On my way to the MUNI this morning, I passed a mother with her young son and I teared up just looking at the little guy. He was about four and was happily singing some song he must have just learned. In his face, I saw all the kids from Sandy Hook Elementary School, which was a little too much for me.
After days of seeing photos of those kids who were mowed down in their classroom, I’m still raw. And I should be. Kudos to everyone who has and continues to broadcast those little faces so they aren’t abstractions but real little people who should have spent Friday night and the rest of the weekend running and playing and fighting with their siblings, then complaining about having to go back to school yesterday.
As a nation, we allowed the Sandy Hook massacre to take place. Pointless shootings at churches and temples and movie theaters and shopping malls and high schools and universities weren’t horrible enough. Why? I don’t know. It still bothers me that none of the dead or wounded in those cases – 70 in Aurora alone – were considered enough of a loss to change anything. Shame on all of us for that.
Since we all had a hand in those deaths – yes, all of us – we need to give them some meaning. If I look back to today in a year and cannot point to significant steps toward making all of us safer from guns, I will know we’ve failed.
We’re going to have to approach it differently this time, though. As important as this is, we have to avoid the hysterics that have attended gun talks in the past. That doesn’t mean excluding those with extreme views on either end. I was wrong when I said we should disregard them in my post on Sunday. As much as I’d like to publicly flog the NRA leadership for their cowardly silence since Friday – including taking down their Facebook page and their Twitter feed – they do have to be brought into the discussion.
Of course we’ll have to deal with the largely Republican members of Congress who live in the back pocket of the gun lobby. Some are wavering, but many are holding to the old “let’s not politicize this” talking points. (Stunningly, Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia said it would be more stressful to the survivors to try to fix the problem than to do nothing. Unbelievable!) A funny thing I’ve noticed about Republicans is that they want any legislation they disagree with to be perfect and address absolutely all aspects of a problem before they’ll consider it, but they don’t hold their own bills to the same standard. For example, since raising taxes on the top 2% won’t solve all of our budgetary problems, it should not be enacted – but it’s completely reasonable to eliminate Public Broadcasting, which makes up 0.01% of the budget.
No easier will be dealing with those who cannot understand any aspect of gun ownership or use and believe they should all be eliminated – Constitution be damned. We’ll have to court them and help them accept that there are good people in this country who like to shoot game and skeet and targets and that they are not the same people who are taking part in gang wars or committing mass murder.
We’ve got a chance if we can keep the conversation in the center. We have both safety concerns and a Second Amendment. We need to honor both. As Chuck Todd put it so well yesterday, “There has to be something between confiscating all the guns and doing nothing.” Odd that this seemed like such a revelatory comment. Shows how hysterical the discourse has been to date.
Hysterical and often frightening. Larry Pratt, Executive Director of Gun Owners of America, made a haunting appearance on “Hardball” yesterday. (Pratt is the nut-job who said the blood of the Sandy Hook kids was on the hands of gun-control supporters for making schools gun-free zones. He’s also on record as supporting the Branch Davidians and had to resign from his position on the 1992 Pat Buchanan presidential campaign because of his activities with neo-Nazis and skinhead groups.) On yesterday’s show, he told Chris Matthews that “we have guns in order to control the government.”
Excuse me?
That’s right. Mr. Pratt believes protection from the federal government is at the heart of the Second Amendment. When Matthews asked him for examples of any times individuals or groups have had to use armed force against the government, Pratt listed the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 (both fights against the British, by the way) and a lone incident in Tennessee in 1946. “Keep going,” Matthews prodded. “is that not enough?” Pratt responded.
No, it’s not enough.
I’m sorry, but in my book if you’re so fearful of your own government that you need to stockpile weapons against it, you do not live in the same United States that I do. You don’t live in the U.S. at all. You live in Somalia.
Seriously, if we can keep the debate relatively calm and grounded in the real United States, we may have a chance at creating reasonable limits on gun and/or ammunition access and to address mental health issues and our permeating culture of violence. All of these are part of the equation, but guns will have to come first. Simply put, a very disturbed, angry Adam Lanza armed with a knife or a baseball bat would not have been able to kill 26 people in a matter of minutes. Period. End of story.