Well, one more school shooting! Did anyone really expect that there would not be another one? And the shooters are getting younger, gaining access to the weapons kept in their households. It seemed inevitable that the parent of the latest shooter would also be arrested and charged since parents are, more and more, being subjected to the consequences of allowing their children access to weapons.
The latest shooter at Apalachee school in Georgia was only 14 years old. And even though he only killed four and injured nine others, the occurrence of these shootings says something really horrific about American society, a society in which there are more guns than people.
Though school shootings total in the scores, even over fairly recent years, the worst of these still remain in the minds of many of us.
At Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007, a college student killed 32 students and faculty.
Perhaps the most horrendous of all the school shootings was Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012. Imagine. Just eleven days before the holiest day of Christianity, twenty kids aged six and seven and six adults, were slaughtered by a 20-year-old wielding an assault rifle.
February 14, 2018, was the day that 17 students and teachers were killed and another 17 wounded at Parkland High School in Florida.
And on May 24, 2022, 19 students between the ages of nine and 11 and two teachers were systematically killed at an Uvalde, Texas school while local law enforcement failed to intervene expeditiously.
So, when these school shootings occur so periodically, there is no reason for anyone to expect that they will cease, and certainly not so when the availability of weapons is so prevalent.
If the deaths of twenty and nineteen children can do nothing to spur lawmakers, it is completely unlikely that the deaths of two students in the latest assault will do so either.
For me the basic question is this: How much NRA money does it take to buy the life of a single child?
Our Congress is impotent when it comes to realistically addressing the problem of gun violence because the flow of funds into the coffers of Congress from the likes of the NRA is blinding our legislators to even trying to find some reasonable solution to the problem.
It’s not a matter of confiscating guns. But it may require that the manufacture of certain types of guns be curtailed and that the flow of unregistered and illegal guns be stopped, and background checks be strengthened and more rigorously enforced.
Too many lawmakers continually try to suggest that the problem isn’t the guns but one of mental health. Poppycock! If someone with mental health problems only had access to a baseball bat, that person would be far less likely to commit the huge numbers of casualties that occur when an AR-15 or other assault rifle or even a semi-automatic pistol is involved.
Lawmakers and judges who claim to be “originalists,” seeking to apply the articles of the Constitution as they “believe” the framers intended, are the very same individuals who consistently refuse to recognize that very vexing clause in the Second Amendment, “A well regulated militia ...”
And can those originalists truly believe that the framers ever considered the technology that has provided the weapons of today that make mass killing so easy?
This should not be a Democrat vs. Republican issue. Undoubtedly, the children who have died in these incidents were the offspring of parents of both political parties.
In the final analysis, the crocodile-tears and “prayers and thoughts” will do nothing to stop the deaths of the children of this country. And every parent will sleep a bit more uneasily questioning if these episodes will be visited on their own children, regardless of how small the community in which they live.
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Written by Chuck Witt, a retired architect, a former newspaper columnist, and a lifelong resident of Winchester. Cross-posted from the WinCity Voices.
