Welcome Back

The greeting was written in chalk on the sidewalk outside of P.S. 102.

“Welcome back,” it said.

This was the first day of school in New York and the buildings were gussied up to encourage returning students and put a positive spin on the least favorite day of a kid’s life. At least, it was for me.

Another message in chalk encouraged students to “Dream Big.”

A wonderful sentiment, but I couldn’t help thinking about a school in Georgia where chalk was probably being used to draw body outlines and the only dream was the living nightmare of yet another mass shooting in America.

By now, I’m sure we all know about the massacre at Apalachee High School, where a student at the Atlanta area school killed four people—two students and two teachers—using the mass shooter’s special: a “black semi-automatic AR-15 style rifle.”

Gee, where have I heard about this weapon before? Oh, yeah, that’s right—at just about every other mass shooting in this demented country.

Welcome to America, where students are taught the three Rs: Reading, wRiting, and Running for your life.

Honestly, I wasn’t going to write about this incident. I’ve written so many posts about mass shootings over the years that I didn’t see in the point in cranking yet another one.

Then I switched on the TV and saw the images of the latest victims and a still shot of candles, apparently marking yet another candlelight vigil for this latest group of innocent victims.

Of course, I thought, candles, fucking candles. That’ll fix everything. Why didn’t I think of that?

'His Final Breaths'

Yes, it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness, but we’re dealing with a different breed of darkness here.

This is the darkness of ignorance, hate, and cowardice, as gutless politicians who know goddamn good and well that there are too many guns in this country do the Second Amendment charade in a shameless bid to get votes. There's no candle bright enough to pierce this gloom.

This morning I watched a young girl tell a local news station that she had seen her teacher shot to death, and how she texted her sisters that she loved them, saying “there’s somebody here with a gun.”

“He was trying to crawl back to us,” another student told ABC News. ... we just think he was trying to get to us...And then we hear his final breaths."

Now we have more traumatized children to add to the endless list of survivors who’ve witnessed things no human being should ever see.

The 14-year-old suspect is being charged as an adult, and his father faces four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children.

Investigators said the father knowingly allowed his son possess a weapon and the suspect’s grandfather said yhe guy had been verbally abusive to the suspect.

“He was just a good kid, but he lived in an environment that was hostile,” the grandfather told CNN.

So, yet another damaged, unstable individual had easy access to horrifying weapons of war. What could possibly go wrong?

There have been more than 385 mass shootings across the U.S. so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are injured or killed.

For each of the last four years there have been more than 600 mass shootings - almost two a day on average. More than 50 people are killed each day by a firearm in this country.

And last year Georgia became the 25th in the nation to eliminate the need for a permit to conceal or openly carry a firearm. The law means any citizen of that state has the right to carry a firearm without a license or a permit.

The Facts of Life

Last week, a Chicago man shot four people to death who were sleeping on a train. And on Saturday, five people were shot and seriously injured on I-75 in Kentucky on Saturday. Area residents were encouraged to “stay vigilant.”

Feel like lighting some candles?

Of course, nothing’s going to change. Americans will continue to accept these terrible incidents the way they accept tornadoes, floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters that cannot prevented, only endured.

JD Vance, the hedge fund hillbilly and extremely weird Republican vice-presential candidate, voiced regret that school shootings had “become a fact of life” in the U.S.

Yes, they have, but only because schmucks like Just Deny Vance keep peddling these lies to score political points.

People have killing each other long before we had guns, and absolutely no one thinks we’re going to eliminate murder with tougher gun laws. But we don’t have to make it so easy.

One of the Apalachee High School students who saw her teacher shot to death said she's not sure she'll ever be able to walk down the hallway or sit in a classroom at her school again.

But she still plans to go into law enforcement when she gets older because she wants to help people.

I wish her nothing but the best. All children should dream big. But the biggest dream in America is believing that these mass shootings will ever end.