Our Nation's Shame

On the morning of December 14, 2012, I was cutting frames in Cambridge, listening to a beat up old radio on a shelf next to my chop saw.  As the anchors and their guests were gossiping about some news story in Boston, one of the female hosts interrupted to deliver a news flash.  "Apparently, there has been a shooting in at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.  No word on injuries yet, but rumors are suggesting there is at least one fatality."

As soon as I heard Newtown, I stopped cutting and stared at the radio.  I can't remember how many times I've been to the place - whenever I did deliveries to the galleries and shops in New York, we'd stop off on exit 10, off 395 southbound, to get a quick breakfast at the Blue Colony Diner, and get gas at the Mobil station next door.  I would associate Newtown with my own hometown of Colchester: a sleepy New England community, beautiful in its relative rural isolation, and no more to most than a rest stop between two cities that make the news on a regular basis.  A school shooting?  Probably some disgruntled monster who shot his wife in front of a bunch of students.  The gabbers on the radio thought the same thing.  Couldn't be another Columbine.

Two hours later, the same newscaster interrupted.  But this time, she sounded slightly more distraught.  "I'm sorry folks, I just got information from Sandy Hook.  Twenty-seven dead, including the shooter."  Everybody on the show just gasped.  I dropped the molding on the table with my jaw agape.  The daily meeting was just about to begin, and I had just learned of a tragedy, in my home state, in a town I've been to countless times, that can only be described as unthinkable.  Twenty-seven people.  This was a staggeringly high number, and these were elementary school students.  Everyone I told was just as bewildered as I was at hearing it.  Later, we would learn that his mother's corpse would bring the total to twenty eight.

When I got back from our meeting, a tearful Dan Malloy was delivering word of the specifics: a single shooter, a young white male, gained access to the school.   He murdered 6 staff members, and 20 students, all of them first-graders.  There was a separate murder scene, where the victim's mother was found.  The shooter was also dead, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.  Speculation floated around that his mother was the school psychologist.  Only later in the day did we find out that, not only was she not the school psychologist - she wasn't associated with Sandy Hook Elementary at all.

The shooter, for all we know, was a socially-isolated only child with visible psycho-social deficiencies.  The closest theory we have towards a motive is that his mother was planning a move to Florida against his will, and that he committed the massacre in an attempt to cause as much of a gut-wrenching public impact as he could before he ended his own life.

If one looks through any discussion thread on the internet that day, they will find at least one person that brought up the issue of gun control, even before the full extent of the incident was revealed to the public.  And within just a few responses to that comment, there would inexorably be an indignant retort: "You can't even wait for the bodies to be cold?"

No, we can't.

I don't quite understand the significance of letting time pass after such horror takes place, nor do I accept that the temperature (and the incredibly insensitive acknowledgment) of the aforementioned corpses have anything to do with what happened here.  What I understand even less, is the ability of some people to reconcile the scale of this massacre with the idealistic literal interpretation of a law that no longer applies to the time we live in.

I have a lot of questions for these people, but let's start with this one: where the hell in the Bill of Rights does it say that every American, regardless of legal background or professional qualifications, has the right to own a weapon specifically designed for military (i.e. human killing) purposes?  While 18th century muskets were certainly empowering to a "well-armed militia", they did not endow individuals with the ability to kill dozens of targets without having to reload.

Which brings me to my next question: if you TRULY believe our second amendment rights are there to protect us from a totalitarian government takeover, do you also believe that you and your personally amassed arsenal are capable of taking on the Army?  Keep in mind, our government is in possession of a great many devices for crowd control; many of which are non-lethal and far more effective at subduing large crowds of angry protesters than guns; and more of which are totally lethal, and are far more powerful than any weapon you could legally purchase in even the most lenient state.  If the government were hell-bent on prying your gun from your cold, dead hands, it would have done so LONG ago.

Of course, it follows that another fallacy with gun ownership is the element of "personal protection" it provides.  Most revolting are the Facebook posts I see with frightened women, cowering in corners, contrasted with proud, attractive models with Bushmasters.  Underscored are the captions, in the same order: "How gun control advocates fight rape/ How REAL women fight rape".  So many idiots I knew from high school are crowing about the armed bystander who stopped a store robbery (by killing the robber); about the Texas woman who shot her assailant six times in the back, and when questioned by a judge about why she did so, as he was running away with her purse, she responded "because my magazine doesn't hold seven" (and was released free of charges); about how you never hear these stories of individual "heroism" because the "news agencies don't want you to hear about it", and how all they care about is the "shock and awe" stories.

Did it ever occur to these people that the weapons themselves play an essential part in this drama?  Does it ever dawn on them that the very point-and-click nature of a gun could be what is primarily responsible for the frequency and the severity of the violence in our country?  Are they aware the United States has the highest per capita gun death rate in the civilized world?  What about the fact, proven time and time again through repeated independent studies, that a gun is far less likely to assist in the prevention of a crime (less than 10%) than it is to serve in the commission of one?

Another thing I keep hearing is the claim that even if we had gun laws as strict as assault weapons bans or universal background checks, it would not have prevented the Newtown tragedy from happening.  After all, these culprits are breaking the law in the first place.  Well, then, wouldn't it stand to reason that we need to go further?  What exactly is it about allowing the single mother of an undiagnosed psychotic time bomb to own a military-grade weapon that makes our communities safer?

And let's not forget the REAL issue, right?  Mental health?  Is it not transparent to anyone with a working brain that the NRA's sudden advocacy of mental health treatment is an obvious attempt at redirecting American public focus, regardless of the fact that mental health care is, indeed, an issue that needs to be addressed?  Do gun rights advocates really believe that it's easier to overcome the difficulties in our mental health care system, than it is to simply regulate what type of firearms are available to the general public?

But here's the question I most need the answer to, because I cannot, for the life of me, conceive a possible answer: could you look one of those parents in the eyes, and tell them that their fear, of the very type of weapons that killed their children, is unfounded and misguided?  Could you tell them, to their faces, that their motives are fear-based, and therefore irrational?  Would you tell them it's wrong to use their personal tragedy to rationalize "nonsensical and overbearing" restrictions on your "civil rights"?

A New York Times columnist compared our national gun culture to an ancient sacrificial ritual, in which a tribe would kill children to please a deity responsible for good fortune.  They weren't far off.

We, as a people, should be disgusted by the very thought of approaching this tragedy with anything but the utmost consideration to the parents, the friends, the family and community of these murder victims.  It's been almost four months since, and although Connecticut has just passed the strictest gun laws in the country, 10 states have responded to the contrary by loosening firearms restrictions.  While the new laws send a message, Connecticut is a state so small that one could traverse it in a car in three hours, the long way.  Nothing is stopping a determined maniac from driving two and a half hours north to New Hampshire and buying whatever they want to commit their own massacre.  We need a national response, but we've instead allowed the devotees of deadly force to hijack the national dialogue.

At the Blue Colony Diner, they've got pieces of construction paper, with painted hand prints and notes written by students of Sandy Hook Elementary, taped on the glass doors of the entrance.  The atmosphere, only a few weeks after the shooting, was notably solemn.  Black ribbons lined the ceiling around the diner.  A family in formal wear sat across from me and my coworker.  Two small children sat among them.  As the family got up after their meal, the mother leaned down to her son, and said "Aren't you happy you got the day off of school?"  I wondered to myself, were they attending a memorial for one of their classmates?  Or did mom and dad take them out of school, for some old unknown relative's funeral, just so they didn't have to put them on that school-bus again, to what is now an uncertain fate?

Across the street, a makeshift memorial stands next to a large sandwich board sign that says "PRESS PARK HERE".  The news vans are long gone.  A lone woman tends the tented shrine, and stands solitary among the candles, the photographs, the various effigies made to represent the victims.  A big crane stands next to the tent, and hanging underneath the bucket is a wind-tattered American flag.  "We Are Sandy Hook".  "Newtown Chooses Love".

Apparently, not even the horrifying mass murder of twenty innocent six- and seven-year-olds, and six wonderful educators, is enough to make us reconsider the pro-gun mindset as one that is not only non-sensical, but dangerously irrational.  If there is anything to be learned from the Newtown tragedy, it is that we as a nation have become slave to a set of ideals that we as a people do not fully comprehend.

We should not be proud of this.  We should be ashamed.