#WTF yankistan?!

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Texas governor Greg Abbott shares more details about the shooting, including that the shooter posted three times before the attack

Gunman posted to Facebook three times before attack

Beto O’Rourke confronts Abbott: ‘You are doing nothing’

‘Just a loving little boy’: the victims of the Texas school shooting

World reacts with horror and incomprehension to Texas shooting

Why can’t America do anything to stop mass shootings?

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Students across the country walked out of their classrooms to demand action from lawmakers to protect them from the rising wave of gun violence. The group Students Demand Action organized the walkouts after the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

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"Is this the moment to reform gun laws?" British reporter Mark Stone from Sky News asked the U.S. senator

...  Over the span of his career, Cruz's campaigns have received the most donations of any senators from gun lobbyists, at $442,000, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit dedicated to tracking money surrounding America's elections.

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The US supreme court voted in favour of … people getting shot | Hamilton Nolan | The Guardian

Yeah.  Massive fuckery.  Wait’ll ya see the next story I post.

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Let’s get rid of facebook and assault rifles.  These evil assholes constantly use it to flaunt their artillery and bigotry, and NOTHING is done about it.  It could be used as a tool to locate these nanowits, but it’s not.  I can’t recall ever seeing a single story re: “facebook posts lead cops to heavily armed bigot before he commits mass murder.”

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The Tarrant County Sheriff's Office called it "insensitive" and "a profound momentary" lack of judgment

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Omaha Benson students organize walkout to protest gun violence

OMAHA, Nebraska — Students at Omaha Benson High School organized a walkout Thursday afternoon.

The walkout was in protest of this week's mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. It wasn't how these students planned to spend their last few days of school this year, but they don't feel as though they have a choice.

"School shouldn't be a hunting ground, it's the place where we're supposed to learn and become successful. When we fear for our lives we can't do that," sophomore Bunny Galindo told KETV NewsWatch 7.  ...

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Found this in the comments on 21 dead in mass-shooting at Texas elementary school | Boing Boing

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Tennessee school board bans Pulitzer prize-winning Holocaust novel, Maus | Holocaust | The Guardian

...  “I’ve met so many young people who … have learned things from my book,” Spiegelman said. “I also understand that Tennessee is obviously demented. There’s something going on very, very haywire there.”  ...

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Over a year after George Floyd's death, lawmakers abandon the police reform bill named after him - BoingBoing

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Javier Cazares, the father of fourth grader Jacklyn Cazares, who died in the attack, said he and other bystanders considered charging into the school themselves to get their kids

...  Upset that authorities did not appear to be moving into the building, Cazares said he and other bystanders wanted to charge into the school themselves.

“Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to do,” he said to The Associated Press and later confirmed with NBC News.“More could have been done,” Cazares added. “They were unprepared.”

Video footage from outside the school Tuesday appears to show distressed parents and locals reacting to news of the shooting.

One woman is heard yelling: “Get in! Get in! What is the f——— deal?”

“They’re all in there, the cops aren’t doing s--- except standing outside,” a man is heard saying. “You know they’re little kids, right? Little kids, they don’t know how to defend themselves.”  ...

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Police in California ask for help in identifying those responsible for gunfire that broke out after ‘large fight’

Sacramento mayor says 'thoughts and prayers are not nearly enough' after mass shooting

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‘A cartel shouldn’t get away with this.’ Anger at opioid settlements that exclude admission of wrongdoing | Opioids crisis | The Guardian

There is growing anger among families bereaved by the US opioid epidemic at pharmaceutical companies “buying their way out of accountability” with multibillion-dollar settlements that specifically exclude any admission of wrongdoing.

The opioid maker Johnson & Johnson and the country’s three largest drug distributors on Wednesday agreed to pay $26bn to settle a raft of lawsuits accusing them of acting recklessly and illegally in pushing prescription opioid sales when they knew the painkillers were driving an epidemic of addiction and overdoses.

But after announcing the deal, Johnson & Johnson continued to insist its actions were “appropriate and responsible”. The distributors said they still “strongly dispute the allegations made in these lawsuits” even though they have previously paid significant fines to settle federal claims that they broke the law.

Families bereaved by the opioid epidemic, which has claimed 600,000 lives in two decades, criticised what they regard as a persistent failure to hold to account pharmaceutical executives who manufactured the worst drug crisis in US history by manipulating federal regulators and the medical profession into mass-prescribing narcotics with false claims about their safety and effectiveness.

Emily Walden, chair of the Fed Up! coalition of families harmed by opioids, said the restitution payments are relatively small for some of the country’s largest businesses, particularly when they will be made over up to 18 years.

“This should not be ‘the cost of doing business’, another tax write-off,” Walden said. “They need to pay for what they’ve actually done. And then criminal charges need to come against these executives.”

Walden lost her son TJ to an opioid overdose stemming from a painkiller prescription at 11 years old.

“I don’t think we would let a cartel get away with this. So why is it different for a corporation that knew exactly what they were doing? They knew the harm that was resulting and they continued. They get away with paying a fine? There are people sitting in jail for years for possession of drugs, illegal drugs, but still only possession. And these executives are going to walk?”

Johnson & Johnson is renowned in legal circles for fighting lawsuits but it has been less keen to go to court over opioid cases after an Oklahoma judge in 2019 ordered it to pay the state $465m in restitution in a damning verdict that characterised the company’s executives as little better than drug pushers.

Last month, the company agreed to pay $230m to avoid a jury trial after it was sued by New York’s attorney general.

The three drug distributors – McKesson, AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health – are still on trial in a West Virginia civil case that has made highly embarrassing revelations about their failure to fulfil legal requirements to report and halt suspiciously large-scale orders even as they poured more than 1bn opioid painkillers in to the state between 2006 and 2014.

West Virginia has long had the highest opioid overdose death rate in the US.

In emails, executives at AmerisourceBergen called people who became addicted to opioids “pillbillies”, spoke of parts of the country blighted by the epidemic as “OxyContinville” and responded to new regulations in Kentucky to curb painkiller prescribing by writing: “One of the hillbilly’s [sic] must have learned how to read :-)”. ...

... Earlier this month, the US justice department trustee, William Harrington, who oversees the federal bankruptcy system, accused the Sacklers of misusing the process to avoid liability for “alleged wrongdoing in concocting and perpetuating for profit one of the most severe public health crises ever experienced in the United States”.

Harrington said the bankruptcy deal would mean families devastated by opioids could receive as little as $3,500 in compensation. The Sacklers would retain several billion dollars of the profits from OxyContin. ...

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The US has one of the highest maternal mortality rates among developed countries. Yet Senator Joe Manchin struggles to understand why paid family leave is important