This Just In – As women’s history month draws to its close, I’m left only with this. I’m exhausted.

This isn’t the I-need-a-day-off kind of tired. I’m talking about feeling as though sleeping for a week won’t be enough. Exhaustion.

The documentation (security and body camera footage) of the school shooting in Nashville last week will be used by law enforcement as a training resource for doing everything right. A school employee gave law enforcement brief, vital information on arrival. The first arriving officers did not wait for backup. They grabbed the biggest firepower available to them and they dashed into the building. They followed the sound of gunshots, confronted the shooter and ended the rampage.

The security footage shows that the shooter wandered around the halls for a few minutes, looking for victims. The school’s quick lockdown prevented this calamity from being worse. Yet we have six souls lost.

Breathtaking. Exhausting. I started actively working on keeping guns out of schools in 1993. I did it for my kids. Now, 30 years later, it’s for their kids.

The world organized a massive demonstration of objection at the introduction of the Trump presidency and the Women’s March clearly kicked off a political awakening for women that flexed some muscle in subsequent election cycles. In 2018, Nancy Pelosi returned to the Speakership thanks to a majority in the House of Representatives. Women drove the ousting of the 45th president and the election of our first female Vice President.

And the Dobbs decision threw out women’s right to healthcare autonomy. Chaos. Disruption. Women dying from incomplete miscarriages. Disastrous situations for pre-teen rape victims.

As our representatives collect a salary claiming to represent us, they sit in Washington and ignore the will of the American people who agree, by clear majorities, that women should get the healthcare that their medical providers recommend without government interference and that weapons of war do not belong in the hands of civilians.

I am not permitted to have a surface-to-air missile launcher (and its payload) in my front yard. I cannot own a machine gun. There’s a long list of military grade deadly force that I simply cannot legally acquire, because it’s illegal for civilians to own. Military grade assault rifles should be returned to that status.

Mothers and Grandmothers should demand that Kevin McCarthy come out of his room, step to the microphones and explain himself to the public. He should explain why he cannot support the position of the late uber-conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia – a hunter– who said “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. [It is] not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”

McCarthy’s cowardice is on full display and unfortunately is coinciding with the approaching 30th anniversary of the disastrous end to the Branch Davidian siege in Waco, Texas. This event is at the heart of the current day’s anti-government, white supremacy movement. This date was chosen by Timothy McVeigh to blow up the Murrah building in Oklahoma City two years later.

It is no accident that the former guy’s first major political rally (where he paid tribute to the January 6th insurrectionists) was in Waco, Texas. It was no accident that Ronald Reagan’s first speech after securing his nomination in 1980 was in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The GOP has been getting away with exploiting these racist, grievance movements for a very long time.

There’s no time to let Kevin figure it out. House members (including Rep. Valerie Foushee (D-NC)) need to demand that bills updating the Brady Bill get a vote in the House to get this level of deadly force out of the hands of civilians.

One of the most stunning things to watch this past week has been the number of Nashville reporters, who happened to be mothers, interrupting their live reporting because they got a text from or about their children. “(S)he’s safe,” they would read. Then the wave of emotion would hit. They’re trained to keep their composure, but they’re not robots.

So tell me when the Women’s March is on gun violence. We need to make some more history and we need to do it right now.

(featured image: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, file)


jean bolducJean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97.9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.

Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc


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