My heart hurts and my eyes water since I learned about the shooting in a school in Texas. I have been a mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and teacher for 28 years.

I can’t begin to imagine the pain, grief, grief and anger the parents and families of the slain children and teachers must be feeling. It came less than a week after the murder of a Buffalo, New York, mostly elderly, grocery store resident by a lunatic 18-year-old with assault weapons.

I thought with certainty, after the Newtown, Connecticut massacre of kindergarteners, first and second graders, their principal and their teachers, that Congress would finally act to ban guns. assault and endorse universal background checks that nine out of 10 Americans support. He does not have.

Mitch McConnell, Republican Majority Leader in the US Senate, would not even allow the bill to be debated and voted on. And although the Democrats now have a majority in the Senate only because Vice President Harris can break the 50-50 tie vote between Democrats and Republicans, they must put the bill to a vote and force Republicans and Republicans conservative Democrats to show publicly where they stand.

We can’t control what happens in other states, but voters can control what happens here in Florida. The media and Floridians in this midterm election season must force Senator Marco Rubio to answer some tough questions.

Why?! Why has he refused, since the Newtown Connecticut and Parkland Florida school shootings, to demand and pass gun safety laws in the Senate? Make him explain, as he seeks another six-year term as U.S. senator, why he is voting against the right to life of children shot in schools while voting to hold women and girls hostage to give birth to their rapist’s baby.

It has nothing to do with the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. The “right to keep and bear arms” is in the same sentence with “a well-regulated militia” enshrined in the Constitution by the framers in 1791 when there were no police forces, and they did not could not even have imagined laws authorizing any mentally ill person. , angry, criminal or racist American to slaughter innocent people with military style assault weapons.

Make Marco Rubio answer for how he conspired through his refusal to act to stop the deaths of these victims of gun violence.

Governor Ron DeSantis and the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature must be held accountable for putting more and more guns into the hands of people who shouldn’t, while endorsing Stand Your Ground laws that allow the killing of unarmed youths like Trayvon Martin.

I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired of the United States being the world capital of mass murder of its own citizens. Sadly, in a country as divided as we are by hate and racism, we can expect more if we don’t finally demand that the people we elect do something different.

Dorothy Inman Johnson is a former mayor of Tallahassee and a former educator.

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