The Non-Reaction To The FSU Shooting Proves Americans Are Becoming Disturbingly Immune To Gun Violence
This is a text a Florida State University student sent to her father from the library early this morning, when a gunman opened fire and sent more than 300 students running for their lives. One victim is in critical condition, and two are stable. Is this our reality now? Should we all just get used to hearing stories of mass shooting rampages — like they are no big deal? It seems like this is the case. Without a willingness to change our gun laws or even admit that we have a huge problem — we better get used to this type of news — if we aren’t already. Fighting against stricter gun laws equals fighting against our kids.
The gunman fired at police responding to the 911 calls and was killed. He was an alumnus of FSU and an attorney. This video was taken by an FSU student in the library after the shooting:
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j13QfS8B6fU]
From The Washington Post:
It was a consecutive bop, bop, bop, bop, bop,” said FSU freshman Nikolai Hernandez, who was in his dorm room across from the library.
The school’s newspaper, FS View, reported the gunman opened fire around 12:30 a.m. Student Alexandra Magoulas was about 50 feet from the lobby of the library when she heard the shots, she told the paper.
”People immediately started running and screaming and running to the stairwells and to the edges of the room against walls,” she said. ”It was chaos.”
Guns don’t kill people, people do. It’s a mental health issue! Don’t take my guns! Too bad one of the students wasn’t packing to stop the shooter!
We hear this moronic chorus over and over and over again. Just read some of the comments posted on Facebook when Moms Demand Action For Gun Sense In America shared the above text screenshot on their page. Meanwhile, countries that don’t allow their citizens to arm themselves with virtually no restrictions have a tiny fraction of the gun violence we have. And if any of you gun lovers are under the illusion that the second amendment will protect you from a tyrannical government — have you paid any attention to what’s going on in Ferguson? If the government decides to disarm you or render you helpless — it will.
We’ve had a constant loop of Ebola coverage when a grand total of TWO people in this country have died from it. 11,410 people died from gun violence in 2013. Yet we’re doing nothing to change these statistics. It seems the less likely you are to be killed by something, the more likely it is the media will cover it on a constant loop. Hence virtually no coverage of the Marysville shooting a little over a month ago and barely any coverage of the FSU shooting, either.
Because why talk about actual issues we have the power to change? Better to totally freak out about diseases that are not killing Americans than to impose restrictions on one of the the single biggest killers of Americans there is. I hope these students can bounce back from this trauma. I don’t think anyone should have to endure an experience like this. These tragedies will not stop until we start doing something about the root of the problem. Guns, guns, everywhere.
(photo: Facebook)
