Cowardice

It's Thursday, friends, so hope you're looking forward to the weekend.

I was very upset with the news from Colorado that there was yet another mass shooting event in that state, a state where my daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren live.  This event occurred at a King Soopers grocery store, part of the same chain where my daughter and her family shop and not terribly far away from the Boulder store where this happened.

The following day we learned that the suspected assailant is a 21-year-old man with a history of violent outbursts and assaulting others, a man who had been bullied by fellow students earlier in his life.  To my knowledge there's been no specific statement made about the motive for the attack, which left ten people dead.  In his initial court appearance yesterday, his attorney requested a mental health assessment of her client.

Just a few days before, a man entered and opened fire on employees and others in a series of Asian-owned spas in the Atlanta area.  He claimed in his statement to police that he suffers from a sex addiction and this was apparently his way of dealing with his affliction, to murder those who helped him indulge this addiction.  His actions left eight people dead, mostly Asian-Americans.  It's been reported that the suspect was on his way to Florida when he was apprehended, presumably to carry out more such attacks.

Yesterday a 22 year old man was arrested in a grocery store in the Atlanta area with six firearms and body armor in his possession.  The reports I read noted that it was not immediately clear what his motives might have been at the time of his arrest.

The two attacks, just a few days apart, drew the expected reaction from lawmakers and other politicians:  "this needs to stop," "our hearts go out," "we offer our thoughts and prayers for the victims and their families," "we need common sense solutions," and so on.

Those of you who view this blog regularly can remember my posts following the school shootings at Sandy Hook in Connecticut in 2012.  I felt that, finally, we could all agree that something must be done when small children became the targets of a disturbed and heavily armed individual.

But no.  

And here we are again, at a different but equally vexing crossroads, where people who were food shopping or in line to receive their COVID vaccination or were just doing their jobs were gunned down without warning or explanation.

Republicans, predictably, line up with those who support the Second Amendment of the Constitution, guaranteeing citizens the right to bear arms.  The law as written in the late 1700s and as enforced today are not at all compatible, and everyone in Washington knows it.

Senate Democrats aren't united in their effort to curtail access to weapons, despite the recent passage by the Democratically-controlled House of two measures designed to apply stricter standards to the background check process.

It's worth noting that in 2018 the city of Boulder, Colorado, the site of the King Soopers shootings, enacted a ban on the sale and possession of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.  But a local judge overturned the ordinance, saying that only the state of Colorado or the federal government had the authority to enact such regulatory control.

This is all scenery, of course.  The problem is not a new one, certainly, but now, people with hatred toward others, whether justified or not, have spent four years living under a President who essentially assured them that they were justified in their feelings and also steadfastly supported the Second Amendment.

That person is now the former President, and our current President feels very differently about assault weapons, having successfully been heavily involved in the passage of regulations of assault weapons in Congress in the 1990s.

We don't need more cowards, who shoot people indiscriminately or indirectly enable those who do.  We need people of courage who understand the absolute necessity to take action.  And I truly believe that there are such people in government.  The question, ultimately, is whether there are enough of them to take meaningful action.  Finally.