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Gun Control Now - Blog Posts
This exactly. I've heard the argument that if someone wants to go on a mass shooting spree they'll find a way. That's bullshit. Yes if someone is determined to hurt someone bad enough they will but we don't have to make it easier for them to do so. We should have already been making it harder for murderers to murder. The fact that an 18 year old who is not even legally allowed to purchase alcohol can legally purchase an AR-15 should speak for itself. It's about creating roadblocks and deterrents for mass shooters. We should have already done this. Hell humanity is so full of apathy that if you make things difficult enough I'm convinced most people won't bother. Even if that's not the case is what we're doing now working? Has anything been working? Obviously not or this would be a non issue so I ask you, what's the harm in trying something new? The most stricter gun laws could do is not work and since we're already there...
Why not?
On Wednesday afternoon, as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott briefed reporters about the school shooting in the town of Uvalde that left 19 children and two adults dead, he was approached by an unexpected speaker—his Democratic opponent in this fall’s election, Beto O’Rourke. The former El Paso congressman and presidential candidate, who had been waiting silently in an aisle seat in the school auditorium, walked up to the stage and began to challenge the governor.
“You’re doing nothing,” O’Rourke said. “You’re offering us nothing. You said this was not predictable. This was totally predictable.”
He was shouted down by some of the people on stage. One called O’Rourke a “sick son of a bitch.”
“This is not the time or the place to do that,” said another.
“Don’t play this stunt,” Sen. Ted Cruz told him.
Eventually, O’Rourke was escorted away from the stage by police.
Crashing your opponent’s press conference is, as Cruz said, a stunt. Of course it is. But so was the event O’Rourke was crashing, in which the most powerful men in the state assembled at a school auditorium to do…what, do they do, exactly?
We’re all familiar with this routine by now—the elected officials who descend on the scene in their best emergency-response earth tones to bask in their proximity to law enforcement and collectively absolve everyone with power of any responsibility. People like Abbott and Cruz and Ken Paxton and Dan Patrick—the state’s Republican attorney general and lieutenant governor—will emphasize the “tragedy” of what happened and the unpredictability of it all. There were no obvious signs, Abbott said on Wednesday, not long before O’Rourke’s interruption; law enforcement acted quickly, he said, and saved lives; the assault rifles he acquired shortly before the shootings were, of course, purchased legally. They’ll give a few days of defensive interviews about hiring veterans to stand guard at schools. Maybe, in a few weeks, we’ll get “Uvalde Strong” t-shirts.
O’Rourke’s rhetoric on gun control viscerally shifted after the 2019 massacre targeting Mexican and Mexican-American shoppers at an El Paso Walmart. He pushed a mandatory assault-rifle buyback program during that campaign and said at a presidential debate, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15.” He now says he is “not interested in taking anything from anyone,” but he has criticized Abbott for signing a law that allows anyone to carry a handgun without even acquiring a permit.
Ultimately, the question of whether his intervention Wednesday was polite or not is less important than the fact that O’Rourke is right. The effect, if not the outright point, of events like the one he crashed is to ensure that the right time and the place to discuss gun control never comes—to indulge the delusion that the people who are truly doing nothing are actually doing something. The shooting was predictable, if not in the specific sense, then in the broader one: The state’s and the country’s gun laws enable outcomes such as this by design. If it wasn’t predictable, then why can we keep predicting it?
My sister told me a story that I can't stop thinking about in the wake of all this. When she was in first grade they had an active shooter drill, only no one was informed it was drill. There was some mix up with the codes or something. Anyway the point is they all thought it was real. My sister says she remembers the teacher very quietly telling the class that there was an active shooter in the building and that this was not a drill. She says she remembers hearing screaming and crying from kids down the hall. She told me they all had to put on bright orange bullet proof vests and she remembers thinking that the color would only make it easier for the shooter to spot them. She remembers being scared. She remembers seeing someone walking up the hall through the heavily tinted glass. They kept trying to open the door and my little sister said she genuinely thought she was going to die. She was terrified she would never see me or my mom again.
It ended up being the principal coming to tell them that it was just a drill but it was a little too late in my opinion. That fear my sister and her classmates experience was real even if the threat wasn't and that memory is something she still carries with her.
We have to do better.
Republicans are more concerned with denying people bodily autonomy and keeping kids from learning prejudice exists than doing anything to keep those same kids from being shot by the guns they want everyone to have
They also seem to think that children are not mature enough to handle the existence of non cis/hetero people , but they are mature enough to live with the constant danger of a stranger busting into their classroom and ending their young lives