Elementary Massacre

Someone opened fire today in a K-4 elementary school, killing approximately 26 people – it is now believed that 20 of them are students at the school; kids no older than 9. To say that my heart is sick right now from this would be an understatement. It is my fervent hope that this is the last straw – that our society will no longer tolerate this sort of thing as being a cost of living in a free society. Because it shouldn’t be; it isn’t. There are plenty of free countries that do not allow their angry, mentally deranged residents to waltz into a building and buy a firearm.

Plus three more guns.

Plus a bulletproof vest.

The 24 year-old who did this went to the classroom of 1st graders his mom taught, and murdered them all. The motive? Irrelevant – whatever it was, it was purely mental illness.

When we, the people, founded this country, we included in our Constitution a provision that would allow people to keep firearms to protect against tyranny at home and from abroad. Firearms then were significantly different from those we have today, and our constitutional originalists seem to omit that fact when agitating for free and regulationless gun ownership. There was also the well-regulated militia clause, something that has become moot since the advent of our professional military.

But it’s unlikely that we’ll ever change the Constitution, or that we’ll ever change the minds of the people who think that everyone should own guns; that had the teachers at the school in Newtown, CT been carrying guns, why the resulting shoot-out would have saved some lives. Maybe. I doubt it. After all, the shooter was wearing a vest. He had four firearms. Do we really want teachers to be packing heat? Do we really want teachers to dress like SWAT teams? Should we be protecting our schools with riot police and tanks?

The 2nd Amendment may guarantee an individual right to bear arms, but does it guarantee that right free from licensure or testing or regulation? I don’t think so. I’m so sick and tired of angry lunatics being able to obtain all the firearms they want, and bulletproof vests, without so much as a criminal or mental-health check. I am so sick of mass shootings taking place because it’s ok to own a gun, but it’s a horrible thing to provide people with adequate mental health resources. Ours is the only first world country to just allow mass murders like this to happen so often and so regularly, yet when people suggest that maybe the ease of access to firearms and ammunition are the problem, that conversation strengstens verboten ist. I’m sick of the tyranny, alright – I’m sick of the tyranny of the NRA telling Americans that they just have to suck it up and deal with a country that resembles the frontier west.

Because what’s slowly starting to happen isn’t that Obama is coming for your guns. On the contrary, Obama has done absolutely nothing to tighten gun laws. What we’re seeing, though, is America’s decline into 2nd world status. We’re South Africa with better water and sewage systems. Soon, instead of relying on just being a reasonable society, we’ll all travel in bullet-proof cars from gated community to locked-down office. American society is unique in the industrial first world in that we allow unfettered access to firearms, and completely fettered access to health care, including mental health care; guns are a fundamental, God-given civil right, but health care is not.

And if 26 people all died in the same school from a disease, you’d bet your ass the CDC would be in there to find out the cause and to prevent any future recurrence anywhere, at any time.

The United States is first in gun ownership. Yemen is second. We have 300 millions firearms in this country.

I don’t want to hear about these tragedies being rooted in evil or the human heart. We know the human heart is a substandard product. It’s offensive to put this forward as part of a discussion about policy as opposed to theodicy and meditation. We know that the vast, vast proportion of gun owners use them legally and safely. We also know that gun deaths are rare in many other countries quite similar to the USA for the simple reason they don’t have so many friggin’ guns all over the place. This is obvious. And guns just make it easy to kill a lot of people really quickly. Freely available body armor helps too.

Columbine didn’t do it. The shooting in Aurora didn’t do it. Virginia Tech didn’t do it. Maybe the brazen daytime murder of 20 little boys and girls will get us to start talking seriously again about the role of guns in our society, and the ways in which we can perhaps try to prevent something like this from ever happening again. Perhaps this shames the National Rifle Association to come to the table and discuss ways to impose reasonable restrictions on gun ownership that isn’t violative of the Constitution, but also helps to prevent angry lunatics from becoming living, breathing characters from Call of Duty with a few clicks of a mouse. I take some solace in the fact that on Friday afternoon the NRA’s website was fully accessible, but the Brady Campaign’s was so slammed with traffic that it went down.

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. Well, not exactly. It’s more accurate to say that, with both celerity and efficiency, people with guns kill people. In the case of the Connecticut shooting, the shooter:gun ratio was 1:4.

I’m not a gun person, and I’m not creative enough to know what to do or how to even begin to fix what’s quite obviously a horrible sickness in our society. But I am a parent, and I’ll tell you this:

I’m sick of this shit. I’m sick of guns, I’m sick of mass murders, and I’m sick of this shit. Every day is a good day to talk about gun control. Ask James Brady. He took a bullet in the head for Ronald Reagan.

Have a nice weekend.