“We’re children,” he said. “You guys are the adults.”

Second update: a link to the 14 students and three staffers who were killed.  Open the link and look at their faces; next time, it could be your child.  There is NO safe place left in this country.

From an excellent article in the New Yorker:

The gun lobby, and the Republican Party it controls, have accepted as a matter of necessity the ongoing deaths of hundreds of children as the price that they are prepared to pay for the fetishization of weapons. The claim of this lobby’s complicity in murder is not exaggerated or hysterical but, by now, quite simple and precise: when you refuse to act to stop a social catastrophe from happening, you are responsible for the consequences of the social catastrophe.

Do something today.  Tell your family and friends on Facebook. Stand up and be counted.


 Tell your state and national elected officials; no more.

Most of all - do you remember high school?  Consider that those students killed might have been the person another student was sweet on.  What a crashing end to a first crush.  What will Valentine's Day mean to their families - a new Valentine's Day Massacre?  Probably.

Don't let this be your child.  And most of all, every - single - time you leave your child, say "I love you." 

end of update

Updating the Parkland, Florida story

Seventeen (17 !) people dead.  At least two are staff who stood between kids and the gunman.  As in all the other school shootings, not a single staff person ran to save themselves.
From the New York Times:

A janitor appeared, he said, and began to wave. “Stop, stop!” he said, “Go over here!”

Then the school chef opened a door to her office and hurried the teenagers in — first 10, then 20, then some 30 or 40 students crowded in the office. They shut the lights. And then students turned to their phones, and began the horrifying experiencing of watching a school shooting unfold at their own school — through the news apps on their phones.

Kelsey Friend, a freshman at the school, appeared alongside Mr. Hogg on CNN, and grew emotional as she thanked a geography teacher who she said had saved her life.

“I will never forget the actions that he took for me and for fellow students of the classroom,” she said through tears. “And if his family is watching this, please know that your son or your brother was an amazing person and I’m alive today because of him. Thank you.”

What a student had to say:

David Hogg stood in the Florida sun on Thursday, not far from his now shuttered school, and described the events of the day before.

Mr. Hogg, 17, a lanky senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and the student news director there, was in his environmental science class when a single shot rang out, echoing down the hallways.

Mr. Hogg’s younger sister, 14, was also in the building. Two of her best friends were among the 17 people who died, he said.

In an interview with CNN earlier on Thursday, Mr. Hogg expressed his frustration with politicians in simpler terms: “We’re children,” he said. “You guys are the adults.”

About the shooter:

The leader of a white supremacist group said on Thursday that the suspected gunman in one of the deadliest school shootings in modern American history was a member of his group and had participated in paramilitary drills.

The Governor of Florida:

Gov. Rick Scott of Florida said he would meet with state lawmakers to secure more funding for school safety and the treatment of mental illness. “If we have somebody that’s mentally ill, they can’t have access to a gun,” Mr. Scott said.

Governor Scott is considered one of the most friendly-to-guns governors in the country. 

What's fascinating is that these calls for mental illness help don't get follow-up with policy and change (and dollars).

Early Warning

Ben Bennight, a bail bondsman in Mississippi, said in a video posted Wednesday that he reported a suspicious comment left on his YouTube channel last fall by a user named “nikolas cruz.”

“I’m going to be a professional school shooter,” the Sept. 24 comment said.

Mr. Bennight took a screenshot of the comment and flagged it to YouTube, which removed the post. 

Mr. Bennight said he then left a voice mail message at his local F.B.I. field office alerting it to the comment.

With the Parkland shooting, three of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern United States history have come in the last five months. Here is a graphic that records the grim toll of school shootings across the nation.

Mr. Bennight did not fault the F.B.I., he said.

“We live in a country where you can’t just lock people away for saying something,” he said. “You can’t just stuff somebody in a black hole because they said something that makes you uncomfortable. I believe the F.B.I. took it seriously. I hope that they followed up.”

So painful to hear but yes, there are plenty of people with big mouths who don't kill people.  (Reading about the shooter's background, though, it seems he was one of the people who would act.  Almost to a person, people who knew him thought he would do this.) 

Trump

Later, in his televised address, Mr. Trump said he plans to work with state and local leaders to “tackle the difficult issue of mental health.

The president has blamed mental illness for previous mass shootings, even as one of his first acts as president was to repeal an Obama-era regulation that would add the names of mentally ill Americans registered with the Social Security Administration to the database used for gun purchase background checks.

And is this the time when "enough is enough?"

“At some point, we’ve got to say enough is enough,” Senator Bill Nelson of Florida said on the Senate floor. “Let’s talk about that 19-year-old carrying an AR-15. Let’s do what needs to be done, and let’s get these assault weapons off our streets. Let’s accomplish something on background checks.”

Representative Ted Deutch, whose district includes Stoneman Douglas High, said in an interview that skirting the gun question by focusing on mental illness was not enough — an opinion shared openly by numerous students and parents in Parkland, an affluent suburb in Florida’s most intensely Democratic county. 

 NRA, your days of power are numbered and I hope that any politician that continues to take money from them and not support gun control measures gets voted out of office.