Not Really Talking About It...

After Sandy Hook I decided I was done talking about gun control. I was done arguing with people that there were simple, common sense precautions that could be taken. I was over arguing how much more regulation and training we require for cars than we do guns. All of it. Done.

This year the survivors of Sandy Hook are freshman in college and there have been a few retrospectives on their lives and also what changes haven't happened since Sandy Hook as far as our gun culture goes.

And all I could think is...Survivors of kindergarten. That shouldn't be a thing. We shouldn't ever refer to someone as having survived kindergarten. Not as in literal survival. As in a lot of your classmates died. Kindergarten should be referred to as something you did, not something you survived.

A few weeks ago a CEO for a company was shot. There was a massive, and massively expensive manhunt. Giant reward offered. Tons of talking heads on TV wringing their hands about how awful it was. CEOs of other companies looking at extra security. Everyone trying to figure out what caused it.

I mean, aside from those of us who knew even before reading the shooter's manifesto what was most likely the cause.

Anyone who read any of the comments under posts about the shooting could tell you the cause.

The number of horrific stories about being screwed over financially and physically from insurance companies should have clued in the talking heads. People have died after being denied care their doctor's recommended but the insurance company wouldn't cover. People have had to declare bankruptcy when insurance didn't cover the expenses they had to incur to stay healthy. People continue to die and to go broke and the system that that guy was in charge of was using an AI to review cases. An AI he knew had a 90% error rate. People were denied things that they shouldn't have been, delaying treatment they needed while it was appealed. And they knew it was most likely due to an error in their program. They viewed it as a benefit. Delay, deny, defend.

But the talking heads all wanted to talk about how it wasn't okay for anyone to understand why the shooting happened. After all an innocent millionaire was gunned down. This was important. Millionaires shouldn't be in danger just walking down to the street to a conference where they were going to celebrate how much money they made by denying health coverage to Americans who needed it.

Yesterday there was another school shooting. Another. Not another one since Sandy Hook. Another one this year. We have so many that they aren't the top news story when they happen anymore. Mass shootings have to be MASSIVE shootings for it to become top news. This wasn't. The usual thoughts and prayers went out and the far right is trying to convince people that the shooter was trans, because of course they are.

But there won't be a lot of hand wringing about innocents being gunned down. About how something has to be done. How we need to stem the flow of guns into the population. Because we don't care. Not really. We love our guns and our gun rhetoric more than we love our children. Sandy Hook proved that. And nothing has changed since.

So, yeah, I'm not really talking about it.

There is no point.