I join with everyone’s justifiable anger following multiple mass murders in just the last six months in our United States of America. I have had it with excuses from elected officials and their enablers.
Where have honest, brave, manly American men gone? When the going gets tough the tough get going sounds hollow as far too many office-holders retreat to National Rifle Association talking points.
John Wayne is long dead, and with him went the U S. Army’s World War II spirit: “The difficult we do at once, the impossible takes a little longer.” Instead our national leaders epitomize the GIs’ old reply: Situation normal, all fouled up!
Excuse for inaction on guns is like complaining about the weather —everyone talks about it but no one does anything. Take the odd example of Congressman Steve Scalise. A nut with an assault rifle shot him while he was practicing baseball last year. He barely survived, but still votes with the NRA.
We need stand-up men and women to make our world safer from madmen deploying military weaponry. The Parkland, Florida, students have it right — vote all such people out of office. They won’t be missed.
When three staff members and 14 students are murdered in a Florida high school, no one seemed all that surprised. “I never thought it could happen here” is said after every mass shooting, and the beat goes on.
Following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shootings I watched “Fox News Sunday.” Chris Wallace interviewed Florida Gov. Rick Scott who expressed his sorrow as he came up with a list of changes to make guns in Florida harder to get for those under 21, people with mental issues and to ban bump stocks. Under relentless student survivor pressure, Scott signed his bill into law but bypassed assault rifles.
The NRA has long had a death grip on the Florida Legislature and is responsible for watering down every gun bill. Scott told Wallace that he would not propose banning assault rifles like the AR-15 used in this and other mass shootings.
Nevertheless, the NRA filed suit against Florida the next day.
Scott then told a strange truth by saying that after the Parkland horror he immediately called his married daughter. He told her the bad news that, as a parent, she will have to train her school-age children how to react to an active shooter. Thanks, Gramps!
In my mind’s eye I see a Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School English teacher’s Shakespeare class on Valentine’s Day. She is working hard to instill a love for language as written by The Bard. A simple quote from Julius Caesar fits the day: “It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.”
Death arrived for 17 that school day. Parkland survivors decided that such gun-driven destiny has to stop. “Enough” is their watchword and action their response.
They are going after today’s Caesar in the form of elected state and federal representatives who take millions from the NRA but elect to do nothing about lethal AR-15s. Venal political stars are about to fall.
The AR-15 is the civilian version of the Army and Marines M16. It has one purpose, which is to kill humans. Kill them fast in great numbers, especially when you add an extra-large ammunition clip.
AR-15 ammo comes in hollow-point versions that make large holes when exiting a body. it is stopping power intended to do the job with one hit on a teacher, or a student, or a concertgoer, or in a Texas church.
On “Fox News Sunday,” Wallace also interviewed Andrew Pollack, the father of lovely Meadow Pollack, murdered in school on Valentine’s Day. You may recall him at President Donald Trump’s White House “listening session” after the Parkland murders. Pollack bitingly told Trump that the he was “pissed off” because his daughter was not only killed, but shot nine times. Nine times! Meadow and the other 16 were shot without using a bump stock that turns an AR-15 into a machine gun.
Trump promised Parkland survivors that he would “fight” to increase the legal age for buying an AR-15 from 18 to 21. Yet, following dinner with the NRA, he flip-flopped and removed it from his latest proposal.
A combat Marine, now college professor, wrote an opinion article in which he recalled his training before he was allowed to shoot an M16. He carried it, unloaded, wherever he went. He had to assemble and disassemble it while blindfolded. Only after much pain and heartache, including pushups if you were too slow assembling it, did he fire the weapon. He promised to quit his job if weapons were welcomed on his college campus.
A Marine knows how much hell you can create with an AR-15.
Police officers know what Marines know, and just hearing the sound of an AR-15 on a killing spree at Parkland chose to live rather than “run in.” Trump called one sheriff a “coward,” but that’s a hard sell for a college-age, Vietnam-era draft-dodger with five deferments.
The people who still think that it could never happen where they live are whistling in the dark. We need men and women in responsible jobs to step up and find ways to end America’s bloody love affair with AR-15s.
It’s time to make America safer for kids and everyone else.
Jim Cahillane, of Williamsburg, is a U.S. Air Force veteran, father, grandfather, author and poet. He writes a monthly column and can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.