Tag Archives: gun violence

Far too close for comfort

AMARILLO, Texas — All right, ladies and gents, the latest mass shooting to erupt in these United States has occurred too close to make this blogger at all comfortable.

Reports have it that nine people were killed or injured when a dipsh** opened fire at the Allen Outlet Mall, which is in the city where my son and his family live.

An Allen police officer shot the loon to death. He reportedly was en route to another call when the shots rang out. He engaged the lunatic immediately and, according to Allen PD, he “neutralized the subject.”

I am heaving a gigantic sigh, as is my younger son, who is with me in Amarillo tending to a family matter. Our family is safe from this latest hideous spasm of violence, the 199th such mass shooting in 2023.

I also want to thank publicly the Allen police officer who tended to this emergency in rapid order. This is what public service is all about.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

‘Representative democracy,’ yes?

When the founders created this great nation, they established a “representative democracy” in which those we elect to public office are charged with representing the majority view of those who send them to office.

Why, then, does the Texas Legislature — to cite just one example — continue to resist the will of the people who appear to support increasing the minimum age for those wishing to purchase firearms?

That’s what is going on here, according to a new poll published by the University of Texas.

The Texas Tribune reports: Released Wednesday, the survey from the University of Texas at Austin found 76% of voters support “raising the legal age to purchase any firearm from 18 years of age to 21 years of age.” Twenty percent of voters oppose the idea. Republicans back the proposal 64% to 31%.

Poll finds Texans support raising age to buy guns from 18 to 21 | The Texas Tribune

What is just as staggering as the overall support for such a measure is the significant majority of Texans who call themselves Republicans who also support increasing the minimum age.

Indeed, the GOP that controls the Legislature along with every single statewide office in Texas ought to listen to the will of the people for whom they work instead of the gun lobby that keeps funneling money to their campaigns.

I am not suggesting that increasing the age limit is the end-all to the spate of gun violence that plagues our society. It merely adds one more reasonable requirement for those wishing to purchase a firearm. While we’re at it, why not also include universal background checks to ensure that the gun purchaser isn’t a threat to those around him.

I doubt seriously the nation’s founders would approve of the way this political climate has shaken out 200-plus years after they created this representative democracy.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Hunt ends … let justice do its work

The great boxing champ Joe Louis once said his foes “can run but they can’t hide.” So it is as well with criminal suspects on the run from the law.

Police yesterday took a man suspected of killing five neighbors because one of them asked him to stop shooting his AR-15 in the front yard because, according to authorities, he was disturbing her sleeping baby.

What did the moron do? He killed those victim, including a nine-year-old boy before fleeing to a nearby town.

The cops found the suspect hiding under a pile of laundry inside a home in Cut ‘N Shoot, Texas, near the city of Cleveland, where the shooting occurred.

I want to offer a word of congratulations to law enforcement for finding the man accused of the hideous crime. It took a lot of coordination among local, state and federal authorities to bring this individual into custody.

A shocking element of this story is that the suspect, an undocumented immigrant from Honduras, had been deported four times previously. But he got back into the United States anyway! Good ever-lovin’ grief!

I won’t lay any blame on anyone at this moment; maybe later. I merely want to salute the good guys for tracking down this monster and locking him up. Given Texas’s strict laws governing punishment for capital crimes, I am going to presume that the individual captured — presuming he is convicted of the multiple murders — won’t be breathing the good Earth’s air for very long.

As for the reasons for the crime and the availability of the weaponry used in this latest mass shooting, well … that’s a subject for plenty of future debate.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Monument to mass shooting victims? Yes!

Joe Moody has an idea that he hopes his fellow Texas legislators will move into final passage and ultimately into law.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear likely that the El Paso Democrat’s idea will see a fruitful end. He wants the state to erect a monument to all the victims of mass shootings in Texas. He wants the monument to be erected on the Capitol grounds to remind visitors — and legislators — of the crisis we are enduring with the spate of gun violence that continues to plague our society.

According to KERA-TV: “There are too many victims now, and there’s bound to be more in the future,” Moody said. “I remember when I was younger, and Columbine happened. It was unthinkable at the time. But in the years since, mass shootings have become almost commonplace.”

Moody’s community has felt the pain of mass shootings. He also served on a three-member legislative committee that examined the recent Uvalde massacre at Robb Elementary School.

As KERA reported: The text of the resolution lists mass shootings in Texas that date back to 1966, when a lone gunman killed 15 people from the clock tower at the University of Texas at Austin. The text continues by mentioning the 19 children and two teachers killed at Robb Elementary School in May 2022 and the back-to-back shootings in 2019. In early August of that year a gunman killed 23 people at an El Paso Walmart, and another shooter killed seven in late August in the Midland-Odessa area.

Texas Democrat urges Legislature to approve a monument honoring victims of mass shootings (ketr.org)

I fear the bill won’t go anywhere in a Legislature dominated by Republicans, who themselves are dominated by those who are reluctant to enact any meaningful anti-gun violence legislation. Yes, I refer to the gun lobby.

If only we could remove the stubborn resistance to significant gun reforms from the minds of our state legislators.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Biden set to go again?

Joe Biden doesn’t need any advice from little ol’ me out here in Flyover Country … but he’s going to get some anyway.

Mr. President, let me be among the millions of Americans who voted for you in 2020 to wish you well as you launch your re-election effort. We hear it’s this week and that you’ll do it via an online platform of some sort.

Go for it!

The president has plenty to sell a public that seems embittered by the politics of the past half-dozen years. It appears that Joe Biden cannot do anything totally right in the eyes of a public that seems unwilling or unable to recognize success when it slaps ’em in the puss.

President Biden has gotten damn little help from his Republican “friends” in Congress. Democrats have held together on Capitol Hill to approve a number of key laws: gun safety rules, the Inflation Reduction Act, infrastructure repair and rebuilding.

Biden has spoken glowingly of his history of working well with Republicans. I guess it goes only so far as his record in the Senate and his eight-year stint at vice president. As POTUS? The GOP has dug in, many of ’em still angry that he defeated their hero in the 2020 presidential election.

I don’t want the president to re-litigate the previous election, which is what his defeated foe in 2020 keeps doing. Joe Biden should look to the future and tell us what he intends to do in a second term.

President Biden might need some help in ensuring he carries through on his agenda. Voters appear to be getting lathered up over the GOP’s insistence on banning abortion nationally, its resistance to gun safety measures and its haggling over the debt limit increase … and the failure to pay our debts sending the world’s economy into the crapper.

I said prior to the 2020 primary campaign that Joe Biden wasn’t my first pick. He ended up winning the Democratic nomination and, therefore, became my guy along with 81 million other Americans.

He’s my guy going into the 2024 election.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Horrifying sign of the times

There can be no mistaking what is happening in school districts across Texas.

The Texas Senate has approved a bill that requires school districts to implement “active shooter” policies, or else face being taken over by the state education agency.

The legislation is in response to the Uvalde school massacre a year ago in which students and educators were gunned down by a madman.

This is a shocking and horrifying sign of the times in Texas … and everywhere else that has become victimized by the spasm of gun violence.

The Texas Tribune reports: Senate Bill 11, filed by Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville, would create a safety and security department within the Texas Education Agency and give it the authority to compel school districts to establish active-shooter protocols. Those that fail to meet the agency’s standards could be put under the state’s supervision.

Texas Senate passes bill to strengthen school active-shooter plans | The Texas Tribune

I happen to believe this is a reasonable approach to helping reduce the casualties inflicted by shooters. I didn’t think it would be possible to support such a move, but given the alternatives, it makes sense.

One of the alternatives is to arm teachers, give them the authority and ability to open fire on shooters. Bad idea! I continue to oppose the notion of asking teachers — individuals whose calling is to “educate” children — to take up arms and start firing weapons at individuals … hoping they don’t hit innocent victims in the melee.

With so many incidents erupting around the country, I welcome the Texas effort to force public school systems to enact policies aimed at dealing with this existential threat to the safety of our children and educators.

I suppose you can call this the 21st-century version of the “duck and cover” drills many of us once did while the nation was frightened about a possible nuclear attack.

This threat, though, is frighteningly real.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

More guns = more violence

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is quoted asserting that given the vast number of guns in American society, we should be “the safest country on Earth.”

Well, we aren’t. Not by a long shot.

Yet the National Rifle Association, at its annual meeting this weekend, is singing the same, tired mantra that the explosion of gun violence isn’t a “gun problem.” It is a “mental health problem.” It’s a “societal problem.” Donald Trump, the indicted ex-POTUS, told the NRA it’s a “spiritual problem.”

I will agree that all those factors have contributed to the violence. Yet the common denominator in all the massacres that have occurred in this country continues to be guns and the ease with which nut cases are able to acquire them.

The NRA and their Republican toadies in Congress are on the wrong side of history and of public opinion with their continual resistance to any reasonable legislation that could deter loons from obtaining guns and killing people.

Universal background checks are popular among most Americans, even most Republicans. That hold no water with the GOP and the NRA. They lean on the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which references a “well-regulated militia” as “being necessary to the security of a free State.” Can someone justify that the founders’ assertion that a well-regulated militia means any knuckle-dragger who’s able to purchase a firearm?

I continue to believe that there are legislative solutions that can be implemented that do nothing to infringe on law-abiding citizens from owing firearms.

Except that the NRA adheres to the all-or-nothing approach to interpreting the Constitution. The gun lobby’s stubborn resistance is going to get more Americans killed.

More guns mean more death and mayhem.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Now it’s Nashville …

Nashville, Tenn., has joined the lengthy and growing list of communities scarred by random gun violence … but this tragedy has a twist, of sorts.

The shooter was a woman, a transgender individual whom police shot to death shortly after she took six lives.

Yes, I fear we are getting numb to the violence that keeps erupting. That the shooter was a woman is in itself a remarkable change from the lengthy history of these shootings in the United States. They all had been men prior to today’s tragedy.

This case is going to cause a lot of head-scratching, let alone mourning for those who perished.

But here again, we are facing the prospect of more resistance among federal and state lawmakers to enact legislation that makes it difficult for troubled individuals to put their hands on weaponry.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Texas GOP: rigidity matters

Yep, by all means it is true that the Texas Republican Party has gone bonkers over its fealty to the gun lobby.

The State Republican Executive Committee voted 57-5 to censure state Rep. Tony Gonzales of San Antonio over his vote for gun-control legislation. No can do, said the GOP, which now has opened the door for the party to oppose Gonzales in the next Republican Party primary race in that district set for the spring of 2024.

What a sham! And a joke! Not to mention a disgrace!

Texas GOP censures U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales | The Texas Tribune

“The reality is I’ve taken almost 1,400 votes, and the bulk of those have been with the Republican Party,” Gonzales said, according to the Texas Tribune. Ahh, but this vote was the deal-breaker.

The Tribune reported: Gonzales did not appear at the SREC meeting but addressed the issue after an unrelated news conference Thursday in San Antonio. He specifically defended his vote for the bipartisan gun law that passed last year after the Uvalde school shooting in his district. He said that if the vote were held again today, “I would vote twice on it if I could.”

Good for you, Rep. Gonzales.

His campaign issued a statement: “Today, like every day, Congressman Tony Gonzales went to work on behalf of the people of TX-23. He talked to veterans, visited with Border Patrol agents, and met constituents in a county he flipped from blue to red. The Republican Party of Texas would be wise to follow his lead and do some actual work,” campaign spokesperson Evan Albertson said.

Unbelievable, yes? Not really.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Will this tragedy move Congress?

The question is being asked all across the country: Will the Michigan State University slaughter of three students and the wounding of five others produce meaningful legislation that will curb gun violence?

I believe I have the answer.

It is no. It won’t. Too many members of Congress are too beholden to the gun lobby to enact any sort of semi-aggressive legislation that would stem the epidemic of gun violence.

The latest shooting in East Lansing, Mich., is the 67th such “mass shooting” in 2023. Yes. That is correct. The number of shootings so far have outstripped the number of days in the year.

This latest goon was a 43-year-old moron with no apparent ties to the school. All of the victims were — and are — students. One individual, a young female, happened to live through her second mass shooting in a decade. She was one of the children who survived the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Conn. Think about that for a moment, about any individual who can live to talk about two such national tragedies, having seen them both up close.

Congress is too full of political cowards for the body to enact legislation that could keep guns out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have any access to such weaponry.

Shameful … simply shameful.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com