No place is safe

If you really want to read the details (and I understand if you don’t), Joan McCarter of Daily Kos wrote about the inaction of the Uvalde police while the shooter was amongst children. I also understand if you want to skip the stories of what some children did to survive. Kerry Eleveld of Kos wrote that it’s time to retire that myth that the way to stop bad guys with guns is good guys with guns. Wrote Eleveld:

That did not work in Uvalde, nor did it work weeks ago in Buffalo, where an armed, off-duty security guard and former police officer was unable to stop the racist slaughter of nine Black grocery store shoppers. The guard was also killed. Yet, so far, we have yet to hear even one Republican lawmaker admit that it's time to put to rest the failed “good guys with guns” myth that has been perpetrated on the American people.

After listing some of the variations of this lie Republicans are still spouting Eleveld wrote:

The truth is, law enforcement seems very very afraid of the firepower now pulsing through America—turns out AR-15s are uniquely scary killing machines. It's not just the resource officers. DPS [Texas Department of Public Safety] Lt. Chris Olivarez explained to CNN Wednesday that local officers hesitated to do their jobs because they were being shot at. “Don’t current best practices, don’t they call for officers to disable a shooter as quickly as possible, regardless of how many officers are actually on-site?” Wolf Blitzer asked Olivarez. "The active shooter situation, you want to stop the killing, you want to preserve life, but also one thing that—of course, the American people need to understand—that officers are making entry into this building. They do not know where the gunman is," Olivarez responded. "They are receiving gunshots. At that point, if they proceeded any further not knowing where the suspect was at, they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed, and that gunman would have had an opportunity to kill other people inside that school. They could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed.

Walter Einenkel of Kos wrote about Sen. Ron Johnson fleeing from reporters. The reporters wanted to ask, “Why not expand background checks?” As part of his post Einenkel wrote:

The “solutions” being offered up by those on the right are a mixture of suggestions to turn our schools into prisons and to enact various degrees of authoritarian measures. About 99% of the proposed “solutions” have already been tried, and because they do not fix the problem of everybody having guns, they have also been proven not to work.

Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Amanda Taub of the New York Times:

Desegregation sparked a reactionary backlash among white voters, particularly in the south, who saw it as overreach by the Supreme Court and federal government. That backlash, with the help of conservative political strategists, coalesced into a multi-issue political movement. Promises to protect the traditional family from the perceived threat of feminism drew in white women. And influential conservative lawyers framed the Second Amendment as a source of individual “counterrights” that conservatives could seek protection for in the courts — a counterbalance to progressive groups’ litigation on segregation and other issues.

Dworkin also quoted NBC News who had stories from people who survived the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. They feel grief as the trauma is revived and anger because their school shooting ten years ago was supposed to be the one that prompted politicians to act. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary:

Congress could pass HR-8, a bill that was passed by the House over a year ago which would close loopholes in the background checks law. It's being held up by Senate Republicans, possibly because background checks are only supported by 90 percent of voters. Ninety percent! The only thing more popular than background checks is Dolly Parton riding a giant corgi bringing you ice cream. —Stephen Colbert Maddeningly, there are those who say they support gun-control measures, but aren’t willing to use their power to get those measures passed. Like West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who said he would do “anything I can” to move common-sense gun legislation forward, but still refused to eliminate the filibuster. Then you're not willing to do anything you can! It's like if you told your spouse you're willing to do anything to clean the dishes except get up from the couch. —Seth Meyers

Scott Simon, in his opinion moment on NPR on this morning, listed the various locations of mass shootings since 2000: elementary, middle, and high schools; community colleges and universities; churches, synagogues, and a Sikh temple; on streets, in parking lots, in factories and post offices, airports, movie theaters, nightclubs, shopping malls and diners; military bases, in municipal buildings, at festivals, in bowling alleys and spas; supermarkets, health care clinics and apartment complexes, nursing homes, trailer parks, and subways. Simon called it a grim routine. It keeps happening and nothing changes. I’ll describe the list another way that I heard expressed in the last few days – the supremacists are telling us: No place is safe. Daily Kos and NPR are my primary sources of news. That’s because I distrust much corporate news. A couple days ago Kos reached 20 years since its founding. Kos posted about what prompted him to start the site – conservative voices dominated mass media and “liberal” voices weren’t all that liberal (remember political triangulation?). He also discussed how it has grown into a community. True Blue Majority reported on the results of the Koscars for best posts by the community in the categories of Snark/Satire, Call to Activism, Downballot Candidate Story, Community Group, Series, Community Writer, Personal Essay, Rant, and Congeniality. I had written about the Snark/Satire category when there was a request for nominees. I looked at that list when voting began (I didn’t vote because I had read so few of the nominees). Here are a couple posts that were nominated for Snark/Satire that I read and appreciated, but didn’t win. Hunter explained the dark meaning of the Itsy-Bitsy Spider poem that children are taught. An excerpt:

The last two lines of the song may, however, be the saddest of all. Only when the spider has lost all progress does the rain stop, and not a moment before; only when the spider has been returned to his original, lowest position does the sun deign remove the impediments that have so cruelly blocked and brutalized it. Only then is the sociopolitical state returned to an equilibrium, encouraging the spider, which always remains at least alive after the deluge, to begin its long, futile journey once again. The top, however, will never be reached. The climb is eternal, as is the failure. The spider will never reach the bright light at the end of its lifelong tunnel; never will it taste the free, warm air, except as filtered through the long, dark pipe that defines its struggle. Whether it be economic conditions and the abuses of the upper classes, as is represented by the rain, or the fleeting and inconsistent governmental protections against those abuses, represented by the ever-too-late sun, the spider will never improve its lot even an inch, save as temporary perch.

A lot of progressives are annoyed that Democrats don’t fire back at the vile things Republicans do. There is a joke that Democrats are keeping their powder dry. That is usually followed by a complaint that if there is ever a time to use that powder it is now! as democracy is threatened. In 2007 blueness visited the hidden vaults where all that dry powder is stored. An excerpt:

"This vault we have the most trouble with," he said, swinging wide the doors to an enormous room filled with blood-red powder molded into a ninety-foot-high statue of Saddam Hussein. "The dry powder for Iraq. "In the early days," he explained, "Dean was the worst--he was in here scooping it up as fast as we could dry it. Nowadays it's Kerry and Feingold--that lot--who we can't keep out of here. Worse than mice in a granary, those two! Couple of damn powder-pilferers! We've even chained-out pit bulls here: doesn't matter. They keep coming back." He shook his head sorrowfully. "Kerry, of all people, should know better. It was the Democratic Congress refusing to fund the Vietnam War that lost the war, you know. That and the media, of course. Still, it's we Democrats who get the blame. Just listen to any Fox anchor--they'll tell you." "Are you out of your mind?" I snapped. "The Vietnam War was lost because in a post-colonial world no nation of any decent size or population is going to be successfully occupied by anybody. The Russians learned that in Afghanistan, and so will we. We're learning it every day in Iraq." "You sound like Kerry," he sneered, "and look what happened to him.