Republicans do not prevent gun violence but wear ugly AR-15 pins

A nation’s future dying one bullet at a time

More children nationwide die from gun violence than any other single cause. That won’t change any time soon.
An echo opinion published by Renée
Graham, the associate editor and columnist, in The Boston Globe newspaper:

Michigan State University students support one another after placing flowers on campus following the evil Monday February 13,  2023, shooting.(Washington Post)

In the Russell Banks novel “The Sweet Hereafter,” a small town struggles with its monumental grief after 14 children die in a school bus accident. A father whose 9-year-old twins perished tries to wrap his mind around how to navigate a landscape reversed and the realized nightmare of every parent.

“It’s almost beyond belief or comprehension that the children should die before the adults,” he says. “It flies in the face of biology, it contradicts history, it denies cause and effect, it violates basic physics, even. It’s the final contrary. A town that loses its children loses its meaning.”

When “The Sweet Hereafter” was published in 1991, motor vehicle crashes were the leading cause of death for children nationwide. Now gun violence kills more children than any other single factor. 

At a rate higher than any nation, America is most likely to lose its children not from the misfortune of car accidents but from guns.

Instead, gun violence became the leading cause of death for children ages 1 through 18 in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Firearms killed nearly 3,600 kids in 2021, a disproportionate number of them Black victims of homicide. White children, especially boys, are more likely to die by suicide using a gun.

Technically speaking, the three Michigan State University students killed during a recent mass shooting on their campus were adults. Arielle Anderson was 19, and both Brian Fraser and Alexandria Verner were 20. But by any other measure, they were kids still pondering all they wanted to do in this world.

What happened at Michigan State is one of at least 72 mass shootings this year, more carnage than there have been days in 2023. And while school shootings tend to garner the biggest headlines, they account for less than 1 percent of kids lost to gun violence.

Most of those children are like Sebastian Robinson, a 12-year-old Andover boy who loved to play cello and was described by his teachers as “a gentle soul.” Along with his mother, Sebastian was killed this month by his father.

They are Rasante Osorio, 14, of Dorchester, who was shot and left to die on a Roxbury street last October. And they are Tyler Lawrence, 13, of Norwood, who loved basketball and was learning to cook and play music. While visiting his grandmother and walking near her Mattapan home on a Sunday morning last month, Tyler was shot multiple times. A 34-year-old man has been charged with first-degree murder.

“No 13-year-old deserves this,” Douglas Taylor, Tyler’s great-uncle, told the Globe. “What could a 13-year-old do?”

Through no fault of their own, what they did was live in a nation where one political party values a misbegotten culture of guns as identity and birthright more than the sanctity of children’s lives.

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a Democrat elected to the Senate in 2012, shortly before the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in his state, has made gun reform one of his key issues. Spurred by recent mass shootings, he has reintroduced his legislation to expand background checks so they include the transfer and sale of firearms online, at gun shows, and by unlicensed sellers.

Such legislation didn’t make it into the final version of last year’s Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, that was signed into law by President Joe Biden. It came a month after the racist massacre of 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket and, less than two weeks later, a mass shooting at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school that killed 19 children and two adults.

It was the first major gun reform legislation passed by Congress in nearly 30 years. But passage of Murphy’s revived bill is virtually impossible because it will never make it through the GOP’s AR-15 pin-wearing anarchy clowns in the Republican-led House.

Evil Republican gun embracing clowns who wore hideous AR-15 pins!

So nothing will change — except the body counts, the makeshift memorials for those too young to have been snatched from this world, and more harrowing stories of teenagers who’ve survived multiple school shootings with wounds both seen and unknown.

America buries its children under empty thoughts, prayers, and promises. If a town that loses its children, loses its meaning, this nation is losing its future, one bullet at a time.