I don't mean it go off on a rant here, but, my fellow Americans, we live in a country in which a six-year-old boy deliberately shot his first grade teacher with his mother's gun twenty-five days ago, and the national reckoning, the deep soul-searching and re-evaluation of every law and every cultural norm that has followed is... nonexistent. God bless America.
The school system's superintendent was removed, and the principal was reassigned, while the assistant principal resigned. The kids at this elementary school now have to walk through metal detectors and use clear plastic backpacks under the watchful eye of two cops. Which did no good at all less than a year ago in Uvalde, Texas. God bless America.
And that's it! Nobody has even bothered making a serious plea to change anything at all, because we know nothing will change. Virginia won't change anything any more than Texas did after the Uvalde shooting. We just know that this is now a part of life: sometimes people go to school to get shot. Sometimes it's children being shot. Sometimes it's children doing the shooting. Sometimes it's both. God bless America.
You might say it's been overshadowed in the news by the cops who murdered yet another Black man, a situation in which the Black cops were fired and charged with murder, while the white cops were put on administrative leave. But that murder didn't even happen until the next day, and didn't become public knowledge until three weeks after Virginia shooting. God bless America.
You might say it's been overshadowed in the news by January 6 being the anniversary of an attempted insurrection, for which the prime suspect remains at large. God bless America.
But if that's true, what does it say about this country that a six-year-old shooting his teacher takes third place at most to still more murderous cops and a scofflaw ex-president getting away with inciting rebellion?
God bless America.
@pwinn it’s definitely a particularly weird story, from the “acute disability” angle that required in school parental supervision, to the reports that administrators were alerted repeatedly and refused to search, to the deeply unsettling implications of a boy that young even connecting a gun to anger and conflict, even in a rough city like Newport News. Tbh, I feel like we’re collectively waiting for more shoes to drop on this one to even come to grips with how any of this happened. :/
@pwinn that being said, no, Virginia’s not going to do anything as a state because Youngkin eked his way into office and is angling for a GOP nomination by throwing our schools under the bus and pandering to conspiracy nuts so we’re gridlocked for another couple years at least. We tend to waffle back and forth so we’ll probably go D next time— we’ll see if it helps.
