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Aren’t We ‘Hardened’ Enough?
Mass shootings are the symptoms. The diseases are misogyny and extremism.
The linguistic metaphor falls like a cruel joke.
After the devastating, demoralizing, horrifying, enraging Uvalde school shooting, elected officials in Texas referenced a law they passed in 2019 allowing districts to “harden” their schools.
Don’t these officials know any other way to serve the public than to make things harder?
That’s what Texas Republicans (and the rest of conservative America) have done, after all.
They’ve made it harder to register to vote and to cast ballots.
They’ve made it harder, soon to be impossible for many, for women to control their bodies and reproductive choices.
They’ve made life harder for transgender kids, and they’ve made the jobs of librarians and teachers harder, by banning books and making it illegal to talk about race, gender and sexuality.
About the only thing that isn’t harder is acquiring deadly weapons designed for war. That’s what Texas Republicans do in response to mass shootings: make it easier to get more guns.
Now it’s hard to go anywhere, a concert, a movie theater, a supermarket, a house of worship, a nightclub, a hospital (hospital??), an office or a school, without…
