Gun Control

It's taken me awhile to write about the Newtown massacre, mainly because I'm a parent and I couldn't wrap my head around it.  But I figured that it's such an epic event that I should really come up with some kind of comment on it, so here goes.

We live in a country that makes the claim that "life is precious."  We seem to have no problem ensuring that laws are passed to prevent women from terminating pregnancies because the potential life in them is so "precious."  We go to sometimes ridiculous lengths to make sure that our children never get hurt on a playground or in a car or while riding a bike.

Yet it seems to me that all of this "caring" is just a facade of sorts.  Our own children are precious to us, but we allow other people's children to go hungry and go without healthcare, and all in the name of "personal responsibility."  We seem to have no problem letting other people's children suffer simply because we don't think their parents are trying hard enough.

So in this kind of atmosphere, how can we even begin to discuss reasonable gun control measures?  After all, the "right" to shoot off multiple rounds at targets is more important to liberty than the life of someone else's child.  I actually had one facebook friend content that these deaths are simply collateral damage; the price we pay for living in a free society.

There are guns in my house.  They are family heirlooms from my husband's family, and they are locked up tight in a heavy gun safe in the basement, where they are rarely, if ever removed.  Do I think we need to ban all guns? No. But do we need to take some kind of drastic action on gun law reform to try to prevent this from happening in the future?  Absolutely.  But I'm not convinced this country has the capacity for adult dialogue anymore.

We are the only industrialized country in the world with such a horrific gun violence problem.  Maybe we need to take a look around the world and see why other countries do so much better than us.  I have a feeling that access to guns is going to be at least part of the solution. Yes, it's the person who commits the crime, not the gun, but the gun makes it a whole lot easier and whole lot more lethal.

But until we make a decision to care about other people's children as much as we care about our own, nothing will change.  Until we collectively decide to put ourselves in the shoes of a parent who has to look at unopened Christmas presents for a child who's never coming home, this problem will not get better.  I wish I felt better about the situation, but I don't.  Not here.  Not in America.