Woke up to CNN doing a “How to Survive a Mass Shooting”
feature.
Sad that kids have to spend time learning this and yet we question if science and evolution should outweigh football and baseball.
Perhaps we can demand full separation of Church and State at the very minimum if the GOP will not allow a comprehensive dialog on the country’s archaic gun laws.
It is clear that the Founding Fathers did not want the Church involved in Governance. It is to some not clear how far the same wise old men would go with the freedom to carry arms. We will never know what they would have done. But we could easily comprehend that they would not be happy with the status quo.
Perhaps I am a fool to look at this dispassionately and with intellect and not emotions.
That is nothing we do as a nation when it comes to practicing the guaranteed separation of Church and State (absent for decades, no one cares, no one even understands) and not blindly following another guarantee, (2nd A/right to carry arms).
Around these issues even the otherwise savvy often become jingoistic and out of sorts and even rabid and close-minded.
A community has lost precious lives that were the voice and vision of tomorrow. Lives lost to issues we should have debated and put to rest long ago. Their blood is on our collective hands. The Gun Lobby the biggest and most murderous villain involved. The politicians that support them because of ties, donations, equal in blame. But most of all, it is US that are to blame. We put our leaders into their seats. Our votes. We count, through our vote. We are most at blame!
But that reality and the knowledge that we cohabit with gun-toting and gun-loving and gun-proud people alongside those unfortunately ill and others still violent and apathetic to the vagaries of life - make it imperative to have gun control and a comprehensive one.
Gun lovers are no less fanatical about their ideology than the most extreme followers of religion in this nation.
Piers Morgan and I will never understand why this nation of ours gives birth within itself to people that think differently than those who come to it and make home from another land.
Like Piers, I am foreign only because I speak with an accent and because I was born somewhere else. Like him, I am ashamed of my adopted nation’s gun lobby and the lobbyists and the members of the NRA and the shameful pols that are perpetuating mass murder in the name of some stupid amendment.
He and I will never grasp how one could even worry for a second about not having gun control. That is how Piers Morgan, Queen Elizabeth, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh would all think.
But I am often called a stupid F*^%#+€ foreigner. What do I know? Hopefully, F%^*+#* foreigners like me will not shut up and will cause some anger, some heartburn, and some deep reflection.
To many Americans, religion and guns are issues where logic and historical facts and studies simply do not work.
It is about a belief. A belief as strong or some might say ugly as the didactic belief of the most fundamental and extreme religious lunatics.
That there is easy access to automatic weapons within our borders is nothing to dismiss. Their absence from our system alone can make our society less murderous and tragic. Even if Gun Control fails in making us less violent – at least it controls the death counts. Is that a bad reality to look forward to?
Real mourning for this loss should lead to honest dialog and real change being made in the laws that govern our nation’s gun sales. How many dead Innocent Americans will it take for the Gun Lobby to allow very basic and logical controls set in place.
We can assign blame onto others or do what is in our hands.
We can create tough laws that keep guns, especially the kind that lead to mass murders out of the retail market.
Do we really feel any human being living here today needs three guns? Especially when one of them is a Bushmaster? I can bet the mother of the culprit did not hunt with any of these weapons. That argument is moot around this tragedy.
Let people hunt again as hunters did before guns existed. Well they have their rifles too.
Assault weapons ARE the majority of the weapons used in the last several decades of America's exceptional love for guns and it’s shooting from the hip mentality.
We need dialog and real dialog about guns.
We need to question what makes the richest and fattest nation of the world also the most murderous, amongst similarly developed nations. The members of the OECD.
But minutiae is nothing we invest in as a nation.
It is the obsession of old people and civilizations.
The young and nations as teenage in history as ours are similarly crippled by arrogance and the “my way or the highway” and “do not need to learn from your example” attitude.
The number of people that are poor and are hunting to bring food to their table – a VERY low if at all existent number. The poor are looking to pantries for prepared foods they can easily microwave and eat. Cooking is NOTHING the poorest of this nation indulge in. If they did – we might not be as fat, sick and ill.
Hunting as a crutch against gun-reform is now old and regurgitated bad news.
We must also invest wholly and with vision, respect, and sensitivity to ensure that the poor, less blessed, and the mentally challenged are not forgotten as we grow ourselves. The commitment towards the betterment of life for the least fortunate should always be the most paramount duty.
I wish life were as simplistic as we often want it to be.
Guns are dangerous even when in hands of the most savvy and smart and educated.
Would I like to see this nation rid of guns? Yes! But that’s not happening. We have as many guns or more than people in our country. No wonder we are a violent people. With these many guns in civilian hands - it is not surprising that people think violence before love when having an argument. A gun lets the person find a false sense of ego and pride, bravado and machismo.
No one, including me, is debating a rifle. But those too need to be controlled and not sold like food and candy.
That we need huge gun reform is the calling of the day. No matter how stupid it may seem to the major minority of the nation.
There should be hope for sure. Change will happen. Change is around the corner.
How far that corner is - is the question. We are also not in any small minority.
The tide might be turning on this. We only need a couple of honest leaders in the Senate and Congress to let go of earnings from the gun lobby that dictate their convictions.
There should always be the fundamental belief that tomorrow brings new opportunities and new awakening.
We will awaken to a new tomorrow if the outrage and loss we feel today will not be another momentary glitch that we suffer, forget, and move away from. That is not an awakening we ought to be seeking.
These lives lost and the thousands of others lost in our great nation will not be entirely wasted if we find strength from their loss and bring a true and meaningful awakening for each of us and the kids of tomorrow.
It may even teach us to use precious time not to teach children drills about being safe from gun-showers at school but to get some real education.
Tomorrow shall come. Life shall move on. The world shall live. 12/12 is behind us. But will we be walking along with life or continue to live in a time warp of our own making?
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