"Can we say the words 'pro life' used by Republicans mean nothing anymore?" Joy Reid, last night, on The Reid Out, Thursday night
"These people, at the drop of a hat, will put up giant, poster-size images of a fetus on the Senate floor. And yet they will refuse to look at the bodies of real kids destroyed by an AR-15 after a school shooting." - Sen. Tammy Duckworth, last night on ALL In.
RepublicansRepublicans Don’t Care About Kids — Just Imaginary Children
by Amanda Marcotte | May 26, 2022 - 7:29am | permalink
In the aftermath of the latest mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas — which left 19 small children and two adults dead — Republicans are working through their usual playbook to buy time until the shooting fades from the headlines. So there's lots of "mental health" talk from the same politicians and pundits who want to gut our already paltry social services.
And there's lots of whining about how the real victims here are Republicans being criticized for their sociopathic policies, and not the dead kids and their families. Lots of fantasizing about how the solution is a "good guy with a gun," even though multiple officers were on the scene and exchanged fire with the shooter before he entered the school, to no avail. (All these self-appointed gun experts of the GOP refuse to understand unarmed school teachers and 10-year-olds make easier targets than a shooter armed with an assault rifle.)
The script Republicans roll out is predictable and nonsensical. It's meant to be. Meaningless noise is a useful political tactic. It exhausts people, leaving them too demoralized to fight for a better world.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the news was meant to keep us posted on unusual things that had happened. But for the last couple of days the news has been dominated by another school shooting with lots of dead kids shot by a teenager who'd first killed one of his relatives and then went to a school to kill children.
So, what else is new? This is America, after all, and haven't we seen these images before? Haven't we seen the heavily armed and heavily armored police scurrying around mostly after the blood was shed? Haven't we waited as the death count mounted as more bodies turned up? Haven't we spent days watching the crying parents in their grief? Haven't they always said the same things, because really, there's only so much that can be said in response to such a familiar nightmare? Haven't we heard that limp and tired offering of "thoughts and prayers" so often that it makes us want to puke at how utterly feckless it is to say such a thing in the face of such continuing madness, such stunning affronts to decency and sanity?
by Thom Hartmann | May 26, 2022 - 6:42am | permalink
President Biden is right. “For God’s Sake, and our children’s sake, we must do something about gun violence in America. And we must do it now.
Back in 1996, after a few years of mass shootings, Australia experienced a mass slaughter on a scale like we saw yesterday in Texas. Their Supreme Court hadn’t ruled that Australian politicians could be owned by industries, so they passed extensive gun control and a nationwide gun buyback program. It was a turning point, and the mass shootings have since largely stopped.
Over at Daily Kos, Walter Einenkel has summarized how many millions of dollars the top Republicans in Congress have taken from the weapons industry: it’s a grim toll, starting with Mitt Romney taking over $13 million and Richard Burr over $6 million.
by Brandon Gage | May 26, 2022 - 7:39am | permalink
Democratic Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O'Rourke was escorted out of a press conference by police on Wednesday after he confronted incumbent Republican Governor Greg Abbott over Tuesday's mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde that left 19 students and two teachers dead.
New York Post reporter MaryAnn Martinez snapped a photo of O'Rourke sitting in the audience right before he approached the stage.
"You're doing nothing. You're all doing nothing. This was totally predictable," Beto calmly said to Abbott, who was seated at a table next to Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick (R) while United States Senator Ted Cruz (R) stood behind him.
by Joan McCarter | May 26, 2022 - 7:16am | permalink
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer almost set the Senate up to respond to Tuesday’s nightmare slaughter of school children in Uvalde, Texas. In the hours after the news broke of the horrific massacre, he came to the floor to set up the procedure for the Senate to vote on the already House-passed bill to strengthen background checks on guns.
By Wednesday morning, that momentum had already fizzled. The Senate’s about to go on recess, you see, ironically for Memorial Day. The holiday that is supposed to be a day of mourning in the U.S. On the floor Wednesday morning, Schumer backed off. “There are some who want this body to quickly vote on sensible gun safety legislation,” he said, pointing out that the majority of Americans in every party wants to see strengthened background checks. He says people want to see their senators have to take this vote “so the American people can know which side each senator is on.”
by Lisa Arrastia | May 26, 2022 - 5:50am | permalink
Dear Student-Colleagues,
This is a note of fierce love for you.
You have seen and experienced more in the last few years than anyone should experience in a lifetime; indeed, no one should ever experience any of . . .
- A global pandemic
- Multiple massacres: among them, Black Americans targeted, most recently in Buffalo, NY, and, at this time, 18 babies and one teacher murdered in Texas today – and, maybe not so ironically, all were murdered by what I can only say are our own babies, the young people we, as a national collective of teachers, recently had in our educational embrace. The perpetrators were only 18. They were recently ours.
Entropy (noun): “A process of degradation or running down; a trend to disorder; the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity.” — Merriam-Webster Dictionary
On April 20, 1999, two students entered Columbine High School in Colorado dressed and armed for war. When they were finished, 12 fellow students and 1 teacher were dead, and scores more were injured. While not the first actual mass shooting in a U.S. school, the Columbine massacre is widely viewed as the beginning of an age of in-school gun violence that has accelerated in accumulated horror with each passing year.
Nine days after Columbine, the National Rifle Association (NRA) held its annual convention just a few miles down the road in Denver. Greeted by crowds of gun control advocates, NRA president and former actor Charlton Heston declared, “We cannot, we must not let tragedy lay waste to the most rare, hard-won right in history.”
by F. Douglas Stephenson | May 27, 2022 - 5:58am | permalink
Citizens are waking up to the fact that so many politicians can be so easily bought by the weapons industry, an industry that doesn't care how many people must die to protect their huge profits. SafeHome.org reports that after a record year in 2020, gun sales in the U.S. dipped slightly in 2021. Still, with nearly 19 million guns sold, 2021 was the second-highest year for gun sales in the U.S.—behind only 2020, when estimated gun sales topped 21 million. The previous record year was 2016, with about 16 million guns sold. Total estimated gun sales fell 13 percent between 2020 and 2021, but they remained higher than they were in 2019 (up nearly 40 percent).
The total number of guns sold in 2021 is more than double the number sold in 2001; in fact, sales in the U.S. rose by about 155 percent between 2002 and 2021. No state had more gun sales in 2021 than Texas, where an estimated 1.6 million firearms were sold in the nation's second-largest state. Florida followed closely with 1.4 million firearms sold.
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