Steven Singer is a teacher in Pennsylvania. He blogs at Gadfly on the Wall.
He writes:
I drove my daughter to school today.
She thanked me for the ride, I wished her a good day, and she toddled off to the middle school doors.
Her khaki pants needed ironing, her pony tail was coming loose and she hefted her backpack onto her shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
All I could do was smile wistfully.
Parents and guardians know that feeling – a little piece of your heart walking away from you.
Imagine what the parents of the 19 children who were killed yesterday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, might have felt.
I wonder if the parents of the two adults killed in the shooting gave a thought to their grown children during what may have seemed like just another busy day at the end of the academic year.
We’re all so preoccupied. We tend to forget that every goodbye could be our last.
This marks the 27th school shooting with injuries or deaths so far in 2022.
It comes just 10 days after a shooting at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., where 10 people were killed.
There’s hardly enough time anymore to mourn one disaster before the next one hits.
One would think we would have done something about these tragedies by now.
After all, they aren’t unpredictable. They aren’t inevitable. They’re man-made.
There have been 119 school shootings since 2018, according to Education Week, a publication that has been tracking such events for the last four years.
This only includes incidents that happen on K-12 school property or on a school bus or during a school sponsored event when classes are in session.
If we broaden our definition, there is much more gun violence in our communities every day.
According to The Gun Violence Archive, an independent data collection organization, there have been 212 mass shootings so far this year.
There were 693 mass shootings last year, 611 the year before and 417 the year before that.
Why don’t we do anything about this?
In Scotland 26 years ago, a gunman killed 16 kids and a teacher in Dunblane Primary School. The United Kingdom (UK) responded by enacting tight gun control legislation. There hasn’t been a school shooting in the UK since.
After 51 worshippers were killed in mass shootings at Christchurch and Canterbury in New Zealand in 2019, the government outlawed most military style semiautomatic weapons, assault rifles like AK15’s, and initiated a buyback program. There hasn’t been a mass shooting there since.
In Australia, following a 1996 mass shooting in which 35 people were killed in Tasmania, Australian states and territories banned several types of firearms and bought back hundreds of thousands of banned weapons from their owners. Gun homicides, suicides, and mass shootings are now much less common in the country.
This is not hard.
The rest of the world has cracked the code. Just not us.
Not the U.S.
PLEASE OPEN THE LINK AND READ THE REST OF THIS COMPELLING ARTICLE.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In France the newspaper “Le Monde” wrote an editorial about all the mass shootings in US schools and the unwillingness of America to take action. “If there is any American exceptionalism, it is to tolerate the fact that schools in the United States are regularly transformed into bloody shooting ranges,” the newspaper wrote. We will likely go through another cycle of humiliating paralysis where we blame “mental health.” This cycle is stale and embarrassing.
We need some self reflection as a nation. Our government is not working in this country. We need change if we are to be considered a democracy of, by and for the people. We need to figure out a way to overcome the continuous “stalemate.” We have many, many checks, but no balance in our current government.
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Ask: Why is our government not working?
ANSWER: Because of the Republican Party that refuses to compromise and negotiate. Everyone that votes Republican is voting for autocratic, fascist klpetocrats.
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The massacres will increase
until the NRA whores of the
Republican Party are history.
It really is that simple.
There is no other way.
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Thank you, Steve and Diane!
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The American People have the Will to change, but the American Gov. is not representing and protecting the American People, but is serving its Moneyed Masters.
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I’m curious how many of you have ever seen a gun in real life? Handled one? Shot one? Do you know the difference between different kinds of guns? Pistols, revolvers, shotguns, rifles, etc.? Do you know the difference between semi-automatic vs. automatic? Different kinds and calibers of bullets?
I would strongly encourage you all to take a gun safety and training class sometime – I didn’t want to but a friend roped me into it and I’m glad I did. If nothing else, it takes a little of the edge of fear off because at least you have some real life experience with guns and what they can and can’t do. Also, you might be surprised to find that the types of gun nuts who teach these classes actually tend to be quite zealous about gun safety. For instance, when I took it they’d yell at us if our finger was anywhere near the trigger even if the gun was unloaded. They were upfront about the fact that the sole purpose of a gun is to kill and what that means and how you never take that responsibility lightly.
Not that it will (or even should) change your mind about guns necessarily, but it does broaden your thinking to have actual experience with something around which there is so much hype on both sides. Since taking the class, I’ve found myself rather curious in a Murder-She-Wrote sort of way to educate myself. And you also start to realize that sometimes the “enemy” are actual human beings themselves, simply with differing points of view. You don’t necessarily have to agree, but at least you’ll know more about what you disagree about and that there are valid opposing perspectives even if you disagree.
Or you can just go ahead and ignore all nuance, call me a Putin-loving right-wing NRA gun happy Trump troll and go on with your fear-based hostility because that’s what tends to pass for discourse among certain people around these parts. Have a lovely day, it’s doubtful I’ll be back.
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Dienne, I agreed with every word you wrote until the last paragraph.
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I got a riflery medal back at summer camp in the 1970s. Does that count?
Can someone here explain what this very long and gratuitously smug post has to do with whether 18 year olds should be able to buy semi-automatic assault weapons and ammunition on a whim? Or whether any adult needs to have the right to carry one around town?
I also have no experience with bombs, but I know that it’s a bad idea to drop them on Ukraine civilians. Some folks here think it is fine.
Perhaps this poster should take her own advice and stop thinking of us as the enemy and the right wing folks who want to make trans children disappear as her friends.
Why does this person only challenge our integrity and motives but not the integrity and motives of those on the other side, who she always defends and gives the benefit of the doubt? Why smear and insult us constantly, while lecturing us about how the same folks who hate trans people are actually really good people and we should come to some understanding and just hide our trans kids and let them have the guns they want rather than criticizing them.
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And I qualified “Expert” with the M-1 rifle back in the day during “summer camp”–I guess you might call it. Does that count?
And does being pretty good with a Daisy air rifle count?
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This is not hard.
The rest of the world has cracked the code. Just not us”
Of Codes and Heads
The only thing that’s hard
Is head, in Senate yard
And cracking head’s required
Cuz code is long retired
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/we-ve-got-it-upside-down-admiral-james-stavridis-on-america-s-permissive-gun-laws/vi-AAXKjAU?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=5cf1bf70d8e84d8fab4b18a625debfe0
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Interesting post from Steven. Coincidentally, I was sort of riffing on this this morning:
If you want to vote for any Republican, that is your right. But fall back on being a someone who later whines that “you want your country back” anytime anyone challenges you on the substance of what you support. Not what you say or claim to believe. But what the logical consequences of your choices are.
By clinging to disproven idea that the only thing need to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, you are a consigning thousand of men, women and children to a random, gruesome death or trauma.
By giving unconditional support to military spending as at least 70% of annual funding for all federal departments and agencies, you are consigning the rest of domestic spending to spending levels that will only feed further frustration with government, which is overburdened with legal responsibilities that don’t match budgets.
By supporting charter schools and vouchers, you will destroy institutional K-12 public education in the nation.
By supporting deregulation of toxins like coal waste, pesticides, and pollution standards to save businesses money through “less paperwork and regulations,” you have consigned an anonymous percentage of children and adults to develop complex, deadly cancers as they age.
By continuing to block comprehensive health care access at an affordable cost to all Americans, you are supporting a multi-tiered health care system in which the survival rates of the top are significantly higher than those at the bottom.
By mandating that women carry their children to term without a robust social safety net geared toward individual cases, regardless of the circumstances, you create new cycles of childhood poverty and dependency on sub-par governmental services that you refuse to prioritize.
By emphasizing the extraction of limited sources of oil to save money in the short term, you are forcing your childrens generation to clean up an irreparable long-term policy of climate change denialism and delaying research on renewable sources of energy.
By buying into the argument that the last national election was stolen, you are a knowing liar. Republican gains in Congress and in state and local races prove it. It has to be one or the other, but it is fundamentally illogical and a lie to claim both can be true.
By accepting the rhetoric of a color-blind society, you dismiss objective historiography by implying all history begins now and the past is irrelevant. To you, history is a malleable tool shaped by and used for political ideologies, not actual verifiable facts.
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Excellent comment, Greg.
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Consider there are two endpoints along a continuum of unlawful killing by gun, be it “Pistols, revolvers, shotguns, rifles, etc.” Let’s call one endpoint “vertical killing” and the other “horizontal killing.”
Vertical killing, at one endpoint, is characterized by mass murder occurring within a span of minutes. Bodies pile up, rapidly. Condemnation and other responses come quickly from all over. (The frog immediately jumps out of the pot of hot water into which it was put.)
Horizontal killing, at the other endpoint, is characterized by homicides occurring. Bodies pile up, slowly. Condemnation and other responses barely come from beyond the victim’s immediate family and other persons directly affected. (The frog sits comfortably cooking to death in the pot of water whose temperature was, at first, normal for the frog but now is being gradually increased, so as to not alarm the frog.)
Robb Elementary, and each of the many other school shootings before it, is an example of vertical killing.
Atlanta, Chicago, and other major urban cities are examples of where horizontal killing occurs.
In Atlanta, however, horizontal killings are approaching being much like vertical killings…
https://mailchi.mp/92f00fe9ae13/update-average-time-now-between-city-of-atlanta-homicides-48-hours
Yet, some folk believe Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s “open carry” without a license will make for a safer and better civil society. Why would anyone believe such foolishness?
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This is traitorous talk.
Also they’re zounds of guns, literally a billion guns. Endless. It’s easier to ban people than it is to ban guns.
All gun laws are infringements.
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So LordNoodles, do you have the right to murder children?
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Diane Ravitch, the people who shed crocodile tears after a mass shooting where children are killed and use that as a catalyst to push for gun control have historically been the people who advocate for abortion on-demand. It is hypocritical for people to defend the murder of the unborn under the logic of “my body, my choice” and then weeping at the graves of children who were gunned down by a crazy person with a gun.
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