Kay Lord writes
America in 2025: A Killing Field Disguised as a Democracy
Last night was another night of bloodbath in America. This time it was a Mormon church in Grand Blanc, Michigan. A former U.S. Marine turned his military training on innocent worshippers, driving into the church, spraying bullets with an assault-style rifle, and setting fire to the building. Four lives gone, eight wounded, and a sacred space reduced to ashes.
And yet, if history is any guide, nothing will change. It is the usual American playbook. As always, politicians will flood social media with condolences, the NRA will whisper reassurances to their congressional puppets, and the nation will move on until the next massacre.
The numbers of gun-violent killing in the US this year alone are staggering. Over 10,000-gun deaths and nearly 20,000 injuries by firearms. These are numbers you count in real combat warfare but that is the number in a country not at war with any other country, but at war with itself.
More than 300 mass shootings, that is, incidents where at least four people are shot at once. Schools remain war zones, with dozens of incidents of gunfire on school grounds. Children gunned down in classrooms. Parents left to bury their sons and daughters. Communities shredded by grief.
What baffles me most is that these killings involve war-style weapons like AR-15s, and similar rifles designed not for hunting deer, but for mowing down human beings with maximum efficiency. The same guns used on foreign battlefields are now commonplace on American streets, malls, churches and in schools. Like it or not, this is not a civil society, this is a nation at war with itself.
What’s most alarming in all of this is the sheer cowardice shown by Congress—particularly the Republican legislators, whose refusal to engage in bipartisan, common-sense gun reform has left blood on their hands.
That said, Democrats are far from blameless; too often, they prioritize pushing extreme "woke" legislation over practical solutions. America stands at a deeply precarious moment in her troubled and complex history.
Let’s speak plainly. A large bloc of Republican members of Congress has chosen NRA dollars over children’s lives. They block universal background checks. They refuse to ban assault weapons.
They twist the Second Amendment into a shameful excuse to justify inaction while the blood of innocents soaks church pews and classroom floors.
The NRA bankrolls their campaigns, dangles ratings like carrots, and ensures that anyone who dares to stand up for sensible gun reform risks losing their seat. The result is seeing elected officials cry crocodile tears after a massacre, then go right back to voting against laws that would prevent the next one. That is not leadership. That is moral bankruptcy in the so-called world greatest democracy!
Trump’s supporters, too, must be called out. Too many of them look away, downplay the crisis, or worse, glorify gun culture as if it were some sacred emblems of American freedom.
Freedom does not mean children’s blood spilled out on school floors. Freedom does not mean congregants should die in a house of worship. This is not the called liberty that America often touts itself about. This is lunacy.
Let’s imagine for a moment if a developing nation in Africa were plagued by this level of mass slaughter, the U.S. government would label it a failed state. Lectures would be given at the UN about lawlessness.
Humanitarian aid would be tied to reforms. America would position itself as the world’s moral compass, wagging its finger at “primitive” nations that can’t protect their people.
Yet here is America the self-styled leader of the free world presiding over a bloodbath of its own making. Mass shootings are so routine that it’s no more shocking anymore. The so-called civilized nation has become the global capital of gun killings.
Meanwhile, the contrast could not be so glaring in the UK. After the 1996 Dunblane massacre, politicians acted decisively by banning handguns, and regulations tightened.
In Australia, after the Port Arthur massacre, sweeping reforms pulled semi-automatic rifles off the streets. In much of Europe, gun ownership is strictly controlled, and mass shootings are rare.
You know why? Because leaders in those nations decided that the right to live outweighs the right to own weapons of war. They chose civilization over carnage. America refuses to do the same.
No nation can call itself civilized while allowing its school children, church members, and its citizens to be mowed down with battlefield weapons. No politician deserves respect if all they can offer after a massacre is “thoughts and prayers” while cashing NRA cheques.
Enough of the grandstanding about the Second Amendment. Enough of the crocodile tears. America must confront the truth: what is happening is not freedom, it is not development, it is not democracy. It is primitive bloodletting, enabled by cowardly lawmakers who care more about their careers than human lives.
Until the US Congress gets off their high horse, frequent and petty bickering, and finds the courage to act, every condolence statement release aftermath another gun killing is an insult, every prayer a hollow lie, and every politician who blocks sensible gun-reform legislation is an accomplice to murder.
Condolences don’t stop bullets. Laws do. Courage does. Responsibility does.
Selah!
© Kay Lord, 290925.
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