Stat 1. 6618 Americans have been killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Stat 2. Of the 12664 murders in the U.S. in 2011, 8583 were caused by firearms.
There has been a ton of anger concerning the first stat. Where’s the equivalent outrage over the second?
Isn’t it time?
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John Liming reflects on the Connecticut school shootings.
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I have thought and thought about the horrible tragedy that transpired in Connecticut today!
I have thought and I have felt a cold sensation in the pit of my stomach and I have shed some fairly hot tears thinking of the absolute senselessness of what happened there today.
I have felt a sense of helplessness and I wish there was something I could say or do that might be of some comfort to someone who suffered loss in this awful tragedy today – but like a lot of other people – I am at a loss because there are no words that can possibly be of any help or comfort in a situation like the one I am talking about.
The Connecticut school shooting that took the lives of 20 innocent young children and a number of adults today – what the hell can anyone say except “Oh God! Oh God! Why?”
The question now becomes (in my mind anyway), “So what is going to happen now? Will someone get serious about taking some kind of action to insure that this kind of evil never happens again?”
I fear I already know the answer even before I ask the question.
I fear that the answer is “Nothing will happen.”
I think there will be a lot of discussion but in the end I think that until Big Money and the Gun Lobbies can be stopped from controlling the national conversation, Americans will probably be subjected to the possibility of having to endure more and more of this kind of unspeakable horror as time goes on.
I believe it will take a populist movement of quite some intensity to begin to address these kind of issues but I have never been much heartened about that kind of possibility because this is not the first such event of this kind that we have witnessed and – nothing much of any consequence has ever happened yet.
One can pray and one can hope that America will see this horror for what it is and start to awaken to the possibility that it can at least be controlled to some degree with appropriate controls.
But I think that will be a long, expensive and protracted battle and it will be an emotional battle. It will no doubt be a hotly contested issue with a lot of contention and screaming and accusing, a lot of foot-shuffling, stonewalling and attacking back and forth across the political aisles.
But I think that for the sake of our future generations it is probably a battle worth taking on through the hope of some kind of legislative action that favors human life over profits from the sale of firearms.
I must leave the resolution of this question to the experts and to the politicians.
In the meantime, my heart goes out to those who suffered terrible loss in the tragic events of this day and I pray that God somehow is able to comfort their souls in their unspeakably anguished moments of loss and grief.
John Liming publishes Blue Heart Chronicles.
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Another gun related tragedy.
A shooting at a Connecticut elementary school Friday left 27 people dead, including 18 children, an official said.
The children were all between the ages of 5 and 10. Is this a good enough time to have a rational debate on gun control and, if not, then when the hell would a good time be? How much longer will the NRA and gun nuts be allowed to have a stranglehold on this issue?
Meanwhile in Michigan…
The most sweeping rewrite of Michigan’s concealed handgun law in more than a decade includes details that go well beyond opening so-called “gun free zones” to hidden weapons.
The state House on Thursday passed the bill 68-41 and sent it to Gov. Rick Snyder, one of many laws sped through a lame-duck session that did not conclude until early Friday morning.
Aside from allowing concealed pistols in schools and other places, a number of measures are aimed at streamlining a permit process critics say remains far from uniform statewide.
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Private-property owners can still ban the weapons under trespass laws, but not schools and other public venues…
Insanity.
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In April of 1968, Robert Kennedy gave a speech in Cleveland deploring violence in American society. Two months later, he was gunned down and killed. Listen to this eloquent and powerful speech and determine for yourself whether RFK’s words ring as true today as they did forty-three years ago..
While neither political party has been the picture of perfect civility, it would be a lie to play the game of false equivalency and pretend that Republicans have not been the ones to use violent imagery as a means to stir up their base. How it relates to the tragic shootings in Arizona is unknown at this time but to deny that it poses a major threat to healthy political discourse in America would be as well a tragedy.
The question becomes this: who will be the right’s voice of reason and sanity in today’s charged political climate? Who on the right could give RFK’s Cleveland speech with the same degree of passion and conviction?
No one comes immediately to mind. Any ideas?
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