Have you been paying attention this week?
People are getting shot all over the country, for no
reason. To recap, an African American teenager in Kansas City went to the wrong
house to collect his younger brothers, rang the bell and the elderly resident
of the home shot through the door and wounded him. The 16-year-old survived the
gunshots to his head and arm, but has residual traumatic brain damage. The
homeowner was an elderly man who was described as paranoid and an avid Fox TV
viewer who believed that Black people were roaming the streets to kill whites.
Some cheerleaders in Elgin, Texas, walked to a car that
looked like theirs in a grocery store parking lot and opened the door. An
occupant of the car shot two of them; it was the wrong car. One girl has only
one lung and is still suffering from surgery to repair multiple internal organ
damage, while the other was not seriously injured.
A group of young people were looking for a friend’s home in
a remote area of upstate New York to go to a party. They pulled into a driveway
and realized this was the wrong house. As the driver turned around to leave,
the resident of the home came outside and fired at the car. He shot and killed one
woman in the car. She was twenty years old.
In Gaston County, North Carolina, a six-year-old girl and
her father were playing with a ball in their yard, when it rolled into a
neighbor’s yard. An argument followed between the homeowner and the child's parents
and he shot them. Some wounds, including that of the child and mother, were
minor, but the father remains hospitalized with major injuries. Authorities
later found the suspect in Florida.
Gunmen shot eight people, including a twelve-year-old girl,
in drive-by shootings Saturday evening in Washington, DC.
Outsiders attacked a sweet sixteen party in Dadeville,
Alabama, and left four dead and thirty-two injured. One of the dead was the
brother of the birthday girl. Six people, including four teenagers, have been . To date, there has been no obvious connection to the partygoers released.
Nine teenagers were wounded, none seriously, in a shooting
at a post-prom party in Jasper County, Texas. Authorities have not yet arrested
any suspects.
I noted above just a few instances in recent days where
young people and others were shot while living their ordinary lives and doing ordinary
things. If these events do not disturb you, you must be living in an
alternative reality. Fear mongers, who also tout this alternative reality where
"others" are the enemy, spawned this gun shooter mentality. Those
politicians who follow the NRA mantra of 'a good guy with a gun will keep order'
have encouraged this gun violence. Politicians who have no conscience and push
for open-carry gun policies without registration or background checks promote
this violence.
Our children are getting killed. They are getting shot and killed
in their schools, on their playgrounds, in movie theaters, and in grocery stores.
They are getting killed for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But these places are usually the right place for them to be, at school, at
church, at home, or going to a shopping center. This is what ordinary Americans
do every day. They should be able to do these things without fear.
This gun violence must stop. Each of us must condemn the
lying by right-wing politicians and broadcasters yelling about crime and
frightening Americans into thinking that their lives are no longer safe. There
is seldom a reason for regular people to carry a gun to answer a doorbell or go
to the nearby store. Your home may be your castle, but it needs to not be a
fortress.
According to an article in the Washington
Post by Francis Wilkinson:
“The lesson that gun culture
warriors want American parents to learn is simple: If you want your kids to
grow to maturity, make sure they and their friends never make innocent
mistakes. It's a good rule to live by……
The village that raised these
shooters, and nurtured them to kill, is where we live. It's Fox News spreading
lies and fear day and night. It's the local television news station
broadcasting nothing but stories of violent crime and puppy adoptions, devoid
of context or complexity. It's the National Rifle Association telling
frightened White men that nothing can save them but a "tactical"
arsenal. It's the Republican Party passing laws to put more guns on the street,
in bars, in cars, in churches, in parks, in schools, in homes and in the hands
of the depraved and deranged, and then pretending that gun violence is a
product of a "woke" prosecutor in Philadelphia or San Francisco. It's
the conservative Supreme Court justices who have manufactured history and law
to match the dystopian fantasies of their political allies. It's a gun culture
that makes heroes of killers like Kyle Rittenhouse and George Zimmerman.
It takes a
village to do all this. And a morally shattered, nihilistic movement that feeds
off the fear that it generates. As long as we continue to empower that movement
in government and law, we will remain in thrall to its pathology. Ringing the
wrong doorbell, entering the wrong driveway, opening the wrong door will be
invitations to violence and death.”
The New
York Times noted in an article titled-In a nation armed to the teeth,
these tiny missteps led to tragedy:
“The maintenance man in North Carolina had just arrived to fix
damage from a leak. The teenager in Georgia was only looking for his girlfriend's
apartment. The cheerleader in Texas simply wanted to find her car in a dark
parking lot after practice.
Each of them accidentally went to the
wrong address or opened the wrong door — and each was shot. They had made
innocent mistakes that became examples of the kind of deadly errors that can
occur in a country bristling with guns, anger and paranoia, and where most
states have empowered gun owners with new self-defense laws.
Each one of these incidents resulted from unique events. But
activists and researchers say they stem from a convergence of bigger factors —
increased fear of crime and an attendant surge in gun ownership, increasingly
extreme political messaging on firearms, fear-mongering in the media, and
marketing campaigns by the gun industry that portray the suburban front door as
a fortified barrier against a violent world.
More than 30
states also have "stand your ground" laws. Some have recently
strengthened their "castle doctrine" laws, making it more difficult
to prosecute homeowners who claim self-defense in a shooting.
This article from a NY Times survey
demonstrates how this constant exposure to gun violence has changed us as a
nation:
"I check for escape routes everywhere I go”
I have two
small kids. One is in school. What worries me the most is gun violence
happening at her school. To cope with those thoughts and feelings, I talk with
my family, cry sometimes and just try to move on with my day.”
"I used
to pray that my sons — who are young Black men — are healthy and happy. I don't
do that anymore. Now I pray only for safety for my sons, my family, and myself.
I can only pray they come home at night and are not victims of a shooter at the
grocery store, in their school classroom, driving to the movies, sitting in the
car at the stoplight."
Is this truly the world that you want for your family, for
our nation? One where the ever-present display and use of guns are lessening our
safety?
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In other news this week, The Fox News Corporation and
Dominion Voting Systems settled their lawsuit for $787,500,000, avoiding an
impending brutal court battle. NPR
described the court case:
Even in settling and sidestepping
an adverse verdict, Fox's reputation among its peers has already been shattered.
What
Dominion uncovered in the investigative part of the suit — what's called
discovery — revealed a world grounded in cynicism and hostility. From the top
down, the Murdochs and Fox created a network defined by a relentless pursuit of
ratings that placed profit above politics and partisan advantage above any
sense of journalistic obligation. The public's right to know the truth rarely
earned a hearing.
Primetime stars
Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity privately trashed the people
who lied about Dominion on their network's airwaves and yet also trashed the reporters who sought to hold them
accountable for those lies.
Fox founder Rupert Murdoch — who,
under oath, called himself a newsman at heart — advocated going slow in
confronting Fox's pro-Trump viewers with unwelcome news in order to protect the
franchise. Hannity didn't believe "for one second" the lies being
peddled by Trump and on Fox itself, even though, as Murdoch put it, the star endorsed them "a
bit."
Host
Maria Bartiromo put on an attorney spinning pro-Trump conspiracy theories and
insinuating, without evidence, fraud by Dominion on the basis of a memo whose
author, a Minnesota artist, called her allegations "pretty wackadoodle."
So, in the end, Fox
admitted it made baseless statements about Dominion, but never actually said
that it lied. They did not admit they lied to keep their audience from
defecting to Newsmax when their analysts correctly called Arizona for Biden. They
did not apologize to their viewers for not calling out the lies about the
election from the former president. Emails, where various hosts stated their
disdain for DJT, have not even now, kept him off their air. The network viewers
were treated to a sanitized description of the lawsuit, the first of many in
this area. Have they learned their lesson? Probably not.
Despite this week of
accidental killings, have they decreased the fear-mongering mentioned above?
Not from what I can find-I refuse to watch this network. So, even after paying
out three-quarters of a billion dollars for this issue, expect little to change.
“Til next week-Peace!
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