Independence Day Mass Shooting

For those who think I am too cynical to doubt if America should only receive praise on July 4, consider this!

Just days after President Biden signed a bipartisan gun bill that, among other things, raises the minimum age to purchase a gun to 21 and addresses mental-heath concerns, a deranged shooter killed seven people and wounded 47 others firing with a legally purchased assault weapon into an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois. With AR-15s still very legal and a Supreme Court hell-bent on expanding gun rights,  Independence Day parades are now considered fair game for any nut with an assault weapon.  Kind of makes you feel patriotic, no?  Kind of makes you feel patriotic no is right! 😠 

Incidentally, I went to the Independence Day parade in Montclair, New Jersey - the town's first parade  in three years due to COVID and my first attendance at the parade in four years.  Eerily, the parade route runs a block or two away from Watchung Plaza, where nationwide news was made when a deranged postal worker shot fellow postal employees at a branch post office in 1995.  It's been said that lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but I can't be sure that nothing like what happened in Illinois will happen here.

Oh yeah, people with guns celebrated Independence Day in Philadelphia by firing their weapons along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the grand boulevard connecting the Philadelphia Museum of Art with City Hall.  Philadelphia, where the country was founded . . . good grief, Philadelphia had no record of gun violence in the streets on July 4, 1776, and it was in the middle of a war.  Mayor James Kenney told the press that he's so fed up with gun violence in his city . . . he can't wait until his term ends so he can enjoy life for awhile.  

That's leadership?

Jim Tate, the mayor of Philadelphia in the 1960s, who had to deal with civil rights issues and rioting, wouldn't have been so cavalier about something like this.

Of course, I'm biased in saying that . . . Jim Tate was my grandfather's cousin.