Thoughts and prayers. Thoughts and prayers. Thoughts and prayers.
You all remember the old joke about the guy in a flood who’s praying for God to save him? A boat comes by, but he declines getting in it because God is going to save him. Then a helicopter. And I forget what else, but basically, when he drowns, he gets to heaven and is pissed that God didn’t save him — and God says, “I sent a boat and a helicopter.”
We are living in a fun-house-mirror version of that joke. Kids are dying, and we can save them. We have the metaphorical boats and helicopters and horses and cars and whatever else we need. But we can’t get the people who have the power to operate these vehicles to get in them and save our kids.
"Thoughts and prayers" when you have the tools to prevent these kinds of killings is obscene. Literally kissing Satan’s butt has to be less sacrilegious than offering thoughts and prayers while declining to help.
Now that Gov. Bill Lee has the apparent admiration of Nazis, maybe he should ask one of them to teach him about the importance of deeds and how cattle die and kinsmen die and you yourself will die, but the fame of your deeds is eternal. God, at the least we need some vikings to come name this fool. Along with Thorgeir the Clumsy and Ethelred the Unready, we could have Bill the Feckless — that way everyone would have fair and constant warning of the danger we’re in.
A 9-year-old child is a colt of a kid — wide-eyed, curious, needing space to explore, but also needing to know someone is watching out for them. When you’re 9, you still think that new sneakers make you faster and you might be willing to show it. You might even still believe in the Easter Bunny. You are so very precious when you’re 9 years old. You are so very precious when you’re 60 years old as well.
Something is very, very wrong with us that we accept mass shootings as just what it means to be an American. We are horrified by stories of child sacrifice and child soldiers and children ripped from their parents in war-torn countries. But look at us, sacrificing our children to some slow civil war we won’t admit we’re fighting.
Gov. Bill Lee, surrounded by state lawmakers at Beretta USA's Tennessee campus, signs the so-called constitutional carry legislation. June 2, 2021.
Can you imagine how scared every child in Covenant School must have been on Monday? Can you imagine the terror of parents calling their children’s names and not getting a reply? Can you imagine the families of the adults who were killed? We cannot continue to let terrorists use the bodies of innocent people as the medium upon which they write their societal manifestos. We could take away the tool they use to write with.
We simply could. Whatever argument you’ve heard about why the Second Amendment won’t let us do it is a lie. The Second Amendment requires a well-regulated militia out of those gun owners. We do next to no regulation. If Republicans continue to have their way, we will eventually do no regulation. And we will be in violation of the Second Amendment as it is written. Somehow that never occurs to politicians. But we certainly could regulate gun ownership. We could require people to get a permit before owning a gun. We could require them to pay liability insurance. We could require safety training. We could pass laws that make gun owners criminally responsible for actions others take with their guns unless the gun owners have reported the guns stolen.
And gun owners could take some responsibility here. Is your gun secured in a gun safe when not in use, or is it sliding around the floor of your car? Do you keep trigger locks on your gun when not in use? Are you supporting manufacturers who are coming up with safety features like guns that can only be used by the owner? Are you reporting the plans of the extremists in your midst, or are you letting it slide because, well, you know that’s just how so-and-so is? At the least, people, cancel your NRA memberships.
This is going to keep happening, because Republicans and gun owners are fine with it happening. I wish with my whole heart that knowing there will be six more empty chairs at Easter dinner this year would shock their consciences into action, but it won’t. Everything that could be said has already been said. If some combination of words would unlock the power to fix this without needing politicians, those words would already have been spoken long ago.
Now all we have is the silence of the yawning grave, which we continue to shovel our most precious things into. Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney, Cynthia Peak, Katherine Koonce and Mike Hill. Are guns really more important than them? Do we have to accept the loss of them as just the price of being American? How many dead people will finally outweigh our love of guns?
