Gun Violence
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In the past few weeks we have again seen an uprising in the number of mass shootings. Dozens of Americans have been killed, scores others injured. We have seen shootings at a grocery store, a hospital and, most tragically, a school.
Every time we see mass shootings, we see the gun lobby and gun owners spastically making desperate claims and become mindlessly aggressive. Crying for more armed officers and even civilian volunteers at schools.
In some past cases, armed civilians have patrolled schools. For a few weeks. Then they disappear. So that is not a solution to the problem.
In the recent school shooting, 19 students and 2 teachers were killed while 17 others were injured by the shooter. Claims that we need armed police in schools do not offer a solution. There was an armed officer at the school at the time of the shooting from my understanding. He watched the shooter enter the school, sat down and waited for backup. At least 40 officers arrived, all armed, some carrying AR-15’s, all wearing ballistic vests. They wandered around outside the school, handcuffing and tazing parents who tried to enter the school to extract their children.
This is not the first time that an armed officer or civilian was present before a shooting began. In Parkland, FL there was an armed officer at the school at the time of the shooting. That officer left the building and waited outside while children were being shot.
I want you to try and imagine your own child in a school, facing such a shooter. Looking down the barrel of an assault weapon aimed directly at your child’s face. I want you to imagine the terror which goes through that child’s mind, the desperate wish to be with you for comfort and protection and that is the very last thing they ever experience.
Imagine what the occupants of the grocery store experienced when a shooter entered the store and began killing them. This was a shooter who specifically targeted a grocery store with a primarily black clientele, miles from his own home. That shooter had openly ambraced neo-Nazi ideology and wore the emblem of the Black Sun, a Nazi symbol which is used by the Azov Division in Ukraine, whom he had strongly identified with.
