Sutherland Springs

As I watched Morning Joe this morning, there was an interview with a reporter from the Washington Post which will stay with me all day.  She had visited the survivors of the 2017 shooting in a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas

.26 people were killed, including an unborn child. 22 others were wounded, before the killer killed himself. The attack was the deadliest mass shooting in Texas history, and the fifth-deadliest in the United States.

David Colbath, shot nine times, has high levels of lead in his blood. He can barely stand or use his hands without pain. Kris Workman, Morgan's brother-in-law who was shot twice, was paralyzed from the waist down and told by doctors he'd probably never walk again or conceive children.

Multitudes of purple freckles dot Morgan Workman's legs, arms, chest and cheekbone - tiny shards of metal from bullets and shrapnel that struck her as she worshiped in her church more than five years ago.

The fragments are leaching lead. Workman suffers from toxicity symptoms, including body pains, fatigue, depression - and has been told by doctors that she probably can't have a baby.

The physical impact of the bullets and the number of lives lost were magnified by the shooter's chosen weapon. Devin Patrick Kelley, wielding a Ruger AR-556 rifle, fired 450 military-grade bullets inside the church within minutes, all of which left the barrel at a velocity of around 3,200 feet a second.

The devastation was incomparable to damage from a handgun or shotgun. Doctors who treated the victims likened the wounds to something they might have seen on a battlefield.

"The high-velocity firearm injuries, when they come in, you're missing body parts, and there's bleeding," said Lillian Liao, a trauma surgeon at University Hospital and UT Health in San Antonio. "You don't see muscle. There's just bone and skin and missing parts."

 

(notice that all 9 in the top row are
from the same family)

I want to know why people own assault rifles.  You can' hunt with them.  Why do you have them?  And knowing the damage they can do to a body (The children in the Sandy Hook shooting could only be identified by the clothes they were wearing...or by DNA) why in God's name do the Republicans still feel it is everyone's "right" to own one of these rifles?

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PHOTO OF THE DAY

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