Easter

The Fools

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march photoHappy Easter all if you celebrate. And happy Passover to those who celebrated the Jewish holiday.

Today is April Fools’ Day as well as Easter. Interesting that it falls on the same day. As we returned from the warmth and sun of Florida, Minnesota had inches of snow and it’s bitterly cold. Fooled us.

And yesterday, who were the fools of the day? The Minnesota gun rights folks who had a rally at the State Capitol, armed to the teeth. Do they think this is going to change anyone’s minds after the way the last 6 weeks have gone? Fools all. From the article:

“Gun owners like you and me and the tens of thousands friends and family who couldn’t be here, we are getting trampled on. We’re getting assaulted by the people in this building,” Dorr said. “Gun owners are not respected. We’re under full blown attack in this building.”

Nonsense. You are not under attack. If you are law abiding gun owners, what do you have to fear but fear itself? Yes, we know you love your guns and you have your rights. No one is saying otherwise. But why flaunt your AR-15s after the Parkland shooting? Where is your common sense? The public doesn’t like to see your openly carried guns. Not on the week-end of Easter. Not on the week-end of Passover. Why do you think this is going to help your cause? You have nothing to fear with the suggested stronger gun laws now sitting in Congress and state houses all over the country. What are you so afraid of?

More from the above linked article:

“It is really about common sense gun safety legislation like universal background checks, which are supported by the overwhelming majority of Americans,” Farnsworth said.

But Minnesota Gun Rights says it wants to make sure the voices of firearms owners are heard, and that the Republican-led Legislature knows it will face political repercussions if lawmakers advance any new gun control measures.

Nonsense.

Gun owners’ voices have been the only voices heard at the legislature. That is about to change.

It appears that you might be afraid of the students. And the fear has caused some really stupid and offensive things to happen. For one thing, harassing and attacking students is just not working. They are not having it and neither are we. We see through this fear of yours. You are afraid that a group of students is actually changing the conversation around your gun rights. All they are doing is trying to stop school shootings so they don’t have to be afraid to go to school every day to do what they are supposed to do as students. What about you? Are you so afraid to go to work, go to church, go to a park or a shopping mall that you need a gun to protect yourself? Go ahead if that’s what you want. But the chances of using that gun to protect yourself in those situations are slim to none.

Just check out what NRA Board member and generally crazy and offensive former music “artist” Ted Nugent had to say about the Parkland students:

“All you have to do now is not only feel sorry for the liars, but you have to go against them and pray to God that the lies can be crushed and the liars can be silenced so that real measures can be put into place to actually save children’s lives,” Nugent said.

Many conservatives have been critical of the Parkland survivors’ political beliefs, which isn’t too surprising given that they generally want gun control. But some, like Nugent, have gone further than that — attacking the kids for unrelated and often personal aspects of their lives.

On the radio show, Nugent claimed that the left had lied to the Parkland students, which he said meant they were committing “spiritual suicide.”

“To attack the good, law-abiding families of America when well-known, predictable murderers commit these horrors is deep in the category of soulless,” Nugent continued. “These poor children — I’m afraid to say and it hurts me to say this, but the evidence is irrefutable — they have no soul.”

No soul? Who is the fool who said that? And why would you say that about innocent students who have just gone through the trauma of a mass shooting at their school, in some cases, watching their classmates be slaughtered in cold blood?

What we should all be afraid of is your unrelenting lies and misperceptions that have caused our leaders to be afraid of you. Well, you have fooled them. You are only about 1.5% of gun owners and Americans. Why should we all be afraid of you?

We should be afraid of the 97% of Americans who want universal background checks but are not getting them.

We should be afraid of the domestic shootings and suicides that cause so much devastation in our country. We should be afraid of little kids finding their parents unlocked, loaded guns and killing themselves or someone else. We should be afraid of those loaded guns ostensibly for self defense “accidentally” discharging, sometimes harming another human being. We should be afraid of the fear of others instilled in police officers and others that cause people to shoot first and ask questions later.

This piece by Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, explains that fear of Black and Brown people that permeates our culture and is ramped up by Wayne LaPierre, gun rights extremists and even our very own President. We must address this uniquely racist violence by stopping the fear of “others” who are not like us:

But it’s not a local issue — it’s a national issue. And like every American who claims to be a gun violence prevention advocate, I have a responsibility to speak out against this uniquely American crisis. The unlawful shootings of Black and Brown people by law enforcement is gun violence. If we want to end gun violence, then we have to fight the systemic racism that can cause it, too.

I have great respect for law enforcement officers. They are afraid of being shot themselves almost every day while working to protect our communities. The recent shooting of Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man in Sacramento, was totally uncalled for and rooted in fear of young black men. Police departments must address the issue of shooting people of color more often than they shoot white people:

Our country’s culture of shooting at what scares us has a body count in Black and Brown lives. Research has shown that Black people are three times more likely to be shot and killed by police than white men. In addition, Black men are 13 times more likely than white men to be victims of gun homicides. Black children and teens are 14 times more likely to be the victims of gun homicides than white children and teens.

This is something to fear and something that cannot be hidden under the rug. The student movement after the Parkland shooting has raised the issue of shootings of young people of color as well as mass shootings and school shootings.

So who are the fools out there? Let’s be clear about this. No one needs to be fooled by the ramped up fear and paranoia of the gun rights extremists. I was so proud to have marched with the students in Duluth last Saturday. About 1000 turned out on a cold day to listen to students tell their stories and hear from a graduate student who was the mother of a shooting victim last December tell her story.

This is the American tragedy. We have been fooled by the NRA lapdogs. No more.

The students are challenging everything and because of it right wing FOX TV host Laura Ingraham is in trouble. Why did she foolishly go after the students? She didn’t have to do that. But she is afraid of their power. She is afraid they may be right and that our leaders will and are listening to them instead of her hate.

Why did Vermont gun owners have a rally like that in Minnesota and give away high capacity magazines at the rally to show their opposition to laws that are about to be signed by their Governor in a gun friendly state?

How foolish of them. The public understands what AR-15s and high capacity magazines do to our students and others. We understand. We will not be fooled.

Our students are or will become voters very soon. The gun lobby should be afraid of that:

Somehow it became acceptable over the past several days and weeks for politicians and others to mock mourning students-turned-activists who survived the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.

At what age is it OK to bully someone whose classmates were murdered at school? 14? 16? Adults on social media claim that because our young people aren’t as familiar with lawmaking or the Second Amendment or might not have known the difference between an automatic and a semiautomatic rifle two years ago, they can’t possibly know what they need to feel safe at school.

But those who organized and attended last weekend’s March For Our Lives are not to be trifled with. They have the power of social media and the power of their votes. It’s a bit short-sighted to think that because young people have historically not turned out to vote in large numbers that they won’t come out in droves come November.

Happy April Fools’ Day.

Don’t be fooled by the corporate gun lobby.

And remember the victims and their families on this Easter holiday that will not be happy for far too many. Their empty shoes are filled with memories and their families grieve on this day and all days.

shoes and roses

Virginia Tech-moving stones

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Virginia TechIt’s Easter tomorrow for those who practice the Christian faith. It’s also the Passover season for Jews. What will the victims and survivors of the Virginia Tech shooting be doing and thinking about on the 10 year anniversary of what was our nation’s most deadly and heinous mass shooting until the Sandy Hook shooting took the lives of 20 first graders and 6 educators and the Orlando nightclub shooting took the lives of 50- yes 50 innocent Americans?

When will we ever learn?

The grief of the Virginia Tech shooting victims is matched by the grief of 90 families a day after a gunshot injury became a gun death due to homicide, suicide or an “accidental” gun discharge. This is the daily carnage and the daily news in America in spite of holidays, families pleading for common sense and brave elected leaders willing to stand up to the corporate gun lobby and demand that the devastation be, at the least, reduced and at the most prevented.

We know there is no way to stop all shootings but shouldn’t we at least try? When a public health epidemic that takes the lives of so many people every year (32,000-33,000) we always get busy to study why and then recommend changes or cures that can prevent the cause of the disease or cause of death.

In America, instead, we are making things worse by loosening gun laws at the state and federal level. Why? Good question. I don’t really believe that the gun lobby wants people to die. They couldn’t could they? They must be affected by the photos and videos of all of the shootings that take place on a regular basis everywhere.

So why do they resist gun safety reform and efforts to prevent shootings so vigorously?

It’s a question that we must ask and it needs an answer.

Following the money is one answer. Power and control is another.

Meanwhile, while we are trying to figure out how to work around the money and profits of the gun industry and the outsized power of the NRA and other organizations, mass shootings continue unabated:

Perhaps because Virginia Tech’s fatality count was so high, most of the school shootings that followed didn’t receive the attention they might have in the decade prior to the massacre.

Are these kinds of shooting becoming normalized to the public or is it they don’t want to hear about them because they feel helpless to do anything about them? They are NOT normal and we can’t let them become normal. It is simply not normal for someone to walk into a school and spray bullets around killing random, or sometimes, selected victims.

And of course, the “everyday” shootings happen without much media coverage and every day, ordinary people’s lives are changed forever. You may know some of these people. They are living close to you- in your neighborhoods and communities. They are remembering lost loved ones every day. This is not normal.

Memorials to victims have become normal. Flowers, candles, teddy bears, hearts, cards, bell ringings, stones.

Memorials sprout up all over the country. In the case of Virginia Tech it was stones. From the article in The Trace:

Without realizing it, the kids at Virginia Tech were propelled by the same instinct that leaves mourners in America’s cities searching their surroundings for a way to honor shooting victims whose deaths often go unnoticed outside their neighborhoods. In Lexington, Kentucky, last fall, high schoolers laced track shoes to a chain link fence in homage to a slain 15-year-old runner, Trinity Gay. After a homicide in New York City, lampposts sprouted roses and sidewalks glittered with liquor bottles. In Cincinnati, a menagerie of stuffed animals was deployed to guard the home of a 9-year-old. (…)

The permanent memorial was dedicated with a ceremony on August 19, 2007, four months and three days after the massacre. Thousands of people gathered on the lawn that day, sporting their Hokie colors of maroon and orange. The university president spoke. A bell tolled 32 times. Each original stone had been placed in a mahogany box with a hinged lid, like a miniature coffin. Later, the boxes would be delivered to the families of the victims.

Uma Loganathan can hardly remember the dedication; grief seems to have blurred many of her memories from that time. What she does remember is that first semicircle of stones set earnestly upon the grass, their rough edges befitting of her sorrow.

“Befitting of her sorrow”…. Can anything befit the sorrow we all feel after losing a loved one to gun violence? Or having a close call as did my friend Lori Hass, mother of a Virginia Tech survivor?

Like other survivors, I got into this GVP movement because of what happened. But that’s in the past and what we’re working for is a future where there’s less gun violence and where we’re doing more to prevent it. Our goals are to take the evidence and the policies that work and begin to apply as many as are appropriate. For example, we understand that domestic violence situations become exponentially more lethal when there’s a firearm introduced. Road rage with a firearm can turn lethal. Confrontation in the streets become lethal when there’s a firearm. Toddlers have killed more Americans than terrorists if you look at the numbers over time — all because somebody was careless and left firearms out and unsecured.

Lori Haas speaks during a vigil outside the U.S. Capitol on April 16, 2013, to remember those murdered and demand congressional action on gun legislation.

ALAMY

We want policies that make us all safer. We think domestic abusers shouldn’t have access to guns. We think that there should be a background check on all buyers — how do you stop a prohibited buyer from purchasing a gun if you don’t do a background check to figure out if he or she is prohibited? We believe that you should have to have hands-on training around concealed carry. We think there should be penalties so that gun owners must properly store and secure their firearms so that children can’t get access to them. We think there should be limitations on the type of firepower that everyday citizens can carry on our street. The efficacy of a lot of those policies have been proven in other states and those states have fewer deaths. New York’s gun death rate per 100,000 is in the low, low single digits. Virginia’s is 10.9.

It’s devastating for all of the families, me included, to relive the trauma each time another school shooting occurs. And you can’t help but relive it. What we’re also really traumatized by is the fact that someone else is now added to the club nobody wants to be in: the one where your loved one’s been shot and killed or injured. But [that] club is strong, the club is active, the club is compassionate and supportive. I know dozens of families from dozens of mass shootings. Every day we have gun violence in America, so there is a camaraderie that’s very understood by those [who have experienced it].

Ten years ago tomorrow, the feelings will re-emerge of how things went down that day ten years ago. Lori gives a very moving testimony to how one family experienced the horrendous shooting of 32.

Tomorrow will also be Easter. A stone figures prominently in the Easter story. Stones can be moved but they are hard to move and they are hard to destroy. Tombstones are made of stone for a reason. They signify a marker where a loved one is buried and they are there mostly forever. So are the memories of our lost loved ones.

Tomorrow, please remember these 32. See their photos. Say their names.

We Will Not Forget

Families have approved and released these official biographies and photos of our 32 fallen Hokies. Please join us in remembering and honoring their lives by clicking on their names or photos.

And then work with Lori Hass, Colin Goddard, Andy Goddard and the millions of us involved in preventing the next one of these shootings. Colin has been an advocate for gun violence prevention since he was shot and injured in the shooting. The film, Living for 32, features Colin’s story and his efforts to expose the lack of Brady background checks on all gun sales.

We should not have to erect stone memorials to victims. We should not have to move stones to get the attention of the public and elected leaders about our deadly gun violence epidemic. We should expect that our leaders do this without question in the name of the victims and common sense. If we are to change the conversation and change the culture, we need more than memorials, thoughts, prayers, flowers, etc.

WE NEED ACTION. Get involved in the name of the victims and just because losing 90 Americans a day to gunshot injuries is not normal and not acceptable. Let’s get to work.