Second verse, same as the... Nevermind.

Sometimes I am overwhelmingly glad that hubs and I did not have human children.

Students leave the building, Parkland High School.
Image courtesy of USA Today

Yesterday was one of those days. I cannot even imagine what the parents of the surviving students had to talk about last night when they got home - or the silence in the homes of the victims. My thoughts and prayers go out to the idiots who think that it is all right for a country with so many problems - often touted as the true causes of this kind of mass violence - to give access to weapons that can fire that many rounds that fast to anyone that passes a background check. I passed my astronomy tests in college but I am no astronomer nor do I have even a rudimentary understanding of physics. Keep your handguns if you must, this is the Wild Wild West after all. Keep your hunting rifles if you have to and you don't have the skill to hunt with a bow. But for the LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY can we NOT just say, finally, that having a weapon capable of this kind of carnage is NOT OKAY?

Or, is it okay with you that these sorts of things occur? Don't get me wrong, it is not an either or by any stretch, but I have to wonder. Dunblane happened in 1996. Firearm restriction legislation happened. Go and google how many mass shootings have happened in the UK since. I will wait.

And you, over there, waving your hand madly to add that once they took away the guns there were deaths by stabbing and that people are being run over by cars...of course, these things are happening. Our world is populated with horrible people and with very sick people who do horrendous things. That falls under that other category of issues that need fixing. Those types of events can be tied, I think, to violence being so prevalent in our culture. Those types of people are the ones being failed by mental health care in this country. But the numbers don't prove that a knife or a car can take out as many people as quickly as an AR-15 - believed to be the type of firearm used in Florida yesterday. 

Y'all, I'm so left leaning that I've almost fallen over. I'm basically a socialist. This is not news to anyone that knows me well. I spend as much time being sad for the state of our world (yep, the whole world and not just the United States) as I do being afraid for the world. What happened yesterday is not okay, and there is international evidence to support the idea that if we could just stand up to the NRA and the other lobbies and restrict the KINDS of weapons available, we would be safer. Why is that such a hard thing to do?

30 mass shootings this year - 18 of those at schools - and we aren't even two months in yet. How much is too much?