"(O)nly in the Panhandle you can get away with that stuff"

     This is like a page out of my childhood. Anyone my age who grew up in the 60's would remember seeing the daily casualty reports streaming in from Vietnam on the dinosaur networks. Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley and the rest would show us how many Americans were killed that day versus how many Vietcong. Now, the War has come home to roost and we're seeing literally daily casualty reports coming in.
     Three dead in Gilroy. Two in Mississippi. And this weekend: 20 dead in El Paso. Nine more in Dayton. How many will it be today?
     The Vietnamese at least had the presence of mind to recognize the enemy in its midst and took steps to confront and combat it. And it wasn't with "thoughts and prayers." And we Americans are literally so blinded with hatred that we flail around pointing the finger of blame at nonexistent enemies even as they become the victims.

     Here are your REAL enemies:
     The terrorist lobby group the NRA who'd conned us into thinking that gun ownership being threatened in the slightest was infinitely more unbearable than six year-olds getting slaughtered under their desks.
     The gun and ammo manufacturers who lick their chops and rub their hands at the prospect of a "Newtown bump" in sales after every mass shooting.
     Politicians, mostly Republican, who think the NRA's campaign contributions are worth more than our children's lives.
     The white supremacists and self-styled warriors like Patrick Crusius, a big fan of Trump according to his Twitter feed, who are egged on by our so-called Commander in Chief. At his hate rally in Cincinnati last week, someone yelled we should start shooting immigrants. Trump laughed and said, "That's only in the Panhandle you can get away with that stuff." Then immigrants got shot in El Paso yesterday. At least three died. Six were wounded. Today after someone took him up on it, Trump piously tweeted, there "are no reasons or excuses that will ever justify killing people."
     Then he went back to retweeting praise heaped on him by other idiots.
     "2018 was a particularly active year for right-wing extremist murders: Every single extremist killing — from Pittsburgh to Parkland — had a link to right-wing extremism." said the ADL's Center on Extremism.
     Remember these words next November on Election Day.