“St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” has a whole new meaning this year. Was the connection intentional for the shooter who killed seventeen people and wounded fifteen others in one of the worst school shootings in history? We’re already learning of a white supremacist association with the shooter, so who knows what else is in his pathology?
Perhaps Donald Trump thinks its sufficient to opine on the shooter’s mental health and skirt the issue of gun control altogether, but I believe that says more about the Presidents’ own mental fitness than anything else. After all, the shooter’s white nationalist ties make him one of the President’s peeps.
What is wrong with this country? For years now, the disfunction has been apparent to people all over the world. We Americans simply will not do anything about the availability of “weapons of mass destruction” in our own communities.
There are several possible reasons why foreign enrollment in U.S. colleges is trending downward, not the least of which is the poisonous quasi-official attitude toward non-white foreigners emanating from the White House, and the decline in government support for education in general. But compounding the problem must surely be the steady stream of horrific gun violence stories peppering the news. What parent wouldn’t think twice before allowing their child to study abroad in a country wracked with senseless violence?
The NRA has such a stranglehold over the GOP that even with a “normal” Republican president and congress, there would be absolutely no hope of any action on sensible gun control. They won’t even discuss it; and Donald Trump, always more of an instigator than a leader, is scared to even mention the word “gun” in his response to the horrific shootings…
quaking-in-his-boots scared.
In the absence of courage to discuss the obvious remedy, he and others in his party lay down a bunch of platitudes about mental health; but even that is a sham because the whole mess of them has been hell-bent on defunding every aspect of health and the social safety net at their first opportunity. We’re left with nothing but meaningless words.
Donald Trump wants a military parade and a useless wall: to hell with funding for social services and mental health initiatives.
Law enforcement’s big idea is to increase surveillance of all citizens in order to spot possible perps and presumably do a mental health intervention. Isn’t this a movie plot?
What happens when, inevitably, some future Donald Trump decides those interventions should not just happen to people who say they are going to kill somebody, but extrapolates the legal argument to people who express opinions against government policies or make art lampooning “Dear Leader?”
It’s the damndest slippery slope, but those who hug the second amendment couldn’t give a fig about the first.
Rational gun control isn’t rocket science. Strict permitting requirements should limit access to weapons like that AR-15, and the so-called “bump stock” modifications we heard so much about recently, to security professionals and sportsmen who have passed rigorous safety and mental health screening checks. All firearms should, at minimum, be registered every time they change hands. Why should the most lethal of our constitutional rights also give the broadest license to abusers?
I am disgusted.