a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qs1WCA2BJTg”>Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old young man who’s life was cut short by his own mental and emotional demons expressed in shooting and killing 18 children and 25 people total in Newtown, Ct, is being painted as troubled, sick, and disturbed.
Add this one: catalyst. As in a catalyst for a manhattan project against guns and gun violence.
Adam Lanza’s senseless act is the straw that broke the camel’s back and will lead to a stronger effort to get assault weapons off the streets. There’s no counter argument to gun control that anyone wants to hear now. And that’s because kids were killed.
And it’s not just that children were murdered in cold blood, but that the rest of us have to have our sensibilities challenged just by being forced to consider such an image. That, alone, made my whole family cry on Friday.
Someone blogged that armed teachers would have prevented Adam Lanza from effectively killing anyone. Well, one of the teachers was armed: Nancy Lanza – and her son, Adam, used her guns to kill children. That’s not the point. The problem is that armed teacher is just one more potential ticking time bomb that could explode right at school and commit the same act.
Sorry.
The problem is that the society we have created has become too well-equipped with triggers that seem to be setting more people off than ever before: broken homes producing unloved and unmanaged kids; violent video games simulating what it’s like to kill; Internet interractions that are emotionally abusive and threatening; and a society pushing more people to live alone – with their potentially dangerous thoughts unchecked – than ever before.
All of those dynamics mean we can’t take the risk of giving guns to anyone in an unchecked and unfettered way. No, as I’ve outlined, guns aren’t the problem, but they do cause a whole new set of new problems. And that’s because we lack the collective judgement to know when to appropriately use them.
Moreover, the old saying is, “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” That is a person who has a gun will think about solving a dispute by using it – even if they don’t actually use the gun, the thought of using it is a dangerous first step.
No. We have to stop that. Enough is enough. There’s no one who’s suffered through this tragedy that’s speaking up for guns. That should be your clue that we’ve reached the end of this nonsense. Moreover, any one who defends guns in this climate has to be cold and sociopathic to some degree to even want to do so now. Let us grieve for the children.
Please.
Stay tuned.