I have been silent about last Friday‘s mass murder in Newtown until now, it has taken some time to make my brain understand it. I realize now that there is no understanding. It is completely incomprehensible that anyone could kill one child, let alone 20 beautiful, precious lives. For the families that lost a child, it goes against nature that a parent should outlive their child and my heart is in pain for each and every one of you. You have my most sincere and deepest sympathies.
Now every person with a media platform has been expressing their opinions as to how we can prevent this type of thing from happening again and I am going to give you my take.
YOU CAN’T.
Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano said during his opening testimony against John Gotti, “Gun control? It’s the best thing you can do for crooks… I want you to have nothing! I’m a bad guy. I’m always going to have a gun.”
It’s a pretty self-explanatory statement. No matter which side of the gun control fence you live on I think this is something we can agree on, bad guys will always find a way to arm themselves.
In the past week I have heard all kinds of things that are to blame for incidents like this happening and I personally do not believe any one of them. They have targeted video games, mental illness, the mother, Facebook, the NRA, President Obama, Jon Stewart (weird), homosexuality, religion, lack of religion, the media, the school, and the list goes on, but the big ticket item is guns, and people are riding both sides of that fence. If the teachers had guns they could have minimized it, if no one had guns, it never would have happened. My answer to each and every one of these ideas is simple…BULLSHIT!
The human race is capable of many things and just as we are capable of great love, compassion, intellect and acts of heroism, we are also sincerely capable of reaching the polar opposite of all of those things and that includes what happened in Newtown. Murder is not some new phenomenon. We have killed each other from the beginning of time. Long before Call of Duty and AR-15‘s, we would simple pick up the nearest rock or use fists and feet to snuff out life. My suggestion is that we stop wasting our time looking for what or who is to blame and begin to bear the responsibility of acknowledging that there can be no good without evil. This is a battle that has existed since the dawn of man on earth. Good versus evil.
When you choose which side to fight on, remember you will always have an opponent.
Well said, and I agree with almost everything you say here. I am especially troubled by the outcry from gun control advocates (a label I happily assign to myself, as well), since the guns used in this atrocity were legally purchased by a person in good mental health, the shooter’s mother, who also became a victim that day. I also wonder why – as shocking and horrific as the events in Newtown were – talking heads, politicians, and most activists seem to only be upset by white suburban deaths, when hundreds of people (including innocent children) are killed with guns in this country every day. However, while SOME human “evil” is inevitable (though I think that word is counter-productive: acts can be evil, maybe even some people like Mao or Hitler who pursue a hateful agenda for their adult lives; the shooter was a sick man who did not spend his entire life trying to find ways to hurt others and help himself), we as a nation have a wildly disproportionate number of gun deaths per capita, compared to other industrialized countries. To me, the mental health issue is actually a big one. People in other industrialized countries receive all kinds of free health care, including mental health counseling. I am not so naive as to say this kind of treatment would put anything close to an end to violent atrocities in America, but we are still the richest country on the planet: we can do better. The more mental health services are available to all of us, the less stigma there will be in utilizing those services, and more people will seek them out. I don’t see a downside.
Well said.