136 Days - Still Too Soon?
136 is the number of days from October 2, 2017 through February 14, 2018. On October 2nd of last year, the Trump White House said it was too soon to talk about solutions to the problem of mass shootings.
Apparently in the more than one-third of a year since Trump's spokeshole blathered about this, it was still too soon for those conversations to take place. Now 17 more people are dead. Murdered with an assault rifle purchased legally.
We don't want your thoughts and prayers. The politicians who can offer only that tired platitude are far more interested in the money funneled into their coffers by gun manufacturers than the lives lost in these preventable tragedies.
Much is being made of the fact that this man had an AR-15 type assault rifle. Police say he had "...countless magazines..." I'm guessing we will get a count of the number of magazines he had at some point. Suppose for a moment that we could wave a magic wand and make all of the assault weapons not in the hands of military and law enforcement personnel simply vanish. Would we be any safer? Probably not.
That's a man holding a pistol. Not an assault rifle. He can change clips in just over one-half of one second. While most of us will never approach that level of speed in changing clips, it doesn't take a long time to eject the spent clip, insert the next one and chanber another round.
The laws we have on the books now did not prevent Nikolas Cruz from legally purchasing the gun he used to take 17 lives on Valentine's Day.
But it is apparently too soon to visit the issue of stopping mass shootings in the mind of the Moron-in-Chief. It is more important to deport people whose only crime was being brought to the U.S. as children not legally eligible to enter our borders. It is more important to undo the Affordable Care Act and put more people on the rolls of those without healthcare coverage. And is clearly more important to push through a tax reform bill that was a massive giveaway for the wealthiest Americans to be paid for by adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.
We need to tell every single politician that today is not too soon to talk about fixing this problem. It would be the ultimate comfort to the families of the victims to know that their loved ones will be the last to die before we finally move to stop such events from happening.
Apparently in the more than one-third of a year since Trump's spokeshole blathered about this, it was still too soon for those conversations to take place. Now 17 more people are dead. Murdered with an assault rifle purchased legally.
We don't want your thoughts and prayers. The politicians who can offer only that tired platitude are far more interested in the money funneled into their coffers by gun manufacturers than the lives lost in these preventable tragedies.
Much is being made of the fact that this man had an AR-15 type assault rifle. Police say he had "...countless magazines..." I'm guessing we will get a count of the number of magazines he had at some point. Suppose for a moment that we could wave a magic wand and make all of the assault weapons not in the hands of military and law enforcement personnel simply vanish. Would we be any safer? Probably not.
That's a man holding a pistol. Not an assault rifle. He can change clips in just over one-half of one second. While most of us will never approach that level of speed in changing clips, it doesn't take a long time to eject the spent clip, insert the next one and chanber another round.
The laws we have on the books now did not prevent Nikolas Cruz from legally purchasing the gun he used to take 17 lives on Valentine's Day.
But it is apparently too soon to visit the issue of stopping mass shootings in the mind of the Moron-in-Chief. It is more important to deport people whose only crime was being brought to the U.S. as children not legally eligible to enter our borders. It is more important to undo the Affordable Care Act and put more people on the rolls of those without healthcare coverage. And is clearly more important to push through a tax reform bill that was a massive giveaway for the wealthiest Americans to be paid for by adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.
We need to tell every single politician that today is not too soon to talk about fixing this problem. It would be the ultimate comfort to the families of the victims to know that their loved ones will be the last to die before we finally move to stop such events from happening.
posted by me at 5:25 AM
<< Home