Sandy Hook: Elementary Observations

I didn't learn about the shootings in Newtown, CT until about an hour before I had to go out and pick up my kid at school.  I'm still stunned, like most of the country, about this awful tragedy.   But I don't like hearing people on the radio referring to it as "unspeakable." 
We have to speak.  We have to talk.   And we have to face realities:

Twenty children were slaughtered today by one lunatic with a pair of handguns.

Children are being killed in countless acts of violence worldwide:  horrific wars in Africa, with children becoming soldiers; drones striking from the air, killing innocent civilians;  millions dying of willful neglect by adult leaders not motivated enough to provide clean water, access to education, food, and medical care.

And in a very odd crisis, attacks similar to what we've seen in America have happened recently in China.  Consider this rampage: 

Twenty-two schoolchildren were injured when a man wielding a knife attacked an elementary school in the Henan province, even though the Chinese government has increased security presence because of a spate of similar kinds of attacks dating back to 2010.

Here's an important observation:   none of the children attacked in this latest incident died.  Only nine were sent to the hospital.  

It makes me think of Molly Ivins' great gun-control line:  "I am not anti-gun.  I'm pro-knife."  Meaning:  it's a lot harder to kill with a knife than it is with firearms.  

To be fair, other incidents in China where men have attacked with knives have in fact led to deaths of children.  So to blame what happened in Newtown on weak-gun-law America is unfair.

But it isn't necessarily foolish, either. It's a pretty obvious fact that the EU has more restrictions on handguns and fewer people die from them -- about ten percent of the number of Americans who do so. 

But sure, in America, we have the Second Amendment, and a lobbying group that makes it political suicide for those seeking national office to take too strong a stance on regulating who gets firearms in this nation.  

A lot today has been made of the state of our mental healthcare system, which is just as screwed up as the overall system.  I saw someone tweet that we should tax the sales of guns and ammo and fund mental health care services. 

Of course, you also have to get people to accept the idea of going to get such help.   We're generally not good at that, especially guys, and of course with mental illness the individuals afflicted aren't always aware of what's going on in their heads. 

We can also blame a larger materialistic culture that glorifies violence, that features visually stunning videogames that allow us to kill without actually facing the consequences.  We have a society that's pretty wound up; toss in a general anxiety about life in the twenty-first century, with over-stimulated, info-saturated, multi-tasking people struggling to make ends meet, and it's not surprising that people are reacting as these shooters have. 

What I don't like is that some people want to treat these incidents like the weather, as if there's nothing that could have been done to prevent it, and nothing that can be done to prevent others in the future.   That's too nihilistic for me.

Even accepting the difficulty of stopping raging lunatics in a free society, we can make changes that can protect all of us from such horrors.

I don't accept the suggestion that having more guns at  schools would help.   It is a fair point that one of the reasons such madmen choose schools is that they know that they are gun-free zones, but I think having teachers and staff packing heat in the classroom is a recipe for more disaster.  

I think that we still need to make it harder to buy a gun; I think we need to require that people get trained in how to use them.  The people who respect the power of a firearm are those who have spent years in military or law-enforcement training: they have the discipline and consciousness of how dangerous guns are.   (That doesn't mean they are less susceptible to snapping and going on a rampage, of course.)   Can civilians achieve similar levels of discipline?  Only if they are dedicated to it.   I think that we need to bring back the assault weapons ban; few of us really need to carry military-grade weaponry to protect our persons or our property.

 I think we need to examine what our priorities are as Americans, as parents: is the idea of "greed is good" or "get rich or die trying" really what we want to teach our children?  Do we want them to have fun playing brutally violent games or watching brutally violent films without fully understanding the consequences?  (I'm not talking censorship here: I'm talking awareness, mindfulness.  I grew up on Tom and Jerry cartoons and I cherish the First Amendment as much as the NRA does the Second.) Do we want them to have more respect for athletes than for teachers by glorifying the big contracts the jocks make while most of their teachers won't make one basketball player's daily wage for an entire year?  Do we want them to fight hard to make the 1 percent or to find a way for the 99 percent to live in dignity?

Controlling access to guns is a band-aid, yes.   But children are bleeding.   It's more than our love of guns that's getting kids killed.  A culture that continues to divide and to drive us into the ground except for a handful of lucky ones reaps what it sows.   We need to evolve.