West News Wire: A law called HB 1147 that is currently before the Texas House of Representatives is incredibly graphic. It is suggested that “bleeding control stations” with “tourniquets approved for use in battlefield trauma care by the armed forces of the United States” be made available in schools throughout the state.
The bleeding stations would handle “traumatic injury involving blood loss” in other words, victims of a mass shooting under the language of the measure. The equipment would be taught to school employees, who would then impart these warfare abilities to students in third grade and upwards.
Children in the third grade are typically eight or nine years old.
It has reached this point. If HB 1147 is approved, Texas eighth-graders would be instructed on how to apply compression bandages and chest seals to their friends’ and teachers’ gaping, gory wounds in the event of another mass shooting, which many believe is unavoidable.
Representative Ann Johnson stated that she understood the rationale behind a fellow Democratic lawmaker’s proposal but expressed her fundamental uneasiness about it during a recent debate on the issue in the Texas house. We are teaching our children that it is acceptable for their school to turn into a battle zone, which worries me a lot.
There’s a lot of talk about war zones in America these days. Across the country, lives are being lost, families destroyed, communities shattered by a spate of mass shootings that are occurring with alarming frequency.
The bloodletting is expressing itself in maverick ways. In Michigan this week two school districts banned students from wearing backpacks, even see-through ones, after a loaded handgun was discovered in the bag of a yes third-grader.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, which classifies such instances as those in which four or more people are shot or killed (the gunman excluded), there have been 210 mass shootings countrywide so far this year. Taking a somewhat different perspective, the US is on track to break current records for mass murders.
If the current pace is maintained, there would be 60 mass killings by year’s end in 2023 as opposed to 36 in 2018.
The state of Texas had one of the most tragic tragedies in recent times. On Saturday, eight people were killed when a gunman with Nazi tattoos who had been medically retired from the army in 2008 opened fire at a mall in a Dallas suburb. Youngest victim was three years old.
The rise in mass shootings, according to Robert Spitzer, author of The Gun Dilemma and five other works on gun control, is the result of a number of interlocking variables. The proliferation of extreme and racist ideas since Donald Trump’s election, which appears to have motivated some criminals, maybe including the shooter outside Dallas, are two of them. The copycat effect, when shooters study previous rampages and are inspired to act, is another.
Spitzer claimed that there was one overriding cause, however, that was responsible for the horrifying increase in atrocities: the sheer pervasiveness of guns in America. Though the US government does not store data on how many firearms are bought each year, with records kept only of the number of federal background checks that are required on some gun sales, the best estimates suggest that about 400m guns are owned in the US and rising rapidly. (The total US population is about 332 million.)
At the beginning of the epidemic, there was a sharp increase in gun sales as people’s worries about their own personal safety were turned into purchases with the aid of vigorous gun lobby advertising. According to The Trace’s projections based on FBI data, Americans purchased 23 million weapons during the first year of the pandemic in 2020.
The annual sales volume increased to around 16 million in 2022.
If you look into the statistics more thoroughly, a vicious loop emerges. As a result of crazy conspiracy beliefs that the US government is about to seize firearms, which are heightened by the terror that follows major shootings, more people rush to buy guns, which raises the supply of weapons and the likelihood of further mass shootings.
