Thursday, November 14, 2019

Yet Another...

Three students dead and two others wounded in the latest mass school shooting, this time at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California.  In this latest incident, a student at the high school decided to celebrate his 16th birthday by walking into school this morning, pulling at .45 caliber handgun from his backpack, open fire on the students in the quad, and then turning the gun on himself.   He survived the gunshot to the head and fled the scene.  He was apprehended by authorities within an hour.

Because we know what would actually work and refuse to do anything about it, I'm repeating an article that I've had to post multiple times now in the near-year-and-a-half that the blog has been running.  I'll continue to do so, until maybe we start to listen.

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Because there have been 20 school shootings so far in 2019...
Because there are five students and one school employee dead from school shootings this year...
Because there have been thirty-seven other people wounded in school shootings this year...
Because active shooter drills are now common place in elementary schools...
Because we're teaching kids to run at shooters and then praise them as heroes, but are forgetting to mourn that necessity...
Because we have a generation of kids who view school shootings as just the way things have always been...
Because we still haven't done anything of substance to stop them...
Because chances are, we will still do nothing about this one...
Because I'm tired...

It bears repeating - From a post over a year ago:

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I'm tired.  I'm tired of this topic continuing to come up.  I'm tired of us continuing to have the same response - thoughts and prayers, then talking at each other, then a whole lot of nothing, and it's forgotten until we move on to the next one.

When I started this blog, my second post was a repost of a Facebook message on the Second Amendment in response to the Parkland, Florida school shooting.  There have only been 54 days in between these posts.  And here we are again, with a school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas.  And I haven't even touched on all of the school shootings that have occurred.  There have been 5 other school shootings in the interim, just not to the same scope.

We have an addiction to guns in this country that causes us to look at anything else except gun control as a possible solution.  It's far past time we put everything on the table.  We should be looking at mental health care.  We should be looking at bullying.  We should be looking at the family structure.  We should be looking at socio-economic status and mobility.  AND we should be looking at sensible gun control.  We're a big country and pretty good at multi-tasking.  We're more than capable of looking at it all.

But I'm too tired to write anymore on this.  Who knows what good it does at this point.  In lieu of further debate, I'm just going to post facts and let them speak for themselves.
  • On an average day, 96 Americans are killed with guns.
  • On average, there are nearly 13,000 gun homicides a year in the United States.
  • For every one person killed with guns, two more are injured.
  • 62% of firearm deaths in the United States are suicides.
  • Seven children and teens are killed with guns in the United States on an average day.
  • In an average month, 50 women are shot to death by an intimate partner in the United States.
  • America's gun homicide rate is more than 25 times the average of other high-income countries.
  • The United States accounts for 46% of the population, but 82% of the gun deaths.
  • Background checks have blocked over 3 million gun sales to prohibited people.
  • Black men are 13 times more likely than white men to be shot and killed with guns.
  • The presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of the woman being killed by five times.
https://everytownresearch.org/gun-violence-by-the-numbers/

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Until it's heard...
Until we stop pretending like it will go away...
Until we do something, anything...
Until we care more about people than things...
Until we listen more to constituents than to special interest groups...

Until the next time...hopefully with a much longer gap in between

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This marked the 385th mass shooting in America in the 318 days so far in this year. 

We're definitely over the shooting a day mark, aren't we?  I guess it really is common place...

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