May 25

 Well, here we are ten days from the massacre in Buffalo  during which ten mostly elderly black shoppers at a supermarket (the only supermarket in an area which was otherwise a food desert). They haven't even had all of the funerals there and now we have the Uvalde, Texas shooting which (so far) has cost that community 19 children and 2 teachers. The Republicans are either silent or mouthing the usual pap of "thoughts and prayers." I wish one of the survivors would confront Ted Cruz and the others who won't do anything about the epidemic of violence in this country and tell him "take your thoughts and prayers and shove them so far up your backside that they choke you." I noticed that the events both in Buffalo and Uvalde show up the mantra "all that stops a bad guy with a gun is good guy with a gun." Both the shooters were confronted by "good guys with a gun" and one of the died; several others among the Texas officers were hurt. So much for that bit of NRA crap. By the way, I was once a member of the NRA and engaged in target shooting which I enjoyed a lot. I thoroughly enjoyed mastering, at least to an extent, a skill.

I had another thought listening to the coverage: we should reconnect the parts of the 2nd Amendment that the Supreme Court separated some time ago. As originally written it reads 

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

I suggest that all Americans, when they turn 17, are enrolled in the National Guard and they stay in the guard for ten years while they get training, learn discipline, and are available, as the militias of the early Republic were if they are needed. But nowadays few serve in either the Guard or the military. From what I have seen in the news many of the shooters had minimal familiarity with their weapons beyond how to load, point, and pull the trigger.

I just had another thought: perhaps, somehow, we should follow the policy the American occupation officials in Germany after WWII, after the concentration camps had been liberated, of forcing local German officials and local residents to tour the camps and see the worst of what their government did. Make Ted Cruze and others to tour the school and to view the bodies of children whose parents had to provide DNA samples in order to get a positive identification. I would (almost) pay to watch some of our politicians barf up what ever they recently ate.