Your Ideas Of Liberty Do Not Include Murdering Children
We have a gun problem. We’ve always had a gun problem. If you give people the tools to murder some of them are going to use them.
Today some 20-odd people, most of them kindergarten students, were murdered by a gunman at an elementary school in Connecticut. By any account that’s a massacre.
This is not okay. I would think that that would not be something that would require discussion, but apparently it is. Because we keep running into the same thing over and over and over again. People walk into a crowded movie theater, or a shopping mall, or a college campus or an elementary school looking to kill strangers.
How it happens is not a difficult thing to understand. Guns are too easy to get. They’re too unregulated. There isn’t enough focus on getting people the mental health care they need to keep them from doing this in the first place.
Yes, I get that these are not simple things to fix. There are laws to pass and enforcement to figure out. There is funding that needs to be put in place and more vigilance in background checks. There needs to be more emphasis on dealing with mental illness rather than sweeping it under the rug as someone else’s problem.
But it’s doable. And the longer we wait, the worse it will get. More people will die. More CHILDREN will die.
And not just in a school in a little town terrorized by a psychopath. Kids on the street, kids in gangs, kids caught in a crossfire. They are victims just as much as anyone gunned down on a school campus by an insane man with an assault rifle.
The arguments against more regulation are all on the same basic theme. “I have to protect myself.” “I have to defend my rights.” “I have to keep my liberties.”
What part of your liberties include the right to murder 6-year-olds?
Inevitably there are those who will say, “Well, if I’D been there with MY gun this wouldn’t have happened,” as some way to justify that more people armed is actually a good thing.
Okay. Fair enough. Then let’s change the question from “How do we solve this problem” to “Where the fuck were you?”
You weren’t there. You couldn’t be there. The police couldn’t be there. The only thing that would have prevented this from happening is if the person who did it had not had access to a weapon. Period.
I’m not saying outlaw guns. I own guns. I respect the right to own guns. But it is by far too easy to get hold of one whether you’re sane or crazy, an upstanding citizen or a career criminal.
So I’m asking the same question a lot of other people are asking. How many more murders do we need before we put intelligent, nation-wide gun regulations in place? How many dead children do we need before we close the loopholes, before we pay attention to the warning signs that someone might snap?
I get it. The Genie’s out of the bottle and we’re not putting him back in. There will always be guns. There will always be murderers. We will always find ways to kill each other.
But there is no sane reason we should make it easy to do.
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Sadly you are completely correct. I hear the NRA screaming already had the teachers been armed this would have been averted. The reality is that more would probably die as un- and under-trained people reacted to the equivalent of a combat situation, firing towards where they thought a shooter was not knowing if the person firing was another teacher firing towards the gunfire. Of course, when the police arrived and guns were firing everywhere who knows how many children’s bodies would have been added to the toll. But of course, we’re both being ridiculous, after all how often have these tragedies been averted by a hero with a handgun bringing down the psycho early in the shooting. Oh, wait, that has NEVER happened. I suspect the hard asses with guns on their hips would piss themselves as soon as the bullets started screaming past their heads.
peter centorcelli
December 14, 2012
The idea that teachers should carry guns is the worst idea I’ve ever heard — and working in education for the past eight years, I’ve heard a lot of dumb ideas.
Teachers now are ill-trained to deal with disciple, to deal with medical emergencies (the current policy involves watching a video online about Hepatitis). Teachers now still haven’t been trained in the evaluation system that will supposedly determine their pay. Teachers now are expected to spend hours upon hours of their unpaid nights writing elaborate lesson plans and grading papers. At what point are they supposed to practice at the range? When is the district-paid-for gun training course? (And if it’s as good as the district-planned course on “Common Core” I attended, most teachers will leave not knowing which end of the gun is the “no no end.”)
The idea that one of the poorest trained, least funded, least respected, most vilified, and most underpaid professions in the US is suddenly expected to take up arms in between fractions and nap time is beyond asinine.
(I grew up around guns. I respect sane gun owners. I have a gun that I do not carry around with me. That said, the NRA can suck my cat’s left nipple — the deranged soul-stealing cat at that.)
Neliza Drew
December 14, 2012