stagger lee

When my nine year old daughter was just six, and she got paint all over her bedroom carpet-while secretly painting us a beautiful picture-I didn’t say, to my wife “Okay. Enough is enough. One of us is going to have to be pulling guard duty in her bedroom until she goes to sleep each night! It’s the only way we’ll ever stop this from happening again!!” No. I didn’t say that. I simply said “There will be no more PAINT in your bedroom. Ever. When you want to paint, let us know. We’ll get you set up at the kitchen table.” (Where we have hardwood floors) It’s the PAINT!

Mass shooters don’t choose the AR-15 because it looks “cool.” They choose it, because they can kill upwards of 30 people before needing to reload. On Sept 28th, 1982, 12 year old Mary Kellerman was hospitalized after being poisoned by a killer who laced a bottle of Tylenol that was on a store shelf, with cyanide. She died the next morning. A day later, six more would die from poisoned Tylenol. By October 5th, Johnson & Johnson had issued a nationwide recall of 31 million bottles of Tylenol, and launched a massive advertising campaign to get people not to consume any of their products that contained acetaminophen (Tylenol) The 1982 event inspired a rapid and radical shift in how certain products were sent out, quickly prompting manufacturers to start using tamperproof packaging. Untold lives have been saved in the years since. The crisis management response by Johnson & Johnson is taught today as a model of corporate public relations and public safety. These fucking shootings should be SIMPLE to fix. We KNOW how to rapidly bring about a massive reduction in school shootings and the senseless deaths of children and staff. We KNOW how. It’s not happening, because organizations like the NRA spend millions upon millions of dollars to make sure GOP politicians do NOT allow those solutions to be implemented. The NRA rewards the GOP for allowing our children to continue being slaughtered. It’s NOT that we don’t know how to crush this. That, has never been the problem.