So this past weekend, the scene of the all-American slaughter was an LGBT club in Colorado Springs, right in the heart of the Congressional district represented by MAGA gun nut Lauren Boebert, who has also agitated against LGBT “groomers,” but now adds her hypocritical scoopful of dirt to the mountain of empty thoughts and blasphemous prayers. Five dead at the hands of another angry and hate-filled young man with a “long gun.” More heartbreaking tales of heroism and loss, in America’s undeclared civil war of all against all. Is there anything to say, anymore?
There had better be, if the slaughter is ever to stop. From Jan. 1 through Nov. 19, 2022, there were more than 600 “mass shootings” in which four or more people, not including the shooter, were injured or killed, says the Washington Post, citing the Gun Violence Archive. These massacres claimed 621 American lives and injured another 2,524, some of whom will be disabled for life. Why has the vast majority of Americans, including most gun owners, who want to at least slow the unending flow of powerful weaponry to obsessed collectors, fascist paramilitaries, and freelance killers, apparently given up? Are we content to just wait for our number to come up, as we recklessly send our children to school, commute into the office, or go shopping at the local mall?
The fact is, we are allowing ourselves to be held hostage by a minority of fanatics whose wish to own private armories is treated as a right more sacred than our own right to live. They in turn are backed by the might of the MAGA-tized Republicans who will brook no compromise, and who now control the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, and at least half the state governments. And behind them is the billionaire mafia, not all of whose members are as flamboyant as Elon Musk, who have distorted our politics and our society beyond all recognition. Our lives are now on the line, all our lives, as they blockade all attempts to curb the gun carnage, the climate carnage, the debt crisis, and every other problem posing existential threats to our society. As the famous Revolutionary War cartoon of the segmented snake had it, we must all join together, or die.
Emanuel Goldstein 