Hate Abounds: Are We Safe Anywhere?

“This strife among ourselves wastes our energy and destroys our unity. My message to those of you involved in this battle of brother against brother is this: Take your guns, your knives…. And throw them into the sea!” –Nelson Mandela

 

249. The number of mass shootings in the United States. Just this year. 2019. That’s more than one a day.

How can you not look at that statistic and come to the horrified understanding that something is terribly wrong in this country?

Churches. Movie Theaters. Nightclubs. High Schools. Elementary Schools. Colleges. Concerts. Festivals. Athletic Events. Bowling Alleys. Restaurants. Places of Employment. Government Buildings. Banks. Hospitals. Nursing Homes. Fitness centers. Newspaper/Media locations. Press conferences. Gas Stations. Apartment buildings. Hotels. Residential parties. Libraries. Supermarkets. Airports. Malls. Courthouses. Military bases. Navy yards. Indian reservations. Community meetings.

The above list are all places where mass shootings have been carried out. Places that we all visit on a daily basis, a weekly basis. Frequently. Where our kids visit.

What. In. The. Hell?

Just this weekend two were carried out. One in El Paso, TX (20 dead). One in Dayton, OH (9 dead). My sister and her family live all of two miles away from where the Dayton attack was carried out. It can happen anywhere, at anytime, to anyone. If you don’t believe that you are in denial at this point.

If you are somebody that knows me, you know my stance already. If you don’t, it’s pretty simple. BAN ASSAULT RIFLES for civilian ownership. They are used in every attack. Law enforcement, and military. Those are the only entities that should be permitted to have possession of one at any given time.

I’ve been in more than one debate about guns with friends and other people alike. I can’t really fathom why people still support the ownership of these weapons. And nothing that comes from their mouths will ever change my mind. There is no functional reason for a civilian to own one of these weapons. They are used as a toy, or they fall into the wrong hands and are used for a terrible purpose. That is it. There is no in between. YOU DON’T NEED ONE. YOU SHOULDN’T OWN ONE.

One of the favorite arguments of assault weapon supporters I get thrown back at me is “The gun doesn’t kill people, the person does.” Except these guns were implicitly designed to kill. That’s the entire reason they exist. The combination of the two of them kill people. It’s part of a formula. You take away the device that allows that formula to create an outcome, it doesn’t become a reality any longer.

Mental illness. That’s another argument that gets thrown at me. We need to have better ways to treat people with mental illness so they can’t get their hands on guns. Look, some of these shooters absolutely had mental health issues. But that’s not the root cause with everything happening this year. It’s hate. HATE.

Minorities are being targeted. LGBT locations are being targeted. Synagogues and churches are being targeted. Border towns are being targeted. OR the shooter has researched and taken on terroristic beliefs of some kind.

There are so many levels and layers of what actually causes one human being to pick up an assault weapon and use it to kill other human beings. Trying to weed every single one of them out and then to announce we need to collectively address all of them first, it’s not a practical solution. It’s not. You can’t do it. Human beings are always going to have various disorders and issues within the population. You can’t eliminate that. But you can eliminate the things that make this part of the population susceptible to carrying out horrendously terrible acts of violence with relative ease.

The current political climate is only throwing gas on the fire. I’m not going to sit here on my blog and talk about Trump. But his refusal to take any action on gun measures, to take any action on keeping his damn mouth shut and his twitter feed off when it comes to spewing hate rhetoric, is an embarrassing failure of the highest proportions.

Australia. They banned assault rifles in the 1990s and the government bought back all of the existing assault weapons in 1996 after that country experienced the worst mass shooting in it’s history. You know what hasn’t happened in Australia since then? Another mass shooting. They haven’t had a single one since.

I’ve combed through numerous articles the last couple days after these most recent shootings. There is common thread present. People are scared to go anywhere. And if they do, they feel it almost necessary to have an escape plan in place in case something does go wrong. It’s just part of the planning process now whenever you go out to a public space. If a movie theater is packed, people will get up and leave. At church or events, people deliberately find seats that have the best routes to the exits in case something happens.

This is the reality we live in right now. A large percentage of the American population has now found themselves in relative close proximity to a mass shooting, regardless of where you live. How sad is this? It’s devastating and terrible.

Only in America can one be pro-death penalty, pro-war, pro-unmanned drone bombs, pro-nuclear weapons, pro-guns, pro-torture, pro-land mines, and still call yourself “pro-life.”

I’m not going to say “It’s not too late to make a change”, because it is. It is too late. Because so many people are dead. But change is needed still. Hard and aggressive change. Talking isn’t helping, it’s time for somebody to start making decisions. Decisions that will actually serve to stop this madness. Contact the people that make those decisions and let them know you want it to stop. And if they refuse to make changes, be responsible and vote people into office that will.

It’s our only choice. Whether you want to believe it or not. We have to work together to bring this to an end.

God bless.