January 23

Well--another Monday and another news cycle concerns another mass murder by someone with a gun. The tally is another ten dead and ten wounded in one shooting spree. That makes 33 THIS year which is only 23 days old. I have never favored eliminating guns. I have known too many people who depended up hunting seasons to fill their freezers with affordable meat. I knew a lot of people who took out their guns only to shoot targets (inanimate targets) and clean them. My ex-husband (now two decades dead) was one of the latter group. I enjoyed target shooting for a time and earned a couple of minor trophies for my efforts. GUNS ARE TOOLS. Inanimate tools. Relabeling gun control measures as gun safety measures erases the real problem: we have a people problem. Too many people who take out their anger, frustrations, and general pissed-off-ness by physically attacking other people with what ever weapons they can get. We had (and probably still have) "road rage" incidents but they aren't as dramatic as the shootings unless they result in a massive traffic accident. We had a number of Asian Americans, homeless Americans, LGBTQ+ Americans, and other Americans brutally beaten but again those are viewed isolated incidents and not dramatic enough to command the news cycle. As I said; WE HAVE A PEOPLE PROBLEM but our political discourse is focused on a weapon problem people are using.

One of the news accounts of the "March For Life" featured a protestor promising that the movement's aim is to restore a "life affirming America." I don't know when in our national life this country was "life affirming." Evidently she has never read any accounts of the treatment of indentured servants in the colonial period, or the accounts of treatment of African slaves which was only marginally better than on the Caribbean sugar plantations where the populations of slaves was kept up only by importation, or the Trail of Tears, or of the "orphan trains." If the measure for being "life affirming" is being anti-abortion they are setting a ridiculously low bar. If we had universal maternity/paternity/elder care support, universal health care with complete maternity/newborn care, real support for public public education and kept politics out of education I would think we might be "life affirming."