FOR LOVE OF OUR ANGELS
LUPICA: KEEP FOCUS ON GUN REFORM
PARKLAND, Fla. — The young woman’s name is Kelly Baird and she is a teacher from the St. Jude school over in Boca Raton. Now in the early morning she is outside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, a school that has become everybody’s , standing in front of a memorial honoring the dead that stretches all along Pine Island Road and around the corner to Holmberg Road and, God willing, all the way to Washington, D.C., eventually.
“I’m looking for ours,” Kelly Baird says in a quiet church voice.
She means the sign that the 3-year olds she teaches had made as their way of honoring those shot and killed here, a sign that she says was long and a pretty blue and whose message was about light and love triumphing over darkness.
“Did they put some of the signs inside the school?” she says. “Maybe ours is inside.”
Out here on Pine Island Road, candles are somehow still lit. There are other signs honoring the dead of Parkland, and crosses with the names of 17 more gun victims in America written across them, and more than a 100 yards of fresh flowers and withered flowers and stuffed animals. Passersby stop, take pictures, stand reverently at the latest Ground Zero for guns, move on, less than a month after a sick 19-year-old with a semiautomatic weapon was on the other side of these fences firing away in a country sick with guns.
“This is my first time here,” Kelly Baird says, still looking to see if she can find the sign she helped preschool kids — kids not so terribly much younger than the shooting victims of Sandy Hook Elementary once were — make for the victims of Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
Finally she makes her way up toward Holmberg, past a red sign that reads this way: “If you own a gun and have children which would you prefer to lose?” She does this, speaking of heartbreak, even as so much of the country has moved on to other subjects, porn stars and a nuclear summit with North Korea that helps this President change the subject from porn stars, something he seems desperate to do.
The subject of guns, though, does not change at the intersection of Pine Island and Holmberg, in Parkland, where more Americans were slaughtered. The voices of the students who have spoken up since Valentine’s Day have been heard around the country and around the world, voices so powerful and eloquent they shame members of Congress who still do nothing to change anything with guns in this country. It is more than somewhat amazing, if you think about it. Schoolchildren and their parents live in constant fear of guns. And our elected officials, so many Republican, including the one in the White House, live in fear of the gun merchants of the National Rifle Association.
But Florida, a big red state and big gun state, has done something now. Gov. Rick Scott, Republican, on Friday signed a bill into Florida law that raises the legal age to buy firearms to 21, mandates a three-day waiting period for just about all gun purchases in the state, restricts access to guns for people who have shown signs of violence or mental illness, the way the 19-year old Parkland shooter, Nikolas Cruz, so clearly did.
Senate Bill 7026 also opens the door to arming teachers, as reluctant as Scott clearly was to make this part of the deal. Scott still does something, even if what Florida does is not nearly enough; even as this President acts as if he should be carried around the room because he talks about banning bump stocks, the device that turns semiautomatic weapons into the equivalent of machine guns.
Of course the leadership of the NRA, people who pimp themselves out to gun manufacturers the way they continue to do the same with the Second Amendment, immediately sue over Senate Bill 7026, suggesting that it not only violates the Second Amendment rights of teenagers, but their Fourteenth Amendment rights as well. This they do in an America where the legal drinking age is 21. The NRA just doesn’t want that to be the legal gun age. These people actually believe they are patriots. They’re not. They’re punks.
Here is what Fred Guttenberg, who lost his daughter Jaime on
Feb. 14 in Parkland, said the other day about an awful NRA video from the awful Dana Loesch (below left), one that carries the message “Your time is up”:
“If this was put out by a terrorist organization, we would be raising the terror threat level in this country.”
Somehow, though, we spend as much time as we currently do, after so little time has passed after Parkland, talking about some porn star. As always, this is the one about the dogs barking and the caravan moving on. Just not at the intersection of Pine Island and Holmberg. No one spoke of Stormy Daniels (photo right) here on Saturday morning. The only names that mattered were Alyssa Alhadeff and Martin Anguiano, and Nicholas Dworet and Luke Hoyer, and Fred Guttenberg's daughter Jaime, and the other 12 who died at Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
You know who the real porn stars are in this country? The ones from the NRA. The ones who want the dead of Parkland to have died in vain.