Politicians’ phoney well-wishing can’t protect school kids
Americans were left captivated by the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Some 29 million defied the urge to have a weekend lie-in and tuned in to see one of their own officially enter The Firm.
The ceremony made clear no other country in the world does weddings quite like Britain.
It left me wondering what America does better than anyone.
It didn’t take long for me to find the answer – funerals for children.
The illness that has become the scourge of the States returned with a vengeance – another school shooting. This time eight students and two teachers failed to return home from their Texas school after a 17-year-old armed with a shotgun and a .38 handgun shot them dead.
It took the number of school shootings to 288 in the States since January 1, 2009. This is 57 times as many as the other six G7 countries combined.
The massacre followed the recent pattern of killings carried out by the odd, the alienated and the spurned, as a way to find a voice through violence.
It wasn’t long before it elicited the usual phoney thoughts and prayers from pro-gun politicians.
All the National Rifle Association-loving elected officials may not have pulled the trigger personally, but they certainly helped to put the gun into the hands of the killer.
Yet they send thoughts and prayers to those in mourning despite their continued lack of action.
It left me wondering what exactly are they praying for? After all, they vote against gun control.
Surely it would be better to send strict gun control legislation to the house to be voted on?
But worse still is the gutless megalomaniac in the White House who said they have been going on for too long as though it’s only the fault of other administrations. He had a chance in February to bring about real meaningful change following the horrific Parkland shooting in Florida but Trump was simply too scared to upset the gun lobby.
He had promised action “very soon”, but like so many of his pledges, it was nothing more than a false promise.
The measures had included raising the minimum age to buy a long gun from 18 to 21 but he reneged on his pledge, complaining “there’s not much political support”.
Politicians in Washington have no desire to address this issue, no desire to stand up to the NRA and certainly no desire to stop treating such deaths simply as collateral damage.
At the moment, every pupil under his America can assume that one day a fellow student could well show up with a gun and an appetite for death and that there is nothing Washington will do to prevent it.
The day the States realises the problem is not with the gun, but with the gun’s user, then there might be some progress in mitigating further attacks such as this one.
But as long as people persist in thinking that the weapon is the problem, they will go on.
It left me wondering what exactly are they praying for?