Now tolerating “pure evil” is
How long before carnival shooting galleries replace little yellow ducks with cutouts of schoolchildren? Would anyone notice? Would anyone take offense?
First news reports Monday said the Nashville elementary school shooter was a woman. All the rest was familiar. All too familiar. Read the gory details elsewhere.
What stood out in the aftermath more than the gender identity of the shooter was the exasperated reaction of one Nashville tourist, Ashbey Beasley:
“It’s only in America can somebody survive a mass shooting and then go on vacation…and find themselves near another mass shooting.”
“That is a thing that happens now in our country,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow told viewers Monday night. “Gun murders are in fact so common in this country that the shooter in one attack can shoot and kill 11 people [and] drive to a nearby parking lot to kill himself at the site of where another mass shooting had occurred just a few years prior.”
Beasley’s preliminary assumptions about the shooter appear incorrect, but so are many early reports about these events. In one video, Beasley says she’s in town to visit a sister-in-law. In another, she says she’s visiting someone she met through gun safety advocacy. Both can be true these days. God Bless America.
As a spokesman for the Nashville Police wrapped up a news conference on the mass shooting at an elementary school, an exasperated mother stepped up to the cluster of microphones and cried out: “Aren’t you guys tired of covering this?”
Ashbey Beasley said she and her young son were at the scene of another mass shooting just nine months earlier, at a Fourth of July parade in their town of Highland Park, Ill. Demonstrating how frequent such shootings have become, her family happened to be on a vacation in Tennessee visiting her sister-in-law on Monday when yet another shooting took place in their vicinity, this one claiming the lives of three children and three adults.
“How is this still happening? How are our children still dying, and why are we failing them?” she said to the reporters gathered.
“We have to do something,” she added, urging people to call their representatives. “This is going to keep happening. It’s going to be your kid and your kid and your kid and your kid next because it’s just a matter of time.”
At the Fourth of July parade last year in Highland Park, Illinois, Beasley turned and ran with her son from another mass shooter. Then she turned activist. She’s made twelve trips to Washington, D.C. since last July to advocate for gun reform.
The CEO of Daniel Defense, the firm that manufactured the AR-15 style weapon used in the Uvalde, Texas school shooting, testified to Congress that mass shootings using such weapons is “pure evil.” But heaven forbid we limit access to them.
Nuclear weapons don’t kill people either. Just “pure evil” people with nuclear weapons.
Oh right, that was Americans too.