Students Lobby For Gun Control - Republicans Hatch A Conspiracy

Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel visits 15 YO
Florida shooting survivor Anthony Borges on Sunday 

Today marks one week since 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz left 17 students and faculty members dead during a deadly shooting rampage - one of 34 mass shootings in the United States in 2018.

While it's been seven days since Cruz fired more than a 100 rounds into classrooms and hallways in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, today marks a monumental shift in the polarizing debate over gun control in America.

For most Americans who listened to some of the emotionally-wrenching testimony and comments earlier today at the White House in what was described as a listening session, it was hard not be affected by their words and the emotion in their voices.


With Republican lawmakers on the national and state level being eviscerated by mainstream popular opinion during the past week because of their willingness to place their slavish obedience to NRA gun money and archaic interpretations of the 2nd Amendment over public safety and reason, GOP leaders were forced to do something Wednesday they rarely do.

Listen to advocates of gun control as well as some of the victims and relatives of victims of the epic gun violence (there were 15,593 gun deaths in America in 2017) that is ripping this country apart.

If you didn't get a chance to hear the anguish and anger of Andrew Pollack, the only parent of one of the 17 killed in Parkland, Florida to attend the White House event earlier yesterday, take a couple minutes to check out Julie Hirschfeld Davis' New York Times article and watch the 27-second clip of him laying Trump out, or read his comments.

Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was one of the 17 killed last Wednesday, asked the question that so many different Americans of different ages, backgrounds, ethnicities and faiths have wanted to ask some of the Republican politicians who now control all three branches of the federal government:

"How many schools, how many children have to get shot?"

Thousands of students rallied outside the state
capitol building in Tallahassee, Florida

18-year-old Samuel Zeif, a student who survived the shooting last week but lost his best friend, asked Trump how it was that someone can still just basically walk into a store in Florida and purchase an AR-15 after the deaths in Columbine and Sandy Hook.

He's one of many Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS students who have appeared on mainstream national news outlets or social media to express outrage and dismay over notoriously lax gun laws.


Intentionally-watered down Florida gun control laws that gave us "Stand Your Ground"  and allowed a disturbed individual like Nikolas Cruz to purchase an AR-15, large amounts of ammunition and tactical vests without any red flags popping up.

According to a source that spoke with CNN, investigators say that Cruz purchased at least 10 different rifles; but his adopted parents claim there was nothing unusual about his behavior.

Sadly what's not unusual is the reaction of many conservative far-right extremists, who've taken to social media in droves to denounce the MSDHS students as part of some kind of liberal plot to strip away the rights of gun owners.

It's actually remarkable to watch the loony "pizza-gate" faction of the right-wing conspiracy troll movement become enraged by high school students who just survived the 9th worst mass shooting in U.S. history exercising their 1st Amendment right to free speech.

Remember, these are the same folks who fetishize the 2nd Amendment as if it was hewn into rock by a deity that sanctions the slaughter of thousands of Americans each year.

Republican Florida political aide Ben Kelly fired
for forwarding right-wing conspiracy theories 

Don't think that kind of right-wing nutbaggery was limited to anonymous trolls hanging around in the murky corners of Reddit conservative conspiracy porn pages either.

As Tampa Bay Times reporter Alex Leary reported yesterday, Benjamin Kelly, the district secretary for Republican Florida state legislator Shawn Harrison, was fired after he claimed that MSDHS students Emma Gonzales and David Hogg were not students at the school but "actors that travel to various crisis when they happen." 

Both students, survivors of the shooting, have appeared on TV frequently in the past few days calling for stiffer gun control laws.

So trolls started the rumor that they were actors paid by left-wing gun control advocates and immediately started demonizing them - sound like a familiar tactic?

Frankly that's is right down there with Alex Jones' wacky claims that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged.

If you can stomach it, check out Travis Andrews and Samantha Schmidt's Washington Post article (reprinted in the Chicago Tribune), which offers a sampling of the right-wing sleaze bag all stars who came out of the woodwork to fan the flames of fake conservative conspiracy theories.

Dinesh D'Souza kibittzing with Steve Bannon

Including ex-Fox News serial sexual harasser Bill O'Reilly and the fake-Christian conservative adulterer Dinesh D'Souza.

Whose windbag conservative pseudo-intellectualism has long since been relegated to the fringes of the Republican Party.

Why would a guy with a life-long Ronald Regan fetish take to social media to dance by the fire of a loony 3rd rate conspiracy theory?

Now that there's no Obama for D'Souza to bash, perhaps he was desperate to kick up a fuss and earn some street cred with the Trump-happy alt-right movement that ironically sees him as a dark-skinned foreign threat.

D'Souza had the gall to to use his Twitter account to mock MSDHS high school students who travelled to the Florida state capitol building to spend the day furiously lobbying over 70 different state lawmakers to enact stiffer gun control laws.

In an effort to show who's the adult and who's the child, when the Florida state House voted down a measure to debate a bill that would ban assault weapons, D'Souza gleefully mocked the high school students who had the guts to try and influence the political process. 

Sadly, these shameless conservative attacks on these high school students (who have the nerve not to want to be shot and killed in their own school because of shitty gun control laws) were not to promote a rational policy position or anything, or offer substantive debate on the merits of the 2nd Amendment.

No, it was just to try and paint high school students who witnessed 17 classmates gunned down in cold blood in the halls of their school seven days ago as liars and opportunists.

Ladies and gents, I give you the modern Republican Party; whose tone-deaf actions in Florida over the past couple days probably just recruited a whole new generation of Democrats.

Waiting For Republicans - The Slaughter Continues

Accused killer Nikolas Cruz at his arraignment

Trump's live comments on Thursday in the wake of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida seemed like more of the same old useless bunk that most Republican politicians repeat in the wake of the numerous mass shootings that now take place with alarming regularity in America.

Republican lawmakers have controlled the House of Representatives for seven years, and they haven't passed a single piece of legislation that would help to curb the epidemic of gun violence in America.

Not one single law. Not so much as a single bill. Nothing.

Instead of the action outraged Americans from all all over the country are demanding, all we're getting from apathetic Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill is that contrived, mournful shaking of their heads and collective shrugging of their shoulders - like they have no power to do anything.

It's as if they're channeling the characters Vladimir and Estragon, from the influential post-WWII play written by Samuel Beckett back in 1948, Waiting For Godot, wringing their hands in hopeless despair repeating the phrase "Nothing to be done!"

Instead of waiting for Godot, Republican lawmakers, already nervous about the upcoming midterm elections in November, are awkwardly doing the bidding of the National Rifle Association and waiting for the outrage over 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz gunning down 17 innocent people in a Florida High School (with an AR-15 assault rifle he purchased legally) to simply go away.

What's interesting is that both Trump and his sycophant Attorney General-lackey Jeff Sessions both tossed around tough-talking dog-whistle phrases about "having the back of law enforcement" during the 2016 presidential campaign and the subsequent shaky first year in office.

Frequently vilifying President Obama while presenting themselves as saviors of law enforcement.

Trump endorsing police brutality in front of members
of the Long Island PD back in July, 2017

One of Sessions' very first policy statements after his nomination to head the Justice Department was passed by the Senate was to reverse the many consent agreements between the DOJ and local police departments.

Police departments across the country in places like Chicago, Baltimore and Ferguson with proven histories of racially-biased policing practices.

Many cops favored those DOJ consent decrees to enact long-needed reforms.

Even though the DOJ itself had spent time and money compiling data showing that such decrees were needed to reestablish trust between local police departments and the communities they serve, Sessions' bizarre rationale for revoking them was that reversing these agreements, drafted under the Obama administration when Eric Holder was attorney general, would actually make it easier for members of local law enforcement to do their jobs.

As if police departments being held to the standards spelled out in the Constitution was some kind of annoying burden imposed on cops by President Obama out of spite.

Last July, Fake President travelled out to Long Island, New York to trumpet his supposed adoration of cops to try and bolster public support for his irrational xenophobic hatred of immigrants by trying to link them to the El Salvadoran gang MS-13.

Remember Trump standing in front of members of the Long Island Police Department and basically endorsing the use of excessive physical force against suspects in custody?

Trump and Sessions were both big on painting themselves as big supporters of cops and "law and order" as a convenient dog-whistle policy stance to rally their base of hyper-conservative supporters.

But as far as gun control is concerned, are they really supporting members of law enforcement, or the National Rifle Association's pro-gun industry agenda?

Take a look at the detailed list of IACP Policy Priorities For the 115th Congress as clearly spelled out by the International Association of Chiefs of Police founded back in 1893.

Under the section titled "Reduce Firearms Violence and Target Illegal Guns", the IACP states that "A comprehensive approach is needed in order to prevent further gun violence in our communities."

Among the actions steps listed:

"Support legislation that expands background checks, and require background checks for all firearms purchases."   

And "Oppose any legislation that would limit or reduce the ability of U.S. law enforcement agencies to combat the sale of illegal guns."


It's hard to sift through the scores of scandals, firings and tweets, but try and flash back to Trump's first days in office.

One of the very first bills that he signed into law within the first thirty days of his inauguration last February was an NRA-backed law that rolled back an executive order signed by President Obama that would have made it harder for Americans with mental illnesses or those deemed unfit to handle their own finances who receive Social Security checks to obtain firearms.

As Ali Vitali reported for NBC News last February, "President Barack Obama recommended the now-nullified regulation in a 2013 memo following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School which left 20 first graders and six others dead. The measure sought to block some people with severe mental health problems from buying guns."

Yet yesterday, a subdued, almost monotone Trump, obviously reading off a teleprompter, somberly invoked "mental illness" as the culprit in the shooting deaths of 17 innocent people by Nikolas Cruz in Florida.

He didn't even mention the words "gun laws" - like the AR-15 (pictured above) with it's rapid-fire technology and high capacity magazines had nothing to do with it.

In that same NRA-approved statement, Trump made a bunch of totally half-ass empty promises to work with members of federal, state and local officials to tackle the problem of mental illness, blah-blah, blah.

Terrified students comfort one another after being
released from Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS 

What a bunch of contrived, hypocritical horse shit.

Trump is the same spineless clown who's spent three years working with heartless right-wing Republican zealots in congress to vilify and repeal the Affordable Care Act - which mandated that insurance companies provide access to treatment for mental health conditions

Frankly I find it an insult that Trump had the nerve to try and use a press conference to reassure terrified students and teachers in schools across the U.S. that he's working to keep them safe.

Since his inauguration, when he ranted incoherently about "carnage" in America, he's shown himself to be nothing but an ignorant lackey of the NRA lobbyists who pumped millions into his presidential campaign.

Apparently the same K-Street gun lobby bozos who draft the text of his comments whenever another mass shooting takes place - so a contrite Trump can place the blame not on the almost unrestricted access to firearms, but on mental illness. "Nothing to be done!"

As if the guns used in these mass shootings are somehow like an innocent bystander that had nothing to do with anything.

To paraphrase some of the thousands of comments I've read on social media in the past 48 hours, there's no sense even waiting for Republican legislators in Congress to draft laws that would prevent a white supremacist like Nikolas Cruz from walking into a store and buying an AR-15 and a bunch of ammo.

MSD High School assistant football coach Aaron
Feis who died shielding students from gunfire

Thanks to Republican state legislators and the NRA, any 18-year-old in Florida can buy an AR-15 - it's perfectly legal - they can't buy a bottle of vodka but they can purchase the undisputed weapon of choice for mass shooters.

27 people (including shooter Adam Lanza) died at Sandy Hook Elementary and in Newton, Connecticut on December 14, 2012, Republicans who controlled the House did nothing.

49 people were killed on June 12, 2016 when Omar Siddiqui Mateen went on a shooting spree at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Republicans who controlled the House offered "prayers" but did nothing to pass a law restricting firearms access.

58 were killed and almost 500 injured back on October 1, 2017 when Stephen Paddock began firing on concertgoers from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.

In response the Republicans who control the House, the federal legislative body tasked by the U.S. Constitution with writing laws to protect the American people, did nothing.

The only way to mobilize and follow the recommendations of organizations like the International Association of Chiefs of Police to enact reasonable restrictions on dangerous firearms like the AR-15 and components like bump stocks and high-capacity magazines is to be registered to vote in November.

When those who are feeling powerless right now will be empowered to tell lawmakers who've done nothing in the face of the unprecedented gun violence happening in American schools, churches, malls, businesses, streets, concerts and homes, exactly what you think about their apathy, silence and prayers.

In the meantime, just remember there's so sense in waiting for Republican legislators who control which bills get to the floor to be debated or voted on to act.

That's like Waiting For Godot - they'll never show up.