‘Thoughts and Prayers’ are for your Dying Aunt; Action and Resolve is required for Everyday Living
How long do I have to wait for you, honey?
Before a girl like me can move on
Ooh, baby, tell me
How long do I have to wait for you honey?
Before I can say that you’re gone
The opening verse to the late Sharon Jones 2005 song “How Long Do I Have To Wait For You?” may be about unrequited love and the melancholy inquiry as to the amount of time needed to wait before moving on, but it is more apt a question to ask of our country with regards to sensible gun laws. How long do I have to wait for you?
I have held an NRA membership and am not an absolutist on either side when it comes to gun ownership. My father hunts, his father hunted, and my brother and I kept a .38 revolver in the cash drawer of my dad’s gas station when we were teenagers working the late shift to ward off robbery attempts. I only had to pull it out of the drawer once in my life.
2018: The year of school-based shootings
I am over the top sick and tired of the prevalence of gun-related incidents in this country as of late. The fact is that as of February 14, 2018, Valentine’s Day, a day of love, 18 school shootings have taken place in a year where only 45 days have elapsed. Give pause and think about that for just a moment. Whether you support an unrestricted right to own every gun ever made or are shocked and abhorred beyond belief every time one of these events takes place, every 2 days, 6 hours this year in America a school shooting incident has occurred.
You are loathed to find any other country anywhere else in the world that can boast this type of statistic. Don’t believe the numbers? Fake news, as our country’s leader quickly and defiantly characterizes any information that comes into conflict with his world view? The New York Daily News, hardly a bastion of liberal media bias, published the following catalog of shootings that have occurred thus far:
1. January 3, 2018 — East Olive Elementary School, St. John’s, MI (1 fatality, 31-year-old unnamed military veteran, apparent suicide).
2. January 4, 2018 — New Start High School, Seattle, WA (No one was injured or killed).
3. January 10, 2018 — Coronado Elementary School, Sierra Vista, AZ (1 fatality, 14-year-old male, self-inflicted suicide).
4. January 10, 2018 — California State University, San Bernardino, CA (No one was injured or killed).
5. January 10, 2018 — Grayson College, Denison, TX (No one was injured or killed).
6. January 15, 2018 — Wiley College, Marshall, TX (No one was injured or killed).
7. January 20, 2018 — Winston-Salem State University, Winston-Salem, NC (1 fatality, 19-year-old Anthony White, Jr., member of the school’s football team).
8. January 22, 2018 — Italy High School, Italy, TX (1 wounded teenage girl, by semi-automatic weapon fire).
9. January 22, 2018 — NET Charter High School, Gentilly, LA (1 wounded, 14-year-old male).
10. January 23, 2018 — Marshall County High School, Benton, KY (2 fatalities, 15-year-old male and 15-year-old female, 19 injuries, 14 attributed to gunfire).
11. January 25, 2018 — Murphy High School, Mobile, AL (No one was injured or killed).
12. January 26, 2018 — Dearborn High School, Dearborn, MI (No one was injured or killed).
13. January 31, 2018 — Lincoln High School, Philadelphia, PA (1 fatality, 32-year-old Ralph Kennedy).
14. February 1, 2018 — Salvador B. Castro Middle School, Los Angeles, CA (5 injuries, ages 11–15-years-old and a 30-year-old female, one critical, 15-year-old, shot in the head. 12-year-old female placed into custody after claiming to accidently discharge a semi-automatic pistol inside a classroom).
15. February 5, 2018 — Oxon Hill High School, Oxon Hill, MD (17-year-old 11th grader shot in the chest; two teens, 17-year-old Zanaya Bryant and 18-year-old Anthony Hollingsworth charged as adults in the shooting).
16. February 5, 2018 — Harmony Learning Center, Maplewood, MN (No one was injured or killed; third-grader discharged weapon of police officer accidently during safety demonstration).
17. February 8, 2018 — Metropolitan High School, New York, NY (No one was injured or killed; 17-year-old taken into custody for firing shots inside the school).
18. February 14, 2018 — Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Parkland, FL (17 fatalities, 16 injured).
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School
The most recent incident was horrific in nature, reminiscent in part of the tragedy that took place at Columbine High School in Columbine, CO on April 20, 1999, that took the lives of 13 innocents (teens and adults) before the killers, Dylan Klebold, 17, and Eric Harris, 18, took their own lives in a cowardly blaze of self-aggrandization. The Parkland, FL shooter, Nikolas Cruz age 19, is a troubled individual who remarkably possessed the ability to own assault weapons, including the AR-15 semi-automatic used, which he purchased legally a year before the incident. He has been reportedly openly linked to a white nationalist/supremacist group called the Republic of Florida.
Cruz, whose adopted parents had died and had been expelled from the school as a disciplinary risk, masterminded a dastardly revenge attack reeking of the cowardice that Klebold and Harris carried out nearly two decades ago. Just before the end of day bell rang, he allegedly pulled a fire alarm, and as he waited for the rushing mass of humanity to come to him, he easily picked them off without conscious or feeling. An armed security guard and resource officer (first responder named Scot Peterson) employed by the Broward County, FL sheriff’s department walked in the opposite direction, refusing to risk his life or impending retirement to act as a firewall between those innocents gunned down; he has resigned, pending a full investigation.
A call has once again been made for a ban on these weapons. A call for stricter background checks has been again sounded. Once again, a call has been made for increased security, metal detectors and other preventive measures in our schools that already nearly resemble prison warehouses with these implements installed throughout the buildings sorely in need of funding for books, teaching equipment, more pay for beleaguered teachers, etc. None of these measures would have prevented Cruz from purchasing his weapon of choice and the destruction he that he brought.
Nothing in his record would have prevented the purchase, even though he is reported to have abused a former girlfriend and that the cause of his expulsion was an assault he committed on another young man dating his ex. It should be noted that he was reported as a risk to the FBI, posted troubling images online via social media of his love of gun, violence, and causing harm to animals (reminiscent of Jeffrey Dahmer’s obsessions before his murderous spree in Milwaukee and elsewhere during the early 1990s).
The ready access to assault type weapons, the types of tools perhaps appropriate for war but certainly unnecessary for the going on of daily urban living is, at best, troubling to any rational, thinking human being. This despite what the President may tell you about the murder rate in Chicago or the rise of MS-13 gangs across the country, both of which are not germane to the overall conversation about guns and sensible restraints on access to certain types of weaponry. I do not hunt but appreciate those who respectfully engage in the activity.
No hunter I have ever met has ever expressed a need to me for a weapon of such power and viciousness as certain of the semi-automatics (like the AR-15, which seems to be the popular choice for mass killings as of late in this country; look to the Las Vegas assailant in October 2017, who killed 58 and the San Bernardino, CA killers who shot and killed 13 citizens in December 2015, all of whom used the deadly AR-15 semi-automatics and the Orlando night club shooter in June 2016, who killed 49 using a .223 mm AR type weapon along with a 9mm semi-automatic) to take down a buck or shoot rabbits. And before you pivot to protect the home and life argument as justification for gun ownership (paricularly that of a semi-automatic designed to do one thing, kill indiscriminately and without prejudice), accidental deaths are a greater risk for persons under the age of 25 than death at the hands of an intruder who steals a few collected trinkets that are insured and can be easily replaced (a life cannot).
Leadership is sorely lacking
My honest reaction when I heard the news about the latest turkey shoot that took place on the grounds of one of our nation’s schools was barely disbelief. I briefly, and I mean very briefly, shook my head and was thankful that I know longer have school-aged children, as they are all now safely into their adulthoods. My mind turned to the tired “a good guy with a gun can stop a bad person with a gun” rhetoric. My surprise, my shock, my hurt, would hardly register against the avalanche wave of ‘thoughts and prayers’ that some believe will wash away the scourge of this terrible sin and restore a natural order of unfettered gun ownership and the politics of benign neglect.
Afraid to face the media, a media he has taken great pains to vilify at every turn and bring to the podium as proxy his shrew, lying mouthpiece froth of venomous misinformation and misdirection, POTUS took to his favorite outlet for communicating with those still engaged in his musings, Twitter. His response, not a shocker, shared his ‘thoughts and condolences’ for the victims of the tragedy and merit no more examination that the hollowness with which the words were presented.
‘Thoughts and Prayers’
You read the posts on social media or the numerous partisan rantings after a Yahoo! News article and you see blame on the parents, the deconstruction of the shooter’s character (some loathe to point out that he may be an illegal or that his full name is de Jesus Cruz, to insinuate the continued white-black-brown divide this country wrestles with, even though evidence more than suggests that he was a Islamophobic, racist, MAGA supporter), calls for the death penalty (the old eye-for-an-eye mentality), ‘thoughts and prayers’ for the victims of the shooting, ‘thoughts and prayers’ for the families of the dead, ‘thoughts and prayers’ for the community. The tired trope, “a good person with a gun can stop a bad person with a gun,” is trotted out but in a time of profound national grief, momentary and fleeting, it is quickly shouted down as inappropriate.
Thoughts and prayers is the laziest response ever invented. It presumes that a collective nation of faithful people praying to God (which God? Whose God?) can remove the desire to kill and unify and heal the wounds opened up by this type of senseless act. This senseless act that happened 17 times prior to February 14th, and, without a doubt in my mind, will happen 17 more times in 2018 (at least).
How Long?
Is it possible, in the face of overwhelming evidence, to understand that the act of prayer alone is no enough to move the debate on gun violence? The terrible toll in human lives that have been lost senselessly (and preventably) will continue to be lost until our better angels rise to the forefront, left and right, Christian and Muslim, black and white, and place on the table common sense control and restraint? I harbor no illusions that such compromise will take place as I am far too cynical to believe that we possess a better nature; the results of November 8, 2016, proved that. Maybe this admonition from the Book of Isaiah 1:15–17, provide words for both sides to heed:
15 When you spread out your hands in prayer,
I hide my eyes from you;
even when you offer many prayers,
I am not listening.
Your hands are full of blood!
16 Wash and make yourselves clean.
Take your evil deeds out of my sight;
stop doing wrong.
17 Learn to do right; seek justice.
Defend the oppressed.
Take up the cause of the fatherless;
plead the case of the widow.
So POTUS, the United States Congress, state and local governments, gun lobbyists and enthusiasts, religious leaders (Evangelical and otherwise), and the public, I ask you: How long do I have to wait for you, honey?
(Update: Cruz set passively quiet in a Fort Lauderdale courtroom on Wednesday, March 14, 2018, as thosands of students from more than 2,800 schools across the nation and world walked out of classes to observe 17 minutes of silent rememberance for the victims of the Stoneman Douglas H.S. murder/massacre. As 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder were read against the racist miscreant, prosecutors announced their intent to seek the death penalty for Cruz).
