By Josh Resnek
Eleven Asian people celebrating the Asian New Year were slaughtered near to Los Angeles in a Monterey dance hall over the weekend by a crazed gunman who later took his own life.
It was certainly an act of domestic terrorism but the fact an Asian gunman did the killing of other Asians makes this a hard case to prove.
Some news organizations have reported this was the 33rd mass shooting of the New Year 2023 and we’re only 25 days into the new year, if you can imagine that.
Add to this Monday another mass shooting in California with another seven innocents dead.
This time, the perpetrator was caught. He sitting in jail.
Some law enforcement officials took comfort in the fact the California shooter in the first instance apparently did not use a high powered assault weapon.
Everett and all our surrounding communities have somehow, so far, been free type of savage violence and senseless mass shootings.
We are left to wonder, how many people living in Everett have assault weapons in their homes?
Legally and illegally?
How many people carrying or owning weapons are mentally ill or deranged enough to shoot innocents?
How many Everett people are carrying concealed hand guns legally and illegally?
Hundreds is the likeliest answer.
Check this story out from CNN:
“At least 10 people are dead and another 10 injured after a mass shooting in Monterey Park, California, Saturday night, that happened as the city large Asian American community was celebrating Lunar New Year weekend.
A lot remains unknown, but the scenes of agony and horror are increasingly all too familiar in America. In fact, Saturday’s mass shooting joins a staggering 32 others from just the first three weeks of 2023, per the Gun Violence Archive.
Communities from Goshen, California, to Baltimore, Maryland, are reeling while others brace for the possibility of such violence in their own backyards.
“A time of a cultural celebration … and yet another community has been torn apart by senseless gun violence,” Vice President Kamala Harris told a crowd in Tallahassee, Florida, on Sunday. “All of us in this room and in our country understand this violence must stop.”
“But how that happens with a divided Congress, vastly different policy prescriptions, and a deeply entrenched gun culture remains to be seen.”
Whether or not you support the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms or not, the huge numbers of mass killings makes a mockery out of gun safety programs and our belief that we are the greatest nation in the world.
After all, how can a nation be great when mass murders are being perpetrated on us almost day to day throughout the nation?
How long before one of these mass murders takes its toll on us in Massachusetts?
We are not immune.
We must never forget this. We must work as hard as we can to protect ourselves from savage gun violence – although no one seems to know the way.