This is been a crazy week both in my life and in the life of our country. The mass shootings over the weekend make no sense – haven’t we seen too many of these? I spent the first two days of the week at the VA hospital in Fargo North Dakota. I had a chance to talk to other combat veterans about the shootings and we can make no sense of them. You cannot be normal and take the lives of others without it having a major effect on you. It’s clear the shooters are far from normal and something needs to be done to prevent people like them from being able to have guns. I am afraid that once again common sense will lose out to politics.
The other question that the shootings bring to mind is one about politicians. They have to take some responsibility for the shootings. It was clear before last weekend that the president’s reelection people were going to exploit illegal immigration and they would do that by any number of means. The clearest indication of that was the use of the word “invasion.” This automatically made immigrants trying to cross the southern border into our enemies because only enemies invade a country. This definition seems to have influenced the El Paso shooter according to his “manifesto.” Politicians often make ridiculous claims and go too far in an attempt to either get elected or reelected. I think we have to stand up to and tell the politicians to find another way to get reelected before their campaign slogans cause another person with obvious problems to go off the rail and we have another mass killing.
