Sandy Hook: Time to Get Furious

Okay. No more brave assertions about “our thoughts and prayers being with the victims.” No more gibberish from television commentators about “tragedy bringing us together.” (The day someone comes to me with that line when my child’s life is taken in this way, is the day I will get a gun.).

It is time to get furious. This latest shooting “episode” is repulsive. Actually, in a healthy country and culture there would be rioting in the streets. Twenty years ago William Bennett wrote a book entitled, “Outrage,” claiming that Americans had lost the capacity to be morally furious. His fury was directed at….Bill Clinton’s sex life. I wonder if we will hear from Mr. Bennett today, or from anyone on the right, where they wear their patriotism on their shirtsleeve. Because it might occur to them that this ought to be profoundly humiliating to anyone who boasts (as I do) that America is the finest country on the earth.

There will be no more fence-straddling by me on the issue of gun control. I had been inclined to give up on this one—too many decent people, including friends, are gun owners. And there are so many other things to be furious about. And, well, the second amendment says what it says. Or does it? There has been a long-running debate about whether the amendment protects the individual’s right to own a gun, or the right of states to operate a militia.

But really who can stand on legal niceties in the face of this? Read this excerpt from a fine piece of exactly the kind of outrage that ought to be universal, by the author Adam Gopnik, writing in the New Yorker today.

After the mass gun murders at Virginia Tech, I wrote about the unfathomable image of cell phones ringing in the pockets of the dead kids, and of the parents trying desperately to reach them. And I said (as did many others), This will go on, if no one stops it, in this manner and to this degree in this country alone—alone among all the industrialized, wealthy, and so-called civilized countries in the world. There would be another, for certain.

Then there were—many more, in fact—and when the latest and worst one happened, in Aurora, I (and many others) said, this time in a tone of despair, that nothing had changed. And I (and many others) predicted that it would happen again, soon. And that once again, the same twisted voices would say, Oh, this had nothing to do with gun laws or the misuse of the Second Amendment or anything except some singular madman, of whom America for some reason seems to have a particularly dense sample.

And now it has happened again, bang, like clockwork, one might say: Twenty dead children—babies, really—in a kindergarten in a prosperous town in Connecticut. And a mother screaming. And twenty families told that their grade-schooler had died. After the Aurora killings, I did a few debates with advocates for the child-killing lobby—sorry, the gun lobby—and, without exception and with a mad vehemence, they told the same old lies: it doesn’t happen here more often than elsewhere (yes, it does); more people are protected by guns than killed by them (no, they aren’t—that’s a flat-out fabrication); guns don’t kill people, people do; and all the other perverted lies that people who can only be called knowing accessories to murder continue to repeat…

Read the full article here http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/newtown-and-the-madness-of-guns.html. And I would urge you also to read his previous columns, after the shooting in Aurora this year http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/07/aurora-movie-shooting-one-more-massacre.html, and the episode at Virginia Tech http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2007/04/30/070430taco_talk_gopnik#ixzz2F5UTvu6.