I’m cooked from a week of soul-ripping horror and other assorted mayhem that I and just about every journalist in the nation traipsed through this week, but I refuse to fold yet and let absurdity win the day, again.
You only need to know one horrible thing from the Uvalde, Texas massacre to understand how wrong Republican political obstinacy has become.
A little girl in a classroom in Uvalde covered herself in her just-murdered friend’s fresh blood and laid still in hopes that the gunman in her school would pass her over as already dead. She surreptitiously called 911 and begged police to come rescue her and other terrified students. Meanwhile, just on the other side of the classroom door, 19 “good guys with guns” waited for almost an hour for the school custodian to let them into the room to take out the mass murderer. It was after he killed 21 people, mostly children, and injured others.
And the nearly unanimous Republican response to this new nightmare, after decades of nightmares almost exactly like it, including right here in Aurora?
“The existence of evil is one of the very best reasons to arm law-abiding citizens,” former President Donald Trump told an accepting audience at an annual National Rifle Association convention, held in Houston on the heels of nearly back-to-back grisly mass murderers.
Evil? Like, the Devil made this week’s mass murderer run out and buy military assault rifles and systematically execute a room full of children and teachers?
It’s not surprising that the same people who offer only thoughts and prayers to parents — who stand outside schools or grocery stores, waiting to find out if the most important person in their lives was shot to death as the price we must pay to ensure Texans can hunt varmints with assault rifles — are the same people who think Beezlebub tells people to take their semi-automatic assault weapons to school and kill everyone.
It’s increasingly difficult to discern who is more mentally unstable these days, the mass shooters or those who defend their rights to “legally bear arms,” until they become mass murderers or just shoot a few people they don’t like.
Trump and GOP Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and GOP Texas Gov. Greg Abbot and GOP Colorado Congressperson Lauren Boebert and NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre and GOP South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem — and are you seeing a pattern here — insist that the only solution to more gun violence is more and less-restricted guns.
If you don’t see the lunacy in this, you might not only have a problem, you are the problem.
These people insist that we cannot control rampant gun violence that terrorizes every student and parent in the country, so we must arm ourselves and our children and cower in fear, waiting for a fellow student, a teacher or a stranger to open fire in yet another classroom.
Noem told a cavern full of NRA members that “calls to further restrict gun access are ‘all about control, and it is garbage. I’m not buying it for a second and you shouldn’t, either,’” the AP reported.
Seriously?
Hell, yes, it’s about control. It’s about controlling the distribution of one of the most deadly devices ever invented and profited on, guns. It’s about controlling them in the same way we control deadly drugs, deadly explosives, deadly toxins and even deadly cars.
It’s about keeping terrified children, awash in their friends’ blood, from having to plead with police to come save them before they’re murdered themselves.
The answer from Cruz and thousands of elected Republican leaders is to “harden” schools to make it more difficult to get inside and execute dozens of little boys and girls.
So, these determined gunmen can then, what, drive to the nearest grocery store and massacre people there?
“At least it wasn’t all children this time,” is the best we can hope for in the United States?
In every modern democracy in the world, the rights of parents are given huge deference in how they treat, and mistreat, their own children. But nowhere in decent parts of the world are adults permitted to abuse other people’s children.
That’s exactly what these misfit Republicans are doing. By obstinately resisting even the most innocuous gun control measures, people like Boebert, Abbot and Cruz have shown repeatedly they are incapable of being trusted to be responsible for all of our children and ourselves.
The lives of your children, your loved ones, your friends, your own life and those of people you’ve never met are less important to these GOP extremists than their unshakable gun worship.
Cruz, speaking at the NRA convention, blamed the nation’s endless shooting massacres on poor character and bad parenting, ironically excluding himself and others like him.
I frequently take this test when assessing people’s character. Would you entrust the person to take care of your own child? How about your dog? A neighbor’s hamster?
Exactly.
How do you feel about Congressperson Lauren Boebert as a parenting figure after she infamously last Christmas posed her own young children armed with assault rifles as they mugged for the camera in front of the Christmas tree to create a lurid holiday card?
To claim that sating some sordid ammophila outweighs the lives of innocent children, innocent grocery shoppers or movie goers is so bent that even listening to the gun lobby’s sadistic defense of its principles is offensive and abusive to normal people.
“Classroom doors should be hardened to make them lockable from the inside and closed to intruders from the outside,” Trump said.
That’s exactly what school officials in Uvalde did, just like almost every school in Texas. It’s how the gunman was able to lock out police while he murdered children and teachers inside the classrooms.
It’s all yet another distraction, waiting for your horror to fade.
Take it from the surviving victims of the Aurora theater shooting and the hundreds of friends and families of those who didn’t make it out of that cinema alive almost 10 years ago. The horror and the terror never ends. The losses never fade. And each time another gunman terrorizes and massacres another venue, it inches closer to our turn. Your turn. Your children. Your life.
Don’t let these warped Republicans tell you we’re the only nation on the planet that must suffer like this, or that we’re just one mental-health center or one armed cop at school away from fixing it.
It’s the guns.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or [email protected]
Guns were more prevalent at schools prior to 1975, I even used to bring a rifle for target practice inside the high school building for ROTC. Mass shootings were extremely rare. Why? I suspect the guilt lies squarely on the Democrat party that has created a massive mental illness problem for people today. Between all the dysfunctional types of requirements on speech, actions, tolerance, acceptance, phobias, hate, beliefs, etc , along with attacking Police, Law and order, decency, pushing psychotropic drugs, etc, that the Democrats have put on society, there is no wonder why we are seeing this mental illnesses respond in shootings. Guns have never been the problem, todays Big Pharma is the driving force behind these horrific school shootings with detached expressionless psychotropic drugged out teenage shooters. Democrats pushing more and more to drugs, i.e Vax. Big Pharma is clearly the shot callers. This is the variable everyone is looking for.
I agree. People have always enjoy killing other people. The technique is irrelevant.
True. Always will be true. But? We do nothing to stop it?
Nothing. Only the way and the means will differ. Human beings carry evil like a plague wherever they go. They line millions up for the gas chamber and sell their own children for convenience. There may be other, more efficient butchers in the universe, but it will be a close contest.
So we just give up?
Several famous individuals have made the attempt and failed. One was nailed to a cross. Others existed in the area of the gun and were shot. One day humans will be shaken off the planet like so many vermin and no one will mourn their passing.
This is the best example of deflection I have ever seen.
Our “control of deadly drugs” is working quite well, wouldn’t you say Mr Perry?
That’s your answer to all these kids being murdered??
Please see my response to Mr Felice below.
Except that we’re not talking about drugs. Why change the subject?
Mr Felice, please re-read the editorial, he wrote: “It’s about controlling them in the same way we control deadly drugs, deadly explosives, deadly toxins and even deadly cars.” I didn’t change the subject.
No, Dave, it’s not “the guns.” It’s hardly a coincidence that these incidents have become more common as your side has increasingly taken control of the nation’s cultural institutions.
“By obstinately resisting even the most innocuous gun control measures”
Every law your side has passed since Columbine, they claim it will mitigate the incidents. If they haven’t, then it means the laws haven’t worked.
“That’s exactly what school officials in Uvalde did, just like almost every school in Texas. It’s how the gunman was able to lock out police while he murdered children and teachers inside the classrooms.”
Hey moron, how did the Border Patrol officer and the cops who helped him get inside, after the Uvalde police chief told them to stand around with their thumb up their ass for an hour?
When the shepherd won’t protect the sheep, don’t be surprised when the wolves take the flock.
So you’re in favor of just letting things continue as they are? Or do you have an idea for reducing the 40,000 gun deaths and twice that number of maimings a year?
That’s what he said because it’s easier to blame somebody than to actually do something about it.
“Do something about it” has been the clarion call of the weak for decades now.
Do you have an idea for reducing the 85,000 alcohol deaths each year, or are you in favor of “just letting things continue as they are”?
Great deflection to an entirely unrelated discussion. How about: ‘The number one cause of death is birth. Are you in favor of doing away with births?’
That seems to fit your rhetorical style.
Don’t blame me just because you’re fine with not stopping 85,000 deaths a year from alcohol -related causes. We used to even have an amendment prohibiting it for that very reason.
Those deaths are people doing themselves in. Not forcing 8 or 10 others to die with them 😲
Most firearm deaths are by suicide.
Do you ever listen to yourself?
“Classroom doors should be hardened to make them lockable from the inside and closed to intruders from the outside,” Trump said.”
That wasn’t a Democrat saying that!!!
Hey goofy, the door WAS lockable from the inside. You know how the gunman got in? A teacher propped the door open when she went out to her car to get her cell phone. Try to keep up.
Disproven. Another attempted deflection.
The event itself is a deflection? Okay, boomer.
Nope that is proven false
The wolves’ taking control of the flock have nothing to do with Democrats. We’ve tried to reason with you people to no avail.
They have everything to do with Democrats. You don’t speak from reason, just emotion, and you have no credibility whatsoever.
This writer nailed it!
I read the “comments”, but I can only hear the voices of desperate, cowering people who want more than anything their right to life.
But the screams of dying children are so much louder.
The answer to the problem is plain for anyone with eyes to see. But you are so blind with partisan hatred and your own overweening fear that you refuse to see it.
No nation can survive like this. No sane person can retain their sanity in the face of your blind terror.
It’s always someone else’s fault for you cowards. Your guns mean more to you than human life itself. Meanwhile, we’re drowning in the blood you spill. It’s not someone else’s fault. If you want the answer to this, look in the mirror. You will see the face of fear and hatred.
May I share this? Excellent!!
Correct. Human beings enjoy killing. They will shove you into the gas chamber, machine gun you at the ditch or rape and strangle you in your livingroom. They pick their victims by specific critera. They must be innocent, must be without blame and must be unable to defend themselves. Such is the history of the race. A despicable one to be sure. As a species, one day they will dissappear from the face of the earth and their passing will go unnoticed and will not be mourned.
We can’t survive and if we fail to do something about this, we won’t. It will be one of the issues that leads to a civil war.
Yeah, looking in the mirror and actually dealing with the high-scale social dysfunction that left-wing culture has wrought would be too much for you, Jeff.
“The answer to the problem is plain for anyone with eyes to see. But you are so blind with partisan hatred and your own overweening fear that you refuse to see it.”
Woof, the projection in this statement is off the charts.
You are so tedious with your unbridled hatred and tunnel vision.
Damned well put sir!! Vote 🔵
I don’t know how they can possibly continue to fight constitutional restrictions.
Perry just seems to become more and more unhinged in how he looks at the world. His rhetoric is devoid of rational thought and focuses instead on epithets and bullying. It his really a text book view of the Left in how it addresses the issues facing us.
Said by a follower of the yellow crime boss whose trademarks are threats, extortion, bullying, name-calling, and demeaning.
Consider it an in-kind contribution.