Wednesday, December 1, 2021

One More......

Four students have died and several others have been injured following a school shooting at Oxford High School in Oxford Township, Michigan.   The students were shot at lunch time.  The primary suspect is 15 and there had been rumors of threats leading up to the event.


I almost forgot about this over the pandemic.  It was the one great benefit.  We did experience a great drop in school shootings, with only ten in 2020.  (And even saying only ten in 2020 is mind-blowing that I can qualify and minimize it like that.)  It almost seemed like these were becoming less of a concern.  And then, something happens to jolt us back to reality.  And to realize that the trend is back on the rise, with twenty-nine so far this year.  Twenty-one of those have occurred since August, making them part of the 2021-2022 school year.

Because we know what would actually work and refuse to do anything about it, I'm repeating an and updating article that I've had to post over and over and over again now in the three years 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 29 school shootings so far this year in 2021...
Because there have been 87 school shootings since 2018....
Because there are nine students and one school employee dead from school shootings this year...
Because there have been many 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 at the beginning of this blog:

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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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There have been 582 mass shootings in America in the 335 days so far in 2021.

Humbling perspective.

If only we'd learn, someday soon...

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