Posted Jul 20, 2012, 10:03 am
A year and a half ago, the nation held Tucson to its heart.
Today, let us offer our prayers to the people of Aurora, Colo.—to the victims of Thursday night's horrific shooting, to their families, friends, and the people of that city. Let us send them our love, our thoughts of healing, our helping hands if needed.
But tomorrow, let us move beyond the platitudes from afar. They indeed may bring comfort to Aurora as they make us feel good and moral, but prayers over what has been done change the future no more than they change the past.
South of the border on Thursday evening at least several people were killed, including a police officer, in a gun battle involving drug cartel members. As terrible as that is, there's a logic behind the fighting as cartels battle for the enormous profits to be had from smuggling drugs.
But the Aurora shooting? Binghamton? Westroads Mall in Omaha? Ft. Hood? Columbine? Not to mention two mass shooting incidents in just over a decade in our Old Pueblo. Mass shootings happen with distressing regularity. Just in the time since the Jan. 8 shooting, at least 143 people have been murdered and 300 wounded in mass shootings in the United States.
How many shootings must occur? How many perfectly innocent victims must be murdered before we take up the task of having a serious conversation?
Such crimes are beyond reason, but it does not follow that our response should be beyond reasoning. We cannot accept mass murders as inevitable.
Our mental health system is fundamentally broken. Our day-to-day interactions are characterized by insularity at best, if not disdain and vitriol for others. Our society values confrontation over cooperation. We value our neighbors little, and strangers nearly not at all. And deadly weapons are simple to obtain for the tragically troubled.
You may accept the bumper-sticker slogan that "guns don't kill people, people do," but that trite phrase does nothing to prevent disturbed individuals from leveling a gun and pulling a trigger. Certainly we are not individually responsible for such evil acts by others, but are we not collectively responsible for creating a more healthy community?
A dozen people in Aurora should be more than just a number. Six in Tucson should have been more than just a number. They should do more than just give us pause for a moment of silence.
Silence is no longer enough. We must do something. I only wish I knew what.
Latest comments on this storyRead all 8 »
Dylan,
I am glad you didn’t wade right into the gun control approach. All the talk in the past decade has done nothing but increase the availablity of guns to criminals and the seriously mentally ill.
There are answers, probably too many of them to pursue any one path in particular. Our response to problems like this are too diffuse to be effective.
Lets try one besides trying to get the 300 million guns off the street. Every time we try to do that we just increase the number by ten percent.
How do we identify the so-called “mentally ill”? We take their word for whatever they say, right? It’s the only way to diagnose whatever is going on in someone’s head. As long as society at large knows that the “mentally ill” get to play by a different set of rules, all accused murderers are gonna play the twinkie defense and say whatever they have to say to get a pass or a reduced sentence.
I say it is long past time to take “mental illness” out of the equation of the criminal justice system, and have the same set or rules-and consequences-apply to everyone.
And, to those who say that the death penalty isn’t a deterrent…well, in it’s current form, maybe not. Those on death row currently get to live off of the taxpayers for a quarter century (or longer in some cases) then they’re put peacefully to sleep. If we brought back the electric chair or gas chamber, and shortened the foot-dragging process to something more reasonable (I say five years is more than enough time to cut through any red tape that needs cutting through) then perhaps that would serve as more of a deterrent.
Our survival instinct is supposed to the the most primal and strongest instinct we possess. If appealing to that instinct isn’t enough to keep someone from shooting up a parking lot or a movie theater, then nothing else you can possibly try is going to work, either.
And, how do we identify the threats based on “mental illness” without violating our rights? I say it can’t be done.
Look, any one of us is “mentally ill” if you try hard enough and dig deep enough. No one has had the perfect life. We’ve all had pain. We all have regrets. We all have issues that either we haven’t made peace with, or it took us a long time and a lot of work to do so. We’ve all had some adversity we’ve had to fight through to overcome. We all have emotional scars. My point is that if you drill deep enough, you can find something in anyone’s past and blow it up to the point where idiots like Larry Burns will call you “mentally incompetent to stand trial”. My point is that the “mental illness” card needs to stop being played, and everyone needs to be held accountable for their actions.
Let’s stop thinking about “mental illness” and just call an asshole an asshole.
You can choose what to do with missing consonants, verbs and vowels. I trust you, as I always have, when I type too fast.