Buy Back Congress from the NRA

6/12/2016

Do not get distracted.

This is not about ISIS.

Charleston was not about ISIS. Columbine was not about ISIS. Virginia Tech was not about ISIS. Aurora was not about ISIS. Fort Hood was not about ISIS. Isla Vista was not about ISIS.

Newtown. Was. Not. About. ISIS.

Chicago is not about ISIS. DC is not about ISIS. Brooklyn is not about ISIS.

None of our inner cities are about ISIS.

This is about America being a safe haven for over 300 million guns. It is about our country being asleep and afraid and more beholden to a broken corrupt system bought and paid for by the NRA than to our own deep moral imperative to change it.

I have said it before and I will say it again:

Children will one day tell ghost stories about us, about this period of cunning and insane darkness. They will whisper and shudder, not believing it could really be true. Tell the one about the people in Florida, they'll say...
They went out into the night to celebrate their pride.
They went out dancing.
And while we were frozen in silence, they were slaughtered.

***
I wrote that less than a year and a half ago. The biggest mass shooting in our history is no longer the Pulse massacre. It occurred in Las Vegas a month ago. Two days ago, 26 people were murdered in cold blood while praying in Church by a man who was court martialed for abusing his wife and infant. Neither events were about ISIS.

Malls. Concerts. Movie Theaters. Hospitals. Baseball Fields. Schools. Houses of Worship.

More than 33,000 people a year die from gun violence.

93 people die on average a day.

Three times that number are injured.

50 Women are shot to death a month by intimate partners.  

7 CHILDREN die a day.

No place in America is immune. Nowhere is sacred. 

In 2016 Congress members accepted $838,215 from the NRA. Congress is supposed to represent our interests. They have instead systematically ignored the will of the American people, refusing to even allow a VOTE on gun laws after the slaughter of twenty first- graders. Newtown was five years ago. More than 1,700 of our citizens have died in subsequent mass shootings. More than 6,000 have suffered injuries.

That is unconscionable.

Most Americans, including NRA members, support stricter gun control laws. The  vast majority of gun violence survivors and their loved ones want stricter gun control laws.

America's gun homicide rate is more than 25 times that of any other developed Nation on Earth. This is our own entirely personal, very particular shame.  

If our current Congress can be bought by the NRA whose only goal is to shield the profits of gun manufacturers, which are in turn cravenly benefiting off the reckless disregard for our public safety, then we simply must outfund them.

We are the ones we've been waiting for.