Mine, mine, mine, mine
by Tom Sullivan
A gunman entered her high school on Valentine's Day and killed seventeen of her classmates. Wiping back tears, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Emma Gonzales held back nothing else in challenging President Trump, national politicians, and the National Rifle Association in a powerful speech to an anti-gun rally in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on Saturday.
If there is one thing teenagers' eyes see better than adults', it is hypocrisy. Their tolerance for it is lower too.
Gonzales told the crowd:
In February of 2017, one year ago, President Trump repealed an Obama-era regulation that would have made it easier to block the sale of firearms to people with certain mental illnesses.Grassley said after the Florida shootings, "We have not done a very good job of making sure that people that have mental reasons for not being able to handle a gun getting their name into the FBI files and we need to concentrate on that."
From the interactions that I had with the shooter before the shooting and from the information that I currently know about him, I don't really know if he was mentally ill. I wrote this before I heard what Delaney said. Delaney said he was diagnosed. I don't need a psychologist and I don't need to be a psychologist to know that repealing that regulation was a really dumb idea.
Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa was the sole sponsor on this bill that stops the FBI from performing background checks on people adjudicated to be mentally ill and now he's stating for the record, 'Well, it's a shame the FBI isn't doing background checks on these mentally ill people.' Well, duh. You took that opportunity away last year.
I read something very powerful to me today. It was from the point of view of a teacher. And I quote: When adults tell me I have the right to own a gun, all I can hear is my right to own a gun outweighs your student's right to live. All I hear is mine, mine, mine, mine.Contrast that with the comments of the conservative Australian rancher Jon Oliver spoke with in 2013. He did not want to part with his weapons when the government banned them after the Port Arthur massacre, "But ... I felt as if I had a bit of a duty to the rest of our society." [timestamp 3:32]