Posted Dec 14, 2012, 10:49 pm
Nearly two years ago, the nation held Tucson to its heart.
Not even six months ago, horrific mass shootings at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and a Colorado movie theater led to further national outpourings of emotion.
And today, on a Friday morning when schoolchildren's thoughts should have been drifting toward what they might find under the Christmas tree, we yet again feel our eyes well with tears — a horror more unexpected, more unfathomable, in a place even more ordinary.
Today, let us offer our prayers to the people of Newtown, Conn. — to the victims of this terrible 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 Newtown 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.
And that past is entirely too anguished.
Newtown. Oak Creek. Aurora. 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 Jan. 8, at least 184 people have been murdered and over 400 wounded in mass shootings in the United States.
And those are the mass murders. Each year, over 10,000 Americans die because they've been shot with a gun.
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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?
Our politicians duck from any discussion of gun control. "Now's not the time," they say.
Will there ever be a time to reconsider how our society handles the sale of weapons when mass shootings happen nearly every week? Innocents are gunned down every week, every week there are more grieving families.
Now's not the time? When, then?
The National Rifle Association would have us believe that shootings occur because not enough of us are armed everywhere we go. Supporters parrot "an armed society is a polite society," but Robert Heinlein was a science-fiction writer who lived in a circular house north of Santa Cruz, Calif. Travel to Mogadishu if you want to test that thesis.
The Christian right says, in the words of Mike Huckabee, that we've "removed God from our schools."
"Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?," Huckabee said on Fox News.
I say we should be more than surprised, we should be horrified. I'm sure God is, not because teachers can't lead their classes in prayer, but because we so easily walk away from attempting any action that might be effective.
It's become common to speak of these events as tragedies. "The Tucson tragedy." "The Aurora tragedy." Now, "the Newtown tragedy."
Tragedy implies responsibility, that events are the result of a terrible flaw or moral weakness. Who bears the tragic flaw when a mentally-ill gunman opens fire on a crowd of innocent children? Shall we elevate these sick, doomed young men (for they are nearly all young men) as heroes in the drama?
Or does that weakness lie with us? Do we do such an absolute godawful job of treating those among us who are ill, of ensuring that they don't have ready access to deadly weapons, of finding better ways to handle our petty disputes than squeezing a trigger and ending a life in agony?
Even as mass murders by gunmen become so common that we are no longer shocked by them, we cut funding for mental health care. Children today do lock-down drills in school, just as Baby Boomers rehearsed ducking under their desks to hide from nuclear blasts. But little is done to evaluate their mental health. As we saw all too well in Tucson, even the obvious "troubled loners" are a problem to be brushed off, pushed away. They're somebody else's problem — until they're holding a gun.
Firearms are a significant part of American culture, an accessory to our national ethos of self-reliance. It's not a realistic proposal to nearly ban guns, as in Japan, or radically limit them, as in Great Britain. Both of those nations have much lower murder rates than we suffer — not just from guns, but overall.
But those are just the numbers.
Twenty small children in Newtown are more than just a number. 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 find the strength to do something. I only wish I knew what.
Latest comments on this storyRead all 7 »
^^^exactly what I was referencing in my post. Shameful.
Since the school shooting on Friday, there has been a hotel shooting in Las Vegas, a hospital shooting in Alabama, a mall shooting in Newport Beach CA and an arrest in Indian of a guy who threatened a school in Indiana who was found with 47 guns.
None of this activity seems to sway the opinions of those that love their guns and they are in vicious attack mode against those who suggest they should give some thought to their first love…
I first read this story a few minutes after it was posted. I didn’t comment on it at that time…I thought I would wait a while to see if what I thought would happen would happen. Well, it did.
Here, facebook, other areas of the internet, all the same thing…far too many people using a tragedy to further some sort of political agenda, and far too many people trying to place blame everywhere except where it belongs, which in this case is solely on the lowlife asshole loser who shot up the school.
I haven’t learned his name, nor have I seen his photo. I am deliberately avoiding both because said asshole most likely did what he did to be famous. If I don’t have a clue who he is, then I don’t give him what he wants.
Legal or not, if this asshole really wanted a gun he would have found a way to get one. And, if he really wanted help with a mental illness, he would have reached out for it. You can’t force help on anyone who doesn’t want it. You may not like the sound of that, but that’s not my rule…that’s life. Not liking it won’t change it.
What happened to those poor people is a tragedy, NOT an opportunity.
Thank you Dylan for publishing the list of the victims. The list is far too long, and those ages are far too low :(