The Kids.....

 

It has taken me days to find a way to deal with the murder of those 20 children.    Awake or asleep, I can’t helping thinking about how I would feel if it were my children or grandchildren. Then I think, those babies were everyone’s children and grandchildren. They are supposed to be safe in school. On 9/11, it was determined that the kids in Arlington Va. would be safest if they remained in school.  School, where when we were kids we went to the gym to practice what we would do if there was a bomb scare.  But the bombs were coming from Russia, not from the kid who lived around the corner. 

We should not need another law or magnetometers  at the doors of every elementary school in order for this shooting horror never to happen again.  It’s a societal and logistical nightmare.  How do we take semi automatic weapons away from people who purchased them legally?  The ‘legally,’ makes me physically sick.  I get wanting to own a gun.  But who would purchase an assault weapon for hunting or even personal protection. There is something wrong with our society.  There is something wrong with glorifying violence in the things we find entertaining.  Sex has a R rating.  Violence, like chopping off someone’s head, or massacring hundreds of people with a machine gun, does not.   This horrible event has become fodder for a few days of gruesome news coverage and then we’ll move on to the next story.  

Years ago, Sara Brady asked me for help with gun control legislation after her husband was shot.  During the Reagan Administration Jim Brady was the Press Secretary when the attempt was made on President Reagan’s life.  Jim was shot and seriously injured. This psychopath  who shot him is looking to get out of the mental institution where he has been for years.  OK parole him, but make him responsible for Jim Brady’s daily care. 

Anyway, you can laugh if you want to, but the only way to affect change within the NRA, is to take them over.  All the people who are horrified by the random gun violence and have given lip service to changing the laws,  the strong NRA lobby,  and wrong thinking NRA leadership, should join the NRA, and take them over from the inside. The fact is that wanting to have guns is pretty much 50/50.  Women want to be able to protect themselves, and men want to be macho, or hunt, or just shoot for fun.  

But here’s what I know. Significant change will not happen unless we stop thinking about the second amendment as a tool for crazy people to acquire machine guns – legal or not. 

The mother and son went out for target practice.  They knew there was something wrong with him so they watched him carefully.   Well I guess not.  If he hadn’t had access to those guns, he might have shot his mother and then realized it was pointless to kill anyone else because it would take too long with a target practice weapon.

That event in Ct. was a clear, “There, but for God, go I.”  Anyone who has a child, or knows a child, or has heard about the gift of children, suffered a loss in that shooting. We

Need to do something to make sure it wasn’t our humanity.  We’re just sayin’… Iris