I called them because the day after the Florida mass school shootings they hadn’t yet made statements. I told their Congressional staff I wanted to hear in detail what they were going to do this time. I told them they were elected to make legislation, not to pray and I didn’r want to hear about prayers, I wanted to hear about legislation. I told them my children who are high school students and soon, voters, also wanted to hear their answers. I did this because I listened to the surviving students and the families of those who were killed. They said to do something. It is time for me to pick up the phone. It is time for me to write a letter. It is time for me to send a contribution. It is time for me to do something and to support others who will be in a position to do more if I do something.
I plan to call the Congressional offices again because the answers that followed later that day aren’t good enough. They aren’t answers. And they do nothing. I may not be able to change their minds but they will have heard from a constituent. I promise the students and families that I heard them. I promise that I will do something.
I will be doing everything I can to elect Democrats in 2018, This will be hard in my home state. South Dakota is red. Democrats running for office there will almost certainly not meet all of my progressive ideals. I will still support them this cycle because not doing so has cost us too much. The alternative is indeed worse. My state is suffering from years of one-party dominance, so obvious Republicans can see the problem, It has among the highest public support for our current pResident. And yet, like every other red state and every other red district there are Democrats who work tirelessly against the tide, keeping hope alive and fielding some of the most competitive candidates they’ve had in a long time this cycle.
John Thune took office in 2005 after defeating former Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle. He was reelected in an uncontested US Senate race in 2010 (may that never happen again) and in 2016 giving him the seniority, despite an unimpressive record of actual achievement, to be number three in Senate Republican leadership. His is one of the faces silently looming behind McConnell in media appearances. He has a massive amount of money to fund future campaigns in a relatively cheap market so he is assumed to be the senior SD Senator forever, At least he has stopped talking about running for President.
While Thune has not put out a statement on his website about the gun massacre of high school students, he has posted within the month, this concern for other lives:
Right now, there are only seven countries in the world that allow elective abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The United States is one of them. Among the others are China and North Korea….
Unfortunately, we’re going to be keeping company with those countries a little longer, since Democrats in the Senate chose to block us from moving forward on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.
This legislation should be a no-brainer. The scientific evidence is clear: At 20 weeks, unborn babies feel pain.
Senator Thune, Right now there is only one country in the world that allows virtually anyone to obtain a weapon capable of killing massive numbers of people in mere minutes, Unfortunately, we’re going to be keeping company with those statistics a little longer because your Republican leadership in the Senate chose to block us from moving forward on any Future-Capable School Child Protection Acts, This should also be a no-brainer, The evidence is clear- when they are shot with AR-15 rifles, school students feel pain and they die. And unlike Republicans, like you funded by the NRA, Americans share that pain and support gun control legislation.
His Republican script this time:
We’re confronting evil in a way… I think we’re all open to what can we do to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. In many cases as you know there’s a, this starts the control, everything’s to be over gun control and whether or not we oughta have stricter gun laws. In most cases I kinda look at it based on, OK, would those laws have prevented this from happening? In most cases, the answer is no. There’s a lot of people it seems like, with very deep and almost systemic problems, psychological, mental, and certainly it makes sense that we do everything we can to better prevent and detect those things earlier on and make sure that, you know, really serious weapons don’t end up in the hands of people who have those types of diseases.
What about this time? if the answer this time, is stricter gun laws would have absolutely prevented this from happening, let’s take a minute while you look at the faces of those who died and listen to the families who survived them, to let that sink in. And if you want to focus on “those types of diseases” then I wand to hear you speak out about Trump reversing the rule that kept “you know, really serious weapons” from ending up in their hands. That was your leader. That was a year ago this month. (And for a compelling perspective on your equating mental illness with evil see this post They are killing us twice…)
South Dakota’s inept junior Senator and former incompetent Governor has been getting more media attention, This time he was interviewed by CNN's Anderson Cooper.
One thing that may have made a difference is if military-caliber weapons like the AR-15 Cruz allegedly used were banned. But when Cooper asked Rounds about gun control, mentioning that law enforcement officers are broadly supportive of common-sense gun laws, the senator bristled, citing how “emotional” the issue is for gun owners like him.
“Part of the problem that we have, Anderson, is that it becomes a very emotional issue at that point where, once you start saying this is an assault gun because it has a larger magazine, or this is an assault gun because you can have it as a semi-automatic,” Rounds said. “I’ve got a 3-shot automatic shotgun. Under some proposals that suggests that since it’s a semi-automatic, that it also defines itself as an assault weapon. Even though it’s not a rifle, it could be used.”
Senator Rounds. If you want to bring up emotional, there are interviews out there you need to watch. And if you are getting emotional now, on national television, the day after yet another horrific school shooting, about the possibility of losing your rifle, through legislation you make and which your party controls, you really need to listen to the families who are so past your trivial, worries, families and friends and community thrust into a nightmare loss of their children and all the hell that goes with it. by you and those who are complicit with you.
Speaking to SD media, Seth Tupper of the Rapid City Journal tells of his angst dropping his kids off at school the morning after and asks Rounds “In all seriousness, how do we not talk about guns?” Rounds pedantically clarifies that while we can talk about guns, we can’t do anything about guns because Second Amendment. He does actually have an idea to reduce school shootings. When Rounds goes to work in DC, he has multiple security stops, metal detector scans, and ID checkpoints. Just add those layers to school entrances he says and problem solved, Tupper follows up and asks about his kids in elementary school who go outside for recess three times a day, and before and after school. Do we need to build 20-foot walls around our schools? Rounds admits “I don’t know that we have a good answer,” but goes on to defend weapons — again.
Finally, SD’s US Representative Kristi Noem, who tired of doing nothing in Washington, is leaving her Safe Republican seat to run for the open but Safe Republican Governor seat being vacated by Dennis Daugaard. While this office would mean a more direct role in education, she had little to say about the school shooting, not even speaking to media but directing them to her Twitter account:
Watching developments in the Florida school shooting closely and praying for the families grieving tonight, for the first responders and for the doctors fighting tonight to save the lives of those injured.
And tomorrow Kristi? You pray tonight. But what will you do then? Because this will not be over for those families and first responders and doctors tomorrow. And this will not be the last shooting.
I promise to do something. I know this community does too.
