IT'S HOLIDAY TIME (duck and cover)

The United States 2022:

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). 

We live in a country gone mad. 

According to Gun Violence Archives, there have been 607 mass shootings in the US in 2022.  There were 690 incidents in 2021, and 610 in 2020. 

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. 

Duck and cover. Stay safe.