Song of the day:
All I want for Christmas is to wake up and find no news of a mass shooting or of people dying by gun violence. I want to see news of people getting the help they need and of sensible gun control laws and policies. I don’t really think it’s that much to ask, do you?
I didn’t even know about the Tuesday shootings in Texas until yesterday afternoon when I saw a post about the shooting in Las Vegas. These events have become so commonplace that they don’t even rise to the top of social media feeds anymore. And every day more and more people die. It’s not okay.
Pretty much every other country on the planet has figured this out, but we simply can’t get there because of the power the NRA holds and the chokehold they seem to have on a huge percentage of our population, including pretty much everyone in the Republican Party.
President Biden had this to say last night:
This year alone, our nation has experienced more than 600 mass shootings, and approximately 40,000 deaths due to gun violence. This is not normal, and we can never let it become normal.
For all the action we have taken since I’ve been President, the epidemic of gun violence we face demands that we do even more. But we cannot do more without Congress. Republican lawmakers must join with Democrats in Congress to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, pass a national red flag law, enact universal background checks, require the safe storage of guns, and advance other commonsense measures that will help stem the tide of gun violence. And together, we must do more to prevent more families, and more communities like Austin, San Antonio, and Las Vegas, from being ripped apart by gun violence.
We have to reelect this man in order to have a prayer of getting these kinds of laws passed in the next few years. And we have to continue to elect more effective members of congress to help get these laws passed.
I pray that the families of the victims of these latest tragedies, as well as the countless others in recent memory, are able to find peace. I can’t even imagine trying to process this kind of information. It’s absolutely awful.
Video of the day:
At least in the midst of a very broken world, we have lovely stories like this one.