Emma Gonzalez Gun Control Rally Speech

As you may be aware, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School senior  Emma Gonzalez put Trump, the Republican Party and the NRA on blast during her powerful speech at a gun control rally in For Lauderdale, FL a few days ago that has since gone viral.

Here's  Ms. Gonzalez's speech.   The text of it is below the video.

We haven't already had a moment of silence in the House of Representatives, so I would like to have another one. Thank you.

Every single person up here today, all these people should be home grieving. But instead we are up here standing together because if all our government and President can do is send thoughts and prayers, then it's time for victims to be the change that we need to see. Since the time of the Founding Fathers and since they added the Second Amendment to the Constitution, our guns have developed at a rate that leaves me dizzy. The guns have changed but our laws have not.

We certainly do not understand why it should be harder to make plans with friends on weekends than to buy an automatic or semi-automatic weapon. In Florida, to buy a gun you do not need a permit, you do not need a gun license, and once you buy it you do not need to register it. You do not need a permit to carry a concealed rifle or shotgun. You can buy as many guns as you want at one time.

I read something very powerful to me today. It was from the point of view of a teacher. And I quote: When adults tell me I have the right to own a gun, all I can hear is my right to own a gun outweighs your student's right to live. All I hear is mine, mine, mine, mine.

Instead of worrying about our AP Gov chapter 16 test, we have to be studying our notes to make sure that our arguments based on politics and political history are watertight. The students at this school have been having debates on guns for what feels like our entire lives. AP Gov had about three debates this year. Some discussions on the subject even occurred during the shooting while students were hiding in the closets. The people involved right now, those who were there, those posting, those tweeting, those doing interviews and talking to people, are being listened to for what feels like the very first time on this topic that has come up over 1,000 times in the past four years alone.

I found out today there's a website shootingtracker.com. Nothing in the title suggests that it is exclusively tracking the USA's shootings and yet does it need to address that? Because Australia had one mass shooting in 1999 in Port Arthur (and after the) massacre introduced gun safety, and it hasn't had one since. Japan has never had a mass shooting. Canada has had three and the UK had one and they both introduced gun control and yet here we are, with websites dedicated to reporting these tragedies so that they can be formulated into statistics for your convenience.

I watched an interview this morning and noticed that one of the questions was, do you think your children will have to go through other school shooter drills? And our response is that our neighbors will not have to go through other school shooter drills. When we've had our say with the government -- and maybe the adults have gotten used to saying 'it is what it is,' but if us students have learned anything, it's that if you don't study, you will fail. And in this case if you actively do nothing, people continually end up dead, so it's time to start doing something.

We are going to be the kids you read about in textbooks. Not because we're going to be another statistic about mass shooting in America, but because, just as David said, we are going to be the last mass shooting. Just like Tinker v. Des Moines, we are going to change the law. That's going to be Marjory Stoneman Douglas in that textbook and it's going to be due to the tireless effort of the school board, the faculty members, the family members and most of all the students. The students who are dead, the students still in the hospital, the student now suffering PTSD, the students who had panic attacks during the vigil because the helicopters would not leave us alone, hovering over the school for 24 hours a day.

There is one tweet I would like to call attention to. So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities again and again. We did, time and time again. Since he was in middle school, it was no surprise to anyone who knew him to hear that he was the shooter. Those talking about how we should have not ostracized him, you didn't know this kid. OK, we did. We know that they are claiming mental health issues, and I am not a psychologist, but we need to pay attention to the fact that this was not just a mental health issue. He would not have harmed that many students with a knife.

And how about we stop blaming the victims for something that was the student's fault, the fault of the people who let him buy the guns in the first place, those at the gun shows, the people who encouraged him to buy accessories for his guns to make them fully automatic, the people who didn't take them away from him when they knew he expressed homicidal tendencies, and I am not talking about the FBI. I'm talking about the people he lived with. I'm talking about the neighbors who saw him outside holding guns.

If the President wants to come up to me and tell me to my face that it was a terrible tragedy and how it should never have happened and maintain telling us how nothing is going to be done about it, I'm going to happily ask him how much money he received from the National Rifle Association.

You want to know something? It doesn't matter, because I already know. Thirty million dollars. And divided by the number of gunshot victims in the United States in the one and one-half months in 2018 alone, that comes out to being $5,800. Is that how much these people are worth to you, Trump? If you don't do anything to prevent this from continuing to occur, that number of gunshot victims will go up and the number that they are worth will go down. And we will be worthless to you.

To every politician who is taking donations from the NRA, shame on you.

(Crowd chants, shame on you.)

If your money was as threatened as us, would your first thought be, how is this going to reflect on my campaign? Which should I choose? Or would you choose us, and if you answered us, will you act like it for once? You know what would be a good way to act like it? I have an example of how to not act like it. In February of 2017, one year ago, President Trump repealed an Obama-era regulation that would have made it easier to block the sale of firearms to people with certain mental illnesses.

From the interactions that I had with the shooter before the shooting and from the information that I currently know about him, I don't really know if he was mentally ill. I wrote this before I heard what Delaney said. Delaney said he was diagnosed. I don't need a psychologist and I don't need to be a psychologist to know that repealing that regulation was a really dumb idea.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa was the sole sponsor on this bill that stops the FBI from performing background checks on people adjudicated to be mentally ill and now he's stating for the record, 'Well, it's a shame the FBI isn't doing background checks on these mentally ill people.' Well, duh. You took that opportunity away last year.

The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and our parents to call BS.Companies trying to make caricatures of the teenagers these days, saying that all we are self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submission when our message doesn't reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call BS. Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call BS. They say tougher guns laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS. That us kids don't know what we're talking about, that we're too young to understand how the government works. We call BS.

If you agree, register to vote. Contact your local congresspeople. Give them a piece of your mind.

(Crowd chants) Throw them out.

Another US Mass Shooting Nothing Will Be Done About To Prevent The Next One

These school shootings are happening so often I barely comment on them anymore. 

This Valentine's Day massacre wasn't conducted by Al Capone's mobsters in a Chicago warehouse.  It was in a Parkland, FL high school by a 19 year old 'white identity extremist' named Nikolas Cruz.

The antidote to stopping them has been obvious to me for a long time. 

*Ban the ownership of assault weapons like AR-15's by civilians
 *Institute instant background checks for anyone wishing to buy a gun tied to the National Crime Database
*Allow the CDC to study the effect of gun violence
*Ban high capacity magazines
*Vote people out of Congress who take NRA money and block any attempts at passing sensible gun control legislation
*Kick the Republicans out of control of Congress and the White House,
*Keep the GOP out of power for the next 30-40 years so we can FIX the gun violence problem 

Lori Alhadeff,  mother of 14 year old Alyssa Alhadeff, one of the 17 people slain in this latest incident, called out Trump on CNN.



How many more kids have to die before something is done about this problem?   Will it take the death of the child of a senior NRA leader?   The death of a GOP congress member's child or a GOP congressmember before that happens?

That's a good question.   But thoughts and prayers damned sure aren't going to stop these mass shootings.  Actions like banning assault weapons will.

Why I Hate HB 901

As the New Year dawned in Texas, another example of idiotic Texas GOP governance took effect as the ammosexuals danced with glee.

The loophole ridden HB 901 took effect that allows the open carry of guns across the state, and is so convoluted it is practically unenforceable.  However, if a business doesn't want open carry handguns on their property, they must post a Section 30.07 sign alerting the gun toters of that fact.

As a TransGriot public service, here's a list of the Houston area establishments that will ban open carry of handguns compiled by Kyle Nielsen, Phaedra Cook and Darla Guillen.

There's also this graphic making the rounds of a card people can leave for business who are trying to straddle the fence between sane Texans and the ammosexuals.  

I know I'm not hanging around any place in which ammosexuals show up with guns and I don't know what their intent is, especially in light of the fact we had a 1991 mass shooting at a Luby's in Killeen. TX.  

I'm also careful when I drive because of the possibility of a road rage incident escalating into gun violence.  Got a reminder of it on New Year's Eve in Denton when 20 year old Sara Mutschlechner, a University of North Texas coed acting as a designated driver for her friends, was shot and later died in a road rage incident.

I also have another reason hate HB 901 and be nervous about its implementation after what recently happened at a Biloxi. MS Waffle House when an ammosexual with a short fuse shot and killed a waitress for telling him to put out his cigarette and all the anti-Black, anti-Muslim, anti-trans, and anti-Latino hatred being stirred up on the GOP presidential nomination trail.

Until all the uncertainty sowed by HB 901 is sorted out by the courts, may be doing a lot more drive through in restaurants that don't have Section 30.07 signs, or frankly, not taking my business there at all.

Archie Dies

One of my childhood pleasures which probably surprised some of my readers, was announcing my love for Archie comics. 

My dormant interest in the Archie comics and the Riverdale gang was reawakened after the six series arc of comics (that I own) in the Life With Archie series launched in 2010 was published which depicted him being married to Veronica and another marriage scenario to Betty.

It was interesting to note in those six issues how his life evolved along different trajectories in both instances based on whether Betty or Veronica was his spouse.

I was also intrigued by issues #608 and 609 in which he and Valerie Smith of Josie and the Pussycats briefly dated and issue #636, the gender swap one in 2012 in which the eternal love triangle between Archie, Betty and Veronica gets gender flipped and it's a female Archina being pursued by Billy and Ronnie.

But hitting the stands today is Life With Archie issue #36 in which our hero is shot while trying to stop an assassination attempt on openly gay  US Senator Kevin Keller.  

Keller is one of the newer characters in the Archie universe. He's a married military vet (issue #16) who is pushing for more gun control after his partner Clay Walker is shot in a robbery attempt
     

Archie unfortunately doesn't survive the shooting and dies.  In Issue #37 the story continues and skips ahead a year as all his friends honor his legacy as the series of comics that feature adult versions of Archie and his pals concludes.

As to who shot Archie?   That will be revealed as well. 

The Life With Archie series touched on the post Riverdale High School lives of our fave characters.  It also tackled more socially relevant storylines and topics that seems at times ripped from the headlines such as Keller's same gender marriage to Clay, the death of beloved teacher Ms. Grundy and sometimes Archie love interest Cheryl Blossom tackling breast cancer and affordable health care.

Now the Archie writers are taking one the issue of gun control and the senseless violence that plagues our society.

Countdown to Fox Noise and the conservafools slamming the issues in 5...4...3...2...1... 

If they haven't sold them out at my fave comics stands, I'll definitely be getting those two issues.

Do Transpeople Need A '2nd Amendment Remedy' To The Anti-Trans Violence Problem?

"It doesn't mean that I advocate violence, but at the same time, I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don't call it violence when it's self-defense, I call it intelligence."-Malcolm X

I'm pondering this quote and the gun debate in the wake of more infuriating news out of Philadelphia of another anti-trans violence incident. 

A gunman forced his way into a trans woman's third floor apartment, pistol-whipped her and shot her in the head.  She fortunately survived it and is recovering at Hahnemann University Hospital.

I stumbled across a January 2009 TransGriot post that I wrote during another wave of anti-trans violence incidents and began to examine once again the question of whether we should consider '2nd Amendment Remedies' to deal with the problem of the out of control anti-trans violence.

I live in Texas which along with 32 other states has an ALEC sponsored Stand Your Ground law I hated before the Trayvon Martin killing and I despise even more today.  My personal philosophy about guns is a mixed one.  

On one hand Malcolm X has a point in the quote I posted at the beginning of this essay.  When you are being repeatedly subjected to near genocidal levels of unprovoked violence, then it is a viable option for the people that unprovoked violence is being aimed at to intelligently consider using violence in self-defense 

Translation:  Bust a cap in 'em, but only in self defense.

But that conflicts with my personal philosophy on guns that primarily mirrors what FoxSports.com columnist Jason Whitlock wrote in a December 2012 column in the wake of the Kasandra Perkins-Jovan Belcher murder-suicide last December. 

"Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it."

I'm quite aware that something has to be done about the unacceptable levels of anti-trans violence disproportionately affecting Latina and African-American trans women.  But I'm also not keen on additions to the over 300 plus million handguns already causing havoc on American streets.

I'm also concerned if we have an instance in which an armed trans woman found herself in a situation in which she shot and killed someone that instigated an unprovoked attack on her and then claimed the Stand Your Ground defense because of justified fear her life was in jeopardy, I submit that jacked up law would work no better for us than it did for Marissa Alexander.

Anti-trans violence is a multifaceted problem requiring a multifaceted solution.   While the gun manufacturers and their NRA shills might be happy to see more trans customers parting with their precious T-bills to buy their instruments of death in designer colors, I'm not. 

But at the same time I'm beyond sick and tired of the long lists of names we read at TDOR's around the world every November.   If the trans-haters out there know there is a possibility their desire to bash or kill a transperson may end up with them taking the long dirt nap instead of the transperson, that's a point in the favor of the trans folks packing heat in whatever color and caliber they desire. 

I'm not going to criticize trans people who believe that 2nd Amendment remedies need to be part of the discussion in terms of the measures we employ in putting a dent in and eventually ending anti-trans violence or who paraphrase the Pink Pistols slogan in that armed transpeople don't get jacked with.

But as I said at the conclusion of the 2009 post and will restate and remix here, I'd much rather see a resolution to the problem of anti-trans violence that doesn't involve busting caps in people and getting concealed carry permits.

But since the trans haters aren't going to renounce violence aimed at us anytime soon, it would be wise for us in the trans community to consider the intelligent use of violence in self defense.

Seriously Gun Nuts? Claiming Arming My Peeps Would Have Prevented Slavery?

The gun nuts keep making our case for sensible gun regulations in the United States with every passing day..

A doozy of a talking point came out of the mouth of Larry Ward, the chairman of something called Gun Appreciation Day, which is ostensibly being held on January 19, the day before before President Obama's second inauguration happens on January 20.  

Note to these history challenged conservafools.   January 19 is also Confederate General Robert E. Lee's birthday, which is celebrated as a holiday in Florida, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Georgia and in Texas as Confederate Heroes Day.

Oops   But the crime against history I'm about to pimp slap is this ludicrous comment from Ward.

"I think Martin Luther King, Jr. would agree with me if he were alive today that if African Americans had been given the right to keep and bear arms from day one of the country's founding, perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our history,"

WTF?  Let's get real for a moment.  The reason you and other white males have such a fetishistic attachment to guns in the United States is because of what your ancestors did to mine during slavery.  

With your looming status as a minority in the US rapidly approaching in 2040 or 2050, you peeps are deathly afraid that once non-white peeps get power, we will do unto you what you did unto all of us.

And let's get back to that jacked up slavery talking point I'm going to have fun eviscerating.  Guns are what allowed you to kidnap Africans and bring them to the Western Hemisphere in the first place.   With slave rebellions a far more frequent occurrence than the 'happy darkie' meme let on, you damned sure didn't want free Blacks to have arms out of fear they would either use them to help free their captive relatives in the Deep South or send them that way in mass quantities to arm rebellious slaves.

Your fear level of armed slave rebellions went up dramatically after the successful Haitian Revolution from 1791-1804 ejected the French from their profitable Saint-Dominigue colony and established the Republic of Haiti.

The anxiety was especially acute in the Deep South in which they feared a successful repeat in the United States of what transpired in Haiti.

My ancestors damned sure did their best to make it happen with multiple slave rebellions in the wake of the successful Haitian one.  The most well known of the slave rebellions of that period was the one triggered by Nat Turner in 1831. . 

Frankly you didn't want to prevent slavery.  It was far too profitable for you and it took a Union victory in the Civil War and the 13th Amendment to end it.

So don't even try to peddle some stank revisionist history like that to attempt to justify your weak position of unfettered gun access.    

True, Guns Don't Kill People But...

TransGriot Note: Been a while since I spotlighted the brilliant commentary of Kat Rose on this blog, and this one definitely needed to be signal boosted in the wake of that jacked up press conference this morning by Wayne LaPierre in which he talked loud but said nothing as usual in the wake of another mass shooting their NRA lobbying paves the way for.

Kat has very definite opinions about that too, but let me give you a taste of her commentary in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting last week that I needed to signal boost.

Despite that, people like the Connecticut shooter(s) aren’t what worry me most.

What does?

Morons.

Morons with machine guns (or any other kind of gun.)

And, no, I don’t mean mass murderers who, after the fact, do suddenly begin to care about what the legal system might do to them and then try to game the system with an insanity plea – and I don’t even mean people who may truly be insane (though they are technically a subset of who I’m talking about.)
I mean morons – the people you, I and everyone know who you would never even let touch the remote control to your television because they’d somehow manage to break the entire system, from the DVR to the dish and right up to the satellite itself…

but who, if they suddenly get a hankerin’ after managing to watch at least part of Sudden Impact before the system crashes via their incompetence with the remote control, can run out and buy and one of them thar big-ass automoatic pistols that Clint used in the movie.

read the rest of 'True Enough, Guns Don't Kill People' at ENDABlog 2.0

Call Me A Flip-Flopper, But I Have Reconsidered And Altered My Position On Guns

TransGriot Note: A must read post from Deep Thought's Eli Blake  

I've been remarkably consistent in my views on guns over the past few decades. Essentially, it has boiled down to the following statement, which I had posted in more places than I can count:

I support your right to own a gun. Any gun.

The Constitutional fact that Americans have the right to be armed aside, I fundamentally believe (as a liberal) that you have the right to read, download, drink, smoke, have sexual activity or whatever as you please as long as you are not harming someone else by it, and therefore also to buy what you please (and if it is a gun, then buy it.) In fact, until recently the debate on guns has been moving further and further to the right, where without changing a single position, I had gone from guns being one issue where I generally agreed with the right (when the debate was about registration and limitations on ownership) to where I was more likely to agree with the left (when the debate had moved past that to trying to force guns into more and more places like public buildings and private businesses over the objections of the business owners.) I summarized this several months ago in this post: The Debate on Guns has been Changing.

Recently though, in light of a spate of deranged gunmen killing large numbers of people, the debate has been moving back the other way. And in theory that would move me back to where I had been focused, against any new restrictions. To restrict individual rights, I believe in a high bar.

That bar has been reached. The slaughter of first grade children at an elementary school yesterday has been the point at which I have to reluctantly agree that the harm to society caused by allowing the ownership of a particular category of weapons-- assault weapons with clips capable of firing large numbers of rounds before reloading, and in rapid succession-- outweighs any good reason one could have for owning one.

And the fact is, this weekend was only a third as bloody as it could have been. In the past 48 hours you didn't read about another school shooting in Bartlesville, Oklahoma because of a brave student informant and an alert school administration, nor about a massacre in a hospital in Alabama this morning because of two alert hospital staff and two police officers, three of whom were wounded but who stopped the gunman before he could shoot anyone else.

You can read the rest of it at his blog

Two Fracking USA Mass Shootings

We always like to brag in the United States when we're number one in the world about something vis a vis other nations, but being number one in the number of people who die due to gun violence is not something to be proud of.

We've had two mass shooting in the States this week.   One was Tuesday at a mall in Clackamas, OR that killed three people and yesterday it was a mass shooting at an elementary school campus in Newtown, CT. that killed 27 people.  20 of the victims were children between the ages of 5-10 along with seven adults.

As someone who is part of a community that continues to experience a gun violence plague, I'm beyond sick and tired of seeing people die because some people have a fetishistic attachment to guns.  

I'm also beyond sick and tired of vanillacentric privileged card carrying NRA gun nuts pointing to the Second Amendment and immediately deploying their 'guns don't kill people' and 'if people were armed, it would have stopped the attack before it happened' spin lines.

Yeah right,.the shooters in the last three incidents were wearing masks and body armor.   There were armed people in the vicinity when former congressmember Gabby Giffords was nearly assassinated in Tucson by Jared Loughner and when James Holmes attacked the Aurora, CO movie theater. 

Someone was even mindnumbingly stupid enough to say that if the kids at the school had been armed it wouldn't have happened.  Don't even insult mine or anyone elses intelligence by trying to peddle that line. 

We always hear about protecting the rights of you gun owners.   How about protecting the rights of us Americans who don't want to own guns, but our safety and security are increasingly threatened by the out of control gun culture.  This is not the Wild Wild West anymore and the United States has a highly competent, well equipped professional army unlike in 1787 when the Constitution was adopted.  Our gun laws need to reflect that.   It's time to deal with the reality this fetishistic gun culture is killing innocent people and making our country less safe.  

And it's not just us liberals complaining about the flood of guns in the US making our streets less safe.   The guns are now spilling over across the Mexican and Canadian borders and negatively impacting their citizens and their nations, too.

It's past time for sensible gun control legislation that balances the 2nd Amendment rights of gun owners with the needs of people who don't want to come near a gun, but have just as much right to have the ability to go about their daily lives without the fear of themselves or their loved ones being shot or killed.

To paraphrase Spock from Star Trek, the needs of many Americans outweigh the needs of a few militant gun owners.

I asked this question when I wrote my post in the wake of the Aurora, CO shooting and it bears repeating once again.

How many more people have to die, be wounded or crippled in the United States, Canada and Mexico before y'all stop tripping and allow some common sense gun laws in this country that ban assault weapons, extended magazine clips and people with mental health issues getting their hands on weapons that kill mass quantities of human beings?

Can somebody in the National Rifle Association answer that question for me?  And this time, I think people in Clackamas, OR and Newtown, CT would be very interested in hearing the answer to that question.