After the FSU mass shooting, no one wants your weak prayers

Thoughts and prayers.

On Thursday, April 17th, a 20-year-old student roamed FSU’s sunny campus and fired a handgun. Two deaths; Six people were injured.

Reactions from the selected leader? Usually: “Thinking and praying.”

The governor of Florida said he was “praying,” adding, “we’re all seminolles today.”

First Lady Casey DeSantis: “Prayer.”

Senator Rick Scott: “Pray.”

The US president called the attack “awful, shame,” blew away proposals for gun control reform, calling him a “big advocate for the second amendment.”

Maybe he missed the prayer note.

I teach at FSU. And that Thursday afternoon, I was locked up in my office.

Yes, it was scary. It was also terribly familiar. This is America: Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Columbine, Ubarde, Nashville, Parkland.

The Tallahassee Democrats reported that some of the survivors of the 2018 Marjorie Stone Man Douglas shooting were on campus that day.

Robbie Aradeff’s younger sister Alyssa has passed away from MSD. “We have to change something,” he said.

Graduate student Stephanie Horowitz saw people running and immediately learned what was going on.

Jason Leavy was a freshman with MSD when Nicholas Cruz killed 17 people. He knew too, and began barricadeting the classroom doors.

“To be honest, that’s the most amazing thing in the world,” he said.

All of those kids have experienced multiple active shooter drills. Many teachers also have it.

We are supposed to push desks against the door, turn off the lights, “strengthen” schools, churches and university campuses, and act as if we are grateful when politicians express their dishonest and candidly slanderous “sympathy.”

No one wants their weak prayers, and when it comes to their ideas, if the violence-loving reactionaries in charge of this state actually had an idea, then they realize that things don’t need to be like this.

Priority

From the state Capitol to the US Capitol, politicians shrugged. Guns are more important than people. Children, high school students, college students – don’t give big money to political campaigns.

The second modification wins everything else.

We are supposed to accept that there is nothing anyone can do. This is the way of doing things.

As the headlines for evergreen onion shoots go, “There’s no way to prevent this,” only states where this happens regularly. ”

But the kids aren’t okay. The kids are scary – and furious.

Last Tuesday, a group of FSU students confronted the morally harmful smoke at the Capitol to demand wise gun control, red flags and firearm storage laws.

“The fact that they can sit here and prioritize weapons in my life, my friends’ lives, my community around me, is deplorable,” said Madalyn Probst, president of FSU College Democrats.

The problem is that the grown people in charge don’t care.

The Florida home has approved a bill that allows an 18-year-old child to buy a gun, repealing the law passed after the murder at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School.

We don’t let them drink, but hell, they can get themselves a 9mm semi-automatic handgun just like they killed three people and hurt five people at Michigan State in 2023.

Here at FSU, the injured can see mountains of fallen flowers and teddy bears. But the governor with the emotional intelligence of a poisonous dirt frog is trying to push forward what he calls “the summer of the second amendment.”

If you are purchasing guns or ammunition between Memorial Day and July 4th, you will not need to pay sales tax.

Because more people want to pack their fever.

Children of “protective”

FSU Atrocity was Florida’s sixth mass shooting and the 27th school shooting.

this year. so far.

The grown-ups in charge are obsessed with “protecting” children from fluoride and potentially “protecting” them from life-saving vaccines.

We won’t allow them near books such as “And Tango Makes Three.”

It will not let trans people or strange people discover them.

They can’t stand the thoughts of high school students reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved Project or the 1619 Project, so that they don’t learn about the horrors of slavery.

They may be digging into political theory that suggests a model of the state that does not insist that a scary university student study sociology and encounters books that do not pose a great deal of intense capitalism or challenge religious orthodoxy.

When it comes to sex, they don’t even want to think about it – of course, unless your teenage daughter gets pregnant or your teenage son gets an STD.

They advocate for protecting children from many normal human realities, but there is no gun violence.

It’s okay for young people to know how to barricade themselves in the classroom or learn strategies to avoid large shooters, but they don’t watch poetry, play instruments, or master foreign languages.

It is okay for them to live scared that lonely child, or that man who appears angry, or someone they can’t see, or who want to spill as much blood as possible.

The freedom to always get a gun for some reason is even more important.

There, there are Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Columbine, Ubarde, Nashville, Parkland and now FSU.

Against hatred

One of my students thought there was a “United Abu Abu Hate” symposium on April 17th in honor of Maura Binkley.

Maura Binkley was a student who was filmed and killed in a yoga studio in 2018 with another woman.

The symposium was to promote campus safety, but it had to be cancelled.

The FSU building where that was supposed to happen was a crime scene.

Maura Binkley was murdered by a man who disliked women.

A young man who is allegedly roamed the campus is shooting his classmates as he hates people of color. He is a Trump supporter and a white supremacist.

He told fellow students that black people were ruining his neighborhood.

The US government produces hatred towards non-white Christians and accepts violence against citizens.

It’s not safe anywhere.

Diane Roberts is an eighth generation Florida native and was born and raised in Tallahassee. This column first appeared in Florida Phoenix and was reprinted with permission.