There's a problem in our country. It's a deep sickness that affects everything we do, or see. It's called "politics," and I don't believe it has a cure.
On Friday, the the town of Newtown, CT was the scene of a terrible act of evil. A young man, apparently mentally ill, took a veritable arsenal to a school, after having already killed his mother, and killed over two dozen people. He then took his own life. This is a senseless act of mindless violence.
"Senseless": It has no sense. No amount of rational thinking will ever allow us to understand what was going through that young man's head.
"Mindless": He wasn't using his mind. Perhaps he was incapable of using his mind. Someone thinking clearly doesn't target innocent children in some random act of violence.
As a nation, we all feel wounded by the events that unfolded. Some of those wounds will close quickly. Some of those wounds will never close. The only thing we should be worrying about is how provide some measure of comfort and compassion to the survivors of Friday's attack.
Yet, for some reason, people believe politics must be brought into the discussion.
One professional political pundit, I can't even remember which one, remarked that 2nd Amendment advocates would probably be calling for "arming kindergartners," before we even knew all the victims. See, it was important to get it on record immediately that more people having guns wouldn't have stopped this attack. Never mind that he's wrong.
In what was supposed to be a prayer service for the victims and their families, the President decided to make a call for increased gun control. On the other side of things, 2nd Amendment advocates were pre-politicising the event, since history says that exactly what did happen (increased call for gun control) would happen.
Now, those are things that can certainly be discussed. It is in our nature to want to avoid this kind of pain and monstrosity. When something like this happens, we rightly review to see what, if anything, could be done to prevent future recurrence. So I don't have a problem that it's being discussed. I do have two problems with the discussion, however.
The first, and most important, is the timing. The political discussion was occurring, on both sides of the aisle, by around 1 PM CST, if not earlier. The President politicized a prayer service. It seems little or no consideration was given to the grief of those affected.
The second reason, however, is that the discussion is not honest. As Ace so correctly pointed out on Friday, whenever Liberals say they want to have a "discussion" about guns, what they really mean is they want to demonize them and push for more gun control. They're just smart enough that they know they can't say that out loud. For the gun rights advocates' part, they seldom mention the shear danger involved with a totally armed populace.
Today there will be more posts from me. I've been out since last week with a bad back, and today is the first I can even really use my laptop while laid out on the couch. I hope to avoid some of the dishonesty in this discussion. Most of all, I hope that we can all be honest about our goals, and see the facts for what they really are.
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