By November 11, 2024, an estimated 100,000 people walking around alive and well in America today will be shot by a gun and 40,000 of us will end up being murdered by a gun. There will also be 24,000 less Americans a year from now due to gun suicides, and aren’t we the greatest country ever? After Sandy Hook, the fact that we did absolutely nothing as a country to prevent another elementary school shooting proved more than anything else that we just might be a failing nation, unwilling and unable to do what it takes to be a moral people and protect our children from ritual slaughter. Nearly 1,500 children and teens have been killed by gunfire so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive and to Christian Conservatives I would ask: “What would Jesus do?”

If the MAGA jerkoffs who are overwhelmingly committing recent mass killings took their medication and had a long, hard look at themselves in the mirror, maybe they’d see that they’re the ones helping the most to make America the shithole they claim ‘woke’ people are making it, and it’s not the vegan lesbians to blame. It’s the hard-right Conservatives that are taking this country down the shithole. Mass killings have numbed us, time and again, to the feeling that we’ve become a nation inhabited by only perpetrators and victims, and we must now admit to our fellow Americans that the leading cause of death among our children is guns. For over 60 years, it was car accidents, but as of 2020, it’s guns. Again: The leading cause of death among American children is GUNS.

Because of these increasing mass-killing rampages, after the news of the latest one breaks, Americans always go out and buy MORE guns. The ‘Good guys with guns’ cop-out is a smokescreen, however, with the evidence provided by no less than the conservative Texas House of Representatives in their Investigative Committee report attributing fault in the Robb School Massacre in Uvalde, Texas and the resulting death of 19 innocent children, unprotected by the inept local police (the good guys actually paid to have guns), charged with “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making” by the investigating authorities. The report said, “At Robb Elementary, law enforcement responders failed to adhere to their active shooter training, and they failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety… [T]here was an unacceptably long period of time before officers breached the classroom, neutralized the attacker, and began rescue efforts.” Turns out that being shot and killed by a heavily armed madman in tactical gear outweighs heroically taking down an active shooter. Go figure!

When the Second Amendment was ratified on December 15, 1791, it took an average of almost two minutes to reload a flintlock rifle for each shot. Gun enthusiasts always refer to their ‘God-given’ rights enshrined in the Second Amendment when justifying their ownership of semi-automatic weapons that can fire 16 armor-piercing bullets per second, but anyone who has actually read the amendment in question should also read some of the reasoning behind the adoption of the amendment from founder James Madison:

… [W]ere the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will and direct the national force, and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments, and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance, that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it.

— James Madison, Federalist No. 46

The current interpretation of the Second Amendment was codified in 2008’s District of Columbia v. Heller and in 2010’s McDonald v. Chicago, where a 5-4 majority of Supreme Court justices ruled that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms for defense in the home (italics added by me for emphasis) and later, on June 28, 2010, another divided, 5-4 Supreme Court decision upheld gun-ownership rights within homes nationally, expanding the 2008 decision to the entire nation.

Justice Alito wrote for the majority bloc in MacDonald, where the Court answered a question it didn’t answer in 2008: does the Second Amendment protect against State infringement of the right to possess a handgun for self-defense? The Court held that it did, and thereby incorporated the Second Amendment as also applying to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause:

It is clear that the Framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty,” Alito wrote. “A provision of the Bill of Rights that protects a right that is fundamental from an American perspective applies equally to the Federal Government and the States.

The Supreme Court’s Opinion of the Court in Heller, delivered by Justice Scalia, was joined by Chief Justice Roberts and by Justices Kennedy, Thomas and Alito, yet in dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens questioned the majority’s logic:

The fact that the right to keep and bear arms appears in the Constitution should not obscure the novelty of the Court’s decision to enforce that right against the States. By its terms, the Second Amendment does not apply to the States; read properly, it does not even apply to individuals outside of the militia context.

Also important in America’s legal gunfight, the 1934 National Firearms Act didn’t ban the sale of machine guns in part because Congress at that time decided that doing so would be unconstitutional; interpreting the Second Amendment, Congress reassured the States that they could keep their militias and that Congress wouldn’t disarm them, so there was a personal right to bear arms, however the militia was the main issue the Constitution was concerned with — and its only the militia where the Amendment should’ve been considered.

In Lewiston, Maine, anyone who personally knew the latest crazed gunman was obviously worried that he was capable of killing lots of people with his legally-owned semi-automatic weapons, from his immediate family to fellow reservists in the Army Reserve who probably knew better than anyone else how dangerous Robert Card would turn out to be; one reservist predicted that Card would do just what he ended up doing and had advised that his passcode to the Army reserve base be inactivated because war fighters understand what damage a single man with a (semi)automatic weapon can do, the innocent bowlers just out looking to have some good, clean fun at Just-In-Time Recreation, however, didn’t have a clue about the crazy Card because no one warned them.

Maine has a ‘yellow flag’ law that can be used to assess an individual with access to weapons. The first step is for law enforcement to take someone believed to be dangerous into custody and then have them evaluated by a medical professional. Officers from the Sagadahoc and Kennebec County Sheriff’s Offices tried to contact Card on September 16, less than six weeks before the shootings, visiting Card (once) and promptly leaving the premises after ringing the doorbell (once), and when no one answered, even though they heard noises within the house, they high-tailed it outta there. What would you have done? Is anyone lining up to forcibly enter the abode of a heavily armed nutcase to see if he’s doing okay? Um, no, and shortly after the Lewiston madman killed 18 innocent people and wounded 13 more after moving from the bowling alley to Schemengees Bar and Grille and tens of thousands of area residents had to be sheltered at home behind locked doors as hundreds of law enforcement officers scoured the beautiful, idyllic Maine countryside looking for the gunman, who was eventually found dead a couple of days later due to a gun suicide. Yes, another gun suicide in America, but this one I don’t mourn.

Robert Card was a MAGA Trump supporter, he ‘liked’ tweets published by Donald Trump, Jr. (with Junior blaming ‘woke’ trans people for committing mass shootings after the Nashville massacre, natch), as well as liking Tweets from Tucker Carlson and Dinesh D’Souza and by former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan. Maine has shitty gun laws, but the state with the toughest gun laws (and not coincidentally the lowest gun death rate in the nation) is right next door to Maine in my home state of Massachusetts, but the eleven states that have highly restrictive gun laws are seeing firearm deaths now going UP due to guns coming ACROSS state lines. When guns from another state are found at a crime scene, four out of five of them come from states with weak background check laws.

Open carry is legal in the State of Nevada (no need for a pesky permit!) where anyone 18 and older may openly carry a semi-automatic weapon virtually anywhere in the state. In 2020, Nevada had the 18th-highest gun death rate in the country and exported crime guns at the second-highest rate. Not coincidentally, Nevada was also home to armed violent extremists at the Bundy ranch in 2014 — where we needed to literally bring out the militia to check in on them — an event that foreshadowed a rise in violent, anti-government extremists now at the heart of Trump’s MAGA. Oh, and also not coincidentally, Nevada suffers from a gun death rate that’s 40% higher than the national average. The state also has a substantially higher gun suicide rate at 60% above the national average and while only 9% of the state’s population identifies as Black, African-American victims represent 34% of all gun murder victims. Last year, the gun suicide rate among Black teens in America surpassed the rate among white teens for the first time on record, even though they represent a far smaller demographic. Nevada’s youth are also disproportionately affected by gun violence, with shootings now the leading cause of death for the state’s young people.

Because of these shitty statistics, especially after the Route 91 Harvest massacre, Nevada enacted new, stronger gun laws and in 2016, voters approved a ballot measure to have universal background checks. In 2019, the Nevada Legislature approved a number of gun violence prevention bills, including one to ban bump stocks. Lately, the Supreme Court, in all it’s conservative ‘wisdom’ might actually set them back, but the Nevada Legislature also passed a bill creating an extreme risk protection order, enabling family members or law enforcement officials to seek a court order to temporarily remove firearms from someone deemed a threat to themselves or others and they strengthened the law to prevent children from having easy access to guns. Mainers will be up next with stronger gun ballot initiatives and legislative action now that the carnage has hit home.

In 2017, Stephen Paddock ended up killing 60 people and injuring 867 during the Las Vegas massacre, but before he became a mass-killer in Vegas, he had researched information about Fenway Park in Boston. Coincidentally, former Red Sox pitcher Mike Timlin and his friends were among the 22,000 people at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival on that awful day on the Las Vegas Strip. Paddock had also Googled several other venues and institutions in the Boston area in addition to Fenway: the Royal Rooters’ Club, the Blandford Street MBTA station, Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, the Hotel Buckminster, and the Red Sox team store. Obviously a big Sox fan. That same day, his computer records show he searched for the terms “summer concerts 2017,” “open air concert venues,” and “biggest open air concert venues in USA.” In May 2017, Paddock’s internet search history included the terms “La Jolla Beach,” “biggest open air concert venues in USA,” and “how crowded does Santa Monica Beach get,” according to documents made available by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Paddock also visited the San Diego Tourism Authority website, SanDiego.org, at least once the same day he searched for La Jolla, the investigation revealed.

A caller to Savage Nation (hosted by conservative talk show host Michael Savage) named ‘Rick’ claimed he was a neighbor of Paddock from December, 2015 to June of 2016. When asked by Savage if Paddock had ever expressed any political opinions to him, the neighbor said: “No sir, not a thing, I mean other than I told him … I was wearing a Trump Team shirt that said ‘Trump Team’ on it, and he [Paddock] was a Trump fan.” Paddock was very knowledgeable about US gun laws and in defending his view of the Second Amendment, according to the Las Vegas Police Department’s investigation, Paddock espoused right-wing, anti-government and conspiratorial viewpoints, including FEMA conspiracies and the need to arm citizens to fight gun control. He reportedly told a friend that, “sometimes, sacrifices have to be made” in order to encourage the American public to arm themselves. Of course, gun sales soared after the Las Vegas massacre, so Paddock would’ve been a happy serial killer, but he killed himself as many of these cowards do after they commit their bloody massacres, oh, and at the Las Vegas shooting, it also took the ‘good guys with guns’ two hours to storm Stephen Paddock’s room after he had been dead for over an hour.

Paddock purchased his guns from stores in Nevada, California, Utah and Texas, accumulating an arsenal of 47 guns in all — and all of them were purchased legally — 23 of those firearms were found inside Paddock’s Mandalay Bay hotel room that terrible day and they included 14 AR-15 rifles, seven AR-10 rifles, one Ruger American bolt-action rifle and one .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Model 342 revolver. His deadly collection included a large quantity of ammunition in special high-capacity magazines, holding up to 100 cartridges each and some of the rifles rested on bipods and were equipped with the latest, high-tech telescopic sights. All fourteen AR-15 rifles were outfitted with ‘bump fire’ stocks that allow semi-automatic rifles to fire even more rapidly, basically simulating fully-automatic gunfire. Paddock’s gun purchases spiked significantly between October, 2016 and September 28, 2017 — just 2 days before the massacre. Prior to that, he purchased approximately 29 firearms between 1982 and September 2016, mainly handguns and shotguns.

The nutcase in the Parkland High School massacre, Nikolas Cruz, the year prior to the mass-killing, sneaked his ‘Make America Great Again’ hat into his dead “liberal, anti-gun-type” mother’s casket after she died in 2017 and took a photo of it to share on his social media platforms, where he also posted “Hello. My name is Nik and I’m going to be the next school shooter of 2018.” and “My goal is at least 20 people with an AR-15 . . . Location is Stoneman Douglas in Parkland, ­Florida.” Would anyone call this a Red Flag? Anyone? Anyone? The registered Republican is probably unhappy that he only killed 17 innocent people at his alma mater, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine’s Day, 2018, and I have to admit to myself that I’m unhappy that he didn’t also kill himself.

Robert Bowers, the anti-Semitic asshole behind the 2018 killing of eleven innocent Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburg, with six others wounded — including four police officers — wrote on his Gab social media account that he actually didn’t vote for Donald Trump, in fact, he apparently hadn’t voted since 2011 and said that Trump was a puppet of Jews. Bowers told officers afterward that Jewish people were committing genocide and he wanted all Jews to die, according to charging documents. I’m against the death penalty, however even I won’t raise an objection when he’ll be put to death — and none too soon.

Nutcase loser Patrick Wood Crusius, who killed 23 innocent shoppers and injured 22 others at a Walmart massacre in El Paso in May, 2019 with his legally-purchased semi-automatic weapon wrote a rambling, unhinged screed on 4Chan railing against the “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and later wrote that he supported Donald Trump. Crusius pleaded guilty to 90 federal murder and hate crime charges this past July and was sentenced to 90 consecutive life sentences, but he’s currently pending trial for Texas state charges that may still potentially result in the death penalty under Texas law, so this asshole will test my opposition to the death penalty once again, fingers crossed.

13 hours after the El Paso massacre, pathetic loser Connor Betts shot and killed nine innocent people (including his brother) and wounded 17 others at the Ned Peppers Bar in Dayton, Ohio, but here it turned out that the gunman was a Bernie Sanders supporter, so both sides. Betts was fatally shot by responding police officers 32 seconds after the first shots were fired with his legally-purchased AR-15 semi-automatic weapon, so the ‘good guys with guns’ worked out (marginally) well against this liberal gunman — and I’m happy he’s dead.

Robert Eugene Crimo III, the wannabe Nazi prick who perpetrated The Highland Park parade massacre on July 4th, 2022 is probably the biggest Trump supporter of all the recent mass-killers, Crimo has been identified attending at least four pro-Trump demonstrations in Highland Park, Deerfield and Northbrook, Illinois in 2020 and after Trump lost the election, he was at a December 7, 2020 ‘Stop the Steal’ demonstration, natch. He shot at innocent parade watchers from a rooftop nest with his legally-purchased semi-automatic weapon at the prominently Jewish community’s Independence Day celebration, (his dad did get a slap on the wrist for sponsoring the purchase for his insane kid), Crimo had posted on his social media such Red Flags as, “the math is all screwed, the logistics of 6m jews doesn’t make sense, but I’m just retarded” and three days later he posted, “I say we just get rid of the blacks all together.” Two days before killing seven people and wounding 48, on July 2, 2022 Crimo posted twice, first saying “retarded jews” followed by “orientals should be gassed then washed.” Needless to say, I’m unhappy he didn’t also kill himself and this scumbag will stand trial this December on 48 counts of attempted murder, 48 counts of aggravated battery and 21 murder charges.

Payton Gendron, the shit for brains, white supremacist fuckup that killed 10 innocent Black people at the Tops Friendly Market in 2022 in Buffalo with his legally purchased semi-automatic AR-15, was sentenced to a total of 11 life sentences without the possibility of parole, which included a conviction on a domestic act of terrorism motivated by hate and 10 counts of first-degree murder. Gendron repeatedly cited the discredited “great replacement” theory, the stupid and fake idea that some mysterious cabal is attempting to replace white Americans with non-white people through immigration, interracial marriage and violence, espoused by Tucker Carlson (remember him?) before his shitty show was shit-canned by Fox News. Also in Gendron’s half-baked ‘manifesto,’ which was posted to Google Docs two days before the shooting, he claimed that “critical race theory,” the MAGA, right-wing talking point that has come to generally encompass teaching anything about race in school, is part of a Jewish plot and a reason to justify the mass-killing of Jews.

Gun nuts love to talk about how the Nazis took gun rights away from citizens when Hitler rose to power, but that isn’t true because the only gun rights taken away back then were from Jewish people. The 1938 Regulations Against Jews’ Possession of Weapons, which came into force the day after Kristallnacht, effectively deprived all Jewish people living under Nazi rule of the right to possess any form of weapons, including knives, firearms and ammunition. The legal age at which guns could be purchased for all other Germans was actually lowered from 20 to 18 and on the whole, gun laws were actually made less stringent for German citizens who supported the Nazi regime.

Until we Americans realize that our freedom is actually curtailed due to easy access to guns and that strong gun laws aren’t going to end up in some Nazi-style domination of America, we should spurn actual, fascist rhetoric and simply vote for Democrats, but until the stupid, immoral and degenerate Americans who have shaped today’s Republican Party are sidelined, we’ll see ever more chaos, death and destruction (see January 6, 2021 for reference) and the choice will be ours. The next massacre that will happen in America will dutifully follow with ‘thoughts and prayers’ and revelations about missed Red Flags and obligatory 500-page investigations, but we Americans shouldn’t for one second think that nothing could have been done to save innocent victims of gun crime. Either we adopt strong gun laws like here in Massachusetts in all 50 states or the blood will be on our hands.

Please let’s stop killing each other with guns, and while we’re at it, let’s stop driving around America’s streets like crazed lunatics and senselessly killing ourselves by abusing drugs and even while ‘having fun’ like boating (please wear a damned life preserver), biking in traffic (please wear a damned helmet), mountain climbing (please, just find something else to do) and recreational swimming (again, please wear a damned life preserver), but if we end up, God forbid, in the hospital, I beg our wonderful medical personnel, doctors, nurses and orderlies, please try not to fuck up as much as you have been (Over 250,000 people in America die each year because of medical errors!) and we all might be able to live longer and happier lives. Or you might be dead by November 11, 2024. Take your pick.

Carl Holt
November 11, 2023