(Dobbs) No End In Sight For Slaughters Like Yesterday's In Highland Park
It could be where any of us lives, tomorrow.
Although I live in Colorado, this could be— and after an internet search of newspapers around the nation, it is— this morning’s front page in just about every city and town in America. It is about what happened yesterday in Highland Park, Illinois, but it’s also about what can happen tomorrow in any other city and town in America.
As if that’s not shocking enough, The New York Times has a story today headlined, “The attack in Highland Park was not the only shooting over a violent holiday weekend.” In fact Highland Park was only one of two mass shootings in the Chicago area alone. “As of early Monday morning,” The Times reports, “at least 57 people had been shot in Chicago over the Fourth of July weekend, nine of them fatally.” That does not even include the six poor souls slaughtered at the parade in Highland Park.
But there’s more: there were shootings in Philadelphia; Minneapolis; Sacramento; Kansas City; Richmond, Virginia; Kenosha, Wisconsin. And still more in Mullins, South Carolina; Tacoma, Washington; Manassas, Virginia; Clinton, North Carolina; Haltom City, Texas; and New York City.
And it’s not just this holiday weekend. It’s this summer season… so far.
Of course if history is any guide, the gun lobby will point to Highland Park and say, “Illinois has some of the strictest gun regulations in the nation: safe storage requirements, red flag warnings, universal background checks. See where gun control got them? A mass shooting on Independence Day.”
What it then will say is, “If more citizens had been armed, this would have been prevented.” As if anyone was likely to identify the madman on the rooftop— and not get shot themselves— in the seconds it took him to mow his victims down.
Maybe more important, what it will conveniently fail to point out is, it does not have an assault weapons ban, which the NRA and all its enablers fight tooth and nail. The rifle the gunman fired from a rooftop caused what a doctor on the scene described as “wartime injuries.” He said victims were “blown up by that gunfire… blown up.”
Buffalo, Uvalde, now Highland Park. A nightclub in Orlando, a Walmart in El Paso, a theater in Aurora, a party in San Bernardino, a concert in Las Vegas. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Sandy Hook Elementary, Columbine.
When will it end?
If the gun nuts have their way, never.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Unfortunately correct
To the NRA is Ill has strict gun laws In and Wisconsin do not
If intent on proving you were once alive buy a gun next door drive and kill