Ten Years After Sandy Hook And America Remains Broken
We could stop this. We honestly could.
Ten years ago today, the Wonkette story that made me cry the hardest didn't mention Sandy Hook directly at all. It might be the most heartbreaking thing we've published, or that might just be me. It's just three short paragraphs by Rich Abdill:
Breaking: More Than 79 Million Children Come Home From School
In an incredible stroke of almost unanimous nationwide good luck, students of 67,139 of the country's 67,140 elementary schools got to go home after school today, to their parents, or guardians, or whoever is in charge of them, and they didn't really have a bad time when they got there. They may have been hungry, and there is a 19 percent chance they are in poverty, but children in every single state in the union got to go home today.
Children on both coasts and in the middle and all the way out in the weird foreign parts like Hawaii came home from school, and ate dinner, and ice cream, and got hugs, and whined about their homework, and got more hugs, and they didn't necessarily know why.
And that's OK, because they came home, and it's the best news anybody's heard all day.
And you're goddamned right I'm sobbing all over again, in grief, and in the absolute certainty that it's going to happen again and again, because even if most Americans want to keep it from happening again, the powerful people who prevent any action from being taken are still very able to block progress.
We've had so many mass shootings and sat through so much rightwing mockery of anyone who thinks we should stop them that we misremembered something about that day. We had thought that Fox News had mocked President Obama for crying as he spoke about the murdered children. That actually happened three years later, when Obama teared up as he remembered Sandy Hook during a speech calling for gun control. Witty "Outnumbered" panelist Andrea Tantaros joked that had she been at the speech, she'd "check the podium for like a raw onion or some No More Tears," and Meghan McCain very seriously added "Go to your hometown of Chicago instead of talking about God-fearing Americans who just want to protect themselves when ISIS is coming to their hometown and shootin' up 14 people."
But that was later, so we remembered that wrong. Only stupid people cry about murdered children. Terrorism is far scarier, especially since it's far less common than somebody shooting up a school. Or a nightclub. Or a grocery store. Or a workplace. Or another school.
Joe Biden was vice president when a shooter armed with a gun that was advertised as a manhood restorative entered Sandy Hook Elementary and killed 20 children, six adults, and himself.
Today, President Biden issued a statement to mark this awful anniversary, so Fox News will have something to castigate him about, and they certainly will, because he said Americans
should have societal guilt for taking too long to deal with this problem. We have a moral obligation to pass and enforce laws that can prevent these things from happening again. We owe it to the courageous, young survivors and to the families who lost part of their soul ten years ago to turn their pain into purpose.
What a monster he is, suggesting that anyone should feel bad about the beautiful wonderful guns that keep us free and safe except for now and then, and anyway, Chicago.
Biden noted that Congress finally passed its first substantial gun bill in ages this year, banning "ghost guns" and ramping up penalties for gun trafficking, and providing funding to help states enforce red flag laws.
He also called again for a ban on
assault weapons and high-capacity magazines like those used at Sandy Hook and countless other mass shootings in America. Enough is enough. Our obligation is clear. We must eliminate these weapons that have no purpose other than to kill people in large numbers. It is within our power to do this – for the sake of not only the lives of the innocents lost, but for the survivors who still hope.
Children will be coming home from school all over America this afternoon too, and if we're lucky, we'll get through the day without some idiot deciding to mark the day with another massacre. Other nations have responded to horrific massacres by banning firearms or restricting them even further. In America, we have consultants who'll sell schools reinforced steel safety pods that can also double as tornado shelters.
It's been a decade since Sandy Hook. Maybe it won't be another decade before we get rid of the assault rifles. Maybe we've screamed long enough.
On that sober note, you may open thread.
[ White House ]
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That was the thing about Saturns. You could drive them for 300,000 miles with no problem. Then they fall apart all at once.
Best of luck. I've only ever changed one person, and he was a gay Republican. In 2005 I asked him "so you're voting for a party that hates you and doesn't think you should be allowed to marry? That's kind of like being a Jewish Nazi." He told me later that the part about the "Jewish Nazi" was what made him switch.