Six years ago today, 20 children were gunned down in cold blood at Sandy Hook Elementary, while six educators were also killed trying to protect their students. All of this was perpetrated by a sociopath armed with an AR15 semi-automatic rifle, manufactured and sold for profit with the singular purpose of inflicting pain and death on living beings.

In the wake of Sandy Hook, not only was Congress incapable of passing a single law restricting the purchase of these deadly weapons, but gun-fetishists including a sitting U.S. congressman held contests in which they gave away AR15s as prizes. The last thing 20 kindergarteners saw was a muzzle flash from an AR15, and now those same weapons were being used as wacky rewards in promotional giveaways. The very zenith of cynicism -- of cruel whimsy.

While students from another massacre, Parkland High School in Florida, have successfully achieved a slate of new state-level gun control laws, Congress continues to be rendered impotent by the ghouls in the NRA -- a lobbying outfit tasked with one thing: selling as many firearms as possible. A sliver of hope in this chaos is that the NRA appears on the verge of insolvency, not to mention serious legal jeopardy as the Russia investigation closes in on its obvious money-laundering for the Russians and the GOP.

That horrible day at Sandy Hook impacted me and so many others in a way we hadn't experienced since 9/11. My heart still aches at the thought of those children and their grieving parents. 

I feel similarly about the children and parents who've attempted to seek freedom and safety in America, only to be demonized and attacked by Trump and his Red Hat army of a bigots and a-holes. Faced with certain death in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, they wrongfully assumed America would provide for their children a better life. And if things were normal, it would. But things are far from normal here.

This is Jakelin Ameí Rosmery Caal Maquin.


She was the same age as the Sandy Hook children when she died of dehydration while in custody of the U.S. Border Patrol, reports indicate this week. It turns out she wasn't treated for eight hours after being taken into custody and died shortly thereafter.

Vox reported: 

The girl was traveling with a group of 163 migrants and was in [Customs and Border Patrol] custody for more than eight hours before she started having seizures. She was transported to a hospital in El Paso, where she died. CBP says she “reportedly had not eaten or consumed water for several days.”

We've all seen the footage of CBP officials emptying water jugs left as lifelines for refugees in the deserts on both sides of the border. And we've all seen how the Trump administration has exploited these refugees for their political fearmongering about "invasions."

Congress and the Republican Party bear partial responsibility for the deaths at Sandy Hook. Likewise, the Trump administration, along with all of its enablers, deserve partial blame for the death of Rosmery Caal. This is partly on Trump himself who continues to desperately pander to his Red Hats for a border wall that'll never be built. Why? Because he doesn't give a shit whether it's built. He wants the fight and the fight alone because it makes good TV. 

Boiled down, Rosmery is gone partly because Trump needs the bigot vote.

Here's to hoping his prison cell is small and his incarceration is endless.