Content warning: guns and mutilation.
When I was nine years old, Mom opened a cooler in the car, hauled a pork shoulder joint onto a meat hook and a chain, then hung it from a tree out in the middle-of-nowhere New Mexico.
I was already enrolled in the local NRA gun safety classes. We were a gun-owning family in a gun-heavy rural area of the American Southwest. We were hunters, Republicans, and business owners with property to protect.*
“I want you to see this,” Mom told me, as she waved me off to a safe distance. She had on earplugs, safety goggles, and an old white sheet draped around her like a combo veil and apron.
Then she blasted that pork shoulder from only a foot away with our 12-gauge shotgun.
You don’t un-see that damage. Pink mist exploding outward. Shards of bone scattered for a few yards. Splatters of red glistening on rocks and grass. What was left on the meat hook had a huge hole blown the front left side.
The sheet had pink and red sprays on it.
She pointed at the meat on the hook. “Now think of that as a person. This is what guns can do,” she told me as we cleaned up and the gun cooled off.
That was ‘just’ a shotgun with one shell loaded.
Not an automatic weapon with a high firing rate and overstuffed magazines of bullets.
I will get back to this.
* We had been robbed, but not generally by the hardworking Latino migrants we routinely helped avoid La Migra. The last people to try it, a few years before my time, were the good Republican sons of a local school official. They did jail time. That feud made my school years *hell*.
But I sure didn’t show up with a knife or a gun to even the score.
***
Nineteen kids dead and counting in Uvalde, Texas. Three adults and counting.
Another ‘school shooting’ aka domestic terrorist attack.
Young gunman, newly purchased weapons of war, prior indications of mental instability.
We are hearing all the excuses all over again.
We see the overt effects of pervasive racism, too. Presumably Latino gunman shot and killed. Numerous White gunmen arrested and handled solicitously by law enforcement.
This *is* a mental health issue: y’all keep letting unstable idiots buy & use WEAPONS OF WAR.
Nobody sane and responsible hunts with assault weapons & 100-round magazines. Those ruin the meat, bones, and hides.
These weapons are meant to *kill humans*.
I’d be an absolute hypocrite if I said there is no use for these weapons anytime. There is. We see this in Ukraine.
Normal civilians do not need them in a functioning democracy.
If militants think their assault weapons will help them in a Second Civil War against the trained and *very well equipped* might of the United States military…
Sit the hell down, son, your Prepper fantasy will get you killed. And your post-Apocalypse reality would make you suicide quickly.
There are domestic terrorists embedded in the US military, certainly. There are a *lot more* true patriots who will throw down with them in a second, and *win*.
Don’t listen to chickenhawk ‘militant’ lawmakers and pundits who never served in the military (Trump Family, I’m lookin’ at you).
We need an Emmett Till moment again.
We need an anguished parent to make the horrible sacrifice and release color images of what automatic and semiautomatic high-rate-of-fire guns do to human flesh and bone.
To children.
Some of these new victims will only be identified by clothing and/or DNA.
Their families will have to hide their graves from defilement by conservative fringe whackjobs who believe these murdered kids didn’t even exist. These families may even have to flee their homes.
The NRA & its GOP supporters have bloodstained hands. Again.
The US needs assault weapon bans (we had them once AND they worked) and effective gun registration.
We don’t need more gun-worshipping cults.