School Shootings Are The Front Lines Of The GOP War On Kids

When Your Policies Enable Killers, You're On Their Side

Living With School Shootings Is A Choice, A Bad Choice

Mass shootings, especially in schools, are a solvable problem. It does not require major advancements in science and social policy or even an infringement on Second Amendment rights. There are multiple reforms that can be put in place, that have worked in nations like England, France, Japan and even the United States during the period of the assault weapons ban, that can cut mass shootings down to almost nothing.

We don’t do any of those things in America because the Republican Party, acting in the interests of the extremists at the blood-soaked NRA and not the American people — particularly American children — has chosen not to.

The Republican Party is engaged in a war against children, and has been for years. The most notable front in this war comes in the form of school shootings, which in a perverse moment for American history, are now a leading cause of death for kids. School shootings. Shootings.

But inaction on gun violence isn’t the only area of Republican abuse of children. Right now in multiple states and in the Republican-led House, there are efforts to hurt transgender children. Republicans are trying to turn these innocent children into a subclass of American, cutting off their access to health care and even sources of joy like school athletics. Republicans in Texas are working to empower the state to remove transgender children from loving homes, one of the most open embraces of fascism we have seen in this country in decades.

Some Republicans and conservatives have even backed policies that would subject children to genital inspections by the state, or even surveillance in school as a purported anti-transgender measure.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, when he’s not setting himself up to fail against Donald Trump in a presidential primary, has been overseeing another assault in children: Working with Republican legislators to purge books from schools that give an honest accounting of racism in America, both in its present form and in a historical context. Depriving children of knowledge like this is abusive.

Immigration Stunts Are GOP Child Abuse

Immigrant children are in the sights of Republicans as well. We saw that as Trump separated children seeking refuge from their families, and the perverse cruelty has persisted with Republican leaders like DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ferrying families around the country to score points with racist xenophobes.

Children suffer when Republicans refuse to accept federal subsidies for health care, choosing to shut down hospitals that would provide basic family care rather than admit that Obamacare and the Black president affiliated with it have anything good to offer.

When the party opposes access to abortion they are empowering child abusers and child rapists. With the conservative Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade followed by state legislation curtailing and eliminating abortion access, these predators were given a green light. Children impregnated by the most foul elements of society are again being violated by Republican-authored policy that forces them to give birth after the most egregious violation.

Our children are under attack across the board, and are being deprived of their rights as human beings and Americans. The all-encompassing Republican war on children has a body count, bodies obliterated in classrooms and churches and synagogues and mosques, but also in minds and identities ruined by the right-wing zeal to impose its own crooked moral systems on others.

Children have to be protected and supported at all costs. The Republican war on children must be answered rhetorically and legislatively. These assaults must be overturned and the sanctity of childhood restored, or the entire American enterprise is doomed.

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— Oliver

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