BANG TO SCHOOL! Here's How You Know The School Year Has Begun In America!!!
Vacuous performative thoughts and more empty, spiritless prayers in a lost, violent nation.
Cartoon and photo by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink
By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy (8/5/24)
Thoughts n’ prayers.
Thoughts n’ prayers.
I drew the above cartoon eight years ago, back in 2016. In a nation featuring more than a mass shooting every day, I can’t tell you which shooting prompted the image. I can tell you I have rerun it about a dozen times since on various online venues.
Back in 2022, after the heinous school shooting in Uvalde, Texas where cowardly local and Texas State Police stood by as 19 kids and two teachers were killed and 17 wounded, I asked the local newspaper in my county if they would like to run it for free on their editorial page. The editor gulped and declined my offer. They were too afraid. So I spent $300 for a quarter-page ad under my name featuring the cartoon. To the editor’s credit, she ran it on the page facing the editorial page.
I got a threatening letter. I called the police and asked them to visit the dipwad to inform her that if she ever contacted me again I would file a complaint with the police department and hire a lawyer to sue her in civil court for harassment.
Yesterday, the school year got off to a bang … and bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang … with a mass shooting by a 14-year-old boy who killed two Georgia high school teachers, two students and sent 9 wounded people to the hospital.
The FBI confirmed the shooter had been on its watch list and been interviewed as a potential mass shooter when he was 13. Mental health treatment? In ’Murica? Fergedaboudit!
The school year in America has officially begun.
Thoughts n’ prayers.
Thoughts n’ prayers.
Before becoming a journalist, I was a high school teacher for a couple years. But that was in the mid-70s, long before the 1999 Columbine School shooting in Littleton, Colorado, that kicked off the now well established all-American tradition of school shootings.
In the 36-week 2023 school year there were 38 school shootings.The year before, 51.
I am a gun owner and former hunter. I believe in the Second Amendment but not the macabre perversion it has become where we now see more guns than people in the country and some 387 mass shootings so far this year, with just under four months to go until the end of the year.
The daily firearm death toll ticks relentlessly upward from mass shootings, domestic violence, suicide, crime and the uniquely new American tradition of family annihilation, which involves a family member killing multiple family members. A crime that now happens on average every five days.
Most get little more than passing notice in the news.
Thoughts n’ prayers.
Thoughts n’ prayers.
Yes, yes…all we get is vacuous performative thoughts and more empty, spiritless prayers from cynical, cowardly politicians on the take with the National Rifle Association and piddling about in a lost, violent nation that values the lives of its own children about as much as we value the lives of Palestinian children.
Could we be any sicker?
Thoughts n’ prayers.
Thoughts n’ prayers.
4 Killed, 9 Hospitalized In Shooting At Apalachee High School In Georgia
"Literally no other developed country has anywhere near the level of gun violence we have in this country and it's fucking unacceptable we act like there's nothing we can do." — David Hogg, school shooting survivor and gun reform activist
By Ryan Grenoble
HuffPost (9/4/24)
One person is in custody after multiple law enforcement agencies responded Wednesday to a shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, that killed four people and left nine others hospitalized.
Two of those killed in the shooting were students. The other two were teachers.
Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, told reporters that the suspect, a 14-year-old student, surrendered to a school resource officer. The suspect will be charged with murder, Hosey said.
Sources told CNN earlier Wednesday that about 30 people were injured in the day’s violence, including those who have been transported to hospitals with gunshots.
Investigators said there was no apparent relationship between the suspect and the victims, but that it’s still early in the case and further information may emerge. It’s not yet clear how the suspect might have obtained the firearm or brought it to school.
Neither Hosey nor Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith were prepared to discuss the extent of the injuries at a press conference Wednesday afternoon.
Video from a helicopter operated by Atlanta News First showed at least one person being airlifted from the scene at Apalachee High, with multiple ambulances in the vicinity. Officials told the outlet that the person being airlifted had been taken to Grady Memorial Hospital, a level 1 trauma center in Atlanta.
Ciera Roberts, a spokesperson for Barrow County Schools, told HuffPost that all schools in the district were put on a soft lockdown as soon as Apalachee locked down. Approximately 1,900 students attend the school.
All Barrow County schools will be closed the rest of the week, with grief counselors available “every day this week and thereafter,” Superintendent Dallas LeDuff told reporters.
Smith at times struggled to maintain his composure during the afternoon press conference, telling reporters that as a lifelong Barrow County resident, he never could have anticipated “the pure evil that happened today.”…
And Then We Have This…
Boy, 11, Charged With Murder In Deaths Of Former Louisiana Mayor & His Daughter
Joe Cornelius Sr, 82, and Keisha Miles, 31, were found dead with multiple gunshot wounds on Sunday
By Maya Yang
The Guardian (9/4/24)
An 11-year-old boy has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder after the fatal shootings of a former Louisiana mayor and his daughter.
In a press conference on Tuesday, Jared McIver, police chief of Minden, a small town in north-west Louisiana, said that at about 6.30am on Sunday police responded to reports of a shooting inside a house on Austin Street, according to local reports.
Upon arrival at the scene, police found 82-year-old Joe Cornelius Sr and 31-year old Keisha Miles dead with multiple gunshot wounds. They also found two hidden handguns with empty magazines. McIver said the calibers matched the shell casings that were found at the scene.
One neighbor told KSLA “About eight gunshots. Pow, pow, pow and then pow, pow, pow.” …
Thoughts n’ prayers.
Thoughts n’ prayers.
I remember when you first drew this and the incident where you were threatened. Threatened because you pointed out the insanity. George Carlin’s brilliant observation: The far right is VERY concerned about life when the baby is inside the womb … but once it pops out, ‘fuck it’ … unless there is a war of course then we need them again and cry when they die.” This kid on a watch list at age 13. Yesterday the cops so proud of themselves and already announcing he will be tried as an adult. Where is the sadness about how this boy reached this point? The universe is crying out through the children. Children killing children My god we are a sick fucking nation.
It's been 25 years since Columbine.
(sarcastically)
Look how far we've come as a nation.