Another school shooting (the 36th,
so sadly, in 2024 alone, down from 82 a year ago).
Yesterday, four people—two teachers and two fourteen-year-olds—were
killed in Winder, Georgia’s Apalachee
High School, by a student wielding an AR-style weapon.
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Apalachee High in Winder, GA,
is the latest in the long, grim line
of assault-weapon shootings |
The killer is a fourteen-year-old boy.
A fourteen-year-old boy who, for some reason, had access to a
semi-automatic weapon that can fire up to 60
bullets per minute, bullets that fly at over 3200
feet per second, a terrifying velocity that can cause damage, as one trauma
surgeon says,
“like a grenade went off (inside the victim’s body).”
That the student obtained such a weapon is a matter for law
enforcement (and why he would do such a thing is a matter for mental health experts), but the bigger issue is that such a weapon is available, at all.
There’s no argument, really. AR-style weapons should be
banned.
The proof is evidenced by the heinous tally of death and
destruction caused by shooters using the AR-style weapons.
That includes this—so horrifyingly—partial list of just some
of the school shootings with an AR-style weapon:
Robb Elementary
School, Uvalde, TX (2022): 21 killed
Marjory Stoneman
Douglas High School, Parkland, FL (2018): 17 killed
Sandy
Hook Elementary, Newtown, CT (2012): 26 killed
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Student survivors from the 2018 Parkland
shooting are evacuated from their high school |
(The shooting at Sandy Hook—and the loss of those 26
lives—as you may remember, was despicably and falsely championed by many on the
right as a “false
flag” operation, a fake and staged
event meant to further gun control
interests).
And now we add Apalachee (four killed), the deadliest school
shooting since six people were killed just last year at The Covenant
School in Nashville, TN, by a killer using AR-style weapons.
And that doesn’t even include other mass shootings that used
an AR-style weapon, such as in an Aurora, CO, movie theater (2012, 12 killed),
a Sutherland Springs, TX, church (2017, 26 killed), a Pittsburgh, PA, synagogue
(2018, 11 killed), or a country music festival in Las Vegas (2017, 58 killed).
It used to be you'd remember the sad details of a mass shooting because it was a rare and shocking event. Now, however, details are lost, place names are often jumbled or forgotten because now--although still shocking--they have, instead, become relatively commonplace.
Don’t scream “SECOND AMENDMENT!” You’d be wasting your
breath and exposing your idiocy.
AR-platform weapons (the AR stands for ArmaLite, the company
that first made them) are supposedly used primarily for hunting,
target-shooting, and personal home protection.
I can’t imagine what sport there is in blasting a deer with
a semi-automatic killing machine.
Or, for that matter, what would be the necessity (other than
“Because it’s fun?”) of target practice using an AR-style weapon.
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GA Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for
some reason, apparently needs an
assault-style weapon |
And, as far as protection is concerned, guns in the home are
rarely used for defensive purposes, but more likely used for purposes such as
intimidating family
members,
with some
analyses
pointing to home protection with such weapons as about only 30 incidents over a
10 year period.
But AR-style weapons are wildly defended by Second Amendment
lovers, who think, I guess, that NO weapons should be banned--although one can’t
purchase automatic weapons or bazookas, for example.
And the AR-style weapons are not only defended, but they’re
celebrated.
The National Rifle Association proudly calls the AR-15 “America’s
rifle.”
Members of Congress have sported mini-replicas on their
lapels to show support for their access. The pins were
distributed by Georgia Representative and gun store owner Andrew Clyde—whose stake
in his Clyde Armory store may be as much as $25 million dollars.
By the way, the site of yesterday’s school shooting with an AR-style
weapon, is about 20 miles from Clyde’s home and gun store.
Even Alabama GOP Rep. Barry Moore and Colorado Rep. Lauren
Boebert co-sponsored a bill to designate the AR-15 as our “national
gun” (Boebert also owned the now-shuttered
gun-themed “Shooters Grill” restaurant in Colorado).
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Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert
sure seems to love her assault weapons |
To be fair, the vast, vast majority of gun violence doesn’t come in mass
shootings. Nor does it involve schools. Nor does it even include AR-style
weapons.
But some of it does.
And it seems as though banning such weapons would be a
relatively easy fix.
History suggests the same. Enacting a Biden-as-Senator bill
in 1994 to prohibit “the manufacture, transfer, or possession of a
semi-automatic assault weapon” (such as AR-style weapons) for ten years, saw “lower
average annual rates of both mass shootings and death resulting from such
incidents than before the ban’s inception.”
A sharp and immediate increase in both started again when the ban ended in
2004.
So, isn’t it enough? Isn’t Apalachee High School or Parkland
or Sandy Hook or Uvalde enough?
Or will we—or more specifically, the communities, the families,
the schools, the kids—have to simply endure more of these horrific events year
after year after year?
