A wounded young girl in one of the Robb Elementary School classrooms thought she was pleading for help from one of the gaggle of policemen [numbering anywhere from two to 13] in the hallway outside her door. Instead, the person who responded was the shooter who promptly got up from her teacher’s chair and shot her again and killed her.
We know this because her teacher, Mr. Reyes, heard her plea, saw her killed while he feinged death for 77 minutes. All of his 11 students were murdered before his eyes while he survived with multiple wounds.
And now, more than two weeks after the Uvalde executions, Congress busies itself with closed door conversations, discussions and debate about what to do, again, related to gun violence in America, unseen at our level anywhere else in the world.
Second most likely country for you to end up murdered? Yemen, in the midst of a nationwide conflict among warring factions over who will run the place, but still its murder rate is less than half of ours.
Expanded background checks, raising the age to purchase semi-automatics from 18 to 21, an outright ban on AR-15s, all ideas that would have a provable impact in the reduction of mayhem and murder in America; all these suggestions have already been rejected by Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas as too extreme, too violative of the 2nd Amendment, too tough for the NRA to consider … even consider.
I say again, over the last 10 years more school age children have been killed by guns than either police or members of our military. What kind of insanity on the part of our elected members of Congress must exist in their minds, let alone those of the shooters, that continue to reject such life-saving steps described above related to the access, purchase and ownership of these weapons of war.
A congressman from Colorado says they must exist so his constituents can have them to kill raccoons before they kill and eat their chickens. A congressman from Wisconsin wants to add cars to the ban on guns because a nut drove a car into a Christmas parade in a town in his district and killed five people. And these two Republican members of our national Congress are allegedly adults who said such lunacies even before all the children, teachers and others were buried in Buffalo, Uvalde, Tulsa and the other 22 mass shootings in this nation just since the Texas slaughter.
And the two lawmakers did it live, in the Judiciary Committee hearings last week, on the topic of guns in America and both expressed their views with smirks on their faces, knowing full well the absurdity of their excuses to not take the subject seriously.
One might think these two heartless, helpless, thoughtless morons are outliers on the Hill in Washington. They are not. Their views are accepted by the Republican caucus as mainstream, common sense utterances about guns in America – simply a topic to treat with absurdity, even jest, while pretending to offer informed commentary and workable solutions to reduce or stop the carnage.
In closing, envision what an AR-15 loaded with a magazine round of modest size, only 10, would do to the offending raccoon. Now generate in your same mind what was left of the 10-year-old girl who called out for police but was met only with sudden death from a demented, damaged and destructive response from an 18-year-old kid from the same schools and same city. And finally, envision the fake frowns, worried expressions and phony words from their senator, John Cornyn of Texas, as he explains there’s little he and his Republican colleagues can do about what ended both of their lives … one, the 10-year-old child, the other an 18-year-old boy empowered to buy his weapon of warfare, not for use in the battlefields in Ukraine but in the school buildings of Uvalde.
The kids are dead in Texas and Cornyn continues to be braindead in DC. They just wanted to live. He just wants to have a title in front of his name. They did nothing wrong. He just does nothing.
