When you see something that is not right, not fair, find a way to get in the way and cause trouble.
Congressman John Lewis
JUSTICE BUILDING BLOG
WELCOME TO THE OFFICIAL RICHARD E GERSTEIN JUSTICE BUILDING BLOG. THIS BLOG IS DEDICATED TO JUSTICE BUILDING RUMOR, HUMOR, AND A DISCUSSION ABOUT AND BETWEEN THE JUDGES, LAWYERS AND THE DEDICATED SUPPORT STAFF, CLERKS, COURT REPORTERS, AND CORRECTIONAL OFFICERS WHO LABOR IN THE WORLD OF MIAMI'S CRIMINAL JUSTICE. POST YOUR COMMENTS, OR SEND RUMPOLE A PRIVATE EMAIL AT HOWARDROARK21@GMAIL.COM. Winner of the prestigious Cushing Left Anterior Descending Artery Award.
ITEM: Cheasapeake is Virginia's second largest city. On this past Tuesday. at a Walmart around 10pm as shoppers looked for preholiday bargains a manager stepped out a break room and started shooting, spraying bullets everywhere. Donna Prioleau, a worker at the store, saw three of her friends killed.
ITEM: The weekend before the shooting at the Walmart, at Club-Q in Colorado Springs, a state not unfamiliar with gun violence, an establishment catering to LGBTQ patrons, a gunmen opened fire and killed five people, wounding 25 others. Richar Fierro, a former US Army combat veteran who was in the club with his family, disarmed the shooter and beat him, risking his life in the process. On right wing media Fierro is already being attacked and has received death threats. What was a man with a family doing at such a club they ask. As if a family cannot enter an LGBTQ establishment for a drink or meal or to listen to music. "False-flag" accusations are being made, despite the evisceration of right wing media nut Alex Jones and the billion-dollar judgement against him for raising the same lies about the Sandy Hook school shooting. And some religious commentators have darkly opined that the dead will meet their final judgement for the life they led (read being condemned for their sexual preferences).
There were seven mass shootings in seven days in the week before Thanksgiving. 22 people died of gun violence, 44 people were wounded by guns.
The second amendment, which has NOTHING to do with an individual's right to buy an AR-22, is causing a national epidemic of violence and death. And the Right's answer is to arm more people. It's as if in facing the AIDs epidemics, the answer was to have more unprotected sex.
This, readers of the blog, is insanity. It is not something that a civilized society endures.
However the future is grim. We as a nation could not take united action against a pandemic, with a large percentage of the population finding conspiracies behind the mask mandate and the creation and use of vaccines that battled Covid19. If we cannot unite behind that common enemy, we have no chance to unite to end gun violence.
Gun violence will continue, and mark our words, as in Parkland, it will affect people in Florida. We do not wish this. But we can read the writing on the wall.
RUMPOLE NOTES: Thank you Captain. We've been thinking since yesterday that we should write something, and yet there are really no words. Parents send their child off to school, and she is murdered. In the United States. In 2020. And it's happening over and over again. And a large percentage of this country, would scream and yell in ecstasy at the top of their lungs if at a rally a politician said "all we need is more guns and more prayer." It is madness. We have lost our mind as a country. We were thinking of things like "Guns don't kill people, but they kill children at school"; and "Our adults are the Russians and our children at school are the Ukrainians."
Nothing really captures the sadness and horror of this. Other than to say we are broken as a country. Broken to bits when a parent cannot safely send their child to school. If we cannot do that, then nothing else matters. The Constitution, our courts, our political bodies...nothing matters if we cannot protect innocent children. We are broken and we do not see a fix on the horizon. Maybe it's time to call this experiment a day. Break up the union into a country that love guns and prayer and reject science, and a country with gun control that respects education and reason and science and healthcare and logic. Maybe it is time for that. Nothing else seems to work.
Rumpole.
THE CAPTAIN REPORTS:
OUR “WELL REGULATED MILITIA” HAS STRUCK AGAIN .......
On Tuesday, an 18 year old male wearing body armor walked into Robb Elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, pulled out a firearm, and slaughtered 21 human beings including 19 children who were there attending the second through fourth grades. It was two days before the end of the school year.
The attack evoked memories of one of the worst days in recent US history when, our “well regulated militia” struck almost ten years ago, as a young man walked into Sandy Hook Elementary, in Newton, Connecticut, and murdered 20 children and six adults.
Following the attack at Sandy Hook, President Obama and Vice-President Biden led the effort to get Congress to enact significant firearms legislation. Despite bipartisan support, led by West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin (D) (yes that Joe Manchin) and Senator Pat Toomey (R) of Pennsylvania, and in the face of the grieving parents of 20 elementary school children, legislation never made it to President Obama’s desk with the bill failing in the Senate by a vote of 54-46.
Since Sandy Hook, there have been no less than 3,500 mass shootings (defined as a shooting incident in which four or more people are killed or injured) in our country.
Our “well regulated militia” struck again when in 2015, it was at a Black church in Charleston, S.C., and then again at a government-funded nonprofit center in San Bernardino, Calif. They struck again in 2016, at a gay nightclub in Orlando. Again in 2017, at a country music festival in Las Vegas, and again, in 2018, when it happened in our own back yard at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.
A week after the MSD shooting, President Trump met at the White House with the families of the murdered students. He famously clutched a note card that read: “What can we do to help you feel safe?” and “I hear you.”. The next week, Trump stood up to the NRA by calling for comprehensive gun legislation and warned his fellow Republicans not to be petrified of the powerful gun lobby. But, the next day, Trump hosted the NRA’s top lobbyist in the Oval Office, and suddenly, all of the momentum for a post MSD rally to pass any gun legislation quietly faded away.
Our “well regulated militia” was not done. In 2018, they struck again at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. In 2019, on the same day, they struck twice, first at a Walmart in majority-Hispanic El Paso, followed just hours later by a shooting in a popular nightlife corridor in Dayton, Ohio. In 2021, it was at Asian American massage businesses in Atlanta.
And just last week they struck again at a supermarket in a black neighborhood in Buffalo, NY that left ten dead.
American Exceptionalism
America is exceptional at leading the civilized world in mass shootings.
America is exceptional at having more guns per person than any other country on earth. In fact, the estimate of civilian firearms per 100 persons in the United States is 121. The next closest country is Yemen at 53 firearms for every 100 persons.
America is exceptional in not requiring the registration of firearms. There are an estimated 393,347,000 firearms in the United States as of 2017. Of those, only 1,073,743 are registered. The rest are not.
America is exceptional for having over 200 mass shooting having taken place already in 2022. That number works out to ten per week for the first 20 weeks of the year. There were a total of 693 mass shootings that took place in 2021.
America is exceptional for having already experienced 27 school shootings this year where someone has been injured or killed. In 2021, there were 34 such incidents of violence.
Today, before Game 4 of the NBA Western Conference Final between the Warriors and the Mavs, Golden State Coach Steve Kerr took to the podium and refused to discuss basketball. Here is what Kerr had to say:
“I'm not going to talk about basketball. Nothing's happened with our team in the last six hours. We're going to start the same way tonight. Any basketball questions don't matter.
Since we left shootaround, 14 children were killed 400 miles from here. And a teacher. In the last 10 days, we've had elderly Black people killed in a supermarket in Buffalo, we've had Asian churchgoers killed in Southern California. Now we have children murdered at school.
When are we going to do something? I'm tired. I'm so tired of getting up here and offering condolences to the devastated families that are out there. I'm so tired. Excuse me. I'm sorry. I'm tired of the moments of silence. Enough!
There's 50 senators right now who refuse to vote on HR8, which is a background check rule that the House passed a couple years ago. It's been sitting there for two years. And there's a reason they won't vote on it: to hold onto power.
So I ask you, Mitch McConnell, I ask all of you senators who refuse to do anything about the violence and school shootings and supermarket shootings. I ask you: Are you going to put your own desire for power ahead of the lives of our children and our elderly and our churchgoers? Because that's what it looks like. It's what we do every week.
So I'm fed up. I've had enough. We're going to play the game tonight. But I want every person here, every person listening to this, to think about your own child or grandchild, or mother or father, sister, brother. How would you feel if this happened to you today?
We can't get numb to this. We can't sit here and just read about it and go, well, let's have a moment of silence -- yea, Go Dubs. C'mon, Mavs, let's go. That's what we're going to do. We're going to go play a basketball game.
Fifty senators in Washington are going to hold us hostage. Do you realize that 90 percent of Americans, regardless of political party, want background checks -- universal background checks? Ninety percent of us. We are being held hostage by 50 senators in Washington who refuse to even put it to a vote, despite what we, the American people, want.
They won't vote on it because they want to hold onto their own power. It's pathetic! I've had enough!”
There are ten people who are dead today who were alive yesterday when they went shopping in Boulder, Colorado. One of those who was murdered was Boulder Police Officer Eric Talley- 51 years of age, he leaves SEVEN children to grow up without a father. Officer Talley was THE first responder- the first officer on the scene, arriving to protect his fellow citizens, he paid with his life.
People who object to any governmental controls over the sale of firearms will often argue that the way to protect against mass murder spree shootings is to arm more people.
Here is our response- Officer Talley was armed. He was trained. And he was murdered in cold blood by a person with an AR15 rifle.
This shooting comes as we barely began to raise our flags that were at half mast for the victims of the shootings in Atlanta.
Enough is enough.
We now take our lives into our hands when we go to the supermarket, a movie theater, and all too tragically- a school.
There is a virus loose. There is a pandemic that indiscriminately kills innocent citizens, police officers, and children. And it is called FIREARMS.
Why do we willingly devote billions of dollars to use our best and brightest people to create a vaccine in record time to protect us against Covid19, and not spend one dollar to stop gun violence?
In Silvester v. Becerra, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a fourteen page dissent from the court's decision not to grant cert and review California's ten day waiting period to buy a firearm.
"The right to keep and bear arms is apparently this court's constitutional orphan" Thomas fumed.
"We have not heard argument in a Second Amendment case for nearly eight years" the silent Justice whined. "And we have not clarified the standard for assessing Second Amendment claims for almost 10."
Rumpole wonders how many years has it been since the court heard a Third Amendment case (prohibition against the quartering of soldiers in homes) , or an eighteenth amendment case (prohibition against sale and manufacture of liquor)? Should the length of time between the court hearing issues be in fact an issue raised on cert?
Say this for Justice Marcel Marceau, (judges, click here), the man has timing. Because what the world needs now, are guns, more guns...not just for some, but for everyone...
From Occupied and heavily armed America, Fight the Power without shooting.