While the media balanced its’ coverage with three funerals of children shot to death in Uvalde, Texas, with the latest victims of senseless gun violence Wednesday evening in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I asked myself what can I say or write that has not been written or said before. I, along with others, have pointed out the GOP superseding their oath to the United States and its congressional processes with promises and pledges to men and policy. Tax pledges and chasing NRA ratings have turned the Republican party into marionettes—dancing and waiting for the puppeteer to pull their strings. The result is our children’s broken, mutilated, and dead bodies.
Representative Adam Kinzinger is being excised from the Republican party for using common sense. Kinzinger almost reflexively paid homage to the NRA by mentioning that he is a gun owner before discussing common-sense solutions. He mentioned special licensing along with raising the age limit to purchase an AR-15-style weapon. On a personal note, when I got my driver’s license at age seventeen, I could not get behind the wheel of an eighteen-wheeler and tool around the Beltway of my hometown in Washington, DC.; it would have required a CDL license. Why?; because the law felt I was not strong enough, mature enough, or skilled enough to be in control of tons of mobile machinery.
If that is such an easy concept to recognize, why in ‘for God’s sake’ in the pleading words of Joe Biden is the maturity and weight of carrying a machine, whose only purpose is to destroy lives, is not the owner at least required to be deemed responsible. In the Tulsa shooting, reports are that the man who created the hideous carnage was angry at his surgeon and, in less than three hours, bought an assault weapon, killed two doctors, a receptionist, and, almost mockingly, a man with the surname Love. In 2017, former Trump Chief of Staff [ Gen. John Kelly] called Democratic Florida Congresswoman Rep. Frederica Wilson an “empty barrel.” Kelly, of course, was either misled or purposely callous in his criticism and further injured his honor by not being brave enough to apologize. So, the empty barrel accusation of a Democrat was just more projection to obscure the bottomless vat the GOP has become. Vapid, arid, and without a moral floor. The GOP’s entrenched refusal to save lives has an evil aspect beyond money. Sure, the fidelity to money and power is not the exclusive purview of the Republican party. Still, it is becoming more and more apparent that the GOP views outrageousness as a superpower.
While the predictable obfuscation, lies, and finger-pointing went on in the Congressional hearings yesterday to do something about guns, Rep. Greg Steube ( R-FL) decided it would be a good time to brag about his gun collection, only days after the slaughters of fellow citizens and school children.
The parents and loved ones of families still mourning the deaths of their moms, dads, and kids were subjected to the hideous display of a congressman in charge of their protection, taunting them instead. So, Republicans have decided to lean on outrage rather than answers; talking about locked doors, marijuana, and weaponizing teachers and not restricting the guns that killed them is obscene. Hopefully, a teen blasting away at children a few days past his eighteenth birthday is finally more outrage than we will bear.
Continue to Vote for Change.