Akilah Sasilva, Taurean C. Sanderlin, DeEbony Groves, and Joe R. Perez.
These young people should be going about their lives in relative anonymity, attending school, working, and dreaming. And unless one of these individuals is a friend or a loved one, you should not be seeing these images.
But here we are again.
Innocent people gunned down at a Waffle House in Nashville, Tennessee, and we’re viewing people’s images we would not have seen otherwise.
Gun violence is a complex cocktail of anger, mental illness, negligence…and extraordinary access to lethal weapons.
The United States’ Second Amendment to the Constitution states “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
For some Americans, the second part of the sentence gets placed front and center, and has become an excuse to manufacture and amass weapons to such an extent that Americans own more weapons per capita (one for each man, woman, and child) than any nation in the world. The US also has one of the highest rates of gun deaths per capita than any other nation in the world—and way above developed nations.
Hours after this tragic event in Nashville, Tennessee, a man drove his van a mile and a half down a crowded sidewalk in Toronto, killing 10 people and injuring 15 others. This horrifying and senseless crime increases our sense of vulnerability doing the most normal of things—walking down a sidewalk.
Some people will say sarcastically, “So do we outlaw vans?”
Of course not. Vans serve a useful purpose in society, and they are registered and operated by a licensed individual.
Guns, especially weapons such as AR-15s, have only one purpose: to kill or threaten to kill.
Big difference.
I am deeply sorry and saddened for the loved ones of Akilah, Taurean, DeEbony, and Joe.
And the victims of the Toronto slaying: Anne Marie D’Amico, Dorothy Sewell, Munir Abdu Habib Al Najjar, and many others we’ll hear about as their loved ones are notified.
It’s the goal of UrantiaVoice to affirm goals and initiatives that “foster the greatest good to the greatest number of all [people] and for the greatest period of time.” (The Urantia Book 134:5.4)
We believe God is inside each of us and interacting among us to craft a good and loving society. Part of this is personal. But that “personal” has little use if it does not become social. And some of that socialization requires political action.
We support undoing the heinous mass assimilation of lethal weapons in the US.
And by the way, we give our heartfelt thanks to James Shaw, Jr. Here was a good man who stopped an ill man with a gun, using his courage, instinct, and bare hands.
Because of James, we’re not looking at more pictures we aren’t supposed to see.