According to an Online MSN article entitled, “How many US school shootings have there been in 2022?” by Alex Finnis, there have been 248 mass shootings in the US so far in 2022, killing more than 250 people. The most recent occurred in Uvalde, TX where an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children and 2 adults. This came just a week after another mass shooting that targeted African Americans in a supermarket in Buffalo, NY. Ten people lost their lives and three were left wounded. Both incidents were committed by 18-year-old males wielding AR-15s.
According to reports, police were out-gunned by the semi-automatic weapon used by the now-deceased shooter in the Uvalde incident, who barged his way into Robb Elementary School for the purpose of slaughtering people. The school was well-equipped to deal with such an eventuality, and had a police team and other safeguards, including doors that required keys to unlock them from the outside when students and teachers were barricaded inside classrooms. Police were locked out for quite some time while the victims were locked inside with the murderer, until it was discovered that the keys had been in the principal’s office the entire time!
The Uvalde incident was riddled with a lot of other puzzling actions, bordering on the incompetent, that apparently resulted in unnecessary deaths. There were allegations that the police were reluctant to enter the building while the shooter was there, and resisted requests by parents to storm the school. One parent was actually handcuffed because she was insistent that the police do something about what was going on in the school. When she was eventually released from the handcuffs, she took matters into her own hands and entered the school to rescue her offspring. She succeeded.
One question that has arisen regarding the police’s reluctance to enter the school is about their motivation. Why? Is it possible that they feared the perpetrator, Salvador Ramos, because he was armed with an AR-15, and they were not? Was it akin to the officers going to a gun battle with knives? Were the police outgunned and afraid? Apparently, the idea that the police were outgunned did probably factor into the loss of lives during that unfortunate incident.
Blame is being liberally spread around, but the most blame is leveled at Republican lawmakers who have consistently refused to get out of bed with the NRA in order to enact common-sense gun-control legislation. Proposals have consistently included limiting the access to weapons like AR-15s for purchase; instituting background checks, and raising the age required to purchase weapons. Those are just some of the measures that might have helped to limit the carnage perpetrated by rogue citizens with grudges so deep that they are willing to kill unarmed children!!!
Though it may not be possible to prevent every mass murder in schools, the common-sense measures that have been repeatedly proposed by Democrats and knocked down by Republicans would at least serve to mitigate some of these events. Instead, GOP talking heads spout the inanest “remedies” for the problems of shooters in schools. The most idiotic is that of arming teachers!!!! They would rather put teachers in harm’s way rather than support simple legislative changes. Those 21 individuals killed in cold blood in Texas, therefore, were murdered as much by toxic politics as they were by the seemingly crazed gunman. Senator Ted Cruz and other Republicans who refuse to do the right thing actually have blood on their hands; they are silent collaborators with the likes of the immature gun-wielding thugs who feel it is their job to get rid of people that they deem do not deserve to live!
In the GOP playbook teachers, who are overburdened, usually underpaid, and historically maligned, are now expected to become sharpshooting combatants on top of everything else on their plates. The teachers who lost their lives in the Uvalde incident were sacrificial lambs; they were victims of the GOP. When will we have enough of the human carnage that could be prevented by enacting sensible gun control legislation? And when will those hypnotized by the corrupt GOP wake up and rescue our country from the throes of its romance with automatic weapons. If the Republicans can’t and won’t stop the madness, the rest of the country had better figure it out before it’s too late! A Luta Continua.
