9 June 2022

Uvalde, Texas school shooting victim Maite Rodriguez, who died at age 10, was wearing green Converse shoes with a heart drawn on them when she died.  It was the only way they could identify her body. She was a lover of animals and the environment and dreamed of becoming a marine biologist.  Other murdered children could only be identified by DNA because their bodies were so destroyed.

Anderson Cooper said recently that he thinks maybe the reporters are being too "clean" with coverage of these mass murders.  Maybe if people could actually see what a mass murder scene looks like (like seeing such scenes in the Vietnam war helped to shorten the war), Republicans would have different thoughts about gun control.

The bullet from an AR-15 is relatively small, but it leaves the muzzle at three times the speed of a handgun bullet. It has so much energy that it can disintegrate three inches of leg bone. "It would just turn it to dust," says Donald Jenkins, a trauma surgeon at University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. If it hits the liver, "the liver looks like a jello mold that's been dropped on the floor." And the exit wound can be a nasty, jagged hole the size of an orange.

Mortuary workers trying to clean the bodies of the children up for display in Uvalde say that they couldn't just use make up, like they would with a normal death  "They needed extensive restoration. Why? Due to the exceptionally large exit wounds of an AR-15 rifle. Most of the bodies so mutilated that only DNA test[s] and green Converse could identify 'em."

A doctor who saw two of the children at the hospital described....

Two children whose bodies had been pulverized by bullets fired at them decapitated, whose flesh had been ripped apart, that the only clue of their identities was the blood-spattered cartoon clothes clinging to them, clinging for life and finding none."

The gun was invented because the military felt that the weapons they were using in Vietnam were not strong enough and they wanted something that did greater damage. The battlefield testimonials of the AK-15 are horrific: One describes an Army Ranger killing a Viet Cong soldier at about 15 meters with a three-round burst. "One round in the head took it completely off," it reads. "Another in the right arm, took it completely off, too. One round hit him in the right side, causing a hole about five inches in diameter." Each shot was a killer: "Any one of the three would have caused death."

Why does anyone need an AK-15 in middle America?  Right wing gun owners interviewed today say it's because they kill raccoons, prairie dogs and feral pigs and they need the guns.  Is the AK-15 the only gun which will kill these pests?

Today a bipartisan group is discussing possibly changing gun rules, but the provisions not being discussed are:  expanded background checks, universal background checks, assault weapons ban, raising the buying age of semi-automatic rifles from 18 to 21 and restricting high capacity magazines.  I'm not sure what that leaves, and if they come up with anything will it even be discussed?  Republicans have managed to keep all discussion from the floor of the Senate so no votes need to be recorded.

I can't understand what is so bad about allowing a kid, too young to buy a beer, to buy an assault rifle.  What sacrosanct right in the constitution are we destroying by making that small rule?  What's wrong with background checks?  80-90% of Americans, including a lot of NRA members, want these rules to be made, yet they aren't. 

Is Uvalde, like Sandy Hook and other massacres, going to be one of those events that cause a lot of talk and a lot of argument and eventually fades into the background until the next massacre?  (Of course the Gun Violence Archive said there were 15 mass shootings between 5 p.m. on Friday and 5 a.m. on Tuesday on the Memorial Day weekend.  They have become so common they didn't even make headlines.  9 people were killed and several others wounded.)

When are our Republican senators going to start following the desires of their constituents rather than the desires of the gun lobbyists.  And how long before another Uvalde if we keep letting  18 year olds go crazy with the AK-15.