Welcome to Litsy!

Excellent!! Thought it would be dry & boring. Surprised that the combination of studies/data combined with personal stories of the author along with stories of victims was engaging and thought provoking!

This was such an eye opener and I‘m so glad I read it. How long will these ‘all lives matter‘ ‘pro-life‘ people in power allow such needless violence to continue? It‘s an endless cycle. We are more than this. Fuck the NRA—abolish it! Fund where we need it, stop feeding the cycle and allowing money to rule! Note: the 2019 El Paso massacre isn‘t mentioned which I find a bit weird; perhaps the book was already submitted to the publisher.

We need more voters who will decide never to support a candidate who doesn‘t support common sense interventions like universal background checks and assault weapons bans. We need more activists who will demand that Republicans and Democrats find a common ground that is there for the taking on further reform of our racist criminal justice system.

Most of it— The homicides, the school shootings, the suicides, the domestic violence, and the deaths of despair— is all preventable. And what is most offensive to me and all the families who have lost sons and daughters or brothers and sisters to this uniquely American epidemic, is that today Congress isn‘t lifting a finger to solve it.

⬆️⬆️⬆️This! 💯💯💯

Cutting taxes for poor Americans is a good policy start, but by raising revenue from the very richest among us (for instance, those who have personal wealth above $10 million), we could finally begin to make the investments in public housing, broken infrastructure, and higher education.

When Senator Bernie Sanders in 2016 called for the United States to adopt a program of “free college,” American elites scoffed at the prospect. Many of these naysayers were the same people who cheered a massive tax cut for the wealthy that cost taxpayers far more than any free college plan would.

⬆️This is another ugly face of systemic racism and housing injustice.
And it makes me sick to my stomach.

The war on drugs, begun by Nixon and carried on by multiple Republican and Democratic administrations, can more accurately be called a war on people of color, because both the laws and the enforcement of the laws were designed to lock up African-Americans and Hispanics, while giving whites a broad immunity from persecution and prosecution.

⬆️Another face of systemic racism.

It turns out that if you spend resources in places where the consequences of a century of racial discrimination and economic marginalization have been the worst, on quality programming like focused deterrence or trauma intervention, you can make those places safer and interrupt the downward spiral of marginality.

This happens nowhere else other than the United States of America, this epidemic of mass slaughter, this scourge of school shooting after school shooting. It only happens here, not because of coincidence, not because of bad luck, but as a consequence of our inaction. We are responsible.

If more guns led to less crime, America would be the safest place on earth. We are not—in fact, America is the most homicidal country in the high income world—and that, the data clearly demonstrates, is because countries and states with higher rates of gun ownership have more murders than countries and states with fewer firearms per capita. More guns actually mean more lethal crime.

The violence America exports to the world comes in many forms. Lethal hardware pushed by profit motivated military industrial companies; military grade firearms delivered to the most dangerous countries in the world, unregulated; gun shows, A foreign policy that seeks to quell violence with more violence. As much damage as Americans do to ourselves, our addiction to violence arguably does even more harm overseas.

Studies show that women in abusive relationships are five times more likely to be killed if there is a gun in the house. If there was already a report of a previous assault, the presence of a gun in the house makes the woman 41 times more likely to be murdered than those that reported abuse but live in homes without guns.

“Nobody‘s going to protect me except me. Everybody else is carrying. I can‘t be the only one who‘s not.”

“Would you call police when something happened?” I asked.

“The police aren‘t here for us. When I was young, I saw one of them pull a kid out of school and beat him senseless, for doing nothing. So we…don‘t… call…the police.”

ACAB. Fund communities, not police.

I turned to Kinzinger and whispered, “So we‘re basically here protecting the poppy trade that provides the Taliban with an income to continue the insurgency that we are supposed to be fighting?”

The drafters of the constitutional amendment outlawing slavery thought of incarceration in the same terms as enslavement. They said so explicitly, writing an exception to the abolition of slavery for incarceration.

😞🤬

A riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility in the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. —MLKJ

Why does it take one murder of white children for politicians to show up here and talk about the yearly, monthly, and daily death of African American children? Why don‘t our kids matter just as much? Why have we been ignored for so long?

But many others are stocking up because they do, in fact, believe that private citizens need to be armed against a potentially confiscatory government, and an increasingly antigovernment, conspiratorial, uncompromising NRA is exactly the kind of talk that will convince these purchasers to keep bulking up their personal arsenals.

They LOVE propaganda.

There is no reason anyone using a gun to hunt, to target shoot, or to protect his or her home needs a thirty-round magazine or a hundred-round drum. They are the tools of mass murderers.

The modern assault weapon was designed for the military, with the specific purpose of killing human beings as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Why would any thinking, compassionate human being believe that a weapon of that power—with no logical use other than to kill humans—should be in civilian hands?

Elliot Rodger, the college student who killed six in Isla Vista, CA, in 2014, posted a chilling YouTube video prior to his shooting, describing the feeling of buying his first semiautomatic handgun. “After I picked up the handgun, I brought it back to my room and felt a new sense of power. Who‘s the alpha male now, bitches?”

*Tell me this isn‘t about little dick syndrome.

An obsession with weapons, combined with the means to easily obtain them, is at the heart of the American mass shooting experience.

Photo shown is from 2019, in a Starbucks. Unbelievable. You going to protect your latte with that bro? WTF

So if America doesn‘t have more men than other countries and doesn‘t have more mentally ill people than other nations, then what is different about us that causes this almost exclusively American epidemic? Well, here‘s the simplest and perhaps most important truth: It is just much easier to commit mass murder in America.

A middle aged man in jeans, dark sunglasses, and a Vietnam Vet baseball cap was walking back to his car, and I breathed deep to ready myself for my first pitch of the afternoon. “Hi, can I just introduce myself for a second?”
I‘m Chris Murphy, and I‘m running for State Senate in Waterbury. I just wanted to say hello.”
“Guns,” he said, flatly. “Excuse me?”
“Guns. What‘s your position on the Sec Amendment?”

Why is everything always about guns?!

It stuns me that my country does not see this horror—ninety people dying every day from gunfire, a rate ten times higher than other industrialized nations—and choose to act in a way that saves lives.

Is this the ‘pro-life‘ example? 😞

This was an incredibly powerful and insightful look at how gun violence impacts our country. Highly recommend to anyone who wants to understand this issue better. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ #arc #Netgalley

Full review on Goodreads