The Texas murder horror show doesn’t seem like it has much to do with our problems in Oakland, but there’s a connection. It may sound weird, but the National Rifle Association and our own woke “defund the police” crowd have more in common than either side will admit. Let me explain.
It’s unconscionable that the conservative powers that be in America continue to allow the National Rifle Association to dictate gun policy, and by “powers that be” I mean specifically the Republican Party.
The N.R.A. believes that every American has a Constitutional right to own a gun. Not only handguns, but assault weapons, which have no purpose other than to kill as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. The Republican Party has lain down in bed with the N.R.A. and fully embraced their homicidal beliefs. Republicans, who are so concerned with protecting the life of a fetus, clearly don’t care about human life once the baby is born. About 45,000 Americans die each year from guns—nearly as many as died in the Vietnam War—and yet the N.R.A. and their Republican stooges have never supported any sort of gun control laws. They run on Second Amendment rights, but be assured, anyone sporting a 2A sticker is complicit in these deaths.
Texas’s Republican Governor, Greg Abbott, and his Legislature repeatedly have spurned gun control laws. In fact, Texas encouraged the carrying of guns even more radically than they used to when they passed HB 1927/texas.gunowners.org/hb-1927-final-version-what-does-it-say/
last September; under that bill, you no longer even need a license to carry a gun. HB 1927 also gave Texans the right to carry concealed weapons anywhere: schools, restaurants, churches, concerts, ball games, malls, factories. It’s as if Texas Republicans were determined to move their state back to the 1800s, when it was the Wild West.
Here in California, we have much more restrictive gun laws, thank God, but what’s the point when guns are so easy to obtain online, and at stores and conventions? Moreover, ghost guns, which are untraceable, make a mockery of gun control laws—and the N.R.A. has yet to oppose ghost guns.
Here is a post I put up on Facebook: “Let me put this as delicately as I can: Red state, gun-loving, trump worshipping, NRA ass-kissing Texas played with the devil, and is reaping the whirlwind.” Harsh, but true. I suspect that some, if not most, of the parents of the dead kids are Republicans who happily voted for Greg Abbott and his rightwing legislature, and are firm in their opposition to any kind of gun control. I wonder if, in their grief, they will stop to think why their party is so oblivious to human life. What is it about the common sense control of guns that is so abhorrent to these 2A people? Why are they arming to the teeth? In my judgment, the right is preparing for war, egged on by Trump and his ilk, whose desire for a white, Christian America is clear. To make matters even more bizarre, Abbott, Ted Cruz and Trump are all scheduled to speak at the N.R.A.’s convention this Friday in Houston.
This is surreal. Three days after the murder of these innocent little kids in Texas, the leading politicians of Texas, with their fuehrer, Trump, are going to kiss the N.R.A.’s ass, in what the group is calling “a celebration of Second Amendment rights." At least Texas’s other Republican Senator, John Cornyn, who also was supposed to be there, had the decency to cancel.
I’m so proud to live in a liberal city that sees through the hideous deformity of the Republican Party and offers an alternative. I only wish that Oakland didn’t have so many incoherent cop haters. Isn’t it obvious that cops are the only means we have of being protected by gun maniacs? Granted, not every massacre can be prevented, but as I write this, it appears that the gunman was shot and killed by responding police.
Look: if cop haters like Carroll Fife, Cat Brooks, Nikki Bas, Sheng Thao, Rashida Grinage, Pamela Price, Rebecca Kaplan and the rest of the defund-the-police crowd had their way, the Texas gunman would not have been stopped, because there would have been no police to stop him. Countless other children would now be dead. Will this cause any of them to become more supportive of the Oakland Police Department? I doubt it. Their minds are closed, their ideologies too rigid, they don’t give a damn; if they have to choose between “social justice” and protecting lives, they choose the former. Like Abbott, Cruz, Trump and the other Republicans they claim to oppose, they, too, are complicit in each gun death that occurs in Oakland.
Steve Heimoff