Good guys with guns are no match for a bad guy with an AR-15.
Many things get lost when Americans talk about guns, I wrote back in 2016, simple things like tempers, perspective, civility, and reason.
Six years later, the basic recipe hasn't changed at all. The mindless slaughter will continue as long as private profit matters more to us than human loss.
Why else are these outrages allowed to continue year after year despite overwhelming public support for an assault weapons ban?
It's because the same persistent (and impressively deep-pocketed) sub-section of our society holds us hostage, keeping on voting down each proposed ban year after year.
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But what about all the innocent Americans being massacred by these high-powered, high-capacity weapons of war? Don't they have rights too? Don't they have the right not to be massacred at last?
Boulder police officer Eric Talley had seven children, ages 5 to 18. He will never come home to them. He will no longer watch them grow. They will never hear his feet on their front porch again. It's unspeakable.
Gun supporters like to say that only good guys with guns can stop bad guys with guns, but good guys with guns are no match for an AR-15. Officer Talley couldn't protect others or save himself against that lethal war machine solely created for mass murder.
Most Americans shudder at the endless mass shootings they see on their TV's but how many of them could give you any actual statistics? How many of them know that in 2017, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 39,773 people died from gun-related injuries in the US?
Officer Eric Talley was killed during the Boulder, Colorado mass shooting on March 22.
No other country on earth watches this much mass murder after another and decides that the solution is to buy even more guns.
In 2016, I wrote that each new mass shooting does violence to what we stand for and emboldens what we stand against. It is turning this country into a basket case. Other nations see our unmistakable decline in our inability to get even a moderate gun control bill through our House and Senate.
You can not fix what you will not face, wrote James Baldwin once. How right he was. American politicians have no stomach to face the gun lobby (and it's bought and paid for spokespersons in the House and Senate) so they will not fix this crisis until enough of us force them to.
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