The “everybody” the government can’t protect these days includes those dead from gun-involved homicidal violence, accidents and suicides totaling 38,000 a year, over 100 a day, in the U. S.”

Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said of the Virginia Beach shooting: “There are things that the government can do” but that “we’re never going to protect everybody against everybody who is deranged.” So apparently our government of the moment is going to go right on protecting the “somebodies” and ignoring the “nobodies”—according to its perception of same.

Where are those who would serve humanity through obsession with the plight of average Americans? Don’t expect to find them under “republican” on the next ballot. Republicans have worked long and hard to defame the epithet “liberal,” and the regard for individual dignity and well-being for which it stands.

As for the “deranged” who would do us harm, there’s also a lot of disagreement over just to whom that applies these days. Many among us are convinced we have deranged thinking at the top in a big way—an opinion that is fortified about every time Donald Trump opens his mouth or signs an executive order with a flourish.

The “everybody” the government can’t protect these days includes those dead from gun-involved homicidal violence, accidents and suicides totaling 38,000 a year, over 100 a day, in the U. S. Latest figures available are from the Center for Disease Control, which also shows that two-thirds of the deaths are suicides. However, an Associated Press analysis of FBI data shows about 11,000 gun-related homicides in 2016 (up from 9,600 the previous year). Factor in family and friends. Ours is a misery-ridden America.

Every-day shootings in the news go right past the attention of most of a desensitized public, as local-area gunfire may be found reported regularly in the B section of the Seattle Times. When it comes to mass shootings—which seem to happen a lot in black churches, synagogues or mosques in this era of rising white supremacy and nationalism—how many readers here have any idea where Sutherland Springs is?” Ask anyone.

It was only 19 months ago, a year after Trump was elected to office, that a gunman (another home-grown American criminal with a long history of domestic violence) took his illegally-purchased rifle into the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, killed 26 people and wounded 20 others.
For those who have forgotten, here are just a few of 2018’s major mass murders: school in Parkland, Florida, 17 killed; high school in Santa Fe, Texas, 10 killed; Capital Gazette newsroom, Annapolis, Maryland, 5 killed; synagogue in Pittsburgh, 11 killed; bar & grill in Thousand Oaks, California, 12 killed. This 2019 year began at a bank in Sebring, Florida, 5 killed; and also has included a company in Aurora, Illinois, 5 killed; University of North Carolina, 2 killed—and, of course, Virginia Beach. The many other shooting deaths are listed at the gun violence archive described following.

The list grows. Congress has not acted. The president can’t blame it all on immigrants, much as he’d like to.

For current 2019 statistics, check https://www.gunviolencearchive.org. It has documented 161 mass shootings (4 or more victims shot and/or killed) so far in 2019 (as of June 8). It has documented 6,119 people killed and 11,752 injured in gun-related incidents since January 1. Chapter and verse, street by street, city by city. Click on any category for detailed documentation of each incident.

MEANWHILE, GUNS ASIDE, in the United States over 49,000 deaths involved opioids in 2017. More than 70,200 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2017, including illicit drugs and prescription opioids—a 2-fold increase in a decade. This is a still-greater portion of the “everybody“ our government is not trying its best to protect today. A massive vanity wall along the Rio Grande, with Trump’s name on it won’t solve this problem.

Nor will Americans be better protected from harm of various sorts by the “tax reform” our president managed to bully into place at a cost to the public of a couple of trillion dollars—benefiting polluting industrialists and the idle rich. A mere 1,000th of that (.oo1%) could have been put $2,000,000,000 into something such as mental health and spent on defusing the deranged and depressed.
Donald Trump would repeal health care for tens of millions of Americans, gut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, pound money down the rathole that is the Pentagon, defund mental health programs and continue to pander to the National Rifle Association. This is the type of derangement against which the “everybody” that is most of us needs protection. We need a new government, one that will think and act in that direction.