Today is Wednesday, June 1, 2022. We are in the midst of yet another fucking mass shooting, this time in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where at least 5 people have been shot dead, including the gunman. This time madness in the form of a single, male intruder with a gun walked into St. Francis Hospital in Tulsa and shot dead four people for no apparent reason. The gunman is also dead, supposedly of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, but we have no details regarding what possessed this person to go on a killing spree. This latest tragedy comes on the heels of the Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting at Robb Elementary School just 8 days ago. Two young victims from that atrocity were actually being buried today, according to accounts in the paper. These youngest victims of gun violence were Amerie Jo Garza and Maite Rodriguez who were buried in child-size coffins because of their age. Their families’ grief can never be adequately comprehended as they were laid to rest today.

Today’s mass shooting is covered in an online CNN article on my smartphone by Andy Rose and Christina Maxouris entitled “At least 4 people were killed in Tulsa, Oklahoma, hospital campus shooting, police say.”

The shooting took place on a hospital campus in Oklahoma, according to police who were interviewed in a news conference this evening. The gunman is also deceased as a result of self-inflicted gunshot wounds, according to authorities at the scene.

The incident developed as dispatchers received a call about an active shooter at the Natalie Medical Building, a physicians’ office building on the St. Francis Hospital campus, at roughly 4:52 p.m. local time, according to Tulsa Police Department Deputy Chief Eric Dalgleish.

Unlike the Texas school shooting, here police responded quickly, at around 4:56 p.m. and made contact with victims and the suspect roughly five minutes later. The officers who arrived could hear shots inside the building, which directed them to the second floor, according to the deputy chief.

One terrified witness, Debra Proctor, was in another building on the hospital campus for a doctor’s appointment when she heard police sirens ringing out. She told CNN that when she stepped outside, first responders were lined up everywhere. Proctor is a registered nurse for more than four decades; she described the scene as “shocking.” She said, “Police were everywhere in the parking lot, up and down the surrounding blocks. They were still arriving when I was leaving.”

Dozens of police cars could be seen outside the hospital complex, and authorities shut down traffic as the investigation proceeded. A reunification center for families to find their loved ones was set up at a nearby high school.

There you have it, good folks, yet another mass shooting involving a long gun and a handgun. Would you say the gunman was heavily armed here? Now Americans are no longer safe anywhere: whether it be a church, synagogue, grocery store, movie theater, concert venue, school building, on a subway train, on a city street, and now a hospital, the latest site where madness exploded. The Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt called the shooting a “senseless act of violence and hatred” in a prepared statement. He added, “Sarah and I are praying for the families of those who lost their lives and for those who were injured.” I guessed it without even checking Google – that this guy Stitt is a registered Republican. This is the fucking party of “prayers and thoughts” gone amok in this country. This interesting fact about the governor I just discovered by checking Google – that Stitt is the first tribally enrolled Native American to serve as a governor of a U.S. state, since he is a member of the Cherokee Nation. He has been governor since 2019.

We now have a broken country where we have a score of repugnicans being featured in political ads involving them blowing up cars or other objects with high-powered rifles. isn’t that so peachy keen? In one ad, the atrocious Marjorie Taylor Greene is shown blowing up Biden’s “socialist agenda” with her AR-15-style rifle. Guns were featured in over 100 repugnican ads, according to captions supplied by MSNBC. This rank appeal to Second Amendment nuts in this nation is just so abhorrent!! They must be raked over the coals for their subservience to the gun lobby. I would hope voters would turn these idiots away en masse at the ballot box in November. This kind of politicking is just plain immoral on their part.

In connection to the debate on gun control in this country, I listened to my regular podcast in the car which featured a nuanced discussion by Bob Cesca of The Banter in which he outlined his own strategy for dealing with the proliferation of guns in the United States. I’m not sure if it would work, but it does offer some food for thought. He first acknowledges that it will be nigh impossible to get behind adequate gun control legislation because of the repugnican deadlock on the issue. So instead he proposed a different tack and that is to wage a campaign in the same vein as the advertising campaigns in the late 60s and 70s that touted the evils of cigarette smoking that swayed public opinion against smoking.

To counter the argument that gun possession in this country is “neat” or “cool,” Cesca suggests the same kind of campaign be waged to portray gun ownership as anathema and unmasculine, which is just the polar opposite of what the mythology attached to guns is right now in every corner of the land. “We have to portray gun owners as being cowards,” he said at one point. This type of campaign would not involve Congress or the judicial branch at all. It would be conducted by advertising agencies and other organizations with tons of money like the Bloomberg Foundation and other liberal-leaning groups. When I heard this proposal being announced on the podcast, I thought, even if this could be executed properly, I imagined that it would take too long to dissuade people from buying their filthy guns, just as the commercials targeting cigarette smokers took a long time to sway public opinion against the tobacco industry. We don’t have that much time, given how many mass shootings we have on a weekly basis now. We need action immediately, not two or three years from now. Can you imagine how many people will be slaughtered by guns in that time frame alone?

Does anyone have a better solution here then? I would be happy to hear any good ones, so that we could emerge from this viselike grip of the gun on the consciousness of many who believe the only solution to conflict is through the barrel of a rifle instead of engaging in debate. No other country has our rates of homicide related to mass shootings. Not a one! What a horrible statistic to characterize these here dis-United States; it’s one that should bring everlasting shame.

From a personal perspective, I can say that I stopped watching a film yesterday called Blood Father starring that former Hollywood pretty boy Mel Gibson because the opening scene involved a group of young thugs putting bullets in several guns in a car that might have had Gibson’s daughter in the film sitting beside one of the foul-mouthed hoodlums. I was turned off by the imminence of violence occurring in the movie, so I deleted it from my queue. That is another thing we can do: turn our backs on violence depicted in the cinema. I’ve always maintained that Hollywood has always had a love affair with blood and guts instead of human sensuality. It’s always easier to show a body being penetrated by 35-caliber bullets rather than depict two consenting adults making love. You may disagree with me here, but this is just my opinion. Don’t you recall the public outcry over those first X-rated films from the 70s? There was a public uproar over showing the naked form in those early explorations of sex on film.

Tomorrow we bring Jocelyn back to the vet; we believe the report will not be as dire as before. We’ll see then.

Stay safe and be well.