Guns Don't Kill People. Too Many People With Too Many Guns Kill People
by John Lawrence
The tragedy in Buffalo represented less than 10% of the people shot by guns last weekend, but media wants to talk about everything else except gun control. Gun control is the only issue that should be talked about and done something about, but politicians and pundits have given up on the topic. The American ideal seems to be that every American should buy several guns and be fully armed to the teeth, but never harm another person. If they do, they will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Meanwhile, several families will be mourning the deaths of their loved ones. But don't be upset. The shooter will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. That's the American way. And please nobody say that we shouuld get rid of all the guns. That would be unAmerican. After all, the right to own, carry and shoot guns is guaranteed to us by the Second Amendment of the Constitution. Don't anybody go around demonizing the very ownership of guns.
The Guardian reported:
"In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot enacted a weekend curfew for unaccompanied minors at a city park after a 16-year-old boy was killed there. At least 33 people were shot, five fatally, in weekend violence across the city, police said.
The shootings, each horrific in their own way, punctuated the weekend’s main horror: an 18-year-old espousing white supremacist ideology who went to an African American neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, on Saturday and – in less than two minutes – gunned down 13 people at a grocery, killing 10.
That shooting – one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent memory – has renewed scrutiny on internet-promulgated hate speech, access to assault-style guns and body armor, and the inability of law enforcement authorities, elected politicians, religious leaders and the commercial sector to stop such violence from recurring.
A grocery store, a park, a church and a flea market were among the locations where gunfire erupted over the weekend in eight U.S. cities, leaving at least 65 people shot, 17 fatally.
The shootings came over a violent 72-hour stretch and included multiple victims in all of the episodes, prompting elected leaders in two of the cities to impose new curfews.
Gendron, the Buffalo police commissioner Gramaglia said, planned to continue his assault in the surrounding neighborhood. But he was apprehended outside the grocery after removing his body armor and setting down his Bushmaster rifle with an extended 70-round magazine.
“This individual came here with the express purpose of taking as many Black lives as he possibly could,” the Buffalo mayor, Byron Brown, said on Sunday.
It also emerged on Monday that Gendron wrote as far back as November about staging a live-streamed attack on African Americans, practiced shooting from his car and traveled hours from his home in March to scout out the store, according to detailed diary entries he appears to have posted online.
The diary entries, taken from the chat platform Discord and reviewed by several media outlets including the Associated Press and Bloomberg, included hand-drawn maps of the grocery store along with tallies of the number of Black people he counted there, and recounted how a Black security guard at the supermarket confronted him that day to ask what he was up to. A Black security guard was among those killed in Saturday’s rampage."
The planning that went into the Buffalo attack was impressive. The research, the reconnoitering, the acquisition of data and equipment - more time and energy went into this than go into most college dissertations. Nevertheless, the results, though impressive, were not up to he level that the shooter had hoped for. It's only a matter of time until the next shooter comes along who does even more thorough research and planning. He will analyze where this shooter went wrong in carrying out an even more impressive attack. He will be determined to not make the same errors. The aftermath will be the same - a lot of grieving mourners talking about everything except getting guns off the streets and pretty much out of the hands of everyone. That's the only way the US will solve its gun violence problem, but don't hold your breath until this happens. The earth will probably burn up first. Well, that's a possibility too if nothing is done about global warming.
In the Buffalo shooting at Tops Friendly grocery, white suspect Payton Gendron is accused of specifically targeting a Black neighborhood and taking aim at Black victims – shoppers, grocery workers and a security guard.
