A Sense of Doubt blog post #2657 - How many people need to be shot dead before we pry that gun out of your cold, dead hands?
My mind keeps replaying the film Bowling for Columbine and the clip of Charlton Heston, then president of the NRA, holding his gun aloft and saying "from my cold, dead hands," which means, presumably, that we would have to kill him before we take his gun away.
And they are the party of "what if we didn't." People don't matter to them. Human rights do not matter to them. All that matters is "owning the libs." All that matters is blocking Obama or Biden's agenda. They do not want to work together.
Asked Rubio why not ban AR-15s, and he said: "The truth of the matter is these people are going to commit these horrifying crimes, whether they have to use another weapon to do it, they're going to figure out a way to do it." Also contends more background checks won't fix problem pic.twitter.com/crfprWZSyQ
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) May 25, 2022
May 27, 2022
By David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad PhilbrickToday, we mourn for the victims of Uvalde. |
21 lost lives |
Maite Rodriguez, her mother’s only daughter, dreamed of becoming a marine biologist. |
Tess Marie Mata played the same position on her softball team — second base — as her favorite Houston Astros player. |
Layla Salazar sang “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” by Guns N’ Roses, with her father on their morning drives to school. |
Xavier Lopez made the honor roll on Tuesday, which would turn out to be the last day of his life. |
The 19 children killed that day at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, were both typical and extraordinary. To read their life stories — as journalists and family members compile them this week — is devastating. We think that it’s also necessary, as a tribute to the children and an acknowledgment of the toll of this country’s unique gun violence. |
Today’s newsletter contains photographs and a brief sketch of each of the 19 children. It includes the same for the two Robb teachers murdered in the attack: Eva Mireles and Irma Garcia. You can read more by clicking on the links below. |
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Alexandria Aniyah Rubio, 10: Alexandria, who went by Lexi, played softball and basketball and wanted to be a lawyer when she grew up. Her parents saw her make the honor roll with straight A’s and receive a good-citizen award at her school on the day she was killed. |
Amerie Jo Garza, 10: Amerie was “a jokester, always smiling,” her father said. She liked playing with Play-Doh and spending time with friends during recess. “She was very social,” he said. “She talked to everybody.” |
Tess Marie Mata, 10: Tess liked TikTok dance videos, Ariana Grande and getting her hair curled, The Washington Post reported. And she loved José Altuve, the diminutive Houston Astros star whose position she emulated. She was saving money for a family trip to Disney World once her older sister, Faith, graduated from college next year. |
Jose Flores: “My little Josesito,” his grandfather called him. He was an energetic baseball and video-game enthusiast. In a photo his grandfather keeps in his wallet, Jose has a beaming smile and wore a T-shirt reading, “Tough guys wear pink.” |
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Miranda Mathis, 11: Miranda “was very loving and very talkative,” the mother of a close friend told The Austin American-Statesman. Miranda would often ask the mother to do her hair like her friend’s. |
Maite Rodriguez, 10: Maite dreamed of attending Texas A&M University to become a marine biologist, a cousin wrote on Facebook: “She was her mom’s best friend.” |
Makenna Lee Elrod, 10: Makenna liked to sing and dance, play with fidget toys and practice softball and gymnastics, an aunt told ABC News. She also loved animals, and hiding notes for her family to find. She recently gave her friend Chloe a friendship bracelet. |
Xavier Lopez, 10: An exuberant baseball and soccer player, Xavier also chatted on the phone with his girlfriend and made the honor roll. “He was funny, never serious,” his mother, Felicha Martinez, told The Washington Post. “That smile I will never forget. It would always cheer anyone up.” |
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Eliana Garcia, 9: The second-eldest of five girls, Ellie helped around the house, reminding her grandparents to take their pills, helping mow the lawn and babysitting her younger sisters, her grandfather told The Los Angeles Times. She loved “Encanto,” dancing for TikTok videos, cheerleading and basketball. |
Layla Salazar, 10: Layla also liked dancing to TikTok videos, and she won six races at the school’s field day, her father told The Associated Press. She and her dad would sing every morning on their drive to school. |
Eliahana Cruz Torres, 10: Eliahana played softball and particularly looked forward to wearing her green and gray uniform, along with eye black grease. The final game of the season was scheduled for Tuesday, and she was hoping to make the Uvalde All-Star team. |
Alithia Ramirez, 10: Alithia loved to draw. She wanted to become an artist, her father told a San Antonio TV station. After a car struck and killed her best friend last year, Alithia sent his parents a drawing of him sketching her portrait in heaven and her sketching his portrait on earth. |
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Jackie Cazares and Annabelle Rodriguez were cousins in the same class. Jackie was the social one. “She always had to be the center of attention,” her aunt said. “She was my little diva.” Annabelle was quieter. But the girls were close — so close that Annabelle’s twin sister, who was home-schooled, “was always jealous.” |
Jailah Silguero, 10: Jailah was the youngest of four children, the “baby” of the family, her father said. Her mother told Univision that Jailah liked to dance and film videos on TikTok. |
Jayce Luevanos, 10: Jayce, Jailah’s cousin, would brew a pot of coffee for his grandparents every morning, his grandfather told USA Today. Friends would come over to his house, a block from the school, to play in the yard. He enjoyed making people laugh, another relative told The Daily Beast. |
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Uziyah Garcia, 9: Uziyah enjoyed video games and football. His grandfather told The Los Angeles Times that Uziyah “was the type of kid [who] could get interested in anything in five minutes. Just the perfect kid, as far as I’m concerned.” |
Nevaeh Bravo, 10: “She’s flying with the angels now,” a cousin wrote on Twitter. |
Rojelio Torres, 10, was “intelligent, hard-working and helpful,” his aunt told a San Antonio television station. |
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Eva Mireles, 44: “She loved those children,” a neighbor said. Mireles had worked for the school district for about 17 years. She enjoyed running and hiking. “She was just very adventurous and courageous and vivacious and could light up a room,” a relative told ABC News. |
Irma Garcia, 46: Garcia spent 23 years at Robb Elementary, five of them as Mireles’s co-teacher. She liked to sing along to classic rock tunes and help her nephew, a college student, with his homework. Garcia was known as a steadfast optimist. She enjoyed barbecuing with her husband of 24 years, Joe; he died yesterday, of a heart attack. |
Today’s news |
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How Are Women To Blame For The Mass Murders They Don't Commit? https://t.co/0FFPnpcJw9
— gmrstudios (@gmrstudios) May 28, 2022
Within the past month, we have had two major mass shootings committed by angry young men — one, a white supremacist radicalized by 4chan and angered by the same things that Tucker Carlson gets outraged over every night on FOX and another with a history of being aggressive and inappropriate with girls he knew. So who is to blame for all this, really? Women. Feminists in particular.
While at least this time they're not claiming, Jordan Peterson-style, that these shootings could have been prevented by "enforcing" monogamy in order to make it easier for violent psychopaths to score a girlfriend, there's no shortage of Twitter threads about how these tragedies happen because women don't know their place anymore, because feminists murdered masculinity and won't let any boys be "courageous" anymore, or because single mothers ... exist.
Yes, that is correct, the same people who want to take our reproductive rights away are also pretty sure that single mothers are to blame for all of society's problems, mass shooters in particular.
This week, no one has gone harder on the "women are definitely to blame for all of this" jag than former ESPN person turned rightwing pundit Jason Whitlock (who, to be fair, also blames people who thought it was bad that the police murdered George Floyd).
In an appearance on Jesse Watters's Fox show Thursday night, Whitlock explained how the reason these men are going on murder sprees is because we are all attacking masculinity and traditional male values at the behest of "pansies" in Northern California who run social media sites. That isn't really a thing, but let's hear him out.
Transcript via Media Matters:
JESSE WATTERS (HOST): What do you think is the main factor in our culture that's triggering this kind of rise in mass shootings, especially at schools?
JASON WHITLOCK (BLAZETV HOST): Cowardice. Fear and cowardice. Our culture is controlled by fear and cowardice. Masculinity, traditional male values, are under attack. There's — it's not any mystery why young boys are confused, angry, confused about their identity, angry at the world. Their natural instincts have been under attack probably the last 50, 60 years and most acutely in the last 15 to 20 years since we turned over our culture to the pansies in northern California and their social media apps.
They're imposing their view of the world, their standard for manhood on the rest of us. And we men have been cowards and have taken it. And so I look at that — your opening segment, and people are wondering why the police didn't do anything, didn't run in. They exist in a culture totally controlled by fear and cowardice.
We haven't created a culture that supports men doing what comes natural to them — protecting women and children. That's what comes natural to us when we're allowed to be men. But this new culture we've built is set up to totally annihilate, eliminate our natural instincts and make us think, oh, the people in northern California know better than God about what a man is and what a man should do. Men, boys, under attack. They're acting out angrily and we are too cowardly to do anything about it.
You know what seems super cowardly to me? Needing women to pretend to need your protection in order to feel like a man.
We had four years of what people like Jesse Watters and Jason Whitlock would consider a shining example of masculinity and traditional manhood in the White House. There are manly men like them constantly whining about how no one will let men be manly and courageous, complaining about Wet Ass Pussy, talking about how frightened they are by LGBTQ people or how excited they will be when birth control and abortions are outlawed so they will never again be subjected to recreational non-procreative sex with a heterosexual woman, and watching Tucker Carlson documentaries about manhood featuring ripped men taking bubble baths outside. What more could any of these young men need?
I mean, we know the Buffalo shooter wasn't hanging out on Twitter so much as he was hanging out on 4chan — which, apart from being extremely racist, is also unbelievably misogynistic.
Perhaps they need to watch more videos of Jason Whitlock complaining about how very threatened he is by women in power? You know, if they really want to be macho enough to not shoot up a school and/or grocery store.
Whitlock also blamed this supposed "cowardice" culture for the fact that police didn't go into the school to rescue the children, tweeting, "We've promoted cowardice and demonized masculinity and we're shocked when we see cowardice."
As mentioned, he also believes that the police officers would have rushed into the school to rescue the children had people given them a pass on killing George Floyd, tweeting, "I'm not defending the actions of the officers. But we've demonized law enforcement to the point that there are far fewer rewards for being a hero, for taking risks. When your culture makes George Floyd the hero, real heroes stand down. Cultural rot has consequences."
I'm not really sure how courageous it is to need accolades and rewards and for other people to behave a certain way in order for one to not be a "coward." It kind of seems like the opposite of that to me, but perhaps that is because I am a woman and therefore stupid and evil.
Whitlock was not the only one on this jag. Joining him, unsurprisingly, was Matt Walsh, who tweeted, "Can't tell you how depressing it is that cops in Texas of all places were cowering outside while a maniac executed 19 children. We are witnessing the death of courage and masculinity in this culture."
It should be noted that literally no one is stopping anyone from doing masculinity, whatever it is they think that means. I honestly cannot say I care what they do, so long as they don't get in my face or expect anyone to be forced to go along with them. They can dress like the Brawny man, play sports, do all the 1950s LARPing they want in their own families, and no one will give a shit — as long as they don't demand the rest of us go along with them.
Whitlock's fellow BlazeTV commentator Allie Beth Stuckey also tweeted about how failing to promote "fatherhood, hard work and honor" and denying "innate gender differences" is what is leading these men to go on murder sprees.
Just to be clear — while mass shootings are a more recent phenomenon, male violence is definitely not. Serial killers, also known to have some issues with women, have been in steep, steep decline in the US for three decades now. Discover magazine reports that "189 people in the U.S. died by the hands of a serial killer in 1987, compared to 30 in 2015." Violent crime has also sharply declined since the early 1990s. The only thing that has really increased has been these mass shootings, which for the most part have been committed by misogynists or racists.
Clearly, most of these shooters are listening to people like Jason Whitlock and Matt Walsh a hell of a lot more than they are listening to people like me or to "pansies in North California," so perhaps they are the ones who need to be working on teaching them the gentlemanly art of not murdering a bunch of children at school or Black people at a grocery store.
Though less important than the above content, this one caught my attention.
And fuck the National Anthem that glorifies war and violence.
Home of the Brave?
The day 19 children and 2 teachers were murdered, we held a moment of silence at sporting events around the country, then we played the national anthem, and we went on with our lives.
Players, staff and fans stood for the moment of silence, grieving the lives lost, and then we (myself included) continued to stand, proudly proclaiming ourselves the land of the free and the home of the brave. We didn’t stop to reflect on whether we are actually free and brave after this horrific event, we just stood at attention.
When I was the same age as the children in Uvalde, my father taught me to stand for the pledge of allegiance when I believed my country was representing its people well or to protest and stay seated when it wasn’t. I don’t believe it is representing us well right now.
This particular time, an 18 year old walked into a store, bought multiple assault rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, walked into a school with an armed resource officer and its own police district and was able to murder children for nearly an hour. Parents begged and pleaded with police officers to do something, police officers who had weapons and who receive nearly 40% of the city’s funding, as their children were being murdered.
We elect our politicians to represent our interests. Immediately following this shooting, we were told we needed locked doors and armed teachers. We were given thoughts and prayers. We were told it could have been worse, and we just need love.
But we weren’t given bravery, and we aren’t free. The police on the scene put a mother in handcuffs as she begged them to go in and save her children. They blocked parents trying to organize to charge in to stop the shooter, including a father who learned his daughter was murdered while he argued with the cops. We aren’t free when politicians decide that the lobbyist and gun industries are more important than our children’s freedom to go to school without needing bulletproof backpacks and active shooter drills.
I’m often struck before our games by the lack of delivery of the promise of what our national anthem represents. We stand in honor of a country where we elect representatives to serve us, to thoughtfully consider and enact legislation that protects the interests of all the people in this country and to move this country forward towards the vision of the “shining city on the hill.” But instead, we thoughtlessly link our moment of silence and grief with the equally thoughtless display of celebration for a country that refuses to take up the concept of controlling the sale of weapons used nearly exclusively for the mass slaughter of human beings. We have our moment (over and over), and then we move on without demanding real change from the people we empower to make these changes. We stand, we bow our heads, and the people in power leave on recess, celebrating their own patriotism at every turn.
Every time I place my hand over my heart and remove my hat, I’m participating in a self congratulatory glorification of the ONLY country where these mass shootings take place. On Wednesday, I walked out onto the field, I listened to the announcement as we honored the victims in Uvalde. I bowed my head. I stood for the national anthem. Metallica riffed on City Connect guitars.
My brain said drop to a knee; my body didn’t listen. I wanted to walk back inside; instead I froze. I felt like a coward. I didn’t want to call attention to myself. I didn’t want to take away from the victims or their families. There was a baseball game, a rock band, the lights, the pageantry. I knew that thousands of people were using this game to escape the horrors of the world for just a little bit. I knew that thousands more wouldn’t understand the gesture and would take it as an offense to the military, to veterans, to themselves.
But I am not okay with the state of this country. I wish I hadn’t let my discomfort compromise my integrity. I wish that I could have demonstrated what I learned from my dad, that when you’re dissatisfied with your country, you let it be known through protest. The home of the brave should encourage this.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2205.28 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2521 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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