Sandy Hook Elementary School
President Obama wiped away tears while making the announcement that 26 were shot and killed, 20 of them children, in Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, Connecticut. He wept everyone’s tears, except those of the National Rifle Association, too busy planning how to “manage” this atrocity to weep, terrified that Obama’s mention of “meaningful action” may lead to its worst nightmare: Gun Control.
Perhaps they need not worry; Connecticut’s Gov. Dan Malone spoke of 9/11 and made pious noises in church. CBS News had Dr. Jon LaPook advise parents how to soften the blow to their kids. On PBS News Hour three professors maintained that what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary is “rare,” and that schools are “safe,” suggesting that the solution lies in better security, ID checks, monitoring “troubled” people, and erecting “perimeters” around schools, like air borne troops in hostile territories. Unmentioned was a single word about gun control, the only honest solution.
Politicians have thus far dared not even discuss gun control. The merest suggestion that gun purchasers should have to wait a day for background checks brings frenzied rants about the Second Amendment. Assault rifles that can fire off magazines of 100 bullets in seconds are not classified as machine guns, because machine guns cannot be legally possessed by private citizens. So a whole range of assault rifles designed to kill human beings as quickly as possible are deemed “sport” weaponry. As for “gun shows,” there are no rules and any attempt to impose them is met with foam-at-the-mouth NRA tirades.
Will there now be a grass roots uprising against NRA madness, like the one happening in the economic war of rich against middle class? What with the cowardice of politicians, servile professorate babble, and head-in-the-sand docility of most everyone else, the only force that can prevail must come from the grass roots. But how much more innocent blood must be shed, how many more mass slaughters of innocents will it take?
President Obama wiped away tears while making the announcement that 26 were shot and killed, 20 of them children, in Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, Connecticut. He wept everyone’s tears, except those of the National Rifle Association, too busy planning how to “manage” this atrocity to weep, terrified that Obama’s mention of “meaningful action” may lead to its worst nightmare: Gun Control.
Perhaps they need not worry; Connecticut’s Gov. Dan Malone spoke of 9/11 and made pious noises in church. CBS News had Dr. Jon LaPook advise parents how to soften the blow to their kids. On PBS News Hour three professors maintained that what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary is “rare,” and that schools are “safe,” suggesting that the solution lies in better security, ID checks, monitoring “troubled” people, and erecting “perimeters” around schools, like air borne troops in hostile territories. Unmentioned was a single word about gun control, the only honest solution.
Politicians have thus far dared not even discuss gun control. The merest suggestion that gun purchasers should have to wait a day for background checks brings frenzied rants about the Second Amendment. Assault rifles that can fire off magazines of 100 bullets in seconds are not classified as machine guns, because machine guns cannot be legally possessed by private citizens. So a whole range of assault rifles designed to kill human beings as quickly as possible are deemed “sport” weaponry. As for “gun shows,” there are no rules and any attempt to impose them is met with foam-at-the-mouth NRA tirades.
Will there now be a grass roots uprising against NRA madness, like the one happening in the economic war of rich against middle class? What with the cowardice of politicians, servile professorate babble, and head-in-the-sand docility of most everyone else, the only force that can prevail must come from the grass roots. But how much more innocent blood must be shed, how many more mass slaughters of innocents will it take?
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