A supporter at one of his rallies shouts, “Shoot them,” referring to illegal immigrants, and Donald Trump giggles and says, “Only in Florida will somebody say something like that.” And the roar of the crowd gets louder.
Now we hear that “only in America” schoolchildren are massacred with war weapons designed to tear humans apart in a matter of seconds. But this time there is no laughter that we know of, only sadness and devastation and people wondering why our elected legislators are not taking this “only in America” issue more seriously.
The senseless massacre of innocent people, especially innocent children in our schools, must stop! America’s children deserve better — much, much better, and we can and must provide!
A majority of sensible Americans believe that part of the problem is the easy accessibility to war weapons. The number of weapons in this country, if piled into a mountain, will cast a shadow over all of its inhabitants. Changing gun laws and restricting access to firearms is, at least, a good start in trying to fix this difficult and horrible problem.
Ted Cruz, along with Greg Abbott and other “GOPers,” disagree. Cruz tells us that we must not react to “evil” and “tragedy” by abandoning the Constitution or infringing on the rights of law-abiding citizens. Coming from someone who wasn’t moved by the “evilness” of Donald Trump, this is laughable.
Trump trashed the Constitution and like a delusional dictator he attempted to stay in power by motivating mobsters to trash our Capitol. He attempted to disregard and crush the voting rights of 80 million law-abiding citizens and Cruz is like, “Hey, no big deal, that’s just the Donald!” Why some people still support this clown mystifies me.
Ted and Greg are OK with people openly carrying sidearms like in the good-old wild-wild West days. They are OK with 18-year-old kids not having the right to buy beer, but they see nothing wrong with 18-year-olds easily purchasing AR-15s with lots of ammo and no questions asked.
This is what they fight for, but is this what Americans want their tax dollars to pay for?
In their view, if a child hits another child with rocks, they will rightly blame the child, not the rocks. Taking the rocks away from the child is a no-no; it would be an infringement on the child’s right to throw rocks. Now tell me, is this not the epitome of insanity?
So, what’s the problem here? That our legislators don’t have the cojones to stand up to the NRA? If our H-E-B grocery stores donate and deliver truckloads of jumbo grade-A “huevos” to the Texas Capitol, do you suppose this will help? If yes, I can just imagine hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren happily chanting, “Thank you so very much, H-E-B! We love you!”
Italo J. Zarate lives in Brownsville.
