Gun Violence - Tumblr Posts
The largest mass shooting in American history was a hate crime against gay people. Don’t ever forget that.
A Culture That Kills Its Children Has No Future
An America vacillating between violent struggle and idle nihilism is shuddering toward its end.
Elizabeth Bruenig for The Atlantic, 26 May 2022
The grieving people of Uvalde, Texas, a town in the Hill Country about 80 miles west of San Antonio, now confront the irreplaceability of life in one of its most ghastly and unnatural incarnations: the murder of at least 19 children and two adults, with several more injured. In their mourning they will join dozens of other communities scattered throughout the country where school shootings this year alone have injured or killed people, and in their special torture—these children were elementary schoolers; they still had the faintly round faces of babies—they will join the families of the children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in another episode of stochastic annihilation only 10 years ago.
Yet somehow that brief report of conditions on the ground understates both the scope and the nature of the problem. The nature of the problem, as best I can tell, is that American life isn’t about what is good but is rather about nothing at all (which is, at least, broadly inoffensive and inclusive of most tastes and creeds) or about violence itself. The scope of the problem includes every facet of life that culture touches, which means most every element of daily life.
Violence begets injury begets death, and any culture debased to vacillating between violent struggle and idle nihilism is shuddering toward its end as a culture of death. And a culture of death is like a prophecy, or a sickness: It bespeaks itself in worsening phases. Right now, we find ourselves foreclosing upon our own shared future both recklessly and deliberately—and perhaps, gradually, beginning to behave as if there is no future for us at all; soon, I sometimes worry, we may find ourselves faced with a darkening present, no faith in our future, and a doomed tendency to chase violence with violence.
The murders in Uvalde barely begin to describe the scale of American violence, but they do provide insight into its character. School shootings are only a subcategory of mass shootings, which are themselves only a subcategory of gun crime. America sharply surpasses other comparably developed countries in each of those classes of violent crime. A country in which those indicators aren’t necessarily signs of terminal decline is conceivable. But these aren’t the growing pains of a society making difficult advances toward an orderly peace. These are the morbid symptoms of a society coming undone, and they arise largely from policy choices made by interested parties with material motives.
Call that deliberate foreclosure of the future, a category of offense that also includes the impoverishment of American mothers and children far out of proportion to their international counterparts; blithe indifference bordering on outright malice toward any policy or practice suggesting care for the climate, environment, or preservation of the majesty of the natural world; the subtle but rising set of pressures and risks coupled with an overall sense of stagnation that, taken together, amount to the reason Millennials now have the lowest birth rate of any generation on record. The reckless foreclosure of the future is perhaps most visible in the daily, wanton mistreatment of others that is part of the warp and weft of American life.
But perhaps the most troubling symptom of our cultural rot is the sense, detectable already in some people, that there simply is no future for us at all. This sentiment takes many forms, whether individual or national. Some people are taking their own lives in despair or exhaustion, a phenomenon reflected in spiking suicide rates. Some say there’s going to be a “national divorce,” a coward’s term for a Second Civil War, and some say there ought to be such a war, and it’s difficult to distinguish the two; either way, if you take them at their word, there is no future for the United States of America. Some say the planet is dying and we’re already living on borrowed time. Those people have something like an end point in mind.
Then there are some who say that every terrible thing—including even this untenable thing that no civilization could endure, this demonic murder lottery of schoolchildren—simply must go on, and somehow, they are winning. After all, wasn’t the Newtown massacre like the breaking of a seal, the final entry in a national catalog of stunned loss that had begun with Columbine? It wasn’t that there would be no more losses. It was only that we could no longer be stunned. Yesterday, before the families of Uvalde had buried their children, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a televised interview that he would “much rather have law-abiding citizens armed and trained so that they can respond when something like this happens, because it’s not going to be the last time.” That is to say: It’s going to go on indefinitely. It’s not an end, exactly, but life inside a permanent postscript to one’s own history. Here is America after there was no more hope.
We are already living through this. It is hard to bear. All around us things that ought to matter shrink in proportion to things that ought not to; a sense of real agency in politics or government feels limited, distant; lives that used to seem perfectly accessible to your average young person seem impossible now, while darkly fantastical lives—like those of the mass shooters whose profiles are now too many and too common to differentiate, with their weird paramilitary bravado and meme-inflected manifestos—are growing more familiar to us. I fear they’ll become more familiar still. When we say, in despair, that “these men are by-products of a society we’ve created; how could we possibly stop them?,” we could be referring to almost anyone in the great chain of diffuse responsibility for our outrageous, inexcusable gun-violence epidemic—the lobbyists who argued for these guns to be sold like sporting equipment, the politicians who are too happy to oblige them, the shooters themselves.
Moral decline of this kind produces strange and grotesque effects as it works its way, acidlike, through a society. Resignation takes the form of anger, mistrust, hypervigilance, depression, withdrawal. Nihilism arrives not as society fading quietly to dust but as fruit flush with lurid color, ripening until it bursts. It is the fruit of a culture of death.
Since 2020, firearms have overtaken car accidents to become the leading cause of death in children, taking over 4368 lives.
With the advent of this horrific moment, we’ve built a mobile museum made of 52 empty school buses representing 4368 victims. Some of the buses feature an exhibit of artifacts, photos, videos, audio recordings, and personal memories of these children who have lost their lives to guns.
#NRAChildrensMuseum
from the NRAChildrensMuseum website
more info available at Change the Ref website
Guys what the fuck. This shit is messssed up god damn.
fyi for those in Phoenix Arizona: stay away from Target because the Phoenix Police still won't arrest this dude despite it being illegal to declare intention of violence like this 🙃
✅ safety from guns
✅ wants safe abortion access
✅ queer
❎ black
✅ girl
❎ disabled
✅ kid (minor teen - same thing)
✅ POC
❎ trans
USA looks like hell for me and while I knew I didn't want to stay there now there's absolutely no fucking way I'm gonna go there.
I hope whichever fucks made these laws die a slow and painful death.
Welcome to the United States of America where if you want to be safe from guns you die if you want to get a safe abortion you die if you're gay you die if you're black you die if you're a woman you die if you're disabled you die if you're a kid you die if you're a POC you die if you're trans you die and no one will do anything about it because some stupid cuntrags that are two steps away from tripping on a staircase and dying cling to some dipshit beliefs from over 6 decades ago and decide to make it everyone's problem
“no. i can’t shoot peoples.”
Alt-right men have been groomed. They have been let down by their peers/community.
They have so much internalized shame, they convert it all to shame to deny their pain.
Alt-right men have been groomed. They have been let down by their peers/community.
They have so much internalized shame, they convert it all to shame to deny their pain.
(link to the twitter thread and link to the article)
Let's repeat that number: 94% of the people who murdered their families since 2020 were men. A gun was used 86% of the time. This is why men are so firmly anti-gun control, because they want to terrorize and kill their families with ease. These stories are not divorced from the wider epidemic of gun violence just because they're in the home--the personal is political. Domestic violence is gun violence's best friend.
And this is why violent men are hoping the far-right Supreme Court decides that domestic abusers have a "right" to firearms. (And this is also why, ladies, if you're dating a guy who isn't anti-gun: run.)
I havent seen this posted on here yet so.
Welcome to the United States of America where if you want to be safe from guns you die if you want to get a safe abortion you die if you're gay you die if you're black you die if you're a woman you die if you're disabled you die if you're a kid you die if you're a POC you die and no one will do anything about it because some stupid cuntrags that are two steps away from tripping on a staircase and dying cling to some dipshit beliefs from over 6 decades ago and decide to make it everyone's problem
All jokes aside, this is exactly why we need gun reform in this country. If this doesn't finally convince the Republicans to do something about guns (although they didn't do jack shit when a bunch of first graders were killed back in 2012, or when that shooting at the elementary school in Texas happened so I highly doubt it) then nothing will.
seems like theres also been/is a protest please add / message me of theres more info
yesterday night (24th of oct) a young romani man was killed by greek officers in a car chase (the officers fired 38 shots in total) and another minor was fatally injured as well. this is not an isolated incident of police violence against roma population in eastern europe. a similar thing happened in czech republic on 21st june this year where a czech police officer knelt on the neck of a young rroma man until he suffocated to death. in may last year an autistic rroma boy was found dead in his jail cell in central serbia where he was placed after he stole cake, the cause of death “unknown”.
roma are the most numerous victims of police violence in eastern europe and the killings and crimes against them almost always getting close to zero proper news coverage & sympathy from the general public. ee’s long and ugly history of anti-roma racism is ever so present.
The Hispanic-majority neighborhood of Little Village was one of many communities across Chicago that launched peace marches on Friday calling for an end to gun violence. Nearly all demonstrators had lost a personal friend or family member.
Photos taken for The Chicago Sun-Times Homicide Watch.
a decade ago, 20 children and 6 staff members were shot and killed in the tragic sandy hook elementary school shooting. today, a decade later, 14 children and 1 teacher had their lives taken at robb elementary school in texas. it’s been a decade, and there has been nothing done to prevent this from ever happening again. may they all rest in peace.
Please sign the petition!!!
Third Time, Not the Charm!
Third Time, Not the Charm!
The word of the week is STRIKE for the six-sentence story prompt by girlontheedge. This week we will see the story of Conrad, an ex-con with really bad luck, who agreed to take his cousin to the corner store, and has come to seriously regret this decision. It’s one of those, people see what they want kind of situations, and while I believe most of the “I was just there” defences are crap, some…
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Null
Hello hello and welcome to this week’s response to the Girlontheedge’s prompt CONCEQUENCES. There are consequences to our actions and this week’s narrator was willing to face what was coming to them, and got quite the surprise. Follow our non-gender specific narrator, as they explain how they go to where they are today, and why they made the decisions that they did. You may want to check the tags…
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The Telescreen is Next
Hello hello and welcome to this week’s six sentence story using the word SECURITY. This was inspired in part by a half-remembered quote “those who are willing to give up freedom in return for temporary security are deserving of neither”, which was NOT the quote, but I decided to roll with the concept anyways. It’s also based on my experience in London, where CCTV is EVERYWHERE, and how I…
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