Yesterday, the United States Senate–which is controlled by Republicans–failed to advance any of the four measures which would have, among other things, instituted universal background checks and not allowed those on the terrorist watch list to buy a gun which could be used for an attack such as the one which occurred in Orlando and left 49 people dead.
The New York Daily News made no secret of how they felt about the cowardice exhibited by GOP Senators, publishing this cover for today’s edition:
The Daily News is 100 percent correct with their cover and the report they ran with it. Consider these sobering numbers: Through the first 172 days of 2016, there were 145 mass shootings in the U.S., according to the Gun Violence Archive. And yet it’s still perfectly acceptable for a person who had a mental illness or is under investigation for possibly being a terrorist to walk into a gun store and buy whatever he or she desires.
The NRA loves to say that guns are not the problem. But how many people do you suppose would have been killed if Omar Mateen, who massacred 49 human beings at the Pulse nightclub, had only had a knife, or even a machete, or a crossbow? Instead, he had an AR-15, which is the type of weapon used by soldiers in warfare. It has no practical application other than to kill human beings, to spill the blood of the innocent.
The gun manufacturers and the NRA are equally complicit in what happened at Pulse. They are merchants of death, and they only care about money. Nothing else is sacred to them other than the Almighty Dollar. They are swimming in blood, and in time they will lose.
Until that day, we will have to wear ribbons like this God only knows how many more times:
This article was originally published by the same author at LiberalAmerica.org.