After the demise of civilization as we know it; after the crash of economies and the devastation of cities and shores (due to climate change and/or nuclear weapons); after we are all gone, the survivors who read what remains of our history as they organize new (and reformed) economies and political entities will be shocked to learn that here was a land where the body politic valued lethal weapons far more than it did children. Imagine that!
We hang our heads in shame.
Susan Pyburn
SLO
This article appears in Apr 13-23, 2023.
The survivors will be amazed that we only focused on the relatively small number of deaths from highly publicized mass shootings by the insane, and ignored the far greater number of deaths from the violent habitual criminals that we kept releasing under our bizarre progressive legal “reforms”. They will note that many obsessessed on guns, the inanimate instrumentalities of much of the violence, like some sort of evil totems, and dismissed the idea of actually doing something about the violent criminals by explaining that we already had too many locked up in our ” carceral state”, as if we were in violation of some sort of artificial limit of the number of criminals we could imprison, and were obligated to set the rest free, regardless of their likely continuing predation. And they will be amazed to see how many failed to see how the refusal to protect society from criminals drove so many people to arm themselves in self-defense with the guns which so dismayed the progressives of the era.
Back in 2013, not long after the December 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre, a local “Tea Party” activist told me via an email exchange that the slaughter of six year olds by a deranged autistic youth armed with an AR-15 was “a perfectly acceptable price to pay for freedom.” If such depraved values thrive here on the central coast, imagine what incubates in the diners, evangelical churches, bars & town halls in the red flyover states.
Hey John, do you know what the number one cause of death among children is in the U.S.? Apparently not. Ignorance is bliss. It’s guns. Gun violence kills more children in the U.S. than any other single thing. So, it may be “a small number of deaths” to you, but to us actual humans, it’s an atrocity. The common thread among Republicans and gun nuts seems to be the complete inability to empathize with any issue that they haven’t experienced personally. You’re in luck though, if current trends continue, your daughter, grandson, wife, someone in your family will experience gun violence, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll gain some empathy. Until then, you’re just another ammosexual with a dead soul.
Hey John, do you know what the number one cause of death among children is in the U.S.? Apparently not. Ignorance is bliss. It’s guns. Gun violence kills more children in the U.S. than any other single thing. So, it may be “a small number of deaths” to you, but to us actual humans, it’s an atrocity. The common thread among Republicans and gun nuts seems to be the complete inability to empathize with any issue that they haven’t experienced personally. You’re in luck though, if current trends continue, your daughter, grandson, wife, someone in your family will experience gun violence, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll gain some empathy. Until then, you’re just another ammosexual with a dead soul.