What do I know about guns?
As a St. Louis born city girl, former hippie, University employee, and New
England transplant by way of Texas and Hong Kong, not a whole lot. So part of
me feels like I don’t really have a right to weigh in on this long overdue national
conversation. I don’t hunt. I don’t target
practice. I don’t collect. I don’t understand in the slightest the love and
fascination that some people have with firearms. And I don’t understand the
concern that some people have with that right being taken away.
I’m not a public figure. I
don’t have any power per se. And I’m pretty lazy politically. I volunteered a
little this election, but in general you won’t find me writing letters to my
congressman, or to the editor of the local paper.
But like the rest of us,
today I am heartbroken. Like anyone else in this country that is a parent, or a
son, or a daughter, we cannot imagine the pain those poor parents are going
through. We don’t want to think about the terror those poor babies and their
teachers felt in their last moments of existence, and yet we do. We can’t help
but think, what if that was MY little girl, My son, MY mother….what would I do,
how would I go on?
This weekend, and this week,
the politicians are making speeches. Public figures on both sides of this issue
are making pronouncements. And many, many Americans are saying, ENOUGH. Enough
dead children, enough dead leaders, enough John Lennons. ENOUGH.
I absolutely do not know the
answer, but I feel confident that our current course of action is not working.
I desperately want us as a nation to try something different, a national
experiment in gun control. Pick the deadliest kinds of weapons, the most
horrific types of bullets, magazines, whatever those things are called. You can
still hunt, you can still target practice, you can still collect. But the
weapons that can fire hundreds of rounds of ammunition into a first grade
classroom would be gone. If you currently own a gun like that the government will
buy them back, no questions asked.
I can already hear those of
you that say that if we do this criminals will be the only ones with these
types of weapons. But criminals aren’t the ones shooting up classrooms and
assassinating public figures. The people that do those sorts of acts usually
are fellow students, or have no prior criminal record. They are mentally
unbalanced and have no business being able to acquire weapons of any sort.
Will it work? Will it reduce
the number and intensity of the shooting incidents we have had to endure over
the past 10, 20, 30 years? I honestly don’t know, but I’m willing to let us
try. Lets try limiting gun ownership for a while, say 5 years. If it doesn’t
work, if crime increases, or school shootings get worse, we can look at it as a
failed experiment and try something else. But this just can’t go on, can it?
Are we really so weak and spineless as a nation that we would rather bend to
the whims of the NRA rather than attempt to prevent another school from being
attacked, another town from being traumatized, another child from being
murdered? Are we really that pathetic?
I think not. I hope not. I
pray not.
