Kacey Musgraves to Lawmakers After Weekend’s Mass Shootings: ‘F–king Do Something’
After news of two separate mass shootings -- one in El Paso, Texas, and one in Dayton, Ohio -- rocked the United States on Saturday (Aug. 3), Kacey Musgraves used her time on the Lollapalooza festival stage on Sunday (Aug. 4) to send a message to lawmakers. She later followed up with more thoughts on social media.
"I don't know what the answer is, but obviously something has to be f--king done. Maybe somebody will hear us if we all yell together," Musgraves said onstage. She and her fans then let out a massive yell: "Somebody f--king do something!"
The moment during Musgraves' set was caught on the Lollapalooza livestream and quickly started making its way around social media. Musgraves went straight from their cry into her song "Rainbow," adding an extra bit of poignancy to the moment.
"Thank you to everyone still brave enough to come out to festivals like this to see us play," Musgraves wrote in a tweet after her set. "We all need music & each other more than ever right now but how many of us will have to die before SOMEBODY F--KING DOES SOMETHING."
In a separate tweet, Musgraves turned her attention to the president, Donald Trump: "For a man who clearly loves being well-liked, it’s indescribably mind-numbing to see him blatantly and murderously ignore doing ONE THING that would not only make people happy but would SAVE PEOPLE’S LIVES," she writes. "True leaders don’t stand back and watch the world burn."
Musgraves also retweeted video of the Lollapalooza moment, adding the message "Don’t you hear us, @realDonaldTrump? Don’t you hear our pain? You have the power to become a hero. Why don’t you take it?"
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On Saturday morning, 20 people were killed and 26 more were injured, CNN reports, when a 21-year-old gunman opened fire at an El Paso shopping center. Authorities are investigating a racist, anti-Hispanic immigrant "manifesto" believed to have been posted online by the white shooter shortly before he opened fire. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is calling the shooting a hate crime, and the U.S. Justice Department is "seriously considering" pressing federal hate crime and federal firearm charges, for which the death penalty is a possible sentence.
The shooting in Dayton, meanwhile, took place in a downtown, nightclub-filled area, according to CNN, around 1AM local time. Nine people were killed and 27 people were injured by a 24-year-old gunman who was killed by police after he began shooting. Both he and the El Paso shooter used semi-automatic-style guns, though thus far, investigators have not discovered any evidence of a "bias motive" on the part of the Dayton gunman.
The weekend's two shootings -- which occurred within 13 hours of each other -- are the second and third headline-grabbing mass shootings to occur within one week. On July 28, three people died and at least 12 more were injured at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Northern California, after a 19-year-old gunman opened fire on the festival crowd with a semi-automatic rifle.
According to the non-profit Gun Violence Archive, there have been 251 mass shootings -- defined as any incident during which four or more people, not including the shooter, were shot or killed -- in the United States in 2019. Aug. 4 is the 216th day of the year.
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