It does not end. The victims of one mass shooting aren’t even buried and we are faced with another.  The shootings over the last three weeks have been too much to bear. Buffalo, Uvalde, Tulsa, Philadelphia. It has been a devastating time. An unbearable time. Yet as hard as it is to think about, we have to take on the task.
Our future and the futures of our children are being shaped at this moment. We must engage in the struggle because, as we mourn the deaths of the children and workers and innocent people, the rulers’ propaganda machine is trying to shift the blame away from the bosses and onto the working class. All while desperately trying to salvage the murderers in blue, the police who proved once again to be useless when it comes to helping the working class.
U.S. capitalism was forged in genocide and blood of Indigenous people and enslavement of Black workers. The violence we witnessed in Uvalde, Buffalo,and Philadelphia, are all reflections of a violent system spiraling into deadly decay. Individuals, motivated by the racist, anti-working class and individualist ideology, kill members of our class.
 The bosses’ laws and their racist cops will never bring security to the working class. Our security, our safety, our future lies in relying on our class to smash the capitalist system that is breeding this hatred, and in its place building a society that values the working class: communism.
Rampant anti-working-class ideology
In Buffalo an 18 year-old, fueled by extreme racism and looking to kill Black people murdered 10 of our brothers and sisters in a supermarket in a Black neighborhood. In Uvalde, another teenager, deranged with hatred, walked into a school and killed 19 children and two teachers. In Tulsa, a mentally ill patient took out his anger at the healthcare system that couldn’t treat his pain by killing the surgeon and three others in the hospital. Most recently in Philadelphia, unknown people, without any concern for others, started a shootout following a dispute. In the middle of a massive crowd, outside bars and restaurants, they killed three and wounded 14 others, almost all of whom were bystanders. The bosses point their bloody fingers at the just individuals or guns or call for more background checks. But in all the cases, the driving force was capitalism, a system where workers' lives are routinely cheapened and discarded for the sake of profit.
While the media plays the photos of the children of Uvalde who were robbed of their lives, workers are murdered by capitalism daily. In the U.S. there are over 17 million children officially below the poverty line, a 41 percent increase since last year when the child tax credit was ended (Center on Poverty and Social Policy, 2/17). The bosses’ schools fail to educate our children, and the health care system fails to give us the care we need. Covid-19  exposed the complete disregard the bosses have for the working class as the poorest and the elderly, the most vulnerable of the working class, were killed by exposure to the disease to keep the economy open, while the wealthy sheltered in safety. We live in a society where our class has been made invisible and left to die. In a society that makes the working-class expendable, killing workers through attacks motivated by racism, mental illness and individualism becomes inevitable.
Bosses shifting blame to the working class
Buffalo, Uvalde, Tulsa, Philadelphia. The bosses might as well have pulled those triggers themselves. Those shooters were filled with the bosses’ contempt for the lives of the working class. Now the ruling class' response is to attack our class. The news carries the message that we must scrutinize our children to see if they are killers. We must watch our neighbors and blame each other for these terrible murders. That is how the bosses are turning us against our own class, the working class.
Will they shut down the gun industry that makes billions in profits? Not in a million years. What they will do is pass laws that attack the working class even more. They will turn teachers and social workers into cops charged with reporting children to the police. It will not be the children of the ruling class, safe in their immaculate private academies who will be under scrutiny. It will be the Black and Latin and white working-class children who will come under more pressure at school.
The homeless and mentally ill will be further treated as criminals and more will be killed by the police. The schools and streets will be filled with ever more murderous cops and we will be urged to trust the bosses state and their laws to keep us safe. Yet, we know how flooding cops in schools and communities only results in racist attacks, greater divisions amongst our class and despair. The bosses’ system has only hatred and contempt for the working class. They have no desire to keep us safe. They are only interested in keeping us passive and fearful of each other.
Police will never make us safe
While Salvador Ramos stood in a classroom and killed 19 children, 19 cops stood in the hallway for 47 minutes and did nothing (Yahoonews.com, 6/1).  All the weapons showered onto the police in recent years, all the Kevlar vests and battering rams and assault rifles and armored personnel carriers are not there to keep us safe. How do we know? We saw it play out in Uvalde. The police don’t stop mass shootings. They do the opposite. With each murder committed by the cops, our class is inundated with justifications and articles and news stories about rising crime. The police exist to serve and protect the wealthy, the ruling class, and the bosses. We, the working class, are their targets; we are not the people they are protecting.
The only thing that we can do to keep the working class safe is build a revolutionary movement that bolsters  the working class and fights for communism. We must overcome the fear of each other and turn our anger and our pain into building a movement that throws off the bosses’ leadership and deadly ideology of racism and individualism. We must turn our anger and our pain into fighting for workers' power, into building confidence in the working class, and into the fight for communist revolution!