Sharing More Than I Should

[chuckstevens]

10 years ago today 5 students were shot to death at Northern Illinois University. One of the victims was one of my former students.

She got out of a rough area and was going to college! The irony of that! Senselessly killed at 19 for nothing; not in a gang community, but by some angry young man with mental health issues and easy access to guns.

I wait and hoped that there would be sensible gun changes. 10 years later and still waiting.The only way I see change possible is a constitutional amendment to get outside money like the NRA out of our political system. Until we do that, nothing is going to change.

[lunasun]

1. I remember that @ NIU. He was loaded with all kinds of weapons

Terrible tragedy like all these shootings after that one
no change in sight

[mcar]

2. So sorry, chuckstevens

[cab67]

3. There was a shooting at U Iowa in 1991.

I did my undergrad there, but I'd moved on to grad school by 1991. I remember being riveted at the radio broadcast as it happened (I was working late on a poster session for an upcoming meeting). The shooting started in the physics department and moved to the main college of liberal arts offices.

I grabbed the newspaper the next morning, dreading the thought that the professor I'd had for physics was one of the victims. He wasn't - but I knew the secretary in the college offices who'd been wounded. She was a classmate. Her wound left her paralyzed from the neck down.

That really affected me. And I share your fury that nothing's been done to prevent these things from happening.

[Kajun Gal]

4. Amen!

[Stonepounder]

5. This shit has been going on for over 50 years (8/1/66/UT)

And not a damn thing has changed except for these sort of random mass killings happen now with mind numbing frequency. For 2018 alone we are averaging over two school shootings A WEEK!!!! And the only fucking thing that has changed is that we have made it EASIER to get guns. And we have gotten much, much better at sending 'thoughts and prayers'.

And here's the funny part. They are almost all perpetrated by white male Christian loners with mental health problems. Lone wolves. Nothing we can do about it. Heaven help us if the perp happens to be Muslim or black or Middle Eastern. Then they are (gasp) terrorists. What the hell else do you call someone who goes out and kills 17 high school kids he doesn't even know?

Just as the Reagan administration allowed the AIDS epidemic to go unchecked, now our government has allowed 50+ years of mass shootings to go unchallenged. It used to be said that Social Security and Medicare were the third rail of American politics. Touch it and die. Now Congress and the Orange Shitgibbon are talking about cutting SS, Medicare and Medicaid. Today the 3rd rail seems to be gun control and the NRA. Better that hundreds, even thousands of innocents succumb to gun violence than that one gun or ammunition manfacturer lose a dime's worth of profit, or one Congressman lose a penny of campaign contribution from the NRA.

To paraphrase Buffy St Marie just slightly:

My country tis of our children are dying.