Last time I visited home, I recorded my mom teaching her 11th grade English class. I don’t know why. Maybe I just wanted to take a piece of her home with me. Or, maybe I thought that it would be the last time I’d see her, a high school teacher for nearly 40 years, in her element. After all, I’m getting older and taking trips home less frequently. And she’s getting older, too.
My mom was the first person I called today after finding out that a mass shooting had occurred in an elementary school in Connecticut. Preliminary reports indicated that the carnage was unbelievable – unprecedented for a tragedy of this nature in this country. But I didn’t need to hear the numbers. I just needed to hear my mom’s voice.
I heard her reaction, pictured her face, as she took in the news. We silently cried.
While I don’t know how the shooter obtained the gun or why he decided to kill so many people, I do know that tragedies of this scale mar this country from coast to coast. From quiet, small towns in Connecticut to mosques in Wisconsin to inner-city street corners, they happen all too often. And whenever – and wherever – they happen, all of us hurt.
That it happened this time to so many children is perhaps why I felt compelled to call my mother. She knew me as a child – loved me, cared for me and protected me before I knew how to myself. She knows my vulnerability better than I do. Today, I needed her to protect me.
The children who died today didn’t know, never had to think, about gun control or the Second Amendment or semi-automatic assault rifles or Republicans or Democrats or death or tragedy or loss. But before we point fingers and try to blame someone else for their deaths, let’s ask ourselves some questions. How many of us – journalists, politicians, our Facebook friends – were thinking about (or fighting for) gun control today before this tragedy happened? How many of us were furiously calling our representatives to ask them to do more to prevent this kind of tragedy? And how many of us will call again in the next week, the next month, the next three months?
Shame on us for not doing more to protect these innocent lives.
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Gut reactions to the Sandy Hook shooting
This article appears in Dec 12-18, 2012.
The title of this article asks a question, but I didn’t see where the article addressed that question.
As anyone could have predicted, today’s papers are full of people screaming to remove all the guns from our society and people screaming that we should arm the teachers because even more guns will prevent gun violence. Both arguments are simplistic and would be ineffective. A person who has a simple answer to a complex problem has not thought it through.
Will we, in this country where guns are a religion, ever address REASONABLE gun control? There are people roaming free who should not be allowed to possess guns. They include convicted felons, perpetrators of domestic violence, and the mentally ill. Those people should be SEVERELY punished if they are caught with one, whether or not they used it to commit a crime. The problem is that we are so in love with our wild west image that we resist ANY effort to control the sale and possession of guns. If I, who fits none of those categories, am allowed to buy as many guns as I like, and never have to account for where they are, I can run a very lucrative business buying guns and reselling them to criminals. If a person is to carry a gun that person should be tested to make sure he/she knows when he/she is allowed to shoot someone, and that he/she is actually capable of hitting what they aim at. Not unlike the way you must show you understand the traffic laws and can actually drive in order to operate a motor vehicle. Guns should be inspected regularly to show that the registered owner still possesses them and that they are still in safe working order.
It would be nice if the NRA would quit spreading they are coming for your guns paranoia and work WITH Congress to design effective laws and safety programs that would insure the rights of citizens AND the safety of the general public.
Only in America do we fight tooth and nail to insure that anyone can possess any kind of weapon their little heart desires and then stand in line like sheep everywhere we go and submit to searches of our person to be sure we aren’t carrying them. What is wrong with this picture?
Made my donation to the NRA today!!
Hey “Protecting Violence”… er, I mean “Rights”: I offset your donation by making my donation to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, and I urge others to do the same. Send your donations via this link: http://www.bradycenter.org/donate
Protecting Rights, your lack of empathy and understanding is staggering. You obviously thought your post was daring and humorous when it’s really just insensitive, disgusting and idiotic. You’re a pathetic little person.
I was at work all day. I had nuthin’ to do with it. On a side note, I did go out and buy a N.I.B. Smith and Wesson M&P optics ready 5.56 NATO. I expect it to increase in value at least 25% over the next 2-3 months giving me a better return than any CD.
It’s frightening how many are willing to give away MY Rights.
Your right to have a firearm that can hold more than six bullets? Yes, I’d happily give up your right to that. I’d happily give up your right to sell or possess a firearm with a detachable magazine. I’d be more than happy to give up your right to own a firearm that you couldn’t snap another six-round magazine into and begin firing away again.
Would that violate your Second Amendment rights — or mine? I don’t think so, Mr. Fake Thomas Paine. Our American founding fathers did not have the type of weapons you want to carry in mind when they drafted the Second Amendment. Is there any kind of legitimate need for a firearm that offers more than six rounds of continuous fire? Absolutely not. Not for hunting and not for self-defense — unless you’re a gang member, big-time drug dealer, terrorist or treasonist.
Would bans such as these be radical gun-control measures? Yes. That’s what we need. Radical change in gun-ownership laws.
The Second Amendment is not about weapons. The founders listed it 2nd in the Bill of Rights because it is about liberty or death. Citizens have a right to defend themselves against all enemies, foreign or domestic. Gun violence needs to be addressed. It is a behavior, not a thing that can be rounded up and numbered.
As for the sudden concern for children’s safety here in the states, where is all the concern for the hundreds of thousands of innocents that have suffered at the hands of our military interventions? Where is all your outrage whenever another drone takes out half a village trying to hit one man? Why aren’t you screaming at Congress to do something to stop it? These are the reasons the rest of the world sees us as very selfish people.
Made another donation to the NRA today. You liberal idiots who have never even touched a firearm are so ignorant. Go get some experience with firearms so you have a clue what you are talking about, and quit asking to take away my 2nd amendment rights. By the way, you are going to fail. I promise you that.
Protecting Idiots: Your inchworm-size brain just doesn’t get it, does it? Oh well, once a clueless hateful hillbilly, always a clueless hateful hillbilly.
PR:
Carefully read all the posts and ask yourself which ones sound like the adults.
Of course you are wrong that “Liberals” don’t understand firearms or know what we are talking about. I carried a gun on and off duty for 22 years. Now that I am retired I don’t even own one.
You need to read the second amendment more carefully. It clearly states that it’s purpose is to assure the US the ability to raise a militia quickly because there was no standing army. It doesn’t say a word about protecting yourself from an abusive government. If you think that you and your Bushmaster are capable of taking on our military you are living in a dream world.
This would be a much better country if we could get our citizens as passionate about the rest of the constitution as they are about that one amendment.
where is that photo from? its great! I wish more ppl would credit photographers!
I copied most of this over from John’s similar column. Put emotion and attacks aside. Laws are meant to establish boundaries and penalties. Criminals, and the criminally insane are not going to be deterred by laws, and as these mass-murderers have shown, they are going to commit suicide at the first hint of armed opposition so they are not concerned about the penalties.
I’m heartbroken by the killings in Connecticut, I have children that age, but I see that tragedy as no reason that the Government should take my rifle.
If military style weapons should be restricted to “professionals” like the police and the military because they cause too many deaths, by the same logic shouldn’t cars be restricted to professional race car drivers because they cause more deaths than guns, and shouldn’t household chemicals be restricted to trained chemists because they cause more childhood deaths than firearms? Check the CDC data for cause of death, both of those are true statements. Don’t think a madman with a stolen tanker full of gasoline can’t wipe out an entire school; do we ban gasoline tankers? If you look around, there are plenty of things within easy reach of most people, including would-be terrorists and would-be murderers that can be used to inflict mass casualties. Timothy McVay used diesel fuel and fertilizer.
Rifles in general, where “military style assault weapons” are categorized in the FBI crime stats, account for about 4% of violent crime. You are more likely to be strangled or killed with a bat than shot with an “assault rifle”. There are so few crimes with “assault” weapons that they don’t even merit a separate category. The “assault” weapons ban didn’t work last time, mostly because the wrong guns were targeted. Crime with firearms is statistically is more likely to involve a cheap handgun, either semi auto or revolver. Both can be reloaded rather quickly. Caliber isn’t the issue either, John Grooms mentioned using a .22 in his youth in a recent article, but that is the same bore as the now infamous Bushmaster rifle, and the .22 is the weapon Lanza shot his mother with.
Our forefathers prevented the government from abridging the right (the bill of rights doesn’t “grant” any right, it tells the government which rights of the people they can’t infringe upon) of the people to bear arms, used in the military sense of the word. The musket and rifle were the most advanced military arms of the day, and any capable rifleman could fire three or four rounds a minute. Arms as defined have evolved, but the definition holds, and even if it did not a skilled rifleman with a late 1800’s rifle could still kill 20 people at a high school football game in just a few minutes before a panicked crowd could escape the bleachers and get out of range, so is the evolution of the gun the problem? Is the first killed somehow less valuable than the 20th? Because that constitutes the preponderance of gun crime, and it is statistically committed with handguns, mostly by criminals who have already been incarcerated before.
I carried an M-16A4 and an M-4 carbine in Iraq, and built civilian copies of them when I returned. That’s my reason, but there are many other valid ones. If I was trusted to carry one in defense of the country, at the tip of the spear, am I not to be trusted to carry one in defense of my family, or my neighbors, or my free society? The price of a free, open, and low security society is that there is no prevention from terror or criminal incidents. Except, of course, if there is an armed citizen there that incident happens.
What should we rationally do? Improve database connectivity. The lesson of Virginia Tech is that you should be able to screen for warning signs already noted. Mandate safer storage; a lesson from CT and from Columbine is that warped youth will steal guns from their family members to commit atrocities. Eliminate private sales without a dealer involved. The NRA hates it, but I can’t sell a car without involving DMV for title transfer; why should a gun be different?