COLUMN: Let’s not politicize mass shootings
By Ryan Fitzmaurice on August 27, 2012 7:00 am / 8 comments
That’s three now. Three mass shootings in a little over a month. 72 injured, 19 dead.
But let’s not politicize this.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about this gun control debate we’re currently having is how much we’re not having it.
Due to Friday’s mass shooting at the Empire State Building where a disgruntled employee caused a firefight injuring nine people and murdering one of them, we have again received somber timely coverage from the media, where they discussed gun control as something ideal but distant.
Politicians again, after the dust had settled, either made a brief recommitment to current gun laws, or a brief mention of gun laws we should have, with no specifics or commitments on how to carry those laws out.
And again, nothing really happened.
It sounds like a case of deja vu, because it is.
Neither Barack Obama or Mitt Romney have made gun control even the slightest part of their platform due to potential voter backlash, because as usual, votes are more important than morality.
The Republican-controlled Congress is adamantly opposed to passing anything related to gun control, and the Democrats are still far too timid to bring it up.
After the shooting in Wisconsin on Aug. 5 with the body count at 18, Delaware Governor Jack Markell told the Huffington Post, “nothing’s going to happen over the next few months, and whether or not something gets proposed after that, I can’t say.”
What if people just like your mother, father, brother or sister went to something as mundane as the movies, or their place of worship, and in a split second’s notice, a small lead object slammed into their cranium, spraying their insides into the people behind them?
That’s it, their life is over, they’re dead.
Seem too graphic for a student newspaper?
It’s not. Not for this.
Maybe if we thought of these tragedies with the victims in mind instead of treating these as just occasional macabre events, we would actually commit ourselves to a conversation worth having.
Over the last six months, we’ve had congressional hearings on contraceptives, the House has voted over 30 times to repeal Obamacare, and we’ve spent hours upon hours of news coverage on the fact that Romney tied a dog to the roof of his car almost 30 years ago. And yet when it comes to gun control, that is somehow a conversation we don’t have time for?
It doesn’t matter what opinions one has. One can be adamantly opposed or adamantly for gun control. That’s not the issue. The issue is that we have long pretended that this conversation doesn’t have a place on the table.
But again, I repeat, 72 injured, 19 dead. This is on the table whether we like it or not and it is no longer a conversation we can avoid.
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8 Comments
“we’ve spent hours upon hours of news coverage on the fact that Romney tied a dog to the roof of his car almost 30 years ago”
You should add that one of President Obama’s favorite dish to eat is dog…
As I actually heard him say “it’s a boy eat dog world out there”.
It was was written by him in “Dreams From My Father.” He ate dog as a boy.
And so you assumed it was his favorite dish? You can’t fault someone for trying a food when they are 5 or 6 years old. Plus, dog was one of the first domesticated animals, and it was domesticated for it’s food value, not companionship.
Ryan,
You apparently don’t know that the “mass shooting” at the Empire State building was conducted by the police. The gunman shot and killed one person, hardly a “mass shooting”, but the police shot 9 innocent New York Citizens, plus the bad guy. Or maybe you do know and are suggesting that the police should be subjected to stricter gun control?
If you had a clue, you wouldn’t care who has what guns. I don’t balk at the idea of any child going into any hardware store, buying any gun with ammunition, paying cash and leaving without showing ID. Why? Because next to some of the things you could cook up in your mother’s kitchen or your father’s garage, a gun is nigh on harmless. With a trip to Walmart I can make a victim operated trigger, and a charge heavy enough to stop an MRAP. Batteries not required, thank you kindly. As long as these goobers are using guns, you can fight back. You may not do so well, but you can take actions to affect your own fate and the fate of the people around you. Explosives, on the other hand? The IRA told an envoy in advance when he would die, date and time. They pulled it off, too. Despite a hyper alert security presence.
Ryan – Your perspective of the 2nd Amendment and American Society is unfortunately limited by your youth and your idealism. In your world, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is an anachronism that stands in the way of bold social change. The conversation you say we can no longer avoid has been going on since 1871. What’s the significance of that year you ask? It’s the year the nation’s oldest civil rights organization was formed, the NRA. The modern media demonizes this important institution because it supports and vigorously defends the rights of the individual to keep and bear arms, but of course, in the orthodoxy of the left and the progressives, power of this kind should rest with government and not the individual. But government does not look out for the individual, it is fundamentally interested in its own preservation and expansion of power. The myriad gun control laws already on the books at the federal, state and local level prove that laws cannot control people’s actions, only influence their behavior.
You will be tempted to believe that only total confiscation of all privately owned guns will solve what you consider as a national epidemic. But what will you do when our government tells journalists, “your words are a threat to the peace, safety and stability of the citizenry, so we’re confiscating your right to freedom of the press”. Let that sink in. Who are you going to turn to then? We gun owners don’t worry so much about that. We can take care of ourselves just fine.
Ryan, here’s another question for you… why are you so obsessed with these stastically anomalous incidents as opposed to the ongoing violent epidemic striking Baltimore, Chicago, and Detroit? Is it that these events make for better headlines?
It’s certainly not for lethality considering Chicago is being compared to Iraq and to Juarez, Mexico (http://easybakegunclub.com/forum/thread/564/Chicago—Like-Juarez%2C-but-with-English.html).
As a nation, our short attention span syndrome causes us to often focus on relatively small problems while ignoring the ongoing systemic ones that really need attention. Articles like yours only exacerbate that situation.
What happens when the boogeyman is society as a whole and not just a few random guys?