Almost everything I’ve read about the horrific killings in Parkland Florida this week, I’ve read before...a hundred times or more before. Different names, different date, and a different place but it’s the same old story with the same old response, really. Pretty soon we’ll run out of creative ways to paraphrase what has been written over and over and over again.
As one of the best writers of our time once famously said:
“Somehow this has become routine. The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine. The conversation in the aftermath of it has become routine. We’ve become numb to this.”
So routine, in fact, that this piece I wrote after Stephen Paddock indulged his murderous fantasies in Las Vegas, needs no paraphrasing:
“This will make you cry. This will make you angry. This will make you even more determined to see sensible gun laws enacted to protect us from the 25% of Americans who own over 310, 000, 000 guns.
Watch and be inspired. And please help make this go viral.”
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If there’s one thing new about this latest massacre, however, it is the response from the young people I’ve seen interviewed on TV. The eloquence, the passion, and the palpable anger with which they express themselves give me hope. They are fearlessly and irreverently calling out their elders. They know exactly what they want to see happen and they do not look like they are about to allow themselves to be cowed by the blood-soaked, soulless vampires parading as human beings who run the terrorist organization known as the NRA. Maybe, then, just maybe this time will be different. When the little racist, hatemonger Tomi Lahren offered her unsolicited opinion, for example, a student from Marjorie Stoneman told her in no uncertain terms to “stfu.”
"A gun has killed 17 of my fellow classmates," Kyra wrote. "A gun has traumatized my friends. My entire school, traumatized from this tragedy. This could have been prevented. Please stfu Tomi."
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(h/t to BOHICA)
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Yes, young people seem ready to rumble and my money is on them.
RIP to all those gone too soon. There’s hardly anything that one can say that will bring comfort to grieving mothers and fathers. I know how attractive darkness will seem to them over the minutes, hours, and days to come. Fighting against the monsters who took their babies is the best we can do.
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The Terrorists
The National Rifle Association needs to be listed as a Terrorist organization for their promotion of guns and that gun violence is the only way to solve the nation's problems. The NRA has become the problem for their promotion of weapons.
The list of Representatives who sold their souls — their very humanity — for NRA’s bloody, filthy lucre: