.

“THEANTI-SECOND AMENDMENT GROUP WON’T STOP UNTIL THEY TAKE AWAY ALL YOUR FIREARMS,” HE CLAIMED. “ONE RULE TO REMEMBER: ANY GOVERNMENT THAT WOULD TAKE AWAY ONE RIGHT WOULD TAKE THEM ALL.”

FUN FACT: In the State of Alabama, no one, not even Rep. Moore, may carry brass knuckles or slingshots concealed on their person, subject to fine and up to six months in prison.

Nor may any person sell a pistol or bowie knife to a minor.

Nor may any person carry a “rifle or shotgun walking cane.”

Also forbidden, “possession or sale of brass or steel teflon-coated handgun ammunition” in that state.

Possession of a gun in “a police, sheriff or highway patrol station” is not allowed.

A person may not carry a gun in a psychiatric facility. Or a courthouse. Short-barreled rifles and shotguns are prohibited.

In fact, under Section 13A-11-72, in Moore’s own state, “No person who is a drug addict or an habitual drunkard shall own a pistol or have one in his or her possession or under his or her control.”

(So: gun controls of certain kinds are possible?)

Rep. Thomas Massie and his family.
(They adore their guns.)

***

SADLY, THIS IS AMERICA, and this post may prove eternal. Every time I think all points worth making have been made, fresh evidence pours out in O+ and A and AB blood. More guns in America haven’t made us safer – and never can. 

The “good guy with the gun” is a myth, a pipe dream providing false comfort, and cover for a gun lobby happy to keep doing what they do.

Which is: Selling death.

(Including gun murders and gun suicides, Congressman Moore’s state has the fifth worst death rate in the United States.)

____________________

“Iron draws the hand.” 

Unknown writer, 1500s

explaining how the possession of swords led men to fight

____________________ 

 

Last Thursday, I thought my post was nearly complete – a little proofreading, and done. Then, on Friday morning, I read that the 3-year-old son of a Florida prison guard had picked up an unsecured gun on his parent’s nightstand and fatally shot himself. Later that day, a shooter opened fire at a Shell station in Georgia. Nine children, including a five-year-old, were struck. Then an angry 52-year-old white guy in Mississippi went on a rampage and killed six. (That state, next to Moore’s state, has the worst gun deaths rate of any of the fifty states.) His victims were cut down at three separate locations, including a convenience store and two homes, and included his ex-wife, and her new husband – who did at least survive.

And that doesn’t even count the guy who tried to bring a loaded assault-style rifle and 163 rounds of ammunition onto a plane at Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans.

Last Saturday was just as bloody. We had a road rage incident in Chicago, on I-57. Three dead, including a one-year-old girl. Three wounded. A shooting along the route of a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans. Five people stuck  by gunfire. One killed. Two shooting incidents in Memphis – one dead, ten injured. Murder-suicide in New Jersey. Four dead, including two teens. Temple University police officer shot and killed. Officer Christopher Fitzgerald leaves a wife and four grieving children behind. Finally, Bishop David O'Connell, known as a “peacemaker” in Los Angeles, was found shot dead in his home.

All in one typical American day.

On Monday: a gun story with a twist (and no one dead, thank god). A third grader in Rising Star, Texas (the state where more guns are always the solution), finds a loaded weapon in the school bathroom. Who left it there? School Superintendent Robby Stuteville, who says he and the principle of Rising Star Elementary often “open carry on campus.” Because more good guys with guns will absolutely make us safe!

(Stuteville has resigned.)

And that story isn’t the same as the story of the six-year-old in Pennsylvania, who brought his mom’s loaded semi-automatic pistol to school, but first showed it off to all the other kids on the bus.

*

Slaughter at Michigan State.

A week ago, today, I had thought I’d be able to wrap up my post, after a shooter with “a history of animus toward the Jewish community,” opened fire near an L.A. synagogue, wounding one victim. 

(He had also struck before, wounding one.)

On Wednesday, I knew, blood had been spilled at a mall in El Paso, Texas. One dead. Three wounded.

On Valentine’s Day, they had to mop up blood on the campus of Michigan State. Three dead. Five wounded. Some of those five, police announced, had “life-threatening injuries.” The shooter, a 43-year-old man, with no affiliation to the school, also killed himself. (So, four dead, in all.) Two of his victims were cut down at Berkey Hall. A third was killed at the MSU Union. The killer simply walked in on a class in session and started spraying bullets, before anyone could even react.

The motive – or lack of – doesn’t matter. This is America, where nothing can be done about guns.

Just as the Founding Fathers wanted it.

(Well: they did say slaves couldn’t have guns.)

Today, we are constantly informed that only a “good guy” with a gun can stop a “bad guy” with a gun. Every GOP politician spews the same tired line. The “originalists” on the U.S. Supreme Court agree. You can’t f**k with anything the Founding Fathers said or did. Even though one of those “originalists” is Justice Clarence Thomas – as clueless a jurist as ever donned black robe. Several of the Founding Fathers, Jefferson, Madison, and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, to name a few, would have happily owned his dumb ass, back in 1789, when the Constitution was adopted, and slavery was a fad.

Wait! Is that just “critical race theory,” what I said? Well, don’t worry. The GOP will keep us safe from…knowledge.

Just not guns.

On the campus of Michigan State three innocent young Americans are dead. And the Republicans are hard at work, scaring us all. Not about guns. No. They want us to live in fear because transgender individuals might be watching us pee. And you know what the Founding Fathers said!

Actually, nothing about transgenders at all.

Philosophical query: Can a “good person with a gun” still be a good person with a gun, if they/them are transgender folk?

I wish Alexander Hamilton was still here, so we could ask him. Only he got gunned down in by a nut in 1804.

Dueling! Maybe that’s the ticket. The Founding Fathers were cool with challenging each other to fights. Why not bring back pistols at ten paces? Good enough for the Founding Fathers. Then it’s good enough for us.

*

Arming teachers – great plan!

This is America. In 2023. And nothing can be done. According to the gun lovers, such as the lobbyists for Smith & Wesson, if we make every buyer in the land register the guns they buy, then Joe Biden will be knocking at our doors tomorrow, and he will be there to take away all of our guns. Every one!!! Just like that guy Obama, was going to take away all of our guns. But he never took one.

Thank God, Republicans like President Donald J. Trump, and Governor Ron DeSantis, and Sen. Ted Cruz are on alert!

In America, only the good guy with the gun can stop the bad guy with the AR-15, because President Trump spent his four years in the White House winning the bloody “War on Christmas.” Luckily, he saved the tinsel and ornaments. Now we can keep saying, “Merry Christmas,” whenever we want.

Even on the Fourth of July. Or when we talk in our sleep. Maybe right before we are gunned down on campus, or walking down the street.

Nothing can be done about guns. Not in America. Not now. Not ever. What we really need are more guns! For example, if we want to stop school shootings, we should arm all the teachers. That’s the gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Wayne LaPierre, head of the National Rifle Association.

We should ask Abigail Zwerner, an elementary school teacher in Newport News, Virginia, how that might work. She was shot and badly wounded in her classroom last month – by a bad guy with a gun.

Only the shooter in this case, the bad guy with a gun, was a six-year-old boy in Zwerner’s class.

Zwerner was in the middle of a lesson when the student pulled a gun from his bookbag and purposely aimed at her. Zwerner threw up a hand. The child fired – as he had planned. The bullet passed through her hand and struck her in the chest. A second teacher (not armed), heard the commotion, entered the room, and calmly disarmed the boy. Zwerner had the presence of mind to lead her class out of the room, go to the main office, and tell staff to call 9-1-1. Then she collapsed.

If only she had been armed! She could have returned fire and stopped that six-year-old dead in his tracks.

*

Ban plastic straws, not AR 15s.

I keep adding to this damn list, every time there’s another especially egregious massacre in America, because I can’t believe we can’t come up with a better plan than what we have in place. I don’t think the solution is ever going to be blasting holes in six-year-old “bad guys,” even assuming the good guys see the bad guy coming in time. And also assuming that the good guys have the firepower necessary to stop the kind of bad guys who increasingly like to show up, with AR-15s in hand.

Hamburgers! That’s the real threat!

According to Republicans, guns aren’t the problem. Guns are fun. Democrats hate fun. They want to take away all the hamburgers. Lock and load, patriots! Time to defend the condiments!

Also, those commie bastards want to take our plastic straws.

This is exactly why we need more guns!!! Or more politicians who see the threat to all our freedoms – and straws – and plan to act!!!

For example: Oklahoma State Senator Nathan Damm. Sen. Damm was not going to let the “leftist loons” take away paper straws. And so he introduced legislation in 2021, to ban plastic straws in his state.

You can pry my cold dead hands off...my straw?

Thankfully, we have leaders Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, a man who keeps making it easier for people to buy guns, and carry guns, and sleep with guns at night, fondling them, as it were.

Luckily, Tony Earls was carrying a gun when he and his wife were robbed at a Houston A.T.M. not long ago. As the bad guy made his getaway, Earls managed to unlimber his weapon and open fire. Unfortunately, he missed the bad guy with the gun. Instead, he hit 9-year-old Arlene Alvarez, who was riding in the passenger seat of her dad’s car and happened to be passing by.

Earls didn’t mean to kill the girl; but this was Texas, where even the biggest fool can have a gun.

So he did.

Again, nothing can be done. Conservative lawmakers are too busy with more pressing matters. We can’t keep guns out of peoples’ hands, but we can make them drop the dangerous books! If a teacher has a book called My Two Dads and Me, in a classroom in Florida, that teacher can be stopped. You can’t say “gay” in Florida. Not even if you have a gay student seated six feet away.

Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a book about non-traditional families, that some child in a non-traditional family – or a friend of that child in class – might want to read or…horrors…discuss!

That is definitely something the Founding Fathers included in the U.S. Constitution – I am almost sure.

*

What if the “bad guy” with the gun is dad?

Let’s look at a sampling of the places where, theoretically, more guns should make us safer. But don’t. We already have a sh*tload of guns in this country, and still we’re not close to being secure.

Earlier this week, there was a shooting at a gas station in Louisville, Mississippi. One person was killed, five hurt. Every good guy getting gas should have had a gun and opened fire. That would have stopped the bad guy for sure.

(And maybe an innocent bystander or two.)

As the saying goes, if we ban guns, only bad guys will have guns. So, could we make everybody who buys a gun get a license to own the gun? No! Then only people with licenses will have guns. What next! Are we going to make drivers get licenses? The Founding Fathers never said you needed a license to hitch up a horse to your wagon and take off at a top speed of eight mph.

So take that, “woke liberals,” who want to destroy everything good in America, with your “wokeness.”

Whatever that is.

There were four mass shootings (defined as shootings in which at least four people were wounded or killed) in America on February 5, alone. A total of four Americans were killed, and fourteen wounded.

But absolutely nothing can be done.

There was a deadly shooting at a house party in Huntsville, Texas, the state where more guns make more Texans safe, on February 4. Two dead. Two wounded. Every good guy or girl at the party should have been packing heat. Then you had the shooting in Frost, also in Texas, after a father shot and killed his 12-year-old twins, and then shot himself dead.

Dad is often the bad guy with the gun.

The list of places where more guns should have made more Americans safer – but didn’t – grows with every bloody sunrise. Nothing can be done. Conservatives want us all to have guns. They don’t want us to have to listen to a singer at the Super Bowl belt out “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” That is some woke-ass sh*t, and if the singing isn’t stopped, America will never be America again.

Also, the kneeling during the National Anthem. The real anthem. That kneeling had to be stopped.

Guns aren’t the problem. Kneeling sports figures are.

In Lakeland, Florida, a “targeted shooting” in January left eleven wounded, two critically, including one victim shot in the face.

A shooting on January 28, at an AirBnB near Beverly Hills, California, left three dead, and four wounded.

A bloody incident in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on January 23, left four people leaking bodily fluids. Police said the shooting was not random, and the general public need not be alarmed. As opposed to the other shooting in the same town, on a Sunday night in December 2022. That shooting was random, and ended with two victims wounded, and the suspect shooter dead.

The moral of the story, one would suppose: No good guy with a gun should ever trust a person they don’t know.

Or a person they do.

*

Enough to arm the U.S. military ten times.

Look. This is America. We already have 400 million guns in private hands. We have 25 million assault-style rifles. That’s enough AR-15-type weaponry to arm every member of the U.S. military.

Ten f**king times.

Yet, it’s still not enough to keep us or those we love safe from harm. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the Founding Fathers didn’t know sh*t. And if you’re afraid of Joe Biden coming to grab all the guns, you suck at math. There are enough guns out there for every American to carry at least one.

Nowhere are we safe. Even the proverbial “good guy with a gun” can be cut down trying to stop a heavily armed killer. In Buffalo, New York, a murderer stormed a Tops grocery store. A security guard – a former police lieutenant armed with a handgun – tried to shoot it out with the marauder. The 18-year-old killer had driven two hundred miles, with racist intent in his heart, because he knew the store cliental and staff were almost exclusively African American. He wore body armor, and carried a semi-automatic weapon, and killed the guard. 

(“Blue lives” do matter, by the way.) 

Next, he gunned down a dozen shoppers and employees, killing and wounding a total of thirteen. 

On May 24, last year, a second 18-year-old walked into an elementary school in Uvalde, (Texas again), and used a pistol and rifle to carry out an all-American killing spree. Two teachers were killed. Nineteen students – third and fourth graders – were massacred. 

And in that case, scores of good guys arrived at the scene and milled around outside while the killer did his ghoulish work.

Amerie: one of 21 victims.

On Fox News they responded to that story by ignoring guns and talking about “moral rot” in society. Somehow, that rot was Democrats’ fault, too. Right-wing crazies painted the massacre as a “false flag.” Sen. Ted Cruz went so far as to complain that Democrats were using the slaughter of elementary school children and teachers to “politicize” tragedy. 

F**k Ted Cruz. 

Trump?

As president he routinely used shootings to score political points. His first reaction when there was blood in the streets, was to politicize if he could. He loved to talk about illegal immigrants shooting people. See, for example: The tragic death of Kate Steinle – shot by mistake on a pier in San Francisco. The president did not talk about the white guy in Kansas, born in America, who walked into a bar and opened fire on patrons, killing one, wounding another, because he thought his targets were Muslims – but weren’t.  Trump loved to attack “Democrat-run cities,” and blame the other side for a rising tide of blood. He was scheduled to speak at the NRA convention …in Houston, Texas …the same week all those kids and teachers were cut down. 

Those 21 people in Uvalde were irrevocably dead. The tears on the faces of their loved ones had not yet dried. Surviving classmates and teachers would be traumatized for life. “Robb Elementary School” had been added to the gory American list that always grows and grows. Parkland. Sandy Hook. Columbine. Trump and Cruz and the NRA didn’t lift a trigger finger to help.

This might have helped. Wayne LaPierre, the well-salaried boss of the NRA, should have been required to skip the convention and attend the funerals of the victims of mayhem in Uvalde, instead. 

* 

You can be shot anywhere, at any time, by anyone, for any reason. 

I have tried to redo this post multiple times; but nothing changes, except that the catalogue of crimes grows longer. I re-did it when we had fresh red-stain evidence of our dilemma, by way of – among other incidents – a shooting at Oxford High School, in Oakland County, Michigan. 

There, a 15-year-old opened fire, killing four classmates, and wounding six, and one teacher. 

According to USA Today it was the 28^th school shooting in the U.S. in 2021. In just 2021. At Oxford High, police counted thirty spent shell-casings. The suspect had eighteen rounds left. Sixty ambulances responded to the scene. Sixty. Americans know from harrowing experience, what carnage may await. One of the victims, a teen girl, died in the back of a squad car on the way to the hospital. The shooter was taken into custody within five minutes of the moment he opened fire. 

Even the really good guys can only do so much.

On October 24, 2022, the Michigan teen responsible for that butchery confessed to murder in court. We learned that his parents bought the gun for him, with money the boy saved, four days before he turned it on classmates. On the day of the shooting, the killer brought the gun, and plenty of rounds, to school in a backpack. He loaded it inside a bathroom and came out blazing.

Earlier in the day, his parents had been called to school.

A guidance counselor testified in hearings earlier… that he had summoned the couple and urged them to seek counseling for their son, who had been discovered in class with violent drawings of a gun, a bloody figure and the words “help me” and “my life is useless.”

The parents failed to act.

At this point, we all know gun violence in America is epidemic. On a typical day in Dallas, a 31-year-old man was arrested and charged with the murder of his friend, Asia Womack, 21, after she beat him in a game of basketball. 

It can explode during half time at a high school basketball game in Tennessee. (One killed. One wounded. An 18-year-old shooter in cuffs.) 

The day before, there was a killing in Philadelphia. Samir Jefferson, 14, was waiting at a bus stop when two assailants fired at least 36 shots, striking him eighteen times. 

If we are obsessed with good guys with guns vs. bad guys with guns, we can include the murder of Sara Pierce, a Virginia wife and mother, shot to death in her home by her husband.

She left three young children behind. 

You could add the four fatalities in a likely domestic violence incident in Clayton County, Georgia, around the same time. A 12-year-old boy, shot in the face, tipped police to where the bad guy was – but when they approached the home, one officer was killed, another wounded. In this blood-soaked land, even the good guys with guns are increasingly at the mercy of the bad guys with better guns. And we’re all at risk from the mentally ill bad guys who are often heavily armed.

Day in, day out, Americans die by the gun. Halyna Hutchins was killed by a “prop gun” used on a movie set, and fired by actor Alec Baldwin, when it turned out to be loaded with live ammunition. 

Meanwhile, any and all discussions of what might be done to staunch the blood devolve into idiocy. Donald Trump Jr. used news of Hutchins’ death to hawk t-shirts that read, “Guns don’t kill people, Alec Baldwin kills people.” For only $27.99, you could purchase one yourself, and wear it around, to show the world that you were a tasteless jerk, just like the president’s son. That other tasteless gun-toting jerk, Rep. Lauren Boebert, was seen proudly sporting the black t-shirt with white lettering herself. Could Rep. Boebert have been introducing legislation to address all the killing – even to protect those blue lives – which right-wingers supposedly treasure? No more ghost guns, for example? Required background checks for all purchases, even at gun shows? 

Could Don Jr. think back to that moment, after the Parkland, Florida massacre, when his dad, then President of the United States, said GOP lawmakers were afraid of the NRA and it was time to act? 

And then failed?

Nah, he didn’t care about the victims who had been cut down by guns. He was just being himself.

A jerk.

 * 

No known motive. 

I first started gathering examples for this post in April 2021, after a 19-year-old former FedEx worker showed up at his old warehouse in Indianapolis, climbed out of his car, and started shooting as he crossed the parking lot. Inside, he kept firing, in a rampage that unfolded “in just a couple of minutes.” 

Before police could arrive, the shooter killed himself – proof of what gun-lovers love to say. “Only a good guy with a gun can…” 

Okay, scratch that. The bad guy stopped several innocent victims forever – before police could possibly respond. 

Eight dead. 

Seven wounded. 

No known motive – but the shooter had serious mental issues. His mother had informed authorities in March 2020 that her son might be planning to commit “suicide by cop.” His victims ranged in age from 19 (two young women, Samaria Blackwell and Karli Smith) to 74 (John Weisert). 

(Mental health checks prior to all gun purchases, anyone?)

So, where else can you be shot and killed, or shot and wounded, or just witness others being shot and killed and shot and wounded? 

It can happen in Boise, Idaho. Two dead. Four wounded. Location: Boise Town Square Mall. One police officer shot in an exchange of gunfire with the suspect. Suspect in critical condition and in custody.

Motive unknown. 

“Thoughts and prayers,” as Sen. Mitch McConnell and other Republican lawmakers like to say.

You can be shot and killed while riding in a car. On January 9, 2021, a gunman in Evanston, Illinois killed five, including a 15-year-old girl. 

You can be killed, picking up a prescription at CVS. (Same incident, above.) 

You can be killed while reprimanding your son: On January 24, 2021, a teenager killed six, including his father (who had admonished him about staying out late), his mother, and a pregnant 19-year-old relative. 

Killed at home (again): On February 2, 2021, in Muskogee, Oklahoma, one brother kills another and five children, ages 9, 6, 5, 3 and 1. 

Feb. 6: Leaving your girlfriend’s apartment in New Haven, Connecticut, and getting shot and killed by a jealous rival. 

Feb. 20: Ironically, at the gun store (3 dead, 2 injured).

Arguing over a stimulus check: A dispute on March 14, in Indianapolis, ended with four shot and killed, including a 7-year-old child. 

(Always remember: “Iron draws the hand.”)

Atlanta massage parlors: A man who claims to have a “sex addiction” kills eight on March 16, 2021. 

March 23: You can be cut down at the King Sooper grocery store. A gunman with an assault-style weapon kills ten, including shoppers and the store manager. The first police officer on the scene is shot dead. 

Officer Tally was outgunned.

You can be shot at the convenience store. On March 30, Joshua Green, 27, of Baltimore County, Maryland, killed his parents in their home. Then he killed a man sitting in a car in a convenience store parking lot. He walked inside and killed a patron and wounded the clerk. Finally, he killed himself. 

The next day, at a real estate office in Orange City, Ca., four were murdered, including a nine-year-old girl, there with a parent. 

You can be blasted while working to repair the air conditioning at a customer’s home. Six are killed on April 7, 2021, in Rock Creek, S.C., when a former NFL player barges into their home, shoots a doctor, shoots the doctor’s wife, and guns down their grandchildren, ages 9 and 5. Two men working on the air-conditioning unit outside are also killed.

You can be killed being a janitor, or a student at Rigby Middle School, in Jefferson County, Idaho. A sixth grader opened fire, wounding three, before a heroic teacher, Krista Gneiting, convinced the girl to lay down the weapon. 

At the bowling alley (1 dead, 3 wounded). 

At the beach in Oceanfront, Va. (2 dead). 

At a McDonald’s drive-thru (1 person killed). 

At a Burger King drive-thru (shooter misses all the employees, 30 police officers have to respond). 

You can be shot down while shoveling snow in Pennsylvania. (3 dead, including the shooter, who commits suicide). 

Being black just about anywhere, including jogging (Ahmaud Arbery).

You can be killed cleaning your own gun, etc. (countless examples). 

Accidents with kids (West Bath, Maine, 1 dead, 1 wounded; Cornelius, N.C., 1 person dead; Polk County, Fla., 1 seriously injured; Lakeland, Fla., 1 two-year-old in critical condition after being shot by three-year-old sibling; Houston, Tx., 1 baby dead, shooter a three-year-old). 

Getting shot by your mother, in Houston, when she takes aim at a neighbor’s dog running loose. Mom and two children are riding bikes when the dog bursts out of its house and mom opens fire. She misses the six-month-old boxer puppy. A ricochet off the pavement hits her son. 

Being in your apartment in West Jefferson, Ohio, where, “Things like this don’t happen in West Jefferson, or don’t happen in small towns,” according to the police chief. But they do. In America, of course they do.

Four dead. 

Walking out your front door in San Antonio, to take your three daughters, ages 2, 6 and 10, to daycare and school, and getting murdered, reportedly by your estranged husband (mom dead). 

Inside your mother’s womb, in Baytown, Texas, when a stray bullet wounds your mother and you are delivered just before she dies. 

Having your blood spilled while you are enjoying an evening at the Texas Bank Sports Complex in San Angelo (three adults and one five-year-old wounded). 

While all this blood is being spilled, what are Republicans doing to keep us safe? They are on guard, day and night, against imaginary pedophiles, otherwise known as Democrats, who want to grab our children and harvest them for their blood.

(See: QAnon.)

Only a good guy with a gun can stop the imaginary pedophiles. So a good guy goes to a pizza parlor in D.C., because he’s going to stop Hillary Clinton from harvesting children’s blood. He barges in and opens fire with an assault rifle. Of course, no children are actually there.

So the nutty guy with the gun endangers all the patrons instead.

(“Iron and conspiracy thinking draw the f**king hand.”)

*

Killed on a trampoline.

I’m not the only one to notice all the blood splashed in American streets. Republican lawmakers in Texas can’t ignore the rising tide. In June 2021 they decide to pass a law to make it easier for anyone who wants a gun to get their hands on one. No background checks. No waiting period required. No training necessary. The bad guys who want guns are going to love that law, too.

Where else are you unsafe in America?

 Besides Texas? 

Killed while jumping on a trampoline.

Walking in Times Square, at age 4, 23 or 44, when a gunman opens fire for no reason (but only wounds you). 

Riding in a car seat, at age 6, when another angry driver fires into your mother’s car after a lane change enrages him. 

Exiting a Florida nightclub when assailants open fire indiscriminately with automatic-style weapons, killing two, and wounding 22. One of those wounded is hit once in the abdomen, three times in the legs. 

Getting your haircut in Maywood, Illinois, but refusing to pay, and getting gunned down by the barber (1 patron killed).

May 28, 2021: Jumping on a trampoline with friends, and getting killed by a stray bullet. (We clearly need more 9-year-old good girls with guns – if we’re going to let them jump on trampolines.)

Every day in America, it’s the same. A cacophony of gunfire. Torn corpses littering the streets and schools and shopping malls – and everyplace in between. That means Republicans have no choice but to warn that any effort to do anything about gun violence means the Second Amendment is deader than the six people gunned down at a birthday party in Colorado Springs. 

The shooter was the boyfriend of one of the victims, and then proved again that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is for the bad guy to kill himself. That brought the final tally to seven. 

America is so blood-drenched at this point that when you Google “six killed” you also pull up the story of a murder-suicide pact, which led to six dead in Allen, Texas in April. In that case, two brothers, ages 19 and 21, Bangladeshi immigrants, bragged about how easy it was to buy guns. 

“If I’m going to die, I might as well get some attention,” the 19-year-old posted on social media before he and his brother opened fire. 

For more “fun with guns,” consider a sampling of road rage shootings in April and May 2021. In Chicago one toddler was wounded. Other blasts occurred in Pineville, N.C. (one person wounded), Barrow County, Georgia (one killed, one wounded), Greene County, Georgia (one killed), Spring (one wounded), Humble (one man shot in the hip) and Tomball (an 11-year-old girl wounded), those last three all in Texas. We also have the shooting in Knoxville (where one man was wounded in the shoulder after another driver chased him for seven miles before opening fire). 

(“Iron draws the hand.” While the other steers?)

The list of places you can get shot grows without end, including a funeral home in Milwaukee (seven wounded over some kind of feud), and (one person) during a funeral service in Dayton, Ohio. 

Working at a Waffle House (Aurora, Colorado) and daring to ask a patron to wear a mask. The patron shoots and wounds the cook. 

Eating at a Waffle House in Nashville (4 dead, before the shooter has to reload, and gets tackled by a patron). 

You can get shot at a hospital in Chicago (2 doctors killed, one police officer dead; shooter in custody). 

A mother can be gunned down by her own son, in her home near Stevensville, Montana, as is her son’s wife. Her husband is wounded, but survives, as do the shooter’s two children, a 3-year-old, and an 11-month-old. 

A father in Dayton, Wyoming can be shot and killed by his 15-year-old son, who then calls the police to report the crime. 

Death can come while shopping at Arvada’s Olde Town Square, in the Denver suburbs. That includes one police officer, with nineteen years of experience, who responded to calls of an incident at the shopping mall (3 dead, including the suspected shooter, and a “Good Samaritan”). 

A customer at the Big Bear grocery in DeKalb County, Georgia gets angry when asked to wear a mask. Unfortunately, he has a gun with him and defends his Second Amendment rights by gunning down the unlucky cashier and wounding two others, including an off-duty deputy sheriff. 

Nothing. Nothing can be done. Well, check that. Going on two years later, Republicans can scare their base by claiming that Democrats – now called “Marxists” – are coming to take their gas stoves.

(See: “Biden’s War on Gas Stoves.”)

Meanwhile, the bloodshed never ends. Two 15-year-old Atlanta teens, who have access to firearms, use them to shoot a security guard at a mall, while trying to break into an Apple store after hours. The guard is left in critical condition. 

A shooting in Cincinnati – also involving teenagers – ends only after two children, ages 6 and 8, are caught in the crossfire. “It shakes the conscience of a neighborhood when you have children hit,” says one police officer. 

Republicans are focused on saving the stoves.

* 

Gun reform is long overdue. 

Leading voices on the right want you to believe this slaughter is a problem created by the other side. One evening, I caught a snippet of Sean Hannity’s show. Hannity doesn’t really care about the victims of any of these shootings, but he happily feigns outrage over all the murders in “Democratic-run cities.” 

But not all the blood is being shed in Democratic cities, or Democratic run-states. Blue states, generally, are much safer than red states when it comes to gun homicides and gun suicides. And it’s not “politicizing” the discussion to point that out. It’s a fact. In Albertville, Alabama (pop. 21,460), on June 15, 2021, another in a long list of workplace shootings explodes, this time at the Mueller Co. facility. Two are killed, including the suspect, two wounded. When the suspect’s body is found in his Jeep Cherokee, police recover “multiple weapons.” 

In Hammond, Indiana, a man first shoots and kills his wife. Then he shoots himself dead in a nearby cemetery. 

On April 18, 2021, a Detroit man leaves his two children, ages 6 and 4, alone in a car outside a bar. The older child manages to call mom, and says she’s afraid. When mom shows up around 1:15 a.m., and begins berating her husband, he opens fire on her car with two guns, but only grazes her. 

Eight days earlier, in Pinellas Park, Florida, a 47-year-old man goes to his wife’s workplace and guns her down. A few hours later, in a battle with a SWAT team, he too is killed. 

On May 1, 2021, we had a killing at a farmhouse in New Sharon, Iowa, after a wife shot her sleeping husband in the head. 

Another shooting, this one in Merritt Island, Florida on May 21, ended when a woman was killed by her fiancé. Friends of Alicia “Red” Campitelli, the victim, said they felt like they were “living a nightmare.” 

They were.

And another killing, this time with roles reversed: Fox News has the story of a woman in Tillman Corners, Alabama, who shoots and kills her fiancé after a fight. 

(“Thoughts and prayers. Thoughts and prayers.”)

On May 29, a man in McIntosh County, Georgia (pop. 14,223), shoots and kills his wife and finishes off a murder-suicide plot with a bullet to his head. A 17-year-old female was also said to be in critical condition. Fox News reports that crime, but no one notifies Hannity because his job is to parrot the idea that Democrats want to kill the Second Amendment, instead.  

In Unadilla, Neb., a husband accidently shoots his wife while trying to remove the magazine from his gun. She is expected to recover. 

You can find fresh incidents every day to support these main points: That you can be gunned down anywhere. That you can be killed or wounded at any time in America. That more guns haven’t made us safer. 

That gun reform is long overdue.

June 2, 2021: A disgruntled employee walks into the VTA light rail yard in San Jose, California, and opens fire. Five “good guys” with guns are forced to risk their lives and respond. By the time police arrive nine are dead. The shooter is still alive, but out of action, dying soon after from self-inflicted wounds. The killer had planned the massacre and acquired an arsenal. 

Twelve guns. 

And 22,000 rounds of ammunition. 

June 3: Three officers are wounded while answering a domestic violence complaint in Smyrna, Delaware. 

You also had the bizarre story of two children who ran away from a group home, one a boy of 12, the other a girl of 14. They broke into a house in Enterprise, Florida, and found weapons to hand. When police arrived the boy opened fire with an AK-47. The girl wielded a shotgun, and was wounded by police, before the boy, uninjured, and the teen surrendered. 

(“Iron draws the child’s hand.”)

On June 3 Joslyn Carlon graduated from high school, wearing her father’s fire department jacket. Her father, Tory Carlon, had been shot and killed at work. Another firefighter was wounded, too. The shooter went home, set his house ablaze, and turned the gun on himself. 

June 4: A husband who shot his wife in the arm during a domestic disturbance in 2019, strikes again. The courts had taken his pistol away following that incident. Nine months later, when his case was settled, the State of Alabama handed it back. Sixteen days after that, he used it to shoot and kill Megan Montgomery, his wife. 

Even the good guys with guns are often victims of bad guys with guns, who – wouldn’t it be nice – if they didn’t have so many guns? On June 4 we also learn that Officer Michael Lang had been killed during a traffic stop in Iowa City – back in April – after a suspect goaded him into confrontation. 

At 5:30 a.m. on Saturday morning, June 5, a robber pulls a gun on the 41-year old manager of a Dunkin’ Donuts, who has just opened her Philly store. They enter. He demands all the money. She hands it over. He shoots her in the head. 

That evening a shooter in New York City fired at least eight shots into a house from the sidewalk, killing a 10-year-old boy and wounding the boy’s uncle. Reportedly, there had been a dispute over a parking space. 

That same day, in Belle Glade, Florida, an 86-year-old sugar mill worker shot and killed his boss, after he was told he was being let go. 

(“Iron draws the old man’s feeble hand.”)

June 6: Gunfire erupted as people were leaving a graduation party in Miami-Dade County. Three dead, including a Florida corrections officer. Two wounded. 

In a different time zone, that Sunday morning, a drive-by shooting in Salt Lake City left one 20-year-old dead and four bleeding. 

On June 9, we had another shooting at a grocery store. This time a Publix. This time in Florida. This time a one-year-old was dead. This time the child’s grandmother, 69, died trying to protect the toddler. This time, according to his wife, the shooter had been acting “strangely and paranoid” of late. This time the shooter posted online that he wanted to “kill children.” 

Nothing. Nothing can be done.

No, wait. Something can be done! Sen. Marsha Blackburn, from Tennessee, can act decisively, after all. She insists that Democrats want to take away all of our ceiling fans. And she’s not going to take it. She’s going to pass legislation to protect the fans because that’s the real threat to our lives.

As for Sen. Rand Paul, he goes nuts and says he’s going to act, because Democrats want to take away our best toilets.

Guns?

Nothing can be done.

June 11, 2021: Friday evening proves bloody. Around nine, a suspect or suspects “rolled up in a dark-colored sedan and unleashed a barrage of gunfire on a group of people standing in front of a home in a residential neighborhood” of east Savannah, Georgia. One person is killed, seven wounded. Two are children, ages one and thirteen. Police count at least 60 shell casings, and three houses and several cars are hit by stray fire. 

Not long after, a Houston father pulls his pistol when he suspects he is being followed by a suspicious vehicle. Nothing happens, but when he returns home, he tries to holster his weapon. It discharges, with the bullet striking his nine-year-old son in the chest. The boy is expected to live. 

Saturday morning, June 12, at 2 a.m. gunfire breaks out in the Southside neighborhood of Chatham, in Chicago. A pair of shooters open fire, killing one 14-year-old, and leaving nine victims bleeding. 

Cleveland, Ohio has a turn – with one shooting leaving three dead and six wounded, no details available. 

That same day, the sounds of celebration on the streets of Austin, Texas, are punctuated by gunfire. Once again, a pair of shooters wound 14, two critically. 

This is your blood-soaked country. And the only answer Republicans offer is more guns. In more hands. In more places. 

* 

Iron draws the suicidal hand.

If nothing else, we know that guns in the home make successful suicides far more likely, with 23,941 Americans shooting themselves dead in 2019, and another 24,292 gun suicides in 2020. That would mean 67 Americans were killed every day by bullets they fired themselves. 

What has been the GOP plan to deal with gun violence and gun suicides, generally? Their plan has been to block federal agencies from collecting data that might reveal the scope of the problem. It’s known as the “Dickey Amendment.”

You can look it up. 

Meanwhile, a shooting in Houston leaves a man, woman, and a child (age estimated to be between five and seven), dead in their apartment. A wounded child, aged around 10, manages to call her grandmother for help. 

In Fort Bend County, Texas: On June 5, 2021, a man shoots his mother-in-law multiple times, after she decides (after drinking) to come over to her daughter’s house, and is mistaken for an intruder. 

In Dinwiddie, Virginia, a man fatally shoots his friend one night, also mistaking him for a burglar. 

You can have your blood spilled while working at Bob Evans, when your ex-boyfriend walks in and shoots you in front of co-workers and customers. 

You can bleed to death on the interstate in Arizona, when a gunmen opens fire at eight random locations, killing one, wounding a dozen. 

You can be shot while cutting brush and riding your tractor, when two boys, ages 8 and 9, decide to use you for target practice. 

On July 3, a guy drives his truck onto a golf course and shoots a man lining up a putt. Police find two bodies in the bed of the vehicle. 

Six days later, a man sitting at a restaurant bar in the Houston aquarium gets out of his seat, walks to the end, and shoots a couple enjoying dinner. Then he kills himself. No known connection between killer and victims. 

Your life can be ended while having Alzheimer’s in Lincoln, Nebraska and getting shot by your husband of 57 years, who then gets charged with murder. 

Minding your business at home, when a teenager tries to sneak through a window to see your 14-year-old daughter, and you catch him in the act, and an argument ensues. And he shoots you dead. 

Feeding your two-year-old son when he picks up a pistol he thinks is a toy and accidentally takes your life. 

Winning $2 million in a California lottery, moving to Oklahoma, and getting shot and killed, along with your one-year-old child, by your husband, who then kills himself. 

Going to your son’s soccer game, while pregnant, being spotted by your ex-husband, with your new boyfriend – and he grabs his silver pistol and murders you both. Texas! Where everyone can carry a gun. 

(Even the ump.)

Not paying your rent on time, so your Las Vegas landlord decides to skip the eviction process and go for the gun. Two tenants killed, a third wounded. 

August 3: Getting killed by mistake in your kitchen in Del Ray, Oklahoma, when your teen son accidently fires a gun in the living room, and the bullet passes through a wall and strikes you down.

Your distraught son kills himself in the street. 

Same day: A 58-year-old woman in Champaign, Illinois, hears a knock at her door, and calls out, “Who is it?” Whoever it is, that person opens fire, hitting the woman five times. Police find 75 shell casings. The victim is reported in stable condition. 

Same day: A shooting in the parking lot of Soaky Mountain Waterpark in Sevier, Tennessee, leaves one woman dead, one other woman slightly wounded, and two intoxicated suspects in police hands. Kelsey Cook, 24, was first rushed to the hospital, but died there that evening. 

Aug. 5: Getting shot while trying to steal four cases of beer from a 7-Eleven in Dallas, Texas. 

Aug. 13: Getting shot and killed while on a Zoom call for work – by your toddler, who has found an unsecured gun. 

Aug. 17: Gunfire erupts just after midnight, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. An 18-year-old is shot several times and killed, a 19-year-old arrested. 

Aug. 18: Coming to work at a Clinton County, Indiana automotive plant. Two killed, Pamela Sled, 62, and her granddaughter, Promise Mays, 21. Suspect in custody after a short car chase, ending when he crashed. 

Aug. 24, 2021: Being gunned down while eating at an outdoor café in Miami Beach, while your wife and one-year-old watch. Police say Dustin Wakefield was a victim, at age 21, of a random shooting. “There are few words in the English language that can convey the depth of Dustin’s love and generosity,” Wakefield’s father and stepmother, Matt and Angela Wakefield, write.

Sept. 1: Sitting in class. One student killed at Mount Tabor High School in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The shooter is another student. 

Sept. 3: A Cincinnati man opens fire on a woman driver after a minor traffic accident. The shooter is holding a baby in his left arm, while shooting with his right hand. The baby throws off his aim and he only nicks his target. 

Sept. 6: A former Marine, 33, high on meth, kills four in Florida, including a 3-month-old baby. Her mother is gunned down while trying to shield her child, in an apparently random shooting. An 11-year-old girl is grievously wounded. The alleged killer also shoots the family dog. 

Sept. 9: The Missouri State Highway Patrol reports a shooting. The driver of a taxi van and a passenger get into an argument and the driver pulls over on the side of I-55. Gunfire erupts. The passenger is killed, the driver wounded. 

(“Iron draws both hands.”) 

Sept. 15 (or thereabouts): Four people are shot and killed in Minnesota by a man who admits to his father that he “snapped and shot a couple of people.” The alleged killer drives the bodies of two men and two women across the state line and dumps them in a Wisconsin cornfield. 

A farmer finds them a few days later. 

Sept. 18: A baby shower goes bad, when a Pennsylvania dad-to-be gets mad about presents and shoots three guests. 

(“Thoughts and prayers”…and WTF!!!) 

Sept. 23: Picking up lettuce, cauliflower, and pea pods at the Kroger store in the upscale suburb of Collierville, Tennessee. A vendor who has just been terminated returns to the store and opens fire, killing one, wounding a dozen, including four critically. 

Sept. 30: A first grader at Newtown Elementary School is shot in the leg when a gun in a classmate’s book bag discharges by mistake. The next day, the police chief can at least report of the injured child: “His father told me his spirits are up and everything, he’s talking to everybody, talking to the nurses, but they were getting ready to take him in for another surgery. But his spirits were up, and that’s a blessing.” Your heart also goes out to the child who carried the gun to school, to all the other first graders in the classroom, and the teacher. 

Trauma for all.

Oct. 4: Drug Enforcement Agents attempt to arrest a suspect on an Amtrak train. The suspect opens fire, killing one agent, wounding two, and is killed by return fire. 

Oct. 6: A shooting at Timberview High School in Arlington, Texas, leaves three students wounded, a fourth injured in a fall, and a fifth, the alleged assailant, 18, in custody. Local law enforcement agencies call it “a tragedy, a traumatic incident for these high school kids.” 

(That’s America. Nothing can be done.)

Oct. 8: Two staff members at a Maryland senior living facility are killed after a resident opens fire. 

Oct. 9: In Louisiana a shooter kills one state trooper, while he’s sitting in his cruiser, having already shot four other individuals at two separate locations. One of those victims succumbs to her injuries. 

Oct. 13: A shooting at a post office in Memphis leaves two more dead. The alleged shooter, a co-worker, then kills himself. 

Oct. 14: Bobby Gale, 45, a cement mason and father of five, is shot seven times by an assailant who repeatedly calls him a “n----r.” Stockton, California police label it a hate crime. Almost miraculously, Gayle survives, but has to be rushed to the hospital. Gayle was getting off work when a truck nearly struck him. Words were passed. Then the driver got out of his vehicle and opened fire. 

October 14: So far you can’t be shot in your seat, while flying commercially in the United States, but only because TSA is carefully checking carry-on luggage. As of this date, 4,495 passengers in 2021, have been stopped from bringing guns on board. (That tops the previous record of 4,432 in 2019.) On a brighter note “only” 80% of weapons that have been found have been loaded. 

(By 2022, the number of guns seized will have risen to 6,542.)

Oct. 16: At 2:15 a.m. a gunman ambushes three Houston police officers working an off-duty job at a local bar. One officer killed, two wounded.

Oct. 17: A 16-year-old pulls a gun at a mall in Lancaster, Pa. after an argument and opens fire. Hana Ali, a native of Iraq later tells Fox News, “It reminds me of the Desert Storm war when I was there. It was awful. The sounds of shooting, it’s really bringing things back to you. It’s so terrifying.” 

Fox News is at pains to note that an armed bystander is the hero in the story, because Fox News wants us to think more guns in more hands will make us all safer, so we should vote for people like Rep. Thomas Massie, who adores his guns. “Police said that the armed bystander then got involved with the fight,” Fox explained.  

“The armed bystander then engaged the subjects fighting over the gun and fired shots, striking one of the suspects. The [struggle] ended and the bystander waited at the scene until officers from the Lancaster City Police and Park City Security arrived and took control.” 

(I note that the bystander shot “one of the suspects,” but only one person is mentioned as having pulled a gun. Hope he shot the right person.) 

Four are shot and two others injured. 

* 

Chicken wings and guitar playing lead to gunfire. 

I let my list lapse until December 2021. Then another totally senseless murder riveted my attention. This time a 24-year-old father in Humble, Texas, was gunned down in the parking lot of a Chuck E. Cheese. He was bringing a birthday cake to his six-year-old daughter’s party. 

This is America. This is how we live. And die. And when Trump was president, he said he was going to act – to save our old-fashioned light bulbs. Because Democrats wanted to take them all away.

And they made him look orange.

In any case, when I googled “father shot,” I turned up dozens of stories with a different slant. These were bad dads with guns. That same evening, a Staten Island father, 57, shot his son, 29, dead. The day before, a father in Ohio shot and killed his daughter, when he mistook her for an intruder in the night. In Newaygo County, Michigan, on December 28, another father shot and killed another son, and on Christmas Eve, in West Jordan, Utah, a family argument ends with, yes, a father shooting his son. 

In Garland, Texas, a father drives his 14-year-old son to a convenience store on December 26. The boy opens fire and kills three other teens. 

(WTF!!!)

On January 7, 2022, to start the New Year, a father in Clinton, Maryland is shot twice by his 15-year-old son, after he tries to stop the boy from killing his mother and a brother, only eight. The father survives, but his wife and youngest child are killed.

I couldn’t help myself – and kept digging for proof – that more guns in America don’t make us safer – that they only increase the risk. Fathers killed or wounded sons, in Cathedral City, California (December 17)  in Jacksonville, Florida (December 27), and New Orleans (January 1). In Indianapolis (December 4), another father shot but only wounded his son’s football coach. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana (December 29) and Perdido, Alabama (January 10), sons turned guns round and shot dads. Then we had the two-year-old in St. Louis who picked up a rifle and shot his father in the back, killing him by mistake. 

Gunfire in February 2022 shattered the peace in Aurora, Colorado, once more. Stand your ground? Stand your pew? A shooting at a suburban church left two men wounded, a woman dead. 

February 9: A school bus driver in Minneapolis, Minnesota was shot in the head, while children watched. 

I even stumbled upon a case from last October, where an Ohio dad shot his son, because he had been playing his guitar too long – but dad claimed he was aiming for the guitar, and not the guitarist, which makes it better, I suppose.

That, in turn, brought up another story from October, where a young man shot at but missed his father in Bountiful, Utah, after dad brought home the wrong kind of chicken wings for dinner.

"Iron draws the hand."

In America – it’s always the guns.

But not if you tune in to Tucker Carlson every night. It won’t be blood in the streets he’s riled up about. Some nights, he’ll be howling about the threat we face to our manhood from “woke” green M&M’s.

No one has ever been killed by “woke” M&M’s. But more guns in more hands have often proven deadly. On February 25, 2022, Curtis Reeves, a retired police officer was acquitted by a Florida jury, after he shot and killed a man in a dark movie theater. That killing involved an argument over the victim texting his daughter – Reeves objecting – and the deceased throwing popcorn at the defendant, who then shot him dead. 

Florida is a “stand your ground” and blaze-away state. And the jury must have believed the popcorn was hot.

And buttered. 

*

Finally, let’s not forget the mass murders. 

Last summer, the U.S. Supreme Court (at least the six “originalists” on the bench) made it much harder to do anything to control guns. They struck down a New York law that had limited who could carry concealed weapons – arguing that the Founding Fathers had never said anything about concealed weapons at all. (That state law had been on the books for 108 years.) Meanwhile, no other advanced nation today has to endure this kind of unending bloodshed. If you strip out all other variables, one remains. Guns. Too many guns, in too many hands, in too many places. We also lead the advanced world in mass murders. Barring action, we’re going to continue to build on that lead. 

You can’t go to a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, without getting blown away (7 dead, 48 wounded).

You can’t step out on a Saturday night in Dayton, Ohio, (9 dead, 17 wounded, even though police killed the shooter less than a minute after he opened fire). 

Popcorn, flying or not, that’s not the problem in Aurora, Colorado. A shooter with a semi-automatic weapon and high capacity drum magazines opens fire in the dark (12 dead, 58 wounded).

Thirteen are killed, plus the assailant, while waiting for assistance at a civic association office in Binghamton, N.H. 

A hail of fire at a Walmart in El Paso leaves 23 dead; 23 wounded (the bad guy is armed with an assault-rifle and motivated by racism.) 

Sitting in class at college can get you killed – as in the massacre on the Virginia Tech campus (32 dead, 17 injured). 

Outside a sorority house and at other locations in Santa Barbara and Isla Vista, California (6 dead, 14 injured).

At a dance studio in Monterey Park, California (11 dead, 9 wounded). The 72-year-old killer is stopped by an unarmed bystander, Brandon Tsay.

You can be cut down at the Pulse nightclub if you’re gay (49 killed, 53 wounded). But you can’t send you kid to school in the same state and say “gay.”

If you love music, you can be slaughtered at a concert in Las Vegas (61 dead, 411 wounded; sem-automatic weapons involved). 

You can be killed at a church in Charleston, S.C. (9 African American parishioners dead; shooter a racist)

You can be killed at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. (The attacker, who carries an assault-style weapon, kills 11, and wounds four police officers who respond, as well as two others.)

You can be blown away at a Sikh temple in Milwaukee (7 dead, 3 wounded) or praying on a Sunday in Sutherland Springs, Texas (26 dead, 22 injured).

(“Thoughts and prayers” for those cut down while offering thoughts and prayers.)

You can be killed at Sandy Hook when you are six or seven years old (20 students, 6 staff members killed). And then some fat lout on talk radio will say you didn’t really die.

The shooting was staged. It was all a hoax.

The shooter in that incident also killed his mother at home – and then killed himself at the school.

You can be a teacher in Parkland, Florida, just doing your job, and you can die in a welter of blood (17 dead, 17 injured). Then the right-wing kooks and fools, including Donald Trump Jr. will claim that the survivors who call for action in the wake of all the blood are “crisis actors.”

So: Nothing needs to be done.

And we know what’s coming, no matter how high the toll rises in weeks and months and years ahead. The Republicans and their enablers in the gun industry will say after every gory mess, after the next mass shooting, and the next, and the next, until the end of time: “Guns don’t kill people…”

And to be truly safe, we need more guns and more firepower. Only a good guy eating scrambled eggs and toast at Waffle House or sitting in the third pew in Sutherland Springs, or a shopper waiting in line at Kroger to pick up a pound of sliced Swiss cheese, can stop a bad guy with ... a f**king gun. 

You can’t even get the gun nuts to agree that guns might be an issue. They’re going to counter with: Knives kill people. Rocks kill people. Shovels and ice picks and weed whackers kill people. What? Are we going to ban knives and rocks and shovels?

And let weeds take over our lawns?

*

The “bad guy” is us.

If we can’t come up with sensible gun controls (background checks for all purchases, and required safe storage by gun owners, and maybe gun-misuse insurance), as a nation we’re going to continue to wade in blood. The “good guy” isn’t going to save us from ourselves, because the “bad guy” is us. 

So, what did the Founding Fathers really think? Isn’t that the final refuge of the gun nuts? They try to quote Ben Franklin or James Wilson, wash their red-stained hands, and call it a day.

What did Ben and George and the rest really say? 

____________________ 

We recognize December 13th as the birthday of the National Guard. On this date in 1636, the first militia regiments in North America were organized in Massachusetts. Based upon an order of the Massachusetts Bay Colony's General Court, the colony's militia was organized into three permanent regiments to better defend the colony. Today, the descendants of these first regiments - the 181st Infantry, the 182nd Infantry, the 101st Field Artillery, and the 101st Engineer Battalion of the Massachusetts Army National Guard – share the distinction of being the oldest units in the U.S. military. December 13, 1636, thus marks the beginning of the organized militia, and the birth of the National Guard’s oldest organized units is symbolic of the founding of all the state, territory, and District of Columbia militias that collectively make up today's National Guard. 

National Guard website

____________________

 

On Friday, June 4, 2021, a federal judge in San Diego overturned a California state law banning assault rifles. 

That law had been on the books for thirty-two years, but Republican-appointed Judge Roger Benitez was dismissive of the very idea of gun control. The case before him, he ruled, was about “what should be a muscular constitutional right and whether a state can force a gun policy choice that impinges on that right with a 30-year-old failed experiment. It should be an easy question and answer,” he added. “Government is not free to impose its own new policy choices on American citizens where constitutional rights are concerned.” 

Judge Benitez went on to note that the firearms banned under California law were not “bazookas, howitzers or machine guns,” but “fairly ordinary, popular, modern rifles.” The AR-15, he said, was like a Swiss Army knife, “a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment.” 

Even the judge took note that some weapons can be banned, but missed the central point. You can ban weapons. You can’t own bazookas, machine guns, or jet fighter planes. Not even Elon Musk can buy his own B-2 bomber. 

(There are, indeed, limits on the right to bear arms.)

Nor did Benitez seem to realize that we already have excellent “homeland defense equipment,” as in all the weaponry in the hands of the National Guard. The Guard is today’s militia if you’ve never looked it up. 

And if you really fear big government, the Guard will keep us safe. Guard units are under the control of the governors of the various states. Guard troops are citizen soldiers, like you and me.

But Judge Benitez wasn’t concerned. Those plotting mass murder had to be thrilled with his decision upholding their right to purchase weapons of war to use in carrying out their diabolical schemes.

R.I.P Trinity Ottoson-Smith, and all the other victims of gun violence in incidents listed above, and all the tens of thousands yet to die. 

The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a nine-year-old with a gun, while jumping on a trampoline.

 

POSTSCRIPT: The U.S. Constitution, as adopted in 1789, clearly gave Congress the right to decide on arming the militia. 

So, were the Founding Fathers okay with gun control? 

It would seem they were.