Who has the right to decide who should live and who should die? The bitter privileged think it’s they.
These shootings are not normal. Gun control is not another thing to blow off and try to fix later, when politicians think that the climate is right. Gun control is more necessary than ever and a problem that we have been cultivating for decades — most notably by the NRA.
If a “bad guy” has a gun, people in that room aren’t safer because there is a “good guy” with a gun. One of the reasons is because it just puts everyone within the vicinity in spraying distance of a stray bullet intended for the “good guy.” People are safest in a room when there is absolutely 0 percent chance of being shot due to an absence of the machinery.
That means we need to stop making buying a gun as easy as buying a $5 bottle of wine or fishing permit. Assault riffles need to be demolished and banned, guns need to be restricted to the purpose of hunting (for consumption only, not decoration), with the addition of a nonlethal inhibitor so that if accidentally or maliciously used in the direction of a human, there is adequate time to administer medical attention.
Students already have been accidentally shot, at the fault of representatives who buy into the idiotic mentality to arm school administrators and teachers, proving that not even those with good intentions who are trying to keep students safe can’t — because there is a gun in the room.
RELATED ARTICLE: When the students are the teachers, teens around Puget Sound call for gun control
On Feb. 21 the nation saw a disturbing event take place at a Florida basketball arena in which NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch grotesquely answered the questions of surviving students and family of nonsurviving students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The mother of the late Scott Beigel prefaced her question by mentioning the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the ratification of the Second Amendment (the right to bear arms) made in 1791. She asked why it is that her son’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was not as fiercely defended as the right to bear arms. Loesch disgracefully belittled her with right-wing constituent rhetoric upholding the rights of the privileged.
Gun control is not partisan; it is on the side of logic and life preservation.
But these politicians don’t want gun control because they get campaign financing to preserve their jobs.
So the phrase then is true, that one should not bite from the hand that feeds you. But if your diet is fame, accolades and legacy, then you can rescind the supply from a dirty hand, because you’re not starving.
Gui Jean-Paul Chevalier is a Seattle-based recording artist and author from rural Washington, living counter-small-town-minded for the cause of humanity.
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