{"id":62618,"date":"2012-12-14T18:33:22","date_gmt":"2012-12-14T23:33:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=62618"},"modified":"2012-12-14T20:20:10","modified_gmt":"2012-12-15T01:20:10","slug":"anywhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/fe-911-2\/anywhere\/","title":{"rendered":"Anywhere"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s hard to avoid the conversations going on in my school district office today, or to look away from the worried eyes of my co-workers as they stare at their computers reading the news.<\/p>\n

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Anxious, muffled conversations are taking place among the mothers in our staff in the hallway, some with kids the ages of those kids at Sandy Hook School in Connecticut, others with kids fully grown and away at school far from home, growing into their adulthood. It’s more than heartache everyone feels. It’s shock. Our hearts have been vacuumed clean out.<\/p>\n

We’re trying to reassure ourselves past the grief-numbness we feel with the reassurance that It can’t happen here. ‘Thank God my child is safe’. That’s the mantra. <\/p>\n

It’s predictable as the programming you’ll get on the news channels after any act of gun-related violence in America, which is actually an inoculation against reality. The drug in that inoculation is the reassurance that it will never happen to you, or anyone you love. And these are probably going to be the words that will be shared amongst many of these same mothers in the hallway by early next week.<\/p>\n

That’s how this will be played out. I predict within a discreet waiting period of roughly 24 hours, an attractive blond spokeswoman from the National Rifle Association will issue a statement: “There are already enough laws, tests and screenings in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening. And even though this is a horrible, senseless tragedy…blah-blah-blah…we of the NRA who are also mothers, fathers, parents of children in schools…blah-blah-blah…we must uphold our Second Amendment rights…blah-blah-blah.” And onward we go until the next disaster news bubble.<\/p>\n

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But let’s break down these moments as we’re feeling this grief and shock at a national level. It’s important to examine how truly desensitized we’ve been made to the preventable<\/em> random, senseless gun violence we’ve witnessed today and on many other days in our recent past, and are sure to be witnessing in our future. Random mass shootings are a signature event in our culture now. Not just in Newtown, Connecticut, or the town of Aurora and Columbine High School in Colorado, or at Virginia Tech, but anywhere in America.<\/p>\n

Prior to the ratification of the Constitution and its Bill of Rights in 1791, the concerns of the first citizens of the United States were to deter attack and oppression by tyrannical government, repel invasion, suppress insurrection, facilitate a natural right of self-defense, participate in law enforcement, and enable the people to organize a militia system. If I remember my history correctly, the ability to legally bear arms was justifiable as a defense mechanism in response to England’s monarchical tyranny in order to quickly create an army in the event of massive attack — such as the English perpetrated on its American colonists during the revolution.<\/p>\n

In response, Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution codified the right to bear arms for national self-defense by allowing the Congress to “provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; raise and support armies; provide and maintain a navy; make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces; provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions; provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.”<\/p>\n

Though the second amendment may be called The Right to Bear Arms, it was drafted as a means for 18th century citizens<\/em> to protect themselves from enemy attack. How we have come to this morning in Newtown, Connecticut in the 21st century is now — like so many other institutions holding up our great society in this age of Pluto in Capricorn — a matter ripe for an MRI. The very people who still maintain they need to fight for the right to own as many automatic weapons as they can, legally purchased or not, are also as unaware of the history that gave them that right. Note the immortal words of former a Vice-Presidential candidate:<\/p>\n

He who warned, uh, the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh, by ringing those bells, and um, makin’ sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed. — Sarah Palin, botching the history of Paul Revere’s midnight ride, June 3, 2011.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Incomprehensible or not, there are still so many who feel as entitled to their guns as they are of the cartoon version of American history that enables their ownership regardless of reality. That same cartoon enables the weapons industry to prey upon a sense of powerlessness and fear that we often feel under the pressure of a struggling economy, where the rich ones get and the poor ones pay.<\/p>\n

That same sense of inadequacy haunts us today in a society where women are taking the reins more, and where men feel adrift of previously accepted norms of what is considered masculine. A quick peek at the current leadership of the National Rifle Association<\/a> will tell you a lot about the psyche and economic interests of the people running that ship. The Founding Fathers would be spinning in their catacombs.<\/p>\n

The gun lobby protects an industry that buys political silence on a day like today. It turns a blind eye to illegal gun sales and allows purchase at gun shows of automatic weaponry — weapons with no other purpose than to kill large groups of people — and it should be looked at with a glaring light overhead. It is an industry that is as ripe for our collective dissection as are the predatory banks.<\/p>\n

After all these years, watching the news while Americans from presidents to preachers were gunned down, I have reluctantly silenced myself from the criticism of guns and gun ownership, because the spectrum of gun owners across America is as wide ranging as gang kids from Richmond High School who should not have guns, to my brother-in-law in Santa Cruz, California, who 30 yeas ago used his gun to quickly kill livestock for food. <\/p>\n

There are a lot of good people in between who own guns and own them responsibly. Yet, as we have watched and listened to the timeline of our modern-day history, peppered with gunshots, we have lost our senses and bits and pieces of our soul. Now with the deaths of so many children, our silence on the subject of gun control signals a loss of our collective sanity.<\/p>\n

Yes, random violence can and does happen. But if we start today to act past the numbness and grief we feel in sympathy, perhaps we can fight to make access to deadly weapons more difficult — like MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) who fought for harsher penalties for driving under the influence of alcohol. I don’t care if you think this is reactionary or not, a temporary setback, a random occurrence. We’ve added pre-schoolers to the list of presidents and preachers, and we need to stop somewhere, anywhere and start drawing a line in the sand. We need to dare to ask, “When is this going to stop?” And we need to do this now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s hard to avoid the conversations going on in my school district office today, or to look away from the worried eyes of my co-workers as they stare at their computers reading the news. Anxious, muffled conversations are taking place among the mothers in our staff in the hallway, some with kids the ages of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1740],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62618"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62618\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}