by Noah
Well, that's it, another month just about gone, and, speaking of gone, as of today, 11/29, with one month and one day to go, 40,386 Americans have been killed by general gun violence in just this year alone. That includes the number of mass shootings.
One of the sickest things about all this is that we now need to refer to the latest mass shooting as "Today's mass shooting" in order to differentiate today's shooting from yesterday's. Of course, if you look at gunviolence.org's charts, even that is not precise enough since there are often multiple mass shootings in a day. Soon, at the current rate of increase, we may have to say things like "The 12:00 mass shooting" as opposed to the 10:00 mass shooting or the 3:00 mass shooting. Will it change? Nope. For decades, now, I've been saying that, like many of our society's problems, it won't change until the families of judges and politicians of any and all persuasions are directly affected by the mayhem and, in reality, probably not even then. I mean, just suppose, as just one particularly egregious example, "Ted" Cruz's family got caught in a blaze of everyday Texas gunfire. You have to know, if you've been an honest observer of the man, that he and so many like him would pocket an instant fresh campaign contribution from the NRA and not say a word, not a peep. It's who they are. And, it's who we are when we vote for such filth. When we repeatedly accept the behavior of our politicians, we are also endorsing its consequences.