JD thinks that school shootings have “become a fact of life” and schools are “soft targets” so we need to turn our schools into even more prison-like structures. (Note that JD’s boss was almost killed by a bullet from an AR-15, despite some of the best protection in the world, and he and JD both address outdoor crowds from a bulletproof aquarium, so that’s a fact of life, but I digress.)
Let’s look at some other facts. First, the Georgia shooter’s dad had terrible judgment:
- It’s been widely reported that he bought the AR-15 his boy used in his killing spree after police had visited him out of concern over threats that the kid had made. But did you know the family was evicted in 2022? Its not clear whether it was over money or over them being assholes, but if it was for money, what kind of judgment do you have to spend AR-15 money if you can’t pay the rent?
- This poor boy had been begging for mental health counseling for months, according to his aunt. No money or time for that in this family to actually help the kid — they spent all of that at the gun store.
Teenagers, of course, have access to other possibly deadly tools, like cars, but in those cases we protect ourselves from the terrible judgment of dysfunctional families by making sure the kid passes a drivers’ test, and that the vehicle they’re driving has insurance. It’s a fact of life that something far more deadly than a car is routinely provided by shitty families to their fucked up kids, with none of the safeguards.
Another fact of life is that even those who are injured, or even the uninjured, in the shooting are deeply affected by it.
- Remember the horrible slaughter of some Amish children in their rural Pennsylvania school? Well, the youngest victim of that shooting died on Tuesday. She made it to 23, and was 6 years old when she was shot. She was the most severely wounded survivor. She lived in “a wheelchair and unable to talk, fed through a tube and requiring constant care. She also suffered seizures, at times severe.” The best healthcare in the world, if you can afford it, can save almost anyone who makes it to the hospital alive, but that doesn’t mean they’ll have much of a life afterwards.
- One of the teachers who was ruthlessly murdered in Georgia was a football coach and sounds like a great guy. He left the classroom during the shooting — the students believe he did it to protect them (Uvalde PD, take note). He was shot and tried to crawl back to the classroom. His students dragged him back in and locked the door. Those kids will need years of therapy to overcome that trauma, if that’s even possible.
And the god damned, constant active shooter drills are a traumatizing fact of life. I was at a concert in Rochester last year and ran into some of my daughter’s friends. They were with a young woman in her mid-20s, and standing far from the stage, near an exit. That’s because this woman was deathly afraid of being the victim of a shooter, and wanted to be able to flee if something happened. Active shooter drills are part of children’s lives from kindergarten forward, just like fire drills, but I can’t even remember the last time I heard about a child dying in a fire in a school. If some kids did die in a fire, it would be an undeniable fact of life that there would be an investigation and changes would be made.
Yesterday, Walz likened listening to a Trump speech to hearing the next screenplay for Mad Max. That’s the hellscape Trump’s running mate wants us to accept — prison schools staffed by cops with nothing but time on their hands who won’t protect the kids when the chips are down anyway. We are not allowed to legislate reasonable protection from the worst among us, the disturbed kids of the terrible parents who over and over (Newtown, Michigan, etc.) have shown the most awful judgment when it comes to buying their kids killing machines. We can’t even ask for insurance and licensing, because all these gun humpers know that no sane insurance company would insure their precious plastic AR-15 Jesus. Those are the current facts of life, but for once I have just a little hope that an election might change them.
