Dwain Northey (Gen X)

This is the headline from Fox… ‘Nashville transgender school shooter’s messages to friend show ‘much deeper issues,’ says ex-FBI special agent’.Not, one more horrific school shooting, or anything about our continued national nightmare of gun violence, Transgender school shooter… WFT. Why is this even an issue, we don’t get headlines like, ‘Male White Nationalist’ involved in mass shooting, or ‘Texas gun laws allow WHITE MALE 18 year old to purchase assault style weapons prior to school shooting’.  

This is another horrific event in our history of deifying guns and gun culture, instead of recognizing and confronting the real problem the assailant has to be demonized. That characterization fits the Fox model perfectly if the assailant happens to fall into a group that they are already attacking, it’s the exception that proves the norm.

I am sick about the level of gun violence in the United States, I am disgusted that we keep having funerals for children with no solution even discussed. We had an assault weapon ban in the past and during that brief period mass shooting were rare.

The Supreme Court and lower courts have ruled repeatedly that a wide range of gun safety laws are constitutional, rejecting the gun lobby’s dangerous interpretation of the Second Amendment. The 2008 ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller marked the first Supreme Court ruling on the Second Amendment in nearly 70 years. The Court ruled in favor of Dick Heller, who sued Washington DC over its ban on handguns in the home. The Court clarified an individual’s right to have a handgun in the home for self-defense but denied that the Second Amendment provides an unlimited license to bring weapons into all corners of American society. In fact, Justice Scalia explicitly noted that the Second Amendment is “not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”

Machine guns and fifty caliber rifles are highly destructive weapons appropriate only for military use. Machine guns have been comprehensively regulated at the federal level since the 1930s, and the manufacture or importation of new machine guns for sale to civilians has been banned since 1986. On the other hand, federal law treats fifty caliber rifles no differently from other long guns, as do all but three states and the District of Columbia.

Why aren’t AR15s and assault style weapons classified under this 1930s rule. The gun manufactures rationale is that these weapons sold to the public aren’t fully automatic, only one round per trigger pull. What they never like to point out is that when fitted with a high capacity magazine these weapons can discharge rounds as fast as the shooter can pull the trigger also that any with a metal file and access to the internet can modify the weapon to be fully automatic.

The common denominator in all these shooting isn’t the gender of the shooter or if they were bullied or mentally unhinged it is the weapon and easy access to ammunition. When will we address the elephant in the room just as other nations have done. The same people that stand on their soap boxes and declare that the 2^nd amendment gives ‘all’ Americans the right to keep and bare arms don’t really mean ‘all’ and paradoxically won’t allow guns into their conventions. Yes I am talking about you RNC and NRA.

I am disappoint to admit that the only way that the gun issue will be resolved is when our Government is occupied with Millennials and Gen Z that collectively have PTSD from shooter drills in school from an early age. The current Boomer and even my Gen X representatives don’t seem to understand the trauma that is being imposed on the school children today. I ask the older generation to harken back to a time when there were bomb, hide under your desk drills. Remember how traumatizing those were? Now imagine that that bomb is walking threw your school and you don’t know when it might explode. Not a comforting visual. That is what we have been subjecting our kids with. Police offices go to work every day not knowing if they at some point might be involved in a situation that could cost them their lives, school children are going though that same mental trauma and they are not trained or equipped to fight back.

19 school shootings in 2023 and March isn’t even over yet not to mention the number of mass shooting over all. Congress, thoughts and prayers do nothing!!! Equipping classrooms with bullet\proof dry erase boards, asking for teachers to be armed, even children having Kevlar plates in their backpacks aren’t addressing the problem.

Bullying sucks, it has been going on forever and needs to stop but the easy access to firearms has eliminated the power to resolve issues with words. Shoot first has become the answer to many obstacles… the defining problem is the GUN, address the problem.