NO simple answers to Newtown

When did we lose the ability to think? When did we become so politically correct we lost our appreciation of speech and new ideas? When did we become so bored with life we take placards on social networking sites to be words of wisdom? We did the people of this country become zombies?

So many people have these "simple solutions" to preventing mass shootings. The solution will NOT be simple.

They are things like:

Bring back prayer to schools. First we haven't had prayer in school since 1962. Kids would have gone bad way before 2012 if that were the reason.The Muslims pray several times a day, yet they still have extremists that not only pray THREE times a day, but crash planes into buildings while screaming ALLAH! Prayer isn't the answer.

Bring on more mental health professionals. That would help, but again, we have placed ourselves in our own way. It used to be easy to force people into care and mental institutions, now getting a commitment procedure accomplished on someone is next to impossible. Even if we encourage more people to be trained, it will take a minimum of 6 years to get them trained . We don't have six years.

The more serious aspect of this is that you cannot always help or cure mental illness. You can try to manage it, but stress and life circumstances can  make a person snap, even if they are getting therapy and medication. It is NOT as simple as "get them help". Just like you cannot always cure cancer, you cannot always help mental illness.

We DO need to improve our ability to catch and assist with mental health issues. However that is still not a simple answer.

We do need different gun laws. The ones we have no longer are working. They aren't. We are the most violent country in the world. Hands down. This is something we need not to be proud of. No one wants to take away our guns, and people will shout that this is what will happen, but it won't. Not ever.

Places I have lived with strict gun laws do not have these issues. There are laws to cover if you loan a gun to a person who commits a crime. There are laws about buying and selling, carrying, and using. Where it is hard, the crazy people find other ways to kill yes, but ways that allow the victims to more easily defend themselves.

Here I have a neighbor that gets intoxicated and fires a gun into the air. The bullets do have to come down. An officer told me about his mother in law getting a concussion that way.

There was a knife attack in China. Twenty children. Their children all lived becasue a gun was not used. It is still a terrible thing, but there are not 20 Chinese families preparing for a funeral. When you take several guns with 15 shots each into a school of small children, it is hard to miss. We now have 20 more children dead.

How many more? Columbine, Aurora, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech. How many more.

People say to keep the guns in the hands of the good guys. I am fine with that, but there is not ONE SINGLE INCIDENT of an armed citizen thwarting a massacre by taking out his concealed weapon and killing or wounding a perpetrator. Hasn't happened. There have been people at these scenes with guns. They freeze or are afraid of criminal charges and do nothing.

Things WILL change now becasue they have to. There won't be an option, it is just what exactly will those changes be. The fact remains that good, law abiding, sane citizens will still have their guns, and those who are insane or criminal will not have as many. Even if ONE child's life is saved by new legislation, that is enough!

Our founding fathers wanted to make sure we protected ourselves from tyranny. Nothing wrong with that. I am sure however they never imagined Americans packing several firearms, loading them with 20, 50, 100 shots and taking out people like tin cans on a wall. Never did they imagine that. They would be appalled at the senseless killing and the hollering about gun owners rights. They carefully crafted our constitution to say that we have rights, UNTIL they impinge on the rights of others. That we have rights, but we have responsibilities. So they were much smarter than many people today.

It is time to protect our children. Not make excuses to lessen our fear of having our guns taken away. It is time to be responsible to our fellow humans, and it is PAST time to be direct. It is time to stop grasping at straws that won't solve the issue and take firm, decisive action. Will it make some lives harder, sure.....just like standing in long security lines at airports. Welcome to the 21st century! This isn't your Grandma's world any more, and it never will be!



ADDED Dec 17 10:27 AM:
 "The American Right is fond of putting itself inside the minds of America’s Founders and intuiting what was their “original intent” in writing the U.S. Constitution and its early additions, like the Second Amendment’s “right to bear arms.” But, surely, James Madison and the others weren’t envisioning people with modern weapons mowing down children in a movie theater or a shopping mall or now a kindergarten.

Indeed, when the Second Amendment was passed in the First Congress as part of the Bill of Rights, firearms were single-shot mechanisms that took time to load and reload. It was also clear that Madison and the others viewed the “right to bear arms” in the context of “a well-regulated militia” to defend communities from massacres, not as a means to enable such massacres.

James Madison, architect of the U.S. Constitution and author of the Bill of Rights.

The Second Amendment reads: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Thus, the point of the Second Amendment is to ensure “security,” not undermine it.

The massacre of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut, on Friday, which followed other gun massacres in towns and cities across the country, represents the opposite of “security.” And it is time that Americans of all political persuasions recognize that protecting this kind of mass killing was not what the Founders had in mind."
Robert Parry (the man who broke/reported the Iran Contra scandal).




(C)2012 Dr R M Wolf. May not be used, copied or reproduced without prior written permisison