Today is Monday, March 27, 2023. Less than a week home, we learn of another terrible mass shooting in this “bloodbath” United States: this time in Nashville, Tennessee, at a school where a female shooter armed with at least two assault-style rifles and a bloody handgun (were these legally purchased? we must wonder) shot and killed three children and three adults in the school. What is wrong with this crazy country? This doesn’t happen anywhere else with such sickening frequency as here. As Congress remains paralyzed over doing anything more effective in combating this cancer, maybe it’s time for people to demand real change from their representatives.

The scene of today’s carnage is the Covenant School, a private Christian elementary school, in Nashville, Tennessee. The shooter was initially described as a teen, but that description changed to that of a 28-year-old woman who entered the building through a side door and was heavily armed, as originally reported. Police now believe that the killer was once a student at the school; she was killed during gunfire with police, authorities reported. So now no one will know what motivated this unbalanced woman to take the lives of six innocents. This shooting marked the 129th – 129th! – mass shooting in this blood-red United States so far in 2023, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive. This is only the third month of the year, folks – not the 12th, and we have 129 mass shootings thus far.

“How is this happening?” an outraged survivor of another mass shooting said during a press conference over the latest gun incident. The woman was Ashbey Beasley, a survivor of the Highland Park, Illinois, mass shooting that took took place on July 4, 2022. She interrupted the press conference to decry, “Aren’t you tired of this?” She claimed to have become an advocate for sensible gun legislation since she and her child survived the summer mass shooting in Illinois. She claimed she was in Tennessee with her family for a vacation and then learned of the terror that occurred at the school. People should be fed up with this all-too-regular occurrence of bloodshed caused primarily by assault rifles.

President Joe Biden addressed the shooting in televised remarks today. “It’s sick,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking. A family’s worst nightmare.”

Biden indicated the administration is “monitoring the situation really closely” before again calling on Congress to pass his assault weapons ban, as he did after the mass shooting in Monterey Park, California, in January. How many of you honestly believe that Republicans will endorse such an assault ban even after this incident – after they have cowardly done nothing for decades?

Anyway, Biden continued to denounce the wave of gun violence in the country, saying, “We have to do more to stop gun violence. It’s ripping our communities apart and ripping at the very soul of the nation.”

The governor of the state, a pusillanimous repugnican, Bill Lee, tweeted out a horribly cliched response to the “tragedy”: he urged people to “please join us in praying for the school, congregation & Nashville community,” without proposing an assault rifle ban in the state. Actor George Takei – from Star Trek – called out Governor Bill Lee’s “underwhelming” reaction to the unthinkable, while other Twitter users did point out that Lee endorsed a drag queen ban early on this month in order to “protect the children,” but wouldn’t do anything more meaningful to curb real gun violence directed towards children in school. Fucking repugnican response here, as usual, I say. Just another day then in the shoot-em-up United States, I hate to say. With no meaningful change in the situation. When will enough be enough here?

Reacting to Lee’s unimpressive tweet regarding the “situation,” Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts ridiculed the governor’s repugnican trope of thoughts and prayers routinely offered after such tragedies. She writes, “If thoughts and prayers worked to stop gun violence, there wouldn’t have been a shooting at a Christian elementary school. It’s your actions – including weakening the state’s gun laws – that’s killing kids in Tennessee.” She then added, in capitals, “SHAME ON YOU.”

Now it’s more incumbent on me to say “stay safe” and be well.