Word of the Day: EVENTUALLY

In my last post, my 200th, I mentioned that I've written on the topic of gun violence here in America about a dozen-and-a-half times.  Sadly, I have another post today to add to that count.

On Friday, a school shooting took place at Santa Fe High School in Texas.  It resulted in ten persons killed -- nine students (one of them, an exchange student from Pakistan) and one teacher -- and another ten persons injured.  The shooter, a seventeen-year-old student at the school, is in custody.  His intention was to kill students and commit suicide. .Clearly, a troubled teen who took some of his father's guns with him to the school.

Texas senator Ted Cruz spoke powerfully against this horrific act at a press conference ... the same Ted Cruz who has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from the NRA and currently has an A+ rating from them.  Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick's response was that schools should have only one entrance/exit and arming teachers .... more guns in schools.

The level of hypocrisy and stupidity in their statements is astounding.

With the news of the deaths at Santa Fe High School, came some shocking news.  In a recent report in The Washington Post newspaper, was the following sobering statistic:

There are now more students killed at school shootings 

this year than people killed while serving in the military.

Let that sink in.  We tend to think that lots of deaths occur in military operations.  Indeed, they do, but there have been, this year, more deaths here ... on our soil ... at our schools ... than in the military?  (And this year is not even half over!)  Could a goal of the death-for-profit crowd be to turn America into a war-torn piece of real estate?  Is the next move to have people bombing more and more buildings.  Will the ruins in cities like Aleppo, Raqqa, and Mosul eventually become the new norm in this country?  If that sounds far-fetched, consider the level of mental illness in this country and how it's addressed along with the ease of finding out how to make a bomb, all with the undercurrent of lax laws and law enforcement, and tell me just how far-fetched it really is?

And there are plenty of people around who are ready, willing, and able to take advantage of that ongoing perfect storm.

The Washington Post shared these graphs.  The first is the number of deaths from school shootings compared to the number of deaths in the military (both in-combat and not in-combat).

Compare the above graph to this one, showing the same comparison, but for all of last year.

And this graph, which shows comparisons among the number of deaths from 2000-2018 and among the number of shooting incidents for the same time period.

Seventeen-year-old Santa Fe High School student Paige Curry was interviewed after the shooting.  When asked if everything happening seemed unreal, she replied,

"It's been happening everywhere.

I've always kind of felt that, eventually,
it was going to happen here, too."

Eventually ...

This is what our youth is now thinking because Paige Curry is certainly not the only student in this country thinking that.  When I was in high school, we only had fire drills.  We even hoped we stood outside long enough to take up as much time as possible so that whatever period we were in at that time would be over.  (The other kids who were on their lunch period, though, were not as happy.)  My high school (or even elementary school, for that matter) never had a fire, so even though it certainly could have happened, it just seemed to us less likely.  That cannot be said for today's students.  When worrying about a test, your grades, and if your boyfriend/girlfriend was breaking up with you are no longer to biggest worries a student can have, but being killed is, normality has been ruined.  This is being normalized by referring to it as "the new normal".

"The new normal" is not normal.  It is abnormal.  It will always be abnormal.  And it must stop.

David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland shooting three months ago and outspoken activist member of the #NeverAgain movement, is someone who does not mince words when it comes to gun violence in America.  He immediately posted on Twitter in response to the shooting:

Sad to say, he is right.

Another Parkland survivor and #NeverAgain activist Emma Gonzalez also offered her words of support:

We are on a fast spiral downward to a world where schools are war zones ... no, not like war zones, literal war zones.  We must stop that from happening.  We can accomplish that only if we keep at it.  If we do, our schools will go back to being solely places of learning and not the last place our youth inhabits before their far-too-early funerals ...

... hopefully.

Terry