Donald Trump and maga Republicans have votes to create gun safety laws to prevent automatic weapons from slaughtering American kids

Mass shootings keep killing children. We need better gun laws. | Opinion published in the Houston Chronicle

How many more must die before gun laws are passed❓

Regarding “Minneapolis, a series of shootings and the grim realities of a tough summer,” (Aug. 29): Following the tragic shooting in Minneapolis, which resulted in the loss of two innocent lives and left 17 others injured, it is undeniable that Americans have demonstrated a profound lack of courage in addressing gun violence.

This pattern of inaction is not unique to Minneapolis. It has been a recurring theme in numerous other shootings across the country, including those in El Paso, Santa Fe, Uvalde and Sutherland Springs Church. Despite the devastating consequences of these tragedies, Americans have consistently failed to take decisive action to curb gun violence.

Instead of demanding meaningful change, ❗Americans, instead, resort to superficial gestures such as voting for candidates who have facilitated the easy access to military-style firearms to the shooters. They engage in rituals like prayer sessions and purchase “Texas Strong” T-shirts, as if these actions alone can solve the problem.💢

The most concerning aspect of this behavior is the tendency of Americans to forget about these tragedies quickly. 😟😡😓

Instead of demanding action and holding their elected representatives accountable, they revert to their usual pattern of inaction. This pattern of forgetfulness is a stark reminder that Americans are not as courageous as they may seem.


It is clear Americans would rather tuck tail, forget and run instead of demanding action from our elected officials.


God help us.  From John Cobarruvias, in Houston

Calling on American youth to improve our national human condition

Keep marching, children- So, here it is, in 2023, and thousands of students across the nation, including in Uvalde, Texas, walked out of schools protesting gun violence, and the callousness and cowardice of lawmakers who do little- and outright refuse- to stop it.

In the Virginia State Capitol Building, a beautiful bronze and marble sculpture of Barbara Johns. In 1951, she and other students led a strike to protest the conditions at their racially segregated school.

Echo history opinion by Cary Clack published in the San Antonio Express-News:  

But let's begin in 1951:  

It’s 1951 and R.R. Moton High School is a dump.

Pre-Brown v. Board of Education, the Black high school in Farmville, Virginia., is evidence that separate isn’t equal. 

All while the white high school across town, Farmville High, has all the resources needed for the education and comfort of its students, but on rainy days at Moton, students used umbrellas to keep dry in classrooms because of the porous roofs.

On April 23, 1951, the principal of Moton High receives a phone call that two of his students are going to be arrested at the bus station, so he leaves to go help them.

It’s a trick, and in his absence a note written in his name is sent to each of the classrooms calling for everyone to gather for a general assembly. Not knowing their reason for gathering, the 450 students and 25 teachers wait for their principal to explain.

But when the curtain opens, standing on stage isn’t the principal but Barbara Johns, a 16-year-old junior, who had manipulated the principal’s absence so she could call on the student body to protest the second-class conditions of their school. 

Barbara Johns (1935-1991)

She asks, then demands, the teachers to leave the auditorium. Those who don’t are politely escorted out by students.

Moton High lacks, among other things, a cafeteria, lockers, a science lab, a gym, and an infirmary. Johns tells her fellow students that since their parents and other Black adults haven’t been listened to by the white establishment, it’s time for the Black students to act.

She called for a strike and leads all the students on a march out of school to the county courthouse and into the offices of the school superintendent. All day, the students demanded better schools.

When their demands are rebuffed, Johns reaches out to NAACP lawyers. In a mass rally, the lawyers warn Farmville’s Black community of the dangers involved with filing a lawsuit, but the students respond that there aren’t enough jails to hold them.

Over the next few months, Johns is harassed. The Ku Klux Klan burns a cross in her family’s front yard. Fearing for their daughter’s safety, Johns’ parents send her to Montgomery, Alabama., to live with her uncle, Rev. Vernon Johns, pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

Now it’s 1963, and the man who succeeded Vernon Johns at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr., is leading a civil rights campaign in Birmingham to desegregate public facilities. King spends Easter weekend in jail. After his release, protests continue but the campaign isn’t capturing the nation’s attention.

That changed on May 2, when Black youth, more than 1,000 and some as young as 6, poured out of 16th Street Baptist Church singing freedom songs. Police used paddy wagons, squad cars and buses to ferry the children to jail. The next day, when another thousand-plus students rolled out of church and down the street, Bull Connor ordered high pressure water hoses, dogs and batons be turned on them.

Birmingham now has the attention of the world.

It’s 2023, and last Wednesday, and thousands of students across the nation, including in Uvalde, walked out of school protesting gun violence and the callousness and cowardice of lawmakers who do little to stop it.

One of the Uvalde students was Jazmin Cazares, a senior at Uvalde High School. Her 9-year-old sister, Jacklyn, was one of the 21 people murdered at Robb Elementary. 

Jazmin was part of what she described on Twitter as a 77-minute sit-in, explaining, “That’s how long it took for police to enter rooms 111 and 112 at Robb Elementary.”

Students have been marching with urgency since the 2018, school shooting in Parkland, Florida., stole 17 lives. The name of the student-led movement arising from that massacre, “March for Our Lives” is an indictment of a nation whose leaders leave children with no option but to march for their lives.

Their marching and activism make many uncomfortable because marching and activism always makes people uncomfortable. Nonviolent protest is supposed to make people uncomfortable.

While imprisoned in Birmingham, Easter weekend, 60 years ago, Dr. King began composing his classic, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” as a response to clergy critical of him and the protests.

“You may well ask,” King wrote, “‘Why direct action, why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?’ You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.”

And it worked.

Because of Barbara Johns and her schoolmates, their lawsuit was one of the five cases of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separate wasn’t equal. 

A statue of Barbara Johns will replace that of Robert E. Lee in the U.S. Capitol.

Because of children marching in Birmingham, city leaders and business owners desegregated public facilities.

There is a direct line between Barbara Johns’ generation and Jazmin Cazares’ generation.

So, walk together children. Don’t you get weary.

Maine Writer calls on American youth to rally our recalcitrant policy leaders and champion a movement to improve our national human condition. 

Scary political times

Spooky echo opinion by Maureen Dowd published in The New York Times: 

WASHINGTON — Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. I loved putting up twinkling bats and watching midnight monster-chiller-horror movies.

Not this year.

The world is too scary. Politics is too creepy. Horror is too real.

When I was a child, on Oct. 31, my older brother would put on a vinyl LP of Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” that he had carefully cleaned. The eerie music was used by Walt Disney in the segment of his animated masterpiece “Fantasia” about the surreal celebration of evil during the night of the witches’ Sabbath.

Chernabog, the lord of evil and death, wrapped in a dark cape, stands atop a jagged peak, summoning ghosts, witches and vampires to swirl out of the mountain and pay homage. I was so relieved when, at dawn, church bells rang and drove them off.

But now the bad spirits are lurking all around us. They will not be driven off.

America seems haunted by random violence and casual cruelty every day. In New York, subway riders getting pushed onto the tracks and innocent bystanders being shot. Officials across the country facing kidnapping plots, armed visits to their homes, assaults and death threats. No place seems safe, from parks to schools to the supposedly impregnable, guarded Capitol and homes of the wealthy and well known.

In some states, women — and girls — seeking abortions are treated as criminals. In Uvalde, Texas, terrified children frantically calling the police are slaughtered by a teenage psychopath with an AR-15-style rifle as 376 police officers lingered in and around the elementary school waiting for … what?

On Friday, The New York Post broke the news that someone I know, the former Obama official and former New York City Transit president Sarah Feinberg, was sucker-punched in the face in Chelsea by someone walking by in the bike lane.

Now comes news of a maniac breaking into a house in the middle of the night, bludgeoning an 82-year-old man in the head with a hammer while demanding to know where his famous wife was. Perfect Halloween movie fare. Except, it actually happened.

One of the most macabre stories to come out of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and democracy, ginned up by Donald Trump, was when the mob roamed the halls, pounding the speaker’s door with bloodcurdling taunts of “Where’s Nancy?”

Speaker Pelosi was not there, thank God. She was huddling with other top officials in a secure bunker, placing call after call for help that was slow to arrive.

Luckily, she was safe, in D.C. with her security detail, when a man broke into her Pacific Heights home in San Francisco early Friday morning. He smashed the patio glass door and attacked her husband, who struggled with the attacker for control of a hammer. In a tingly echo of Jan. 6, the man shouted at Paul Pelosi, “Where is Nancy? Where is Nancy?” When police arrived, the man said he was “waiting for Nancy.”

Mr. Pelosi, a genial investor who likes to star in amateur musicals and who has been married to Nancy for 59 years, called 911, The Times reported, bringing police to his home and potentially saving his life. He was hit several times on his hands and head with the hammer and was taken to the hospital for surgery for a skull fracture and is expected to recover.

The police said the intruder was David DePape, a 42-year-old from Berkeley, Calif. CNN reported that DePape’s relatives confirmed that a Facebook account spewing Trumpian conspiracies on topics ranging from climate change to COVID was his. In his posts, he cast doubt on the validity of the 2020 election — sharing pillow pusher and Trump lickspittle Mike Lindell’s absurd videos. And he defended the Trump rioters who stormed the Capitol.

With his usual level of class, Donald Trump put out a message of sympathy to the family of Jerry Lee Lewis, “the Killer” of rock ’n’ roll, who died Friday at age 87, but said nothing all day about the Pelosi family.

On Twitter, Adam Kinzinger urged G.O.P. candidates and elected officials to speak out against the “horrific” attack. He probably didn’t have in mind the sort of speaking out that Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia did. Youngkin made a sick joke of the assassination attempt: “There’s no room for violence anywhere, but we’re going to send her back to be with him in California.”*

Democrats had a nice run, on climate change and gun legislation, and enjoyed some backlash to the Dark Prince of the Supreme Court, Samuel Alito. Now Republicans seem set to win back the House, and maybe the Senate, with a range of incompetent and hypocritical candidates.

“I cannot believe anybody would vote for these people,” Pelosi told The Times’s Carl Hulse on a fund-raising swing.

But a feral mood has taken hold. If you think Washington is monstrous now, just wait.

*Maine Writer post script:  Jealous politicians like Youngkin are full of shit! 

Highland Park Illinois was an exceptional community: Innocence ravaged

On Twitter, there is a popular hashtag that pops up when the word #Republican is entered. Several derogatory slogans immediately come into the twitter screen. I usually choose this one:

#RepublicansAreDestroyingDemocracy 

Dateline Illinois: I worked in Lake Forest when my husband was stationed at the U.S. Naval Training Station in Great Lakes.  In fact, Lake Forest and Highland Park are sister and brother, side by side, exceptional communities. Patients from Highland Park frequently received care at Lake Forest Hospital, where I worked. Both communities are exceptional. They are the upper middle class exceptional suburbs outside of Chicago, conveniently on the train route from the city into North Chicago. Now, Highland Park has lost its innocence as being an insulated, friendly and patriotic neighborhood. Instead, the community has lost its "exceptionalism" because now it is among the places where American mass shootings have tragically erupted the souls of those who believed something like this could never happen in their community. Believe me, if a mass shooter can murder people with an automatic weapon while standing on a rooftop in Highland Park Illinois, then we are all at risk for being victims of random acts of murder. But, if you are reading this, then you are not likely a Republican because #RepublicansAreDestroyingAmerica.  The relentless attraction to the National Rifle Association is superseding and perhaps even eroding their respect for human life.

Essay report published in Aljazeera, by Belen Fernandez

 The ‘terror’ in Highland Park: The US is exceptional, indeed.

But why is it that American ‘exceptionalism’ is now manifested in such uniquely unhinged episodes of mass murder?

On the morning of Monday, July 4, as the United States was gearing up for its 246th, annual celebration of independence from Britain, the National Rifle Association (NRA) – America’s ultra-powerful gun rights organization – offered the following inspirational reminder on Twitter: “The only reason you’re celebrating Independence Day is because citizens were armed”. The tweet ended with the hashtag “#FourthofJuly”.  

Maine Writer editorial statement here:  Proves my point #RepublicansAreDestroyingDemocracy

Senator Ted Cruz is drunk on the National Rifle Association's (NRA) kool-aid #RepublicansAreTheProblem

This was before Monday’s mass shooting in the affluent Chicago, Illinois suburb of Highland Park killed seven people and wounded dozens of others at July 4 festivities in what Highland Park Mayor Nancy Rotering described as an act of “terror that was brought upon us”. Parents with strollers and children on tricycles fled for their lives. And yet the horrific casualty toll was not even the tip of the iceberg in terms of things that can happen “because citizens were armed”.

As NBC Chicago reported before the clock had even struck 9a.m.,  on Monday, at least 57 people had already been shot in the city of Chicago alone over the Fourth of July weekend – nine of them fatally. Nationwide as of July 4, the US had registered no fewer than 309 mass shootings in 2022, according to the Washington, DC-based Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one with “a minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed, not including any shooter”.

Uvalde Texas Robb Elementary School Memorial

There are more guns than people in the US, and this is certainly a large part of the problem – particularly as states like Texas, which recently hosted the Uvalde massacre of 19 elementary school students and two teachers, ensure that it is essentially as easy to acquire a firearm as it is to acquire laundry detergent.

But why is it that American “exceptionalism” – which we have been hearing about since the 1830s, or so – is now manifested in such uniquely unhinged episodes of mass murder?

I am not saying, obviously, that humans do not kill each other in other countries. Of course they do, and, as luck has had it, the US itself has often been complicit in that killing – from the traditional right-wing slaughter of peasants in Latin America to the systematic terrorization of Palestinians, the kind that Israel undertakes under the guise of fighting terror.

Then there is the more hands-on “global war on terror” and other initiatives directly perpetrated by the US military – which, one could argue, have only helped instill in Americans the notion that life is a video game and that it is absolutely fine to go around slaying people.

And, therefore, while the majority of annual gun-related deaths in the US take the form of run-of-the-mill suicides and homicides rather than Highland Park-type spectacles, mass shootings naturally have a more terrorising effect on public consciousness.

In the latter category of event, as it turns out, there is also a frequent common denominator. In June, the Washington Post reported that, as per the paper’s own analysis of 196 mass public shootings since 1966, “nearly 98 percent” of the perpetrators were found to be men, with 40 percent of them between the ages of 18 and 29.

The Post went on to quote an observation by psychologist Peter Langman, an expert on school shootings, in The Journal of Campus Behavioral Intervention: “The sense of damaged masculinity is common to man196 mass public shootings since 1966, “nearly 98 percent” of the perpetrators were found to be men, with 40 percent of them between the ages of 18 and 29.

The Post went on to quote an observation by psychologist Peter Langman, an expert on school shootings, in The Journal of Campus Behavioral Intervention: “The sense of damaged masculinity is common to many shooters and often involves failures and inadequacies.”

To be sure, in a society predicated on violently patriarchal capitalism and mass alienation – in which collective, collaborative existence is abandoned in favor of a focus on dog-eat-dog individual triumph – it is perhaps less than shocking that perceived “failures and inadequacies” might sometimes produce violent, overly masculine responses.

This is no doubt especially the case with disillusioned young white men, who according to the American script are the ones supposed to be doing most of the triumphing. Indeed, in 2021, NPR cited statistics from the nonpartisan research group The Violence Project indicating that “white men are disproportionately responsible for mass shootings more than any other group”.

In the end, it seems that when young men are sufficiently alienated and isolated by a society whose expectations they have failed to fulfil – and vice versa – some opt to just shoot it all up.

The 18-year-old Uvalde shooter was bullied extensively during his youth; ditto for other killers whose visions of revenge against society have been greatly facilitated by easy access to weaponry.

For his part, the 21-year-old suspect in the July 4th, Illinois massacre is described by the Daily Beast as a “wannabe rapper” and apparent “video-game enthusiast”, whose social media operations suggested a predilection for “violent imagery and mass-shooting fantasy”.

In her remarks following the shooting, Mayor Rotering lamented: “On a day that we came together to celebrate community and freedom, we are instead mourning the tragic loss of life.” 

Indeed, while the tragedy and terror are very real, it bears remembering that July 4th, itself commemorates the “freedom” of a nation founded on genocide and slavery – another contributing factor, you might say, to America’s high degree of “exceptionalism”.

And as American violence proceeds unhinged, the truth of the matter is that it has all become tragically unexceptional.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.