I just finished reading your article, while watching the replay of the video on CNN and watching the anguished parents screaming for the police to do something. I am like you so frustrated and angry. I am a retired teacher who just today went to a school to substitute because so many teachers were unable to go in today. The stress, on top of the anger and frustration, the helplessness is palpable in the schools. I am so sick to death of the responses of the Republicans on the issue of guns. They are also supposed to be pro-life-what a joke. I want to know what I can do! Every day there is more disgusting comments from the GOP-do they even realize how dumb and stupid they sound?? And they have too many followers-actual people who believe the answer to guns is more guns?? I can't wrap my head around it-are we suppose to buy the kids handguns and put them in their lunchbox?? Blame it on mental health, which they also don't do anything about. We can't vote them out fast enough, so is the best thing to do to write our senators, to plead that they end the filibuster? Maybe urge them to go after it from a public health safety issue (like the Times article suggested-compare guns to cars-how many safety measures have been created which have lessened deaths in car crashes?) I'm at a loss, and so so angry. Teachers will be quitting left and right. Maybe Mitch and Gregg Abbott can substitute a few days-look those kids in the eye and tell them why you put gun owners "rights" ahead of their safety??
As you said, "There aren't words". This has to stop. There are things our elected officials can do to to make these things less likely, and yet they don't!
We are massacring our children. The only way to stop it is to decrease the amount of guns in this country. Begin with stronger gun laws. Vote only for those who will be strong enough to do this. Our hunger for violence is our national, nay worldwide, shame. Anymore acceptance of this is intolerable, inhuman, criminal.
You ask why legislators are in public service if they don’t serve the public . . . No GOP US Senator IS in public service, only in public power, no service aspect about it beyond serving their egos, simple as that. And there’s NO way to make uncaring people care about anything beyond their immediate interests.
I did look at their faces. The one of a little girl named Tess, with her armload of Siamese cat, just gutted me. I was about her age when we prevailed on our parents to get us a Siamese cat, the first of many I've had. He slept in my bedroom by the space heater. The children are so beautiful. What I can't stand to look at is the corrupt, falsehood-spewing faces of Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott, parading their heartlessness and duplicity for the world to see with no apparent shame. Those are the faces of evil.
I'm a Canadian and I am angry and frustrated, too! Angry about Texas and both angry and frustrated by the ongoing decline of your republic. How can public officials be so completely blind? All of us who are parents have seen our children experience moments of great fear and will recall moments where we needed to soothe and reassure them. It is extremely uncomfortable to think about but no one was there at that moment for those kids in Texas; my pain and my intense anger come from the very real terror those children experienced before death. Your public officials need to sit in a quiet room, perhaps with pictures of their own children, and contemplate that reality. If they come away from that exercise with no sense of shame and no sense of personal responsibility then they are beyond redemption. To your leaders...lead or leave! Your nation is dying...literally and figuratively. This week a panel of Canadian security experts issued a report wherein the United States was identified as a potential national security threat, mostly due to 'democratic backsliding' and the export of extremist ideologies. They might also have mentioned the fact the US is the largest source of illegal weapons in Canada, another violent export. That's the state of your nation: people are dying in mass shootings and neighbors think you are a security threat and source of instability. I know only good Americans...it must be so frustrating for you.
At this point, all I can say is that it is very clear that we no longer live in anything like a democracy because if we did, then the will of the people would prevail. Our representatives and senators have failed us. I am not sure if it is the raw lust for power, fear or ambition, but clearly these people who have been elected to represent us only represent powerful groups like the NRA. They do not care about children or really anybody except themselves. I vote in every election and have since I turned 18 over 65 years ago, but it is not one person, one vote in the U.S. The district I live in is gerrymandered. Votes are restricted in largely Democratic districts and in places where people of Color cast their ballots. I despair at this point because I fear that these cowardly individuals will prevail. By next week, there will be one, two or three more school shootings, and no one will do a thing.
The shooter in Texas used an AR15 assault rifle that has no other purpose than to kill people. It's a terrible hunting rifle because it is so inaccurate and does too much damage to the hunted animal. It damaged the poor children in the school that they had to use DNA to identify the bodies. I cannot rationalize how the AR15 can be understood to be protected as an “arms" under the 2nd amendment of the constitution written in 1781 in the days of the musket and flintlock pistol. I join you in your anger.
I am an avid reader of your column, thank you for your openness. I don't always agree with you but this time I am totally in! I am a practicing psychiatric nurse clinical specialist with a PhD. I am board certified in child, adolescent and family psychiatry. I have been practicing for 62 years, and in private practice since 1976. In sum total I am an expert in mental health and mental illness. Guns kill! Period! Take them away and mass murder disappears and children live. As a nurse, a mother and grandmother I have never been as furious, disgusted, totally incredulous and speechless about the SCOTUS Republican majority, Republican voters and Republican congresspeople's inhumanity and righteous godliness. All 3 groups are pompously driven by, and live by, the 7 deadly sins. Several in power are mentally ill - conspiracy theories meet the rubric for mental illness. Unless we vote them out of office democracy as we have known it will be gone very shortly. It is irresponsibly sick for them to blame the mentally ill while they consciously continue to put guns in their hands - this behavior also meets the rubric for mental illness. Vote Democratic! Vote moderate, humanistic Republican! For
G-D's sake, we must VOTE for mentally healthy candidates!
As we tackle the “what do we do to curb this gun violence” we are going to look at meaningful regulations, and that makes perfect sense. However, we live in a country where, at present, we are taught to hate both government and “the others” that don’t look or think like us. The first should be something that we can legislate…I’m not saying I expect to have success on a national level, obviously the party that promotes policies that lead to bad outcomes will refuse to vote for anything truly meaningful. On the second point, I simply do not know how we ratchet down the rhetoric or increase the trust among our elected officials.
I know we are talking about school violence, which is especially heinous, but it’s all gun issues that have me disturbed. After all, last week, it was a supermarket in a minority majority neighborhood who suffered this pain and now, it’s families of school children.
Anecdotally, I spent the last ten days in Italy on vacation and while there, the Italian language stations, the German speaking stations and the English-speaking stations spent quite a while talking about the Buffalo mass shooting and how gun violence in America is out of control, with no resolution in sight. Sadly, it defines us to the rest of the world.
For the second time, that I have visited Italy, I have met someone who simply will not come to the US because of a fear of guns. The first, in 2015, was a young woman, in her late twenties, who worked in a pastry shop that my wife and I visited each night before calling it a day. She loved everything about the US, asked a non-stop series of questions about what it was like to live here. And, yet, when we asked her why she and her friends hadn’t yet visited our country, her simple answer was guns.
This Year, I was sitting next to a woman from Scotland who had previously visited the US and was accosted by a man with a shotgun who wanted to know why she and her daughter were sitting in her sister-in-law’s car. Apparently, this gun-toting fool was the next-door neighbor and thought he was protecting the neighborhood. She will not be visiting the US any time soon.
And finally, I am in the Education business, working for a large University that has a large foreign student cohort. The number of such students has been in decline for the last several years and surveys show us why. While “not feeling welcome” topped the list and the high cost was the second most quoted reason for not coming to the US, the third reason was gun violence. The most recent survey was done in 2020 and we don’t have any stats since that time.
It's just so daunting that we have to deal with this issue multiple times each year and yet, obvious, common-sense laws like universal background checks, banning military-style weapons and extended magazines, and reasonable restrictions on conceal carry regulations have no chance of passing the Senate. We are failing as a civilized society and I fear, that in my lifetime, there will be many more scenes of such carnage. Again, making available this kind of firepower to a society that wallows in hate is not just irresponsible, it is immoral. Hate, fear, and weaponry are a lethal combination.
I watched the video of that father yesterday in my hotel room and cried. I heard this morning from a CNN reporter of her interview with an 11 year-old survivor who put her hands in the blood of her dead friend so that she could play dead and lay there for an hour until the police finally entered. I am angry and sad and feel helpless. I saw a reference on Twitter yesterday that Chris Murphy of CT had seen the crime scene photos after Sandy Hook. I honestly believe that reluctant gun control/safety opponents should be required to see what an AR-15 does to a body. I read about doctors who saw this kind of damage and how utterly devastating it is to organs. None of this makes sense for a civil society. We must vote out those that are ok with children being killed. I half-jokingly suggested on Twitter yesterday that Biden should use the defense production act to purchase all of the assault rifle output of the gun manufacturers and send them to Ukraine. I've said enough. This has got to stop and I just hope that voters are half as angry as I am to make a difference. Thank you for your piece. I feel ya.
A wise woman and public school teacher and administrator asked on her Facebook page, when will we stop having a 'moment of silence' and when will we start taking an hour for action. Her suggestion was to email every senator with your thoughts. I took her suggested wording and added my own and sent it to every senator. This did take some time, but imagine if everyone took that hour and did the same. Maybe they will get the message, maybe not. But at least you did something to voice your opinion. As a retired teacher and administrator who has worked over 40 years in the public schools of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, I am chilled to the bone when this happens, again, and again. I hear teachers say that when they are on the playground, they scan the vista to determine the best escape route for their class or they are checking to make sure the PA system works and there is construction paper covering the window in their door in case of an active shooter alarm. Over 20 years since Columbine, nearly 10 years since Sandy Hook, still no change. I can't imagine the devastation these families are dealing with after this violence touches their lives. You put your precious child on the bus for school and they don't come home. These politicians need to either do something or we as the voters need to find more worthy people to put in charge of making our laws.
Hiding behind God or Godlessness is frustration from refusal to recognize that America's culture teaches, supports and glorifies horror (someone else's) and murder (not mine either). Life is not a first-person-shooter video game for 'exceptional' people whose sociopathic behaviours are nourished when decent people accept signs of increasing malevolence. It is time to pay attention to what is 'okay'.
Sadly, men are failing. So are most women. The rare exception in either category is a rock, a rock of any color, often pale brown or white, a glacial anomaly, dropped high above the waters, dropped by a retreating glacier of the ice age, carried from nowhere to nowhere, resting quietly and doing little, in plain view, isolated. Sandy
We have gone off the rails in many respects we cannot seem to get a consensus on gun control birth control the people who oppose gun control want to create more children why?. This formula business is manufactured. The Supreme Court is a bad joke on the whole country. We are the laughingstock of the world. I just watch Stephen Colbert interview a former supreme commander of NATO He asked how our allies perceive us his response was not well when are people going to grow a conscience? Nobody should be allowed to make a career out of being a politician or a judge.
I live in AZ and have often said that the state slogan ought to be changed to..."Every problem can be solved with a gun." Will that fit onto a license plate? I firmly reject the mentality that there is a need to carry a gun, let alone something like an AR-15.
I just finished reading your article, while watching the replay of the video on CNN and watching the anguished parents screaming for the police to do something. I am like you so frustrated and angry. I am a retired teacher who just today went to a school to substitute because so many teachers were unable to go in today. The stress, on top of the anger and frustration, the helplessness is palpable in the schools. I am so sick to death of the responses of the Republicans on the issue of guns. They are also supposed to be pro-life-what a joke. I want to know what I can do! Every day there is more disgusting comments from the GOP-do they even realize how dumb and stupid they sound?? And they have too many followers-actual people who believe the answer to guns is more guns?? I can't wrap my head around it-are we suppose to buy the kids handguns and put them in their lunchbox?? Blame it on mental health, which they also don't do anything about. We can't vote them out fast enough, so is the best thing to do to write our senators, to plead that they end the filibuster? Maybe urge them to go after it from a public health safety issue (like the Times article suggested-compare guns to cars-how many safety measures have been created which have lessened deaths in car crashes?) I'm at a loss, and so so angry. Teachers will be quitting left and right. Maybe Mitch and Gregg Abbott can substitute a few days-look those kids in the eye and tell them why you put gun owners "rights" ahead of their safety??
As you said, "There aren't words". This has to stop. There are things our elected officials can do to to make these things less likely, and yet they don't!
We are massacring our children. The only way to stop it is to decrease the amount of guns in this country. Begin with stronger gun laws. Vote only for those who will be strong enough to do this. Our hunger for violence is our national, nay worldwide, shame. Anymore acceptance of this is intolerable, inhuman, criminal.
You ask why legislators are in public service if they don’t serve the public . . . No GOP US Senator IS in public service, only in public power, no service aspect about it beyond serving their egos, simple as that. And there’s NO way to make uncaring people care about anything beyond their immediate interests.
I did look at their faces. The one of a little girl named Tess, with her armload of Siamese cat, just gutted me. I was about her age when we prevailed on our parents to get us a Siamese cat, the first of many I've had. He slept in my bedroom by the space heater. The children are so beautiful. What I can't stand to look at is the corrupt, falsehood-spewing faces of Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott, parading their heartlessness and duplicity for the world to see with no apparent shame. Those are the faces of evil.
I'm a Canadian and I am angry and frustrated, too! Angry about Texas and both angry and frustrated by the ongoing decline of your republic. How can public officials be so completely blind? All of us who are parents have seen our children experience moments of great fear and will recall moments where we needed to soothe and reassure them. It is extremely uncomfortable to think about but no one was there at that moment for those kids in Texas; my pain and my intense anger come from the very real terror those children experienced before death. Your public officials need to sit in a quiet room, perhaps with pictures of their own children, and contemplate that reality. If they come away from that exercise with no sense of shame and no sense of personal responsibility then they are beyond redemption. To your leaders...lead or leave! Your nation is dying...literally and figuratively. This week a panel of Canadian security experts issued a report wherein the United States was identified as a potential national security threat, mostly due to 'democratic backsliding' and the export of extremist ideologies. They might also have mentioned the fact the US is the largest source of illegal weapons in Canada, another violent export. That's the state of your nation: people are dying in mass shootings and neighbors think you are a security threat and source of instability. I know only good Americans...it must be so frustrating for you.
At this point, all I can say is that it is very clear that we no longer live in anything like a democracy because if we did, then the will of the people would prevail. Our representatives and senators have failed us. I am not sure if it is the raw lust for power, fear or ambition, but clearly these people who have been elected to represent us only represent powerful groups like the NRA. They do not care about children or really anybody except themselves. I vote in every election and have since I turned 18 over 65 years ago, but it is not one person, one vote in the U.S. The district I live in is gerrymandered. Votes are restricted in largely Democratic districts and in places where people of Color cast their ballots. I despair at this point because I fear that these cowardly individuals will prevail. By next week, there will be one, two or three more school shootings, and no one will do a thing.
The shooter in Texas used an AR15 assault rifle that has no other purpose than to kill people. It's a terrible hunting rifle because it is so inaccurate and does too much damage to the hunted animal. It damaged the poor children in the school that they had to use DNA to identify the bodies. I cannot rationalize how the AR15 can be understood to be protected as an “arms" under the 2nd amendment of the constitution written in 1781 in the days of the musket and flintlock pistol. I join you in your anger.
I am an avid reader of your column, thank you for your openness. I don't always agree with you but this time I am totally in! I am a practicing psychiatric nurse clinical specialist with a PhD. I am board certified in child, adolescent and family psychiatry. I have been practicing for 62 years, and in private practice since 1976. In sum total I am an expert in mental health and mental illness. Guns kill! Period! Take them away and mass murder disappears and children live. As a nurse, a mother and grandmother I have never been as furious, disgusted, totally incredulous and speechless about the SCOTUS Republican majority, Republican voters and Republican congresspeople's inhumanity and righteous godliness. All 3 groups are pompously driven by, and live by, the 7 deadly sins. Several in power are mentally ill - conspiracy theories meet the rubric for mental illness. Unless we vote them out of office democracy as we have known it will be gone very shortly. It is irresponsibly sick for them to blame the mentally ill while they consciously continue to put guns in their hands - this behavior also meets the rubric for mental illness. Vote Democratic! Vote moderate, humanistic Republican! For
G-D's sake, we must VOTE for mentally healthy candidates!
As we tackle the “what do we do to curb this gun violence” we are going to look at meaningful regulations, and that makes perfect sense. However, we live in a country where, at present, we are taught to hate both government and “the others” that don’t look or think like us. The first should be something that we can legislate…I’m not saying I expect to have success on a national level, obviously the party that promotes policies that lead to bad outcomes will refuse to vote for anything truly meaningful. On the second point, I simply do not know how we ratchet down the rhetoric or increase the trust among our elected officials.
I know we are talking about school violence, which is especially heinous, but it’s all gun issues that have me disturbed. After all, last week, it was a supermarket in a minority majority neighborhood who suffered this pain and now, it’s families of school children.
Anecdotally, I spent the last ten days in Italy on vacation and while there, the Italian language stations, the German speaking stations and the English-speaking stations spent quite a while talking about the Buffalo mass shooting and how gun violence in America is out of control, with no resolution in sight. Sadly, it defines us to the rest of the world.
For the second time, that I have visited Italy, I have met someone who simply will not come to the US because of a fear of guns. The first, in 2015, was a young woman, in her late twenties, who worked in a pastry shop that my wife and I visited each night before calling it a day. She loved everything about the US, asked a non-stop series of questions about what it was like to live here. And, yet, when we asked her why she and her friends hadn’t yet visited our country, her simple answer was guns.
This Year, I was sitting next to a woman from Scotland who had previously visited the US and was accosted by a man with a shotgun who wanted to know why she and her daughter were sitting in her sister-in-law’s car. Apparently, this gun-toting fool was the next-door neighbor and thought he was protecting the neighborhood. She will not be visiting the US any time soon.
And finally, I am in the Education business, working for a large University that has a large foreign student cohort. The number of such students has been in decline for the last several years and surveys show us why. While “not feeling welcome” topped the list and the high cost was the second most quoted reason for not coming to the US, the third reason was gun violence. The most recent survey was done in 2020 and we don’t have any stats since that time.
It's just so daunting that we have to deal with this issue multiple times each year and yet, obvious, common-sense laws like universal background checks, banning military-style weapons and extended magazines, and reasonable restrictions on conceal carry regulations have no chance of passing the Senate. We are failing as a civilized society and I fear, that in my lifetime, there will be many more scenes of such carnage. Again, making available this kind of firepower to a society that wallows in hate is not just irresponsible, it is immoral. Hate, fear, and weaponry are a lethal combination.
I watched the video of that father yesterday in my hotel room and cried. I heard this morning from a CNN reporter of her interview with an 11 year-old survivor who put her hands in the blood of her dead friend so that she could play dead and lay there for an hour until the police finally entered. I am angry and sad and feel helpless. I saw a reference on Twitter yesterday that Chris Murphy of CT had seen the crime scene photos after Sandy Hook. I honestly believe that reluctant gun control/safety opponents should be required to see what an AR-15 does to a body. I read about doctors who saw this kind of damage and how utterly devastating it is to organs. None of this makes sense for a civil society. We must vote out those that are ok with children being killed. I half-jokingly suggested on Twitter yesterday that Biden should use the defense production act to purchase all of the assault rifle output of the gun manufacturers and send them to Ukraine. I've said enough. This has got to stop and I just hope that voters are half as angry as I am to make a difference. Thank you for your piece. I feel ya.
A wise woman and public school teacher and administrator asked on her Facebook page, when will we stop having a 'moment of silence' and when will we start taking an hour for action. Her suggestion was to email every senator with your thoughts. I took her suggested wording and added my own and sent it to every senator. This did take some time, but imagine if everyone took that hour and did the same. Maybe they will get the message, maybe not. But at least you did something to voice your opinion. As a retired teacher and administrator who has worked over 40 years in the public schools of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, I am chilled to the bone when this happens, again, and again. I hear teachers say that when they are on the playground, they scan the vista to determine the best escape route for their class or they are checking to make sure the PA system works and there is construction paper covering the window in their door in case of an active shooter alarm. Over 20 years since Columbine, nearly 10 years since Sandy Hook, still no change. I can't imagine the devastation these families are dealing with after this violence touches their lives. You put your precious child on the bus for school and they don't come home. These politicians need to either do something or we as the voters need to find more worthy people to put in charge of making our laws.
Hiding behind God or Godlessness is frustration from refusal to recognize that America's culture teaches, supports and glorifies horror (someone else's) and murder (not mine either). Life is not a first-person-shooter video game for 'exceptional' people whose sociopathic behaviours are nourished when decent people accept signs of increasing malevolence. It is time to pay attention to what is 'okay'.
Sadly, men are failing. So are most women. The rare exception in either category is a rock, a rock of any color, often pale brown or white, a glacial anomaly, dropped high above the waters, dropped by a retreating glacier of the ice age, carried from nowhere to nowhere, resting quietly and doing little, in plain view, isolated. Sandy
We have gone off the rails in many respects we cannot seem to get a consensus on gun control birth control the people who oppose gun control want to create more children why?. This formula business is manufactured. The Supreme Court is a bad joke on the whole country. We are the laughingstock of the world. I just watch Stephen Colbert interview a former supreme commander of NATO He asked how our allies perceive us his response was not well when are people going to grow a conscience? Nobody should be allowed to make a career out of being a politician or a judge.
I live in AZ and have often said that the state slogan ought to be changed to..."Every problem can be solved with a gun." Will that fit onto a license plate? I firmly reject the mentality that there is a need to carry a gun, let alone something like an AR-15.