We are confronted once again by another scene of carnage in a public school, with the horrific shooting deaths of nineteen elementary school children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. This episode occurred just weeks after the bloodshed in a Buffalo, New York supermarket and a church in California. Like so many other episodes of bloodshed, the nation is acting in shock that more young lives have been snuffed out by gun violence. The outrage has grown stale. We vowed this would never happen again after Columbine. We yet again claimed that we would end this madness after Sandy Hook. Those sentiments were echoed after Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Yet, here we are again, trying to explain away the truth about why we cannot protect our children.

America doesn’t give a fuck about children. It never has and likely never will.

Rooted in the American culture is a strong disregard for the humanity of children. This was evident in the enslavement of Africans and the way enslaved children were abused and treated as property, separated from parents to labor for abusive ‘masters.’ Native American children fared no better, objectified as the ‘other.’ The children of Jim Crow were abused as well, kept impoverished, forced to labor in fields and intentionally segregated from educational opportunity. While the maltreatment of children has weighed heavily on Black and brown children, we cannot forget the abuses hoisted upon poor and immigrant White children in sweat shops that inspired child labor laws. The Great Migration witnessed a generation of Black children who were isolated in America’s cities and trapped in substandard housing and schools that were segregated, underfunded, and abandoned by state education systems. We regularly hear about the abuse experienced by children in our foster care system and state protective care. Conditions of homelessness and hunger are common for many children in America. Yet, we are supposed to believe that the killing of children is an aberration. ‘Right-to-life’ has been a marketing ploy, a political slogan to feign concern to advantage prospective abuse upon children.

These children, 8 and 9-year-olds, were slaughtered. They were gunned down in their classroom, in front of their peers and now another group of students have been traumatized by gun violence. We have normalized the killing of children in America. We are the only nation on this planet where children are routinely killed by gun violence, individually and in mass, and where schools have become shooting galleries.

In the very state that this latest shooting occurred, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and his Republican accomplices have made gun ownership as easy as gum ownership. In their twisted minds, the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is a universal pass to gun possession with no requisite responsibility on the part of the gun owner. It is why Abbott had the audacity to focus on ‘mental illness’ during his press conference on the Robb Elementary School shooting without taking any responsibility for the role he has played in arming Texans.



The only solution is to target elected officials who protect the gun lobby by obstructing common sense gun control and vote them out of office. Politicians like Abbott (and Virginia Lt. Governor Winsome Sears above) are beyond redemption. They are evil enablers of violence and death. Their only interest is in holding onto power and they will ride a bullet to hell if necessary. No appeals to their humanity will change their gun-hugging ways or break their addiction to the gun lobby’s blood money. Nothing will change until our politics reflect the will of Americans to hold gun manufacturers and gun owners accountable for the pain and suffering they have caused families. Let’s stop pretending that America cares about children until this nation shows that it really does.