Congress Needs to Grow a Pair

In the wake of Atlanta and Boulder, empty platitudes about mass murder are not enough

A white supremacist killed eight people — seven of them women — in the Atlanta area last week. He bought the gun the day of the murders, with no background check or waiting period. And we learned Monday that close to a week later, a shooter was taken into custody after murdering another 10 people, including a police officer, at a Boulder, Colorado, grocery store.

Two troubling details from the Boulder shooting: The suspect wielded an AR-15 — that’s a semi-automatic assault rifle that’s been used in several other mass shootings in this country — after a Colorado judge blocked the City of Boulder from enforcing its two-year-old assault rifle ban a little more than a week before the shootings. And, of course, the NRA bragged about blocking the Boulder ban. Of course they did.

Three things stand out to me in the Atlanta shooting, including law enforcement’s initial bungled response to reporters.

“He [the shooter] was pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope,” Cherokee County, Georgia Sheriff’s Department spokesman Captain Jay Baker, “and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.”

First of all, Baker surely functions beyond the pale as a day-to-day misogynist. The shooter had a “really bad day”. Tell that to the Atlanta victims, who surely had a worse day last Tuesday. Seven women — six of them Asian or Asian American — and one man are dead. That strikes me as a hate crime. And if authorities are not ready to call it what it is, they have no business taking the shooter’s feelings into account — at all. Baker, understandably, no longer hands the press platitudes about the investigation in Cherokee County, where four of the murders took place.

Next, the vile, bilious dreck that TFG has spread since the Trump Virus washed ashore one year ago certainly has led to increased violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in our so-called United States of America. President Biden last week placed the blame squarely on the previous president and his cohorts, who repeatedly continue to associate the coronavirus with asinine, racist nicknames.

“We’re learning again what we’ve always known; words have consequences. It’s the coronavirus, full stop,” Biden said; not the China Virus or the Kung Flu.

Oh, and one more occurrence — or lack thereof — stands out to me in the wake of both of these monstrous crimes within the past week. No one “official” — and by that I mean am anti-gun control politician — has said anything about “thoughts and prayers” for the victims, at least in the Atlanta case, as far as I’ve been able to determine. This, for sure, is the hollow aphorism sprinkled on the public psyche in past four years in lieu of concrete action. The go-to, in my book, for the GOP — which stands, of course, for “Greed Over People”, among other noxious labels. Why aren’t they hollering their putrid mantra from the rooftops this time?

I’m pretty sure it’s because we’ve finally figured out their game. And now we have to work harder on the two most important ingredients to bring an end to this national crisis: by passing laws — local, state and on the federal level — to make it more difficult for scary people to acquire and carry guns and by taking a stand, once and for all, and calling this epidemic what it is. Nothing less than white domestic terrorism.

In the wake of 61 dead in 2017 on the last night of a Las Vegas music festival, that’s all we heard: “Thoughts and prayers” for the victims.

After 17 students and teachers were gunned down in 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, we heard it again, at the scene of the crime and in the Oval Office, twisted in a sweetly perverse manner: “Prayers and condolences”, this time, for the victims. Perhaps TFG was trying to be different while at the same time remaining the same, so that the NRA and their henchmen wouldn’t notice. Lord knows, he tried for a half-second or so to exhibit a particle of empathy, but the big bucks emanating from the Number One gun lobby in this country were just too much for him to turn down.

TFG even went to a meeting with gun violence victims after the Parkland shootings with a “cheat sheet” of sorts, reminding him of basic “empathetic” talking points, such as “I hear you”, scribbled by a staffer.

And when 32 lost their lives in consecutive shootings in Dayton and El Paso — in public executions that took place within 24 hours of one another? We heard more “thoughts and prayers”, and watched as the alleged leader of the free world gave his patented “thumbs up”, grinning like the lecherous old goat that he is for a photo-op — as his Eurotrash bride held the two-month-old orphan of two of the El Paso victims.

I didn’t document it, but I’m sure we heard “thoughts and prayers” — or some variation thereof — more often than not from the sphincter-shaped mouth of TFG after every mass shooting on his watch. The empty platitude even has its own Wikipedia page, for crying out loud.

I hate to say it, and it’s a whopper of a truism, but Americans have become desensitized to gun violence. According to the Violence Project, a non-profit that has been tracking mass shootings since 1966, 24 of these senseless acts occurred during the previous administration, including back-to-back mass shootings that happened within 24 hours of one another, in Dayton and El Paso. And more would have taken place, had the country not shut down in the face of a deadly pandemic.

There’s a caveat in the Associated Press story about the organization’s database.

“There have been far fewer opportunities for mass shootings to occur this year [between February 2020 and March 2021],” the AP reports, “with public spaces closed and people in lock down”. Perhaps because TFG was too busy killing more than half a million Americans infected with COVID-19 because of his ignorance and negligence. That previous sentence? My words, not the AP’s.

So I guess that means we would have continued down this insane, murderous road if TFG hadn’t decided to murder Americans in a different way instead. No wonder the infection is called the novel coronavirus, huh?

Before Tuesday’s Atlanta spa murders, only one such mass shooting event was reported right before the country essentially locked down last year because of the worldwide pandemic: a February 2020 shooting that killed five at the Milwaukee Molson Coors complex.

But wait — there’s more. There always is, given the insidious nature of gun violence.

The AP also reports that “the coronavirus pandemic has roiled the economy and exacerbated social isolation and domestic strife — all risk factors for mass shootings,” making such an event more likely as the country comes out of lock down.

Not that I needed any more than the Atlanta murders to prove my point, but Monday’s Boulder grocery store carnage — which is still unfolding — more than helps to demonstrate that this is, indeed, the case.

I’d like to say the cavalry has been called, and the guys in white hats are on their way. There is movement in that direction, but not soon enough to save those who died in Atlanta and Boulder.

Five days before the Atlanta massacre, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 227 to 203 to approve the expansion of background checks and 219 to 210 to give federal law enforcement more time to vet gun buyers. If those bills had been law before the Atlanta shooter took aim, maybe the eight Atlanta victims would have been spared.

My question in that regard: Why weren’t there more votes on either bill in favor of protecting Americans? But I guess in this polarized time we have to take what we can get.

Now let’s see if the U.S. Senate has the cojones to affirm the House’s actions. Because, as we’ve seen the past four years — in Las Vegas and Parkland, El Paso and Dayton, Milwaukee and Atlanta, and now Boulder — thoughts and prayers just aren’t enough.