Gun violence became the leading cause of death among children a few years ago, surpassing automobile accidents.
We teach our children to hide under desks at school in the event that an active shooter shows up there. Children know the ravages of gun violence by the time they are in kindergarten, and they know we send them to schools where, from a child’s perspective, we also send deranged men with high-powered weapons to kill children.
There’s no amount of reason, or words, otherwise to explain it any other way, or explain it any better than that. What are we teaching our children?
The assault weapons these men use are capable of slicing a dozen second-graders into pieces in nano-seconds, and that is what we allow, it’s what we tolerate, and it’s some ways what some promote.
The Washington Post reported this week that “in less than 90 minutes on Sunday afternoon, two 911 calls led police in Texas and Washington to two mass shootings that pushed the nation to a gruesome milestone.
“They were the 37th and 38th shootings this year in which four or more victims were killed, the highest number of mass killings in any year since at least 2006. Last year’s 36 was the previous record.”
Ogden Newspapers reported this week that state Rep. Mike Loychik, R-Bazetta, and state Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Loveland, recently introduced House Bill 51, or the Second Amendment Preservation Act, in the Ohio legislature.
Schmidt described it this way in a news release: If approved, HB 51 would make “unconstitutional federal gun-control laws, executive orders or agency rule interpretations” unenforceable in Ohio.
It’s not really Schmidt’s bill, or Loychik’s bill; it’s a manufactured piece of pseudo-legislation that conflates “sanctuary cities” into political culture warfare designed to protect and promote the gun industry.
The audacity promoting dangerous legislation that in part keeps the door open for disturbed individuals to obtain high-powered weapons is overwhelming. The “group think” and utter lack of intellectual consideration that HB 51 represents, and the pretense that it is somehow patriotic or protecting the U.S. Constitution would be laughable, if it weren’t so deadly dangerous.
H.B. 51 is openly pro-Second Amendment, but it also protects the ability of those on the edges of our society to obtain the means to wantonly inflict death or harm on innocent bystanders.
Lawmakers on both the state and federal level have the right and the duty to consider gun regulation and enact it without a pre-judged determination made by gerrymandered state bodies that are wantonly self-serving and against the national interest.
Against the interests of everyone the public at large HB 51 is highly irresponsible and should be repudiated.
