Six months and a shitload of thoughts and prayers later...

A classroomful of fourth-graders dead in Uvalde.

Grocery shoppers gunned down in Buffalo.

Y'know, I grew up puzzled by how the German people could have allowed the Holocaust to happen. How could they not have reacted, stopped what was happening right before their eyes?

How could good Germans be so indifferent to death?

I'm afraid we no longer have to ask the Germans. We can simply ask each other.

This column was published six months ago...the only thing that's changed is the death toll.

Refuse to give up the outrage

I refuse to give up the outrage.

Four of our kids left for school Tuesday morning. They would be shot to death before they got home.

Our kids. They might have lived in Oxford, Mich., but they’re still our kids. They’re all our kids.

And we’re letting them get killed.

Mention Columbine and everyone knows what you’re talking about. April 20, 1999. Two kids shot up their high school. The whole country was shocked.

Nowadays we don’t shock so easily. The killings at Oxford High are already yesterday’s news.

We ought to be ashamed of that.

Our kids are getting killed and we’re not doing a damn thing to stop it.

We like to believe our kids are safe when we send them off to school, and, for the most part, they are. But in the years since Columbine 298 schools have rang with gunfire; 351 people were hit and survived; 157 of our children were shot to death, leaving 278,000 of their friends and classmates to mourn.

Our kids are being shot and we’re letting it happen … no, worse … helping it happen.

How do you think the kids are getting the guns? Getting the bullets?

We’re buying them for them. Yeah, us supposed grownups. It’s our constitutional right, we say. We’re gonna protect ourselves. Protect our families. Protect our kids.

The 9mm SIG Sauer Ethan Crumbly pulled out of his backpack in the boys’ room at Oxford High was bought by his father four days before the 15-year-old sophomore stepped into the hallway, unleashed more than 30 rounds in five minutes. Seven wounded. Four of his schoolmates dead.

So tell me, who did that gun protect?

The average age of a school shooter is 16. Those guns – 85 percent of them – are bought by parents, friends or relatives – legally, like Ethan’s dad.

And four days later, four more kids are dead. Shot to death. With a legal gun.

Like 153 others since the shooting at Columbine shocked the nation.

Shooting. That’s a key word here. It’s a word my old editor would tell me to keep high in the lead. It’s the key fact, overshadowing all else. All of these people were shot – it is the common element in each and every one of these deaths. It’s the thing that ties them all together. Gunfire was the one thing that made them all possible.

It was the gun, it was the bullets that made those deaths possible. No misfit kid armed with a baseball bat, a crossbow or even a samurai sword has the power inflict the carnage given him by a 9mm and a pocketful of 15-round clips. True enough, people kill people, but a gun in the hand makes them ever-so-much better at it.

And let’s not have anybody spout some silly hoo-ha about cars killing people… Yeah, it only takes a twist of the wheel to turn an auto into a weapon, but until the day every gun and gun owner is registered and licensed with the state, every gun owner is required to carry liability insurance on their firearm, and every gun owner is required to be trained, tested and licensed, and when the average price of a new gun is about $45,000 (the average price of a new car in 2021 according to the Kelly Blue Book), and when a kid can walk into school with the family car stuffed in his backpack… well, you get the idea.

And it takes a perverse and willful act to turn a car into a deadly weapon. A gun’s sole intended function is to be a deadly weapon.

By the way, there are about 279 million motor vehicles of all kinds out on America’s streets…there are more than 393 million guns.  

So far this year, those guns have gone to school 28 times with deadly effect.

Our kids are being shot.

I refuse to give up the outrage.