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A gunman killed eight people Saturday night at an Allen, Texas, mall — one of many public spaces where Americans aren’t safe from gun violence. This is just a week since another gun massacre in Cleveland, Texas. A police officer, who happened to be nearby, killed the gunman, ending this latest round of bloodshed.
Rama Bataineh, a 20-year-old Coach employee, was on her lunch break when the shooting started.
“I went inside and all the customers, all the employees, everyone was in the back sitting on the floor. Everyone was terrified,” Bataineh said. The police escorted everyone outside once the shooting ending, and the sight of the bloodbath will likely stick with Bataineh forever.
“I saw a body, there was a guy in front of me. I didn’t sleep all night. I’d wake up and throw up,” she said.
A 20-year-old woman who works at the mall will now have the same PTSD as the 20-year-old who served in Vietnam. This is America.
EVERYWHERE WE’RE NOT SAFE:
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Steven Spainhouer is a heroic citizen who leapt into action during the carnage, desperately trying to help the wounded and the dying.
“I never imagined in 100 years I would be thrust into the position of being the first first responder on the site to take care of people,” he said. “The first girl I walked up to was crouched down covering her head in the bushes, so I felt for a pulse, pulled her head to the side and she had no face.”
Freely available military-style weapons will inevitably lead to mass shooting events that resemble war zones. Gun fetishists and their Republican enablers have willingly brought the killing fields to our backyards.
If you weren’t sufficiently gutted, Spainhouer described finding a child who survived because his now-dead mother had covered him with her own body.
Authorities are investigating the possible motive, including domestic terrorism. Republican politicians, including Texas’s grotesque Gov. Greg Abbott, are predictably blaming mental health without providing any solutions.
Republican Rep. Keith Self, who represents Allen, Texas, offered empty “thoughts and prayers” and was offended when people, weary of regularly scheduled mass shootings, found this insufficient. When CNN’s Paula Reid pointed out that most Americans demand more concrete actions, a defiant Self claimed they apparently “don’t believe in almighty God, who is absolutely in control of our lives.”
Wait, does Self really believe God wants us to live in constant fear of dying horribly in a gun massacre? Sure, that seems on brand for God, but you don’t need to read Nietzsche to know we can do better.
“I know people want to make this political,” Self said, “but prayers are important.”
Self is a politician not a country preacher, so, yes, we are demanding political solutions from him. This total fraud went on to suggest that America doesn’t have enough “mental health institutions” to lock up all the people who are apparently “sane” enough to easily access weapons of mass destruction.
Steven Spainhouer is a self-described “gun lover” but he also has no patience for these arguments.
“I don’t know what the gunman’s problem was or his motive, but it wasn’t mental health that killed these people, it was an automatic rifle with bullets. That’s what killed them. I’m a gun lover. I have guns. I’m a former police officer. I’m a former Army officer, but these M4s, AR-15s, they’ve gotta get off the streets or this is gonna keep happening, and we’ve got to stop that … prayers won’t bring these people back. We need action in our legislatures.”
We’ll keep you posted as events develop, but that’s all I can stomach for today.
[NBC News]
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