Enough?! What will it take before everyone has had enough?
Lewiston, Maine. The population is about forty thousand people. It’s a small town where the saying that everyone knows each other is close to true. It’s a small town that was known for only one thing. On May 25, 1965, Muhammad Ali fought Sonny Liston at the Central Maine Youth Center. Ali knocked out Liston in the first round.
The keyword in the first paragraph is ‘was.’ That changed last night when a gunman shot and killed eighteen people, while more than fifty others were injured. Lewistown has become the latest to join this list of cities: Jacksonville, Nashville, East Lansing, Richmond and Monterey Park. All of them have had mass shootings in their communities this year.
At no point were any of them shocking enough that people on the right said enough.
Let’s go back a bit further to 2022. Colorado Springs, Highland Park, Chattanooga, Tulsa and Uvalde. Again, nothing was done.
None of this is a surprise. More than a decade ago, twenty-six people were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty of them were children between the ages of six to seven years old. If that didn’t shake people up enough to work on some sensible gun control laws, sadly, nothing will.
Yesterday was just another day in the world of guns in America. The most shocking thing about this is that this type of event occurs so often that we aren’t even shocked by it anymore. In a couple of days, we’ll be done with this story and go on with our lives…until the next one…and there will be a next one.
What’s it going to take to do something about this? What’s it going to take before everyone says ENOUGH!
If the last sentence of your post is a question (hard to tell, it ends with an exclamation point instead of a question mark), the answer is that America can't get enough of this stuff. We're so numb to it that the NRA doesn't even send out its shills anymore to tell us that guns aren't the problem.
America is like Hamas, we love our guns more than we love our children. We tell each other that the weapon used by Robert Card isn't an assault rifle, it's a "sporting" rifle. Apparently, shooting people is one of America's favorite sports.