3 Mass Shootings, a Thanksgiving With 14 Empty Chairs

The idealized image of Thanksgiving is that of family and/or friends gathered together - the husband and I are hosting nine friends today - happiness and a sense of belonging and well being.   That image often doesn't match will reality given family estrangements (something gays in particular know too well), people living far from family, nasty divorces, and other reasons.   But this Thanksgiving, there is another specter - empty chairs due to mass shootings, the result of America's insane lack of common sense gun laws and much needed restrictions on the access and ownership of guns, especially automatic weapons.  The latest mass shooting in Chesapeake - some 20 miles or so from where I sit - claimed six lives, including an as yet unnamed 16 year old boy.   The message to average Americans is that you are literally not safe anywhere as innocent lives are increasingly sacrificed to enrich the gun manufacturers and pander to 2nd Amendment fanatics who have utterly twisted and distorted the intent of the 2nd Amendment with the help of extremists on the U.S. Supreme Court who put the wants and demands of a loud minority over the rights and desires of the majority.   Sadly, some now see mass shootings as unavidable and a fact of life in America rather than redoubling their resolve to vote pro-gun officials out of office.   A piece in the New York Times looks at the horrible reality this Thanksgiving all so gun manufacturers can rake in money and men - it's always men - with sick egos can possess guns to feel important in their own minds.  Here article highlights:

A janitor working his shift at a Virginia Walmart. A 40-year-old woman returning home to Colorado Springs for the holidays. A young man at his girlfriend’s side, watching her friend perform in a drag show.

Three college football players. A mother who worked to help foster children. One bartender who remembered your drink and another who danced.

White and Black, gay and straight, old and young. The collection of the newly dead from just three of this month’s mass shootings are the very picture of the ideals — inclusivity, setting aside differences — that America prides itself on at this time each November. Fourteen people who did not know their last Thanksgiving was already behind them.

Tuesday’s rampage, in which six people were killed in a Walmart in Chesapeake, Va., was the 33rd mass shooting in November alone, and the nation’s 606th this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

That shooting occurred after three students were killed at the University of Virginia on Nov. 13 and five people were killed on Saturday night at a gay club in Colorado Springs.

Yesterday’s parents, children and friends became Thursday’s empty chairs.

“She was going to be at my house for Thanksgiving,” Natalee Skye Bingham said of her friend, Kelly Loving, a Memphis native who promised a spread of Southern food — deviled eggs, collard greens and baked mac and cheese.

“She couldn’t wait to cook for me,” Ms. Bingham said. “And I couldn’t wait to cook for her.”

Instead, she was killed inside Club Q during a night meant to cheer her up. “Now, it’s one less person at my table,” Ms. Bingham said.

All three shootings were carried out at places that, for those within, felt warmly familiar. Safe.

Club Q was widely described as “family” to the L.G.B.T.Q. and straight patrons alike who came there for a drink and a show. The University of Virginia athletes were shot on a bus returning from a play they had watched for a class. And now a Walmart store, a place instantly recognizable throughout America, this one located in a former colony older than the country itself.

At the University of Virginia, the slain football players — Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr. and D’Sean Perry, “vibrant, beautiful young men” — were celebrated at a memorial service that drew some 9,000 people.

Fearsome on the field, the players were remembered as sweet young boys.

Half the country away, in Club Q, with its bingo and karaoke nights and weekend drag shows, Derrick Rump and Daniel Aston were popular bartenders.

Raymond Green Vance, 22, was the opposite of a regular — he had only set foot in Club Q for the first time on Saturday, to watch the show with his girlfriend since middle school and her father, Richard M. Fierro, a U.S. Army veteran happy to be invited along.

“These kids want to live that way, want to have a good time, have at it,” he said later as he described the night. “I’m happy about it because that is what I fought for, so they can do whatever the hell they want.”

But later, as the survivors huddled together, the loyal boyfriend was not among them. “My little girl, she screamed,” Mr. Fierro said, “and I was crying with her.”

In Chesapeake, the dead were identified a day after Tuesday night’s shooting, in which a longtime Walmart manager arrived at the store with a handgun and extra ammunition and opened fire before killing himself, the police said.

First came the names: Randall Blevins, a longtime member of the team that set prices and arranged merchandise. Brian Pendleton, a maintenance worker known to help with whatever the problem was at hand.

Then came the adjectives, painfully familiar: “Quiet,” a neighbor said of one victim, Tyneka Johnson. Another called her “a sweet young lady.”

“Such a nice guy,” a friend posted on Facebook, speaking of Mr. Pendleton.

Sweet.

Nice.

Smile.

Vibrant.

Beautiful.

Friend.

They are among the qualities for which Americans are most thankful, rendered now in too-short obituaries.

All sacrificed on the altar of the gun lobby and the demons of those made lethal thanks to the easy - and utterly unneccessay - access to guns that no one really nned to possess.