The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre 2.0

     (If I'd known Tuesday night when I wrote yesterday's post that the very next day Nikolas Cruz would shoot up a high school in Parkland, Florida, I never would've used that title. As it is, somewhat using the same title is inevitable.)
     Well, we can't prove Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer but we do know the guy who shot up Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida is a Cruz. And he also trained with a White Nationalist militia group called the Republic of Florida (which seems curiously blase about his mass murder of 17 people).
     The 19 year-old, before he was expelled from the school he shot up, was also known to wear a Trump MAGA hat to class. Which, in the eyes of our Commander in Chief, makes him "a very fine person."
     Gov. Rick Scott (R-NRA) in 2014 signed into law five very NRA-friendly bills into law, including those that put that AR-15 into the hands of Cruz. After the Orlando nightclub shooting, he said that every time something like this happens, we want to have that talk and that we were going to have that talk very soon. That was 613 days ago and we're still waiting to have that talk.
     So far as of yesterday, according to the Gun Violence Archive, 2018 has seen:
     •6626 gun-related incidents
     •1,835 gun deaths
     •3,165 gun injuries
     •69 children shot or killed
     •347 teenagers shot or killed
     •181 incidents of defensive gun use
     •216 unintentional shootings
     •30 mass shootings
     •11 school shootings with injury or death
     ...and we're still barely halfway through February.
     The 10 Senators (almost all Republican) who have vacuumed up the most bribes from the NRA had collected $42,822,711, with no end in sight. That's enough to pay for 6117 full funerals with a $7000 average.
     The 10 Congressmen who had accepted the most bribe money from the NRA took in another $4,292,241, enough to pay for another 613 funerals, making a grand total of $47,114,952 just to 20 lawmakers. Imagine how much more the 515 other members of Congress have raked in during their "public service" careers.
     The original St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929 killed seven people, 10 fewer than Cruz, back in the good old days when thugs with guns showed some restraint.
     And still, America reels when weapons designed to kill human beings are once again used to kill human beings then we inevitably throw up our hands and say we can't do anything about civilian mass gun violence that occurs nowhere else in the world.