News items this past week include the graduation of schoolmates of the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting victims, from the area’s Newtown CT high school. That massacre was 12 years ago. What has our society done since then to address the ownership of military-style weapons? Nothing. It’s worse than nothing: the prior week’s Wall Street Journal had a related article: “How School Shootings Are Changing the Design of American Classrooms; Architects are focusing on safety features to keep perpetrators out and create a sense of community for students.” There is a direct correlation. We are normalizing gun violence, accepting it as a part of everyday life. What kind of a deranged society addresses such a problem that way?
And from the Associated Press: “Demolition of the Parkland classroom building where 17 died in 2018 shooting begins.” Presumably the great State of Florida will be hiring those clever architects to rebuild the school. From that same article: “Broward County is not alone in taking down a school building after a mass shooting. In Connecticut, Sandy Hook Elementary School was torn down after the 2012 shooting and replaced. In Texas, officials closed Robb Elementary in Uvalde after the 2022 shooting there and plan to demolish it. Colorado’s Columbine High had its library demolished after the 1999 shooting.”
So apparently, that is that is the “solution.” After the slaughtering of children in our schools, tear the buildings down and build ones hardened against such shootings (after the requisite “thoughts and prayers” and brief puffery by politicians saying they’re going to do something about it). Logically speaking if we continue on the present path to perdition, over time we will eventually replace all schools rather than addressing gun control head on.
Hey, it’s an American right to shoot ‘em up!
It would be bad enough if that was the only recent gun news. But, no, there is more! Those wonderful new conservative members of SCOTUS have reversed the ban on bump stocks. Again, from AP June 14: “The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down a ban on bump stocks, the gun accessory used in the deadliest shooting in modern American history — a Las Vegas massacre that killed 60 people and injured hundreds more.
The court’s conservative majority said Friday that then-President Donald Trump’s administration overstepped its authority with the 2019 ban on the firearm attachment, which allows semiautomatic weapons to fire like machine guns.” (BTW, now Mr. Trump defends the SCOTUS decision.)
We’ve become a one step forward, two steps backward gun addicted society. If only the NRA was solely to blame, but it is ingrained in our “culture.” How many more innocent people will have to die before we have ANY leadership to ban military style weapons and implementing a registration system for gun ownership?
