"For any American who is worried about this country, who feels our core values are slipping away, who believes something has to be done to change the direction of our nation before all is lost -- the NRA is your refuge It is your place to stand and fight with Americans just like you, for all that is good and right." Wayne La Pierre, NRA CEO.
For some of us, Wayne, the NRA is really not the symbol of all that is good and right in America.
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Schmid Tool and WEE1 Tactical, manufacturers that specialize in the AR-15 assault style rifle, so popular in American mass shootings, are now offering the JR-15, a "youth training rifle" designed to look, feel and operate just like Mom and Dad's gun.
Gun violence became the leading cause of death for young children and teenagers in the US in 2020, "outscoring" car accidents for the first time. I don't think the JR-15 is gonna help the situation.
God's Country, 2023
Cut & paste paper collage (vintage women's magazines, newspaper). 10x10"
Every month, approximately 70 women in the US are shot and killed by an intimate partner (Everytownresearch.org). And every day, guns are used to threaten, coerce, control, wound, and kill American women: a woman is five times more likely to be murdered if her abuser has access to a gun (Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions).
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"To stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun," says NRA's Wayne LaPierre, one week after the Newtown, CT school murders.
I dunno, Wayne, didn't really work like that in Uvalde, TX, where pretty much the entire police force just stood outside holding their guns for a LONG TIME, and saved no one.
"The problem isn't guns, it's EVIL" roared Senator Ted Cruz as he comforted the NRA (and his gun-owning donors) at their annual meeting not long after the 2022 Uvalde school shooting in which 19 children and 2 teachers were shot dead. Well, yeah, sure, I guess so.
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It's January, dark time. Short days, cold days, alone time. I'm fine, but maybe not everybody is...
2023
Welcome, new year, I greet you with open arms
and side eye.
I
resolve to make no resolutions, but predictions
must be made.
Long
furry catkins will continue to drip down, but the forest
will be on the move.
Snow
will continue to fall on cracked soil, but the ground will heave and splinter,
if not this year,
then soon.
Men
and women will comfort each other and pray for better but
an angry young man will still raise
his long gun and aim it at blacks, or muslims, or children.
You
will count those you love on the fingers of one hand, but, by the end of the
year,
you will still be able to make a
fist.
And
in the watery depths, the snow crabs will continue to eat their own young, but,
for a while at least,
there will be fishing.
Happy new year.
LMS
1/2/23
