He Did Not Act Alone

He did not act alone, this shooter who, at last count, had taken 19 lives and wounded countless others during a massacre in an elementary school in Uvalde, TX yesterday.

Nor did the shooter who took 10 lives at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York on May 14.

And neither did the male (they are almost always male) who killed 13 people in Virginia Beach, VA on May 31, 2019, or man who killed 12 people on November 7, 2018, in Oakland, CA.

The man who killed 17 students in Parkland, FL, in 2018 did not act alone, nor did the man who killed 61 people in Las Vegas, NV on October 1, 2017. Neither did the fellow who killed 50 people in Orlando, FL in 2016, or the guy who killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Or the man who killed 32 at Virginia Tech in 2007.

We all have blood on our hands because we sit back and offer "thoughts and prayers" as if that is going to stop this grotesque mindset that Americans have, this horrific, terrible thought that "owning my gun" is more important than the life of, well, anybody.

Our senators do nothing. This falls mostly on the Republican side, but the Democrats are proving so useless and spineless that I have come to the conclusion they are complicit, not merely complacent, in all of this, or else they'd find a work-around the stupid rules in the Senate and the House. Those are rules, not laws, and rules are meant to be broken from time to time.

Sometimes even laws need to be broken, and sometimes a perceived right is not a right. I am being inundated by opinion pieces telling me women do not have the right to have an abortion under the US Constitution, but everyone (especially men, apparently), has the right to carry a gun, even though when the US Constitution was written "bearing arms" did not mean carrying a gun. It meant being in the damn military. One can't pick and choose "rights" from that dusty document.

We have to be the most gruesome, gory, heartless, warlike bunch of people to ever live on this planet.

The blood running down the street belongs to all of us, because we accept this as the way of life in the USA. This doesn't happen in other countries. Only here. Anybody want to take a guess as to why that is?

I am all for gun reform. I am for background checks, for making people who own guns carry appropriate insurance, for taking them away from people who shouldn't have them. I am a gun owner - I live on a farm and occasionally they're necessary, when a coyote is killing a calf, or a rabid groundhog goes after a dog. My husband hunts. He pays a fee to get a license every year. 

We both have had gun training. I treat guns with the utmost respect; they are locked up.

But I've blood on my hands, too. I haven't called my legislator every day demanding something be done. I've written a few letters from time to time, but it's not a constant drumbeat.

Why is it acceptable that young children have to have lock down drills in case of a massive shooting incident in this country? Why must we thrive on fear - not only of other countries, but of our own people? I do not believe any of this has to be because "it is what it is." Acceptance indicates lack of desire to change.

I do not accept this.

Isn't it time that we the people, the ones who are really supposed to run this government, stand up and say, no more?

Isn't it time we the people bring the country back to some semblance of sanity? Wasn't one million dead from Covid enough for two years?

My god, how much death do we need to prove our points? How many more elementary school children have to die to prove that certain segments of the population only care about youth when they're in a woman's uterus? Those elementary school children had heartbeats too.

Out, damn spot! Out I say! . . . What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?

Take back our power, people. Wash the blood from our hands, remove the idiots in office, find our footing, and regain our sense of society as a whole. We are all one. We are not islands unto ourselves. We're a society. We're supposed to look out for one another. We're supposed to be brothers and sisters.

It's way past time we act like it.