There Is No Simple Solution

Okay, it's finally time for me to sound off on the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

I have read a lot of commentary from people far more eloquent than I am, and I don't have everything linked here, but these are two articles from The Huffington Post from today, that I think are worth reading. The first is from Janelle Ross featuring individual stories as well as statistics for gun related deaths of children in the U.S. The other article is about the National Shooting Sports Foundation that ironically is based in Newtown Connecticut.

It's hard to know where to begin. I posted Mitch Albom's editorial from the Detroit Free Press a week ago. He was asking when we were ever going to find it okay to talk about gun violence in the U.S. His subject was Bob Costas who was battered for bringing up the subject after the murder/suicide involving a football player. As Jon Stewart pointed out on The Daily Show, if conservative pundits think it's not appropriate to talk about gun control right after a shooting, then we would never be able to talk about it, since there is at least one every single day in the U.S.

Another Free Press writer, Rochelle Riley had a editorial right after the shooting took place, and she sadly ended up referencing one of her own previous articles after the mass shooting in Aurora Colorado this summer. And that was her whole point; that we keep having this kind of violence, but nobody wants to do anything real about it, and she's sick of that hypocrisy.

And so am I. We cannot as a nation, continually entertain ourselves with violent media, whether it be video games, movies, or television, and then ask why when it happens in real life. We are hypocrites to watch this stuff, and not think that life imitates art. Our tolerance for violent movies and television continually increases, to me it's not a coincidence that the violence in our every day lives has increased along with it.

And the irony is not lost on me that the first victim of Matt Lanza was his mother, who owned the gun that was used to kill her. It blew my mind, when a friend was quoted as saying that she had them for protection. Protection, from what? She lived in an upscale neighborhood in a nice community.

After the shooting in Aurora this summer, I saw on the news that gun sales had dramatically increased. Then the question came to mind; I wondered if there were people in the theater that had a concealed weapon, and if so, did they make any attempt to use it to disarm James Holmes. If the reason that most people get guns is to protect themselves, how many times does that actually happen?

The NRA thinks that we should have more guns to fix the problem, not less. Having armed guards at every school in America is their solution. If shootings only occurred in schools, then that might make sense, but that's not reality. In the last week, the shooting in Newtown was the only public shooting at a school. There were two people killed at a shopping mall in suburban Portland Oregon 4 days earlier. And this week, there have been at least three other shootings with multiple victims, and not at single one at a school.

The head of the NRA also said that "the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun". I hope someone mails him a newspaper clipping about the shooting death of a girl here in Washington state earlier this year so he can see how wrong he is. A police officer's young daughter died in an accidental shooting when he left his loaded revolver in the family vehicle and another one of his kids shot her with it. If the police can't even be responsible with their own guns are there really any "good guys"?

When a mass shooting happens, every wants to arm themselves instead of take a serious look at why we have so much gun violence here. Having access to guns is a big part of the problem, but so is why they are used. Domestic violence and drug & gang related violence. When you consider that 1 in 17 Americans suffers from some level of mental illness, why should it be so easy for them to get their hands on a gun?

People that are driven to harm others will find a way, but should they be given such an easy route to harming as many people as possible in a matter of seconds? We want the freedom to have anything we want, but we don't want to accept the responsibility that comes with it.