It was a mentally ill person, a neighbor said disapprovingly to me on the sidewalk out front as he saw me head for the March for Our Lives in the District this morning, not the gun that killed those 17 people on Valentine's Day, and besides it wasn't an assault rifle. I say BS, it was an AR-15, the civilian version of the Army's best and most lethal personal killing machine, with large capacity magazines and high velocity bullets, all legally obtained by an 18 year-old boy, that caused those 15 defenseless children gathered together by us adults in one known place at a predictable time to die, plus 2 heroic care taking adults who died fighting to defend them, in a mere 6 minutes and a few seconds. That's the weapon of choice that enabled an addled teenager to go on a killing spree in a killing ground.
If he had entered that school with a knife, or even a pistol with a 7-shot capacity for an automatic or 6-shots for a revolver, or even a pump shotgun with a regular capacity internal magazine chamber, then maybe 17 people wouldn't have died in those 6 minutes. Maybe the crazed misfit wouldn't have even been able to command the field or fire for those 6 minutes, which would have further reduced the carnage. But we have failed our children in our love for guns that outshines our love for our children, or is it a lust for guns in a way that's clearly improper for us to lust after children.
Today the children marched by the hundreds of thousands in DC, LA, NYC, St. Paul and elsewhere around the country and the world, demanding change now. Earlier this week, two more school children were killed and a third wounded in a school shooting in Maryland, not too far from where a million people marched today trying to effect a long overdue change. No more dead, too many shot down already, with no end in sight to the mass killings of children and others, necessitating a real, dramatic change to be enacted now.
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