You, too, Republicans are holding the rifles killing our children. We need action — now | Opinion  

This is what it’s like to be a parent and a grandparent in America.

You hear, you see the words “school shooting” and terror grips your heart.

Where? Where?

You desperately search news feeds, the pounding, crunching feeling in your chest all too familiar. You unconsciously rub the center of your chest in a vain attempt to soothe yourself.

This time, Uvalde, Texas is the site of another mass school shooting by a young man armed with a high-powered rifle. He turned a school into a bloody battlefield.

You home in on the horrific number of dead, the first report by the governor of Texas Tuesday: 14 children and one teacher killed.

They’re not yours, now you know. Not your two teacher daughters or your teacher niece and nephew in Florida. Not your four grandchildren.

Not this time. But you cry anyway. Because the relief you feel fills you with guilt, helplessness, frustration and anger.

The anger isn’t random, like gun violence, but aimed at one group of Americans who themselves might as well be holding the semi-automatic rifles that kill more children in minutes than anywhere else in the world: Republican lawmakers.

And especially in gun-happy Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has vowed to make this an open-carry state despite our history of mass shootings and Rep. Randy Fine has just threatened President Biden if he enacted gun reforms.

“I have news for the embarrassment that claims to be our president — try to take our guns and you’ll learn why the Second Amendment was written in the first place,” Fine said on Twitter.

READ MORE: Did Florida Rep. Randy Fine just threaten the president’s life?

That firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teens is of no concern to them.

Nor to Florida Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott or Republican members of Congress, too many to name. But yes, Carlos Gimenez, Maria Elvira Salazar and Mario Diaz-Balart, too. They represent Miami-Dade.

We need federal laws from which NRA-ruled states can’t exempt themselves.

If only voters had as much power as the National Rifle Association lobby, to whom you Republican lawmakers are all beholden, you wouldn’t be in office. Not after Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School became a killing field.

If none of you is going to help change the tide of gun violence with your vote, you know what you can do with your worthless thoughts and prayers and sorry tweets.

“Little kids/babies lost leaves us with no words to console. Cry today. Cry. Just a dad here,” tweeted Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry, a Republican.

Crocodile tears. He’s not abandoning his party, only trying to exempt himself from condemnation when he’s an enabler trying to pass as impartial.

“Sadly, political ideologies are stirring emotions tonight,” he went on. “And that’s both sides. Just be fathers, mothers and sons and daughters right now. Just be human.”

Don’t buy it.

It’s only GOP cover-up for the last bloody 10 days, including the killing of 10 Black shoppers at a Buffalo supermarket — among them, the 86-year-old mother of a retired fire commissioner. The helpless shoppers were targeted by an 18-year-old racist who publicly spewed hateful white-supremacist rhetoric and vowed to kill — and still had access to guns.

This happens in a continuous reel because 50 Republican senators in Washington have been sitting for two years on a universal background checks bill passed by the House and supported by 90% of Americans, yet held hostage for political reasons.

Gun rights over kids

It’s maddening the way so-called conservatives pull out all stops to shelter life in the womb, even when it’s only forming cells, but prioritize free-for-all gun ownership over school safety, church safety, supermarket safety, concert safety, theater safety.

We’re no longer able to breathe in true freedom and we can no longer pursue happiness in any corner of the United States as long people as young as 18, who can’t drink, can buy a gun.

As long as there are no universal background checks that leave loopholes for bad actors to access weapons at gun shows that are more apt for war than for defending one’s family or hunting.

As long as there are no red-flag laws that allow a relative to report a gun owner who is angry or mentally incapacitated enough to kill others, there will be no peace.

The death toll at Robb Elementary rose Wednesday to 19 children and two teachers, loved ones their families will never hold again. They left home Tuesday morning and became the grimmest of new statistics: the second deadliest school shooting in America.

My daughter, a principal, could not bring herself to send her children, 6 and 9, to school on Wednesday.

A capable educator coaxed into administration, she tells me she wants to quit working and home-school her children to protect them from violence. She said this, too, after Parkland and Santa Fe, Texas, both 2018 shootings.

This time, I feel she really means it.

Florida and the nation will lose good teachers to this gun madness.

The time to act is right now. Stop hiding behind a Second Amendment, conceived in the era of muskets.

Make this the last time the mood grows dark in this country after a mass school shooting, then lifts, never leading to what we need: sensible gun restrictions.

This story was originally published May 25, 2022 at 4:40 PM.