WoW: The Heroes and Cowards

Being a school shooting hero shouldn’t be part of being a teenager.”

 

 

The Heroes and Cowards

• His name is Kendrick Castillo. He did not graduate from High School. He was dead.
• His school was just 7 miles from Columbine where 2 teenagers massacred 13 students.
• That was 20 years ago.
• Since 2009, America has had 57x as many school shootings as 6 other major industrial nations combined: UK (0); Japan (0); Italy (0); Germany (1); France (2); Canada (2) and USA (288)
• In this academic year alone, America has had 23.
• In addition to our schools, add in places of worship, outdoor concerts, movie theaters and dance clubs and the numbers are staggering.
• It is uniquely an American problem
• Every day in America, an average of 108.9 people are killed or take their life with a gun.
• That’s a total of 39,748.5 people a year.
• That’s more than all the American soldiers killed in the entire Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.
• What is different about America?
• Other countries have mental health problems and have violent entertainment.
• I’ll tell you what’s different . . .
• Only we have absurdly lax gun laws

In Port Arthur Australia, after the 1996 massacre of 35 and 23 wounded, the gov’t immediately went into action and enforced stricter gun controls. Like the USA, Australia is a nation of rugged individualism and high gun ownership. However, unlike the USA, their gov’t leaders realized their responsibility to protect their people. They immediately joined forces to change and enforce strict gun laws which sharply reduced the availability of guns. They:

• Banned automatic and semi-automatic firearms
• Adopted new licensing requirements
• Established a national firearms registry
• Instituted a 28 day waiting period for gun purchases
• Bought and destroyed more than 600,000 civilian owned firearms

In spite of the NRA’s support of the opposition (yes, they are in Australia, too), the entire overhaul of Australia’s national gun policy took just a few months. Since then, gun related homicides and suicides in Australia dropped 65% up until the fatal mass shooting of 7 family members in May. 2018. In the USA, it’s estimated that in 2017, we had over 394 million guns in a population of 326 million citizens with not even the simple requirement for registration in 42 of our 50 states.
We require registrations for cars, boats and even dogs. Why not guns?

• Ask the cowards in our Congress, who sell their souls to the NRA
• Ask the cowardly Senators and Representatives, (who, like it or not, are predominately Republican) why they aren’t brave enough to live up to their duty to keep our country’s citizens and especially our children safe.
• Ask them why they refuse to pass legislation to protect its citizenry like every other sane, law-abiding country.
• Ask them why they put High School students in the position of bravely stopping the shooters with their own bodies, and why the Parkland students courageously stood together with such passion, when they, the supposed leaders of the most powerful country in the world, won’t do one damn thing from the safety of their lofty offices.

Go ahead. Ask them!

Kendrick Castillo is a hero because they are despicable cowards!