It's hard to know what to say about yesterday's unspeakable horror at Va. Tech. But I will say this: How many tragedies will it take before we begin to step away from our culture of guns and violence? How many lives lost, needlessly, before we quit defending our "right to bear arms" as inviolable?
"Guns don't kill people, people do." Yeah, right.
If guns were not so readily available, angry people, deranged people, irrational people, mentally ill people, violent people could not so easily kill the innocent around them.
Keeping guns does not make us safer. The "right to bear arms" does not make us safer.
Einstein said, "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." I would add that you cannot arm a nation and live in peace.
ETA: Trillwing has a most excellent post on this same topic; check it out.
7 comments:
I agree with you. There's a poll on cnn.com that asks about gun control helping to fight violence. Unfortunately most who have answered don't think it would help. Sad, sad.
So sad. Unthinkable. And you know that the first thing the Preznit said was, "I support Americans' right to bear arms."
Does he do ANYTHING right?
YT, in a word: NO
I saw a blip on the news with some guy from a gun-rights group saying that one of the professors who died saving his students could have drawn a gun ("if he had been allowed to carry one") and ended the whole incident.
Here's my thought: Isn't it likely that an Israeli born in Romania in 1930 would have seen enough violence in his life that he wouldn't want to carry a gun?
Would it have turned out differently if Va didn't have such lax gun laws? No telling. But to put yourself in the head of someone who died saving others to promote your cause? Pretty gross, methinks.
So well put. As I listened to NPR yesterday, all I wanted to do was turn off the radio, yet I couldn't. How long, O Lord until your creation learns to respect and love one another? How long, O Lord will we live in a culture that prizes destruction over preservation, in weaponry, environment, and international policy?
I hate to get all political from this tragic event, but it brings me to the point of wondering about all of these things, and what kind of "Christian" nation we are (since that is what Bush and the ultra-conservatives seem to want, though I don't necessarily agree) that as a central tenant of its constitution gives one the right to possess weapons of mass destruction in the form of guns?
Ovens don't bake cookies, people bake cookies.
But it's a heckuva lot harder for a person to bake a cookie without an oven.
(Granted, cookie dough is a delicacy in and of itself, but that's superfluous to this particular metaphor...)
I won't keep a gun in my home but outlawing them will not stop the violence, particularly that of angry people. We could outlaw them and make people hunt deer, turkey and rabbit with bows and arrows. It takes longer to reload those.
Every year or so somebody gets angry and drives through a crowd of people to see how many they can mow down. We could outlaw cars so that doesn't happen.
On 9-11 and at other times airplanes have been used as weapons. Should we outlaw airplanes or just filling them full of fuel?
The Oklahoma City bombing anniversary was this week. They used ordinary things like fertilizer and a rental truck. We could outlaw rental trucks. We could also outlaw fertilizers and anything that could be used to make an explosive device. That wasn't the first time someone used such things and it will probably be attempted again. And they like to put nails in their homemade bombs, like at Columbine. Nails can do damage so they could be outlawed.
Somebody put something in pet food that sickened and killed a lot of pets, including mine. Sometimes, through error or evil intent, it happens in people food too. What can we outlaw there?
I can go on and on but my point is, even if we outlaw guns, it will not stop violence. It will simply change forms.
We live in a lost and hurting world in need of a savior. Life is very fragile and fleeting. Our prayers matter.
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