Suffer, cry, repeat
New shooter always comes along
This time, a month from when a man shot up a prayer meeting at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., it was a summer morning in Chattanooga. A man identified as Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez shoots through glass doors at the Armed Forces Career Center on Lee Highway in that Tennessee city. Abdulazeez is just getting started, behind the wheel of his sporty silver Mustang and about to make this America’s mass killing for July.
The guy heads over to the Navy Network Operations Support Center, over on Amicola Highway. And when the shooting and the killing there are over, there are four dead Marines and three others, including a cop, wounded.
We are the capital of shootings like this now, certainly among what the President calls “advanced” nations. It really doesn’t matter in the end whether they’re officially classified as acts of domestic terrorism or not. In a country where no one feels safe or can be protected from the latest madman with a gun, terror has become predictable and routine. We just don’t know the next stop on the tour.
Shooter acted alone. Multiple weapons. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
“This is yet another terrible, terrible act of violence that should be a call to action for Washington,” Gov. Cuomo, someone who has acted on guns, said late Thursday afternoon. “As we’ve seen time and time again, the human cost of inaction is just too high.”
Elementary school children aren’t safe in Newtown. College kids aren’t safe at Virginia Tech, nor are people engaged in a Wednesday night prayer meeting at a historic church of the South. Now a recruiting center isn’t safe in Chattanooga because Abdulazeez didn’t stop blasting away with an insane amount of bullets until four Marines were dead.
On the same day that this happens, we get word of one guilty verdict after another in the trial of James Holmes, who shot 12 people to death in an Aurora, Colo., theater in July 2012. This shooting on Thursday was like the third-anniversary celebration of that shooting.
Holmes had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. He is 27. Abdulazeez was 24. Dylann Storm Roof, who murdered those people in Charleston, is 21. Adam Lanza, the shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary, was 20 the day he walked into that school and used a fast-killing, fast-shooting automatic weapon on 20 children and six adults. They all sure had all the guns and ammo they needed.
So four dead Marines will join the names of the dead in Charleston. We always remember the shooters and so quickly forget the names of the dead. So one last time, then here are the ones we lost just one month ago in Charleston: Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, a manager for the Charleston County Public Library system; Susie Jackson, 87, a church choir member; Ethel Lee Lance, the church’s sexton; Depayne Middleton-Doctor and Tywanza Sanders and the Rev. Daniel Simmons and Myra Thompson.
Sharonda Coleman-Singleton was another who died that night as well. She was a track coach at Goose Creek High School. And the pastor of the church, and a South Carolina state senator, Clementa Pinckney, died as well. It really does seem like just a few days ago that President Obama eulogized Pinckney before leading the church and the whole country into the singing of “Amazing Grace.”
Now it happens again. We have barely stopped mourning the dead of Charleston when we are asked to do the same for four Marines in Tennessee, because we have gotten our monthly reminder in America that no one is safe from hate and madness. And guns. Now we hear that we need more security at military centers across the country. How much do the people calling for more security think would be enough against an armed country like ours?
This is America in the violent summer of 2015. A month after death by gun for nine at the Emanuel AME Church, on the same day James Holmes hears a verdict because of the 12 he gunned down at a midnight showing of the movie “The Dark Knight Rises” on July 20, 2012, Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez starts shooting from his car and then drives away and keeps shooting until four Marines who never had a chance against his guns are as dead as if they’d been on the front lines in a war across the world.
“I ask the American people to pray for the victims,” Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, out of the 3rd District of Tennessee, told CNN. The President said the same thing in the Oval Office.
The praying never really stops because the shooting never really stops, because this is a country where you can shoot anybody, anywhere. We tour mass shooting like this now in America like we do the circus. Coming soon to a city, or movie theater, near you.