NO SECOND CHANCES

Every time some mentally crazed monster kills or harms innocent people in an active shooter situation such as the recent elementary school shooting in Uvalde Texas we go through a societal wringing of the hands. Many wonder what motivates people to do what they do and what can we do to prevent such tragedies. As the son of a mentally ill father I have had fifty nine long years to contemplate his motives for killing my mother and my unborn sibling. I have opinions on what drove him to do what he did but I will never really know for sure. All I know is that for three years I witnessed his mental deterioration firsthand. In retrospect the red flags were there for all to see. I encouraged my father to get help and he did try for a while but with mixed results. My father always liked his beer but during the years of his mental decline he was drunk a lot. So much so that he was unable to function for days and weeks at a time. He would check himself into a sanitarium where he would dry out but after a few weeks he would be sprawled across our couch drunk as a skunk.

  Daddy owned and operated a drugstore which meant that my mother was forced to give up her life as a stay at home mom and operate the drugstore in order to keep food on the table. She wasn't the manager that my father was so over time the business fell deeper and deeper into debt. Unknown to us at the time daddy was not only drinking but taking prescription drugs. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that this is a bad combination. Things continued to slide downhill until he tried to kill himself in the Spring of 1962. My mother and I walked in one day and found my father sitting on the toilet moaning. He had tried to kill himself with pills. Unfortunately my mother called an ambulance which saved his life. He was committed to a mental institution where he received electroshock therapy. It is my belief that this helped push him into murder-suicide a few months later. I believe that this treatment was so traumatic that he made his mind up that he would never be committed to another asylum. After being released he tried to kill my mother one night by strangling her while my brother Mark and I stood by screaming in terror. Our screams jolted him back to reality and he let go of my mothers throat. She was scared after that and tried to have him committed to the state mental hospital called Central State at the time. A relative told him what my mom was trying to do so he killed her and himself. 

 Call me a cynic but I just don't have much faith in the way we treat mental illness in this country. The results haven't changed much since 1963. If anything things are worse. The common denominator in a traumatic situation like my family experienced and the shootings that have occurred since then, such as Columbine, Virginia Tech, Parkland high school, Sandy Hook Uvalde Texas and an almost endless string of active shooter situations is that most of us never see it coming or we ignore the signs. The authorities in Nashville knew about my fathers mental illness. He knew virtually every police officer in Nashville at the time. Regardless, during his sober moments he was allowed to continue working as a Pharmacist and he was allowed to keep his guns. In fairness my father had to make late night deposits at the bank and needed his guns. Strong gun laws would not have prevented my father from doing what he did. He was a sick man. We can't blame the gun because it was his tool of choice. Any more than we can blame a knife, a car, a truck, an axe, fertilizer, an airplane, or poison. If someone is intent on hurting you, or themselves, they will do it if they can get away with it. 

  I can't tell you how many times I have wished that my father had died that day on that toilet. Or how many times I have fantasized about being able to go back in time and having the ability to stop my father from killing my mother by any means necessary. Even it it meant that I had to shoot in the head in order to stop him. Don't think I didn't love my father because I did but I didn't know the man that killed my mother. Until I was about ten years old there was no better father in the world. As the song goes however, "Whats Love Got To Do With It" Sadly, we don't get second chances. Lives are too precious, especially the lives of our loved ones and our children. Although it has been 59 years since my mother passed away and the pain has diminished over time it is still there and always will be until the day that I die. She never got to see her sons graduate from high school, or see them marry, or see her grandchildren or experience the joys of everyday living. When we think of all the murders happening across this country such as in the big cities, which the politicians never seem to be that concerned about, and all of these mass killings that are produced by a variety of weapons my grief is shared by millions of people separated from their loved ones by these senseless acts of violence. 

I heard about a frantic mother in Uvalde Texas who was so desperate to get inside of that elementary school and protect her children while the police stood by and did nothing. She was handcuffed for a while and when finally released, without their knowledge was able to sneak into the building and rescue her two children. The moral of this story is that nobody has the will and determination to protect their loved ones any more than a parent or a family member. This is why I carry a gun. It is the great equalizer. I am old and on blood thinners. Without my gun I am very vulnerable but with it I stand a fighting chance. I would die protecting my family and hopefully I would be willing to die for a stranger that was being attacked. My goal is not to kill but to stop the threat. Stopping the threat might mean simply brandishing my weapon or it might mean that I have to use it. Luckily I have only had to use my weapon one time in my life and that was when I was attacked by a Pit Bull. I chose not to shoot the dog but instead of killing the dog I fired into the ground. That dog ran off like a bat out of hell.

How do we make our schools safer? Lets close our eyes for a moment. Are your eyes closed? Lets imagine a public school that is full of children belonging to politicians. Imagine if Uncle Joe Biden was young enough to have children there, or Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Gavin Newsome, or Chuck Schumer. Okay, for fairness sake I will be bipartisan. Lets add George W. Bush, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy and Liz Cheney. First of all, this would be a fantasy public school because politicians would never make their kids suffer through a government education. They want their kids to to have a real education. Jimmy Carter is the only modern president that I know who sent his children to a public school while he was president. I guarantee that his children and their classmates were probably safer than at any time in public school history. For the sake of argument, however; if politicians sent their kids to public schools do you think an 18 year old monster wearing body armor and carrying an AR-15 would be able to get into that school alive? Or anywhere near it for that matter. Especially after shooting up everything around the school for 12 minutes before entering an unopened door. No, he would be dead. Shot in the head and left to die like a dog in the street. Or at the very least incapacitated. 

So, there is your answer. Protect these schools as if the children of politicians went there. No matter what it takes we have to increase the security of our schools. No, it should not be done by the Federal government. The Federal Government is the problem, not the solution. It should be done on a state by state basis. Bring in Israeli consultants to give us some good ideas. They are good at protecting things. They have had a lot of experience. If need be we should have k-9's and guards wearing TAC gear and armed with machine guns standing at the doors and the schools surrounded by razor wire. Kill these people like you would kill rabid dogs. We don't kill rabid dogs because we hate dogs. We kill them because they are rabid. Mental health treatment is okay but our priority should be stopping the threat. Remember, when it comes to losing our loved ones there are no second chances.  

 This will never happen because the politicians in Washington hate us. They could care less about these dead children or any other children that don't belong to them. If they cared about the lives of children they would close our borders and stop the flow of fentanyl and drugs that are coming into this country. Stop sex traffickers, criminals and terrorists at the border. Drill for oil, lower taxes, cut spending, and deregulate so their parents can feed, clothe and educate them. Also do this so their children will have a future. Get rid of Democrat mayors and governors who are running their cities and states into the ground  Throw out Democrat mayors and George Soros financed DA's who stand by while children are slaughtered on a regular basis by gangs in the streets of almost every major city in America. Do not preach to us about the lives of children when you celebrate the deaths of over 60 million aborted babies and borrowing a term from the Mayor of Uvalde directed at Beto Orourke those sick SOB's want to kill babies up to and after the time of birth. 

Are those sick SOB's trying to find a real solution to the death and destruction happening in our schools and everywhere else? No, as I write this they are trying to find a way to limit our fundamental right of self defense that belongs to all American's by passing more gun laws that punish the honest law abiding American while at the same time empowering the criminal element. The Democrat party, with the help of some Republicans created this chaotic society we live in today and now they want to disarm us and feed us to the wolves. While they, along with their rich oligarch friends and Hollywood elites smugly live behind their tall fences and walls that are guarded by 24 hour armed security. When they venture forth into the public arena with their security you couldn't touch them with a 100 foot pole. Yet they don't mind disarming us. That attitude is not indicative of a person who cares. I don't hear much about a politician or leftist elite getting mugged, carjacked, raped or murdered. Unless your Jussie Smollette and just make up a story for political reasons. No, they tell us to depend on the police who they are defunding. When the police arrive we will be lying in a pool of blood because we wont be able to fight back or defend ourselves. Or at least that is their hopeful vision of our future. So stop with the crocodile tears over this shooting. Average American's care much more about the children of Uvalde than they do. Their actions betray their real feelings. They can leave our guns alone so we can protect ourselves. Like that courageous mother who saved her children in Uvalde we are quite capable on our own, because unlike you we actually care about them.