05/26/2022
We’re still in shock. A classroom of 4th graders and their brave teachers mowed down by one boy’s hate and one nation’s head in the sand.
Enough of thoughts and prayers. While well-intentioned, they’re useless against a bullet. Let alone against 375 rounds of bullets a boy newly eighteen bought just days ago, along with two assault rifles purchased as easily as he would a soda and a bag of chips.
That’s just messed up, that a nation which collectively and correctly prohibits the sale of alcohol and ma*****na until the age of twenty-one blesses the sale of AR’s to high school seniors with hardly a second thought. A long hard stare in a nation-sized mirror is long overdue.
A false narrative, a false choice pervades our politics: the choice between unrestricted access to any and all weapons of warfare, and total gun confiscation. This is ridiculous.
Almost no one is asking for gun confiscation. Eighty-plus percent of Americans are consistently polled as just wanting a few basic safeguards: background checks, waiting periods, and the prohibition of the sale of assault rifles, particularly to those under the age of twenty-one. Will these safeguards stop all mass shootings? Of course not, but they’re likely to help. A lot.
To those opposing such simple compromises, ask yourself: what if YOUR 4th grader was gunned down in her class, along with her friends and teachers, by an angry hate-filled eighteen year-old boy with his brand new weapons of war bought more easily than an Amazon Prime order? You’d unflinchingly sacrifice your dear child for that boy’s unfettered right to military style weapons?
It’s often said, after each mass shooting, practically weekly in recent years, that ”this is not who we are”. Yes, it is. And its who we have been at least since 2004, when the national assault rifle ban sunsetted, and even since the late 1990s, with Thurston and Columbine.
It is who we are. Acknowledgement is the first step to recovery. It’s time we start insisting our leaders start taking those steps.
