Two more kids didn’t make it home from school in America because of guns. You know who got good and harassed today? Two dead students at Aztec High School in New Mexico.
There has never been an advanced country better at shooting schoolchildren than ours is, even though two dead high school students isn’t close to being the biggest news of the day in the country, not when we have this many horny fools running around.
American women now speak out bravely about sexual harassment in this country, from Hollywood to morning television to the Senate, where Al Franken was forced to resign on Thursday. It is a big and important issue and it has come into the light the past few months and will stay in the light for a long time.
So people speak up and speak out for the victims of harassment. So many Democratic Senators spoke out against one of their own when they spoke out against Franken, even though only the slowest thinkers in politics actually think you can draw a straight line from Franken to a creepy, predatory mall rat like Roy Moore.
But who will speak for two more dead students in this country today? Or will this just be another day when the sound of guns is lost under the loudest political debate of the moment, about harassment or Jerusalem, or the flop-sweat desperation we see from the bullhorn media in trying to demonize a great American like Robert Mueller?
Maybe this just wasn’t a big enough shooting to capture the attention of the country. Only two dead kids at Aztec High instead of the 58 people we lost at a music festival in Las Vegas. You know what the response in Washington was to bloodshed like that? There was no response, just a series of cynical lies about changing the law on bump stocks, a nasty little accessory that enabled the shooter in Las Vegas to kill better and faster; lies from the same people who will likely not even note or care that the latest school shooting in America comes nearly five years exactly from when Adam Lanza murdered 20 first- and second-graders at Sandy Hook Elementary less than two weeks before Christmas that year; when they were the ones who didn’t make it home from school.
Of course Congress did rouse itself finally on guns a few days ago, you bet. The action they took was covered this way in a fine and powerful editorial in this newspaper:
“Two months after the worst mass shooting in American history left 58 concertgoers dead, the U.S. House finally did something on guns: A committee approved a horrifying bill allowing concealed-carry permits minted anywhere in the country to work everywhere in the country.”
So it was Aztec High School this time, in San Juan County, about three hours from Albuquerque. Two students die at a time when the only legislation a Republican Congress cares about is expanding the opportunities on concealed-carry permits. Expanding background checks doesn’t ever interest the people with the votes, not in any meaningful way. They don’t want the access to guns to be harder. They want it to be easier.
This shooting happens five years after Newtown. This shooting happens one month after a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas got shot up and 26 people ended up dead there. And this shooting happens two months and one week after Stephen Paddock holed up in a room at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino and set the modern record for gun massacres in America.
And the Aztec High shooting wasn’t close to being the biggest news of the day in America, except to the families and friends of the dead students. We are used to these shootings by now. Sometimes they come once a month, sometimes faster. Now the shooting comes to a town of 6,500 in New Mexico less than three weeks before Christmas.
“Enough is enough,” Kirsten Gillibrand wrote on Facebook the other day when she led the charge to run Franken out of the Senate.
The New York Democrat was clearly outraged by Franken’s behavior. The whole country is properly outraged about this kind of behavior from powerful men, even as all of them sometimes seem to get the same flogging in the public square, as if they all just came from a frat party at Harvey Weinstein’s house. But where is the consistent outrage about guns in the Senate from someone other than Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut?
When Sayfullo Saipov killed eight people with a rented Home Depot truck in lower Manhattan at the end of October, here was the tweet from President Donald J. Trump:
“I have just ordered Homeland Security to step up our already Extreme Vetting Program. Being politically correct is fine, but not for this!”
Later Trump tweeted this about the same event:
“Not in the USA!”
You know what the presidential tweet should be for the latest school shooting in this country? Always in the USA.
Two more students dead from gun violence, this time in New Mexico. Two more kids who didn’t make it home from school, who became different kinds of silent victims in America once the shooting stopped.
