CARLTON FLETCHER: Politicians’ ‘thoughts and prayers’ meaningless as gun deaths mount

Mister Saturday Night Special, got a barrel that’s blue and cold. Ain’t good for nothin’ but puttin’ men 6 feet in a hole.

— Lynyrd Skynyrd

People have carried the NIMBY concept — not in my backyard — to the extreme. They continue to gloss over discussion of any occurrence that doesn’t directly involve them, yes; but they’ve gotten blase’ to the point that things that happen anywhere else — not in their backyard — may just as well not have happened at all.

Even the fact that a young man was shot dead and five others injured in a mass shooting on the campus of Albany State University during the university’s homecoming celebration last week doesn’t appear to have disturbed too man people’s comfort level, even though ASU is indeed in this community’s backyard. It’s as if the majority of the city’s populace has determined NIMBY includes only an area that encompasses property only as wide as their front to their back steps.

Everything else? Not my problem.

But these people with blinders on must at some point understand that the killing, the gun violence that plagues this nation more virulently than COVID at its worst, has indeed invaded their state, their county, their city, their neighborhood. And given the namby-pamby, non-existent gun laws that now exist, especially in states like Georgia — where anyone can carry a concealed weapon, no license necessary — it’s only going to get worse.

In the United States last year, according to Omnilert, there were 658 mass shootings. America was the scene of 42,996 gun-related deaths — that’s an ungodly 120 per day — with 38,368 additional injuries. Stats show that since 2010, school shootings have risen 2,200% … all at a cost of $557 billion a year.

Yet a very vocal minority with a huge amount of influence says there is no need for restrictive gun laws. One member of that group boldly remarked recently, “If I want an automatic weapon, I should be allowed to get an automatic weapon.”

That old trope about the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution allowing for the purchase of any type and any number of weapons an individual desires — “It’s what the Founding Fathers wanted,” they declare — is so much baloney. Never in their wildest dreams could the American leaders in the 1770s have imagined guns and ammunition with the kill capacity that today’s weapons of mass destruction carry. Protecting one’s homestead is not quite in the same ballpark as building up an arsenal large enough to arm a small country.

People tell me that I should not point fingers at groups like the NRA because of the “good” such organizations do for this country. And while there may be instances in which such groups do manage to show something of a charitable bent, it’s the fact that this one group has given more than $30 million to the man most likely to be our next president — God help us — offers a look at the true objective of NRA and other like-minded organizations.

Politicians, even those who would be dictator, don’t take that much money and expect there to be no quid pro quo. And so, as more people — like the two students and two teachers in Winder, Georgia … yes, our backyard — are gunned down for no reason at all other than the fact the killer has mental issues and shouldn’t have had a weapon in the first place or wants the attention mama and daddy didn’t give him at home, a growing number of people who look beyond the confines of their own domiciles are crying for action.

And these caring politicians — who fail to even answer questions about the mass shootings, declaring they’re keeping the dead ones and their families in their “thoughts and prayers” … and it’s tough to think of a more meaningless response — say they won’t even look into laws that would ask gun owners to voluntarily keep their weapons in safe places and consider precautions that would keep kids away from the guns. That “nonstarter” concept, they say, might anger their base of voters … a few more deaths may be inevitable, but they’ll keep their thoughts and prayers handy.

My guess is it will take an event in their actual backyards for these feckless politicians to put their politics secondary to life and limb.

Meanwhile, the death toll mounts.