Once again I was going to write about something else today, but events have put that on the back burner. Hate and guns have taken to the center ring again.

It’s another list to add to the many lists of names of the innocent dead, victims of this country’s refusal to deal with the issue of gun violence. This one gets to go into the special sub-category of racially motivated gun violence, the kind where reside the weak minded, easily manipulated, likely incel, young men who more often than not are the ones who commit these mini-genocides.

Here are the names of the dead (from the BBC):

• Roberta A. Drury, 32, who had moved to Buffalo to be with her brother, who had had a bone marrow transplant
• Margus D. Morrison, 52,
• Andre Mackneil, 53
• Aaron Salter, 55, a retired police officer who was working as a security guard in Top Friendly Mart grocery store
• Geraldine Talley, 62
• Celestine Chaney, 65, a devoted grandmother
• Heyward Patterson, 67, a dedicated church-goer who drove people to and from the supermarket
• Katherine Massey, 72, a community activist with a “beautiful soul”, according to her sister
• Pearl Young, 77, who dedicated her Saturdays to working in a soup kitchen
• Ruth Whitfield, 86, who had just been to visit her husband in a care home

Tell me, what did these people do to deserve the fate this walking pile of garbage consigned them to? All they did was go to the grocery store like so many other days. How were they to know?

The New York Times quoted the following:

“Don’t tell me you’re a friend of our community and you don’t address this today at your pulpit,” said Bishop Darius Pridgen of the True Bethel Baptist Church in Buffalo, adding, “If you do not stand behind those holy desks and acknowledge that there are still people who hate Black people, you can go to hell with the shooter for all I care. Because at the end of the day, if you’re silent right now, you are not a friend of mine.”

I’ll tell you who else you need to point a finger at Bishop. The media outlets that spew “replacement theory” both tacitly and out loud. Yeah Fox News, you have just as much blood on your hands here as the parents who raised him, the “friends” (if indeed he had any besides other internet trolls), the guy who sold a teenager a weapon they both knew could be easily modified into a semi-automatic assault rifle (and the people who make the kits to do so), and the political party who is even now running to hide behind the thin red line of thoughts and prayers.

Excuse me, but fuck your thoughts and prayers. You don’t care about the victims here, you care about the shooter. Come on Madison Cawthorn with your gun porn photos or you Lauren Boebert with your gun lover Christmas card. You’ve shown which side you’re on.  Repugnicants you have to face the fact that this is what your party stands for now: racial hatred and genocide. The only member of your party to admit you have culpability is Liz Cheney, who you’ve basically thrown out of your party. No wonder you get all weak in the knees for someone like Putin, he’s doing on a large scale what you want to do on a smaller scale.

Maybe they were right when they said guns don’t kill people, people kill people. What they left off is the people who kill people are the genocidal, “let’s make America white again”, ultra conservative, ultimately Repugnicant loving, white Christian males who are threatened by anyone who is not those things because the bottom line is they can’t compete with them on an even footing.

Someone who commits an act like this is a terrorist. Start calling them that. Make them the boogie men you have made all Arabs into. How about a prequel to THE AMERICANS that shows Stan Beeman’s infiltration of the White Supremist group before he moved in next to Elizabeth and Philip. That might make a few sets of parents demand to see their son’s search history and take proper measures. Of course too many of these terrorists have parents who believe the same crap.

I’m sick of reading about it, I’m sick of writing about it, but mostly I’m sick of having in the back of my mind the fear that I might one day be the victim of such violence. Yes, I will admit to the fact that even here in deep blue California we have a sect of these nuts and while Blacks and Latinos might be the first in their gunsights, someone named Shapiro is next on their firing line.

And if we as a society don’t do something to stop these alleged human beings then you dear reader might be next.

Shapiro Out