governor greg abbott lowered the minimum age for buying assault rifles in texas to 18 just LAST YEAR. this gunman bought an assault rifle on his 18th birthday.
donald trump, ted cruz, and greg abbott are all scheduled to appear at the NRA’s annual conference in houston, texas in THREE days.
senator ted cruz has received more funding from conservative, gun rights groups and advocates than any other politician since 2012.
republicans and conservatives ALLOWED this to happen. they created the ability, the freedom, and the access for this to happen.
time to go through another “national conversation” on gun rights and gun violence where we can’t unanimously agree on the fact that kids shouldn’t be getting shot in their fucking classrooms and the fact that we live in a society where an 18 year old is driven to commit mass murder on school children. like, this could’ve been prevented. we are no further along than where we were 10 years ago with sandy hook and it’s despicable. like we live in a country where they want to force you to carry a pregnancy to term, then not help you feed the child if you can’t find formula for them, and then not protect them in their classrooms where they should be fucking safe. what the fuck.
I fucking hate texas I hate that abortions are more restricted than the guns that cause preventable mass shootings at schools and churches and Walmart and and and and it just goes on like this… it’s “protect the children” “what about the children” until the children are murdered in their elementary school and then it all “thoughts and prayers” “there’s nothing we can do” “don’t bring up gun control now it’s disrespectful to the victims” but I bet all 14 children and that 1 teacher would still be alive if we had any sort of gun laws
Today is the second to last day of school. I need to help my students finish their book in a bag projects. I need to make sure they have the summer reading assignment. I need to tell them if they passed the STAAR test. I need to say good bye for the summer.
But in my mind, I keep thinking of Uvalde. Of Parkland. Of Sandy Hook. Of Columbine. I keep thinking of them and I don’t know how to stop thinking of them and what it means that their teachers didn’t get to say good bye for the summer. Didn’t get to say good bye at all.
This isn’t a tornado or a hurricane or a pandemic or an act of God. It isn’t a universal truth, an inevitable tragedy, a cruel fact of life. We could stop it.
But before the body count was even stable, before the bodies collected, before the parents told- already there were people crowing about thoughts and prayers and mental health and kids these days and blaming all the nebulous, vague Boogie men, but never ever ever the access to weapons and the culture surrounding those weapons that has empowered these slaughters again and again and again and again.
And the part of me, curled up in pain, that turns to wry humor to cope, wonders if only we shaped abortion pills to be in the shape of an AR 15- would anyone finally do something about the guns, or would they finally find abortion acceptable.
dont reblog (this is just a random little personal post and i don’t really want it going out into the big world)
remembering out of nowhere how, when we got smash brothers brawl in my house when i was a kid, my parents wouldn’t let us play as any character that had or used a gun in an attack bc my parents were very hard-line abt the idea that guns were real-world tools for killing whose usage on living ppl should not be trivialized even through pretend play. mostly remembering it rn bc i remember samus was always a contested gray area.
i don’t ever really talk about this on the internet because i’m not sure what the point is, but, when I was a sophomore my high school very nearly was another name on the never ending list of mass shootings. a student was caught with homemade bombs and ammo hours before he was going to carry out a “columbine-like attack”. He had a fully formed plan and was prepared to carry it out. He was only caught because a very brave student and teacher reported his ‘off’ behavior to administration and they took it seriously. this incident has haunted me my entire life because the kid sat at my lunch table. i considered him a friend. and i have spent the better part of a decade obsessing over what could have happened to me and my school that day. days like today make me think about it particularly hard. idk what the point of sharing this was, but, i just wanted to get it out
