Greenwood Farm Blog: Light in the Darkness of Newtown

The massacre of innocents in Connecticut brings a pall of darkness over the nation. Yet, in the midst of the darkness, there is new hope we will regain the civic good will that used to restrain carnage such as this. We in Big Horn County share the nation's concern about the pathology of individuals attracted to such violence by life experiences and media. Unfortunately, it's a pathology involving more than a few bad individuals. There is a more pervasive mindset that contributes to opportunities for the disturbed among us to act out their violent fantasies.

It surprised me to learn recently that gun violence in the United States now ranks with that of Somalia, a country known for its ongoing brutal civil wars. Since Columbine there have now been thirty mass murder events, with this one among the very worst. I think most of us know that total gun control is not the best solution to this horrific situation. We know that tighter gun control laws and enforcement of those laws will not necessarily end killing sprees. Sadly, reducing access to weapons won't guarantee a reduction in severely deranged individuals among us.

A useful direction would be to address the national mindset that required twenty beautiful children, and seven adults, to pay a horrific price for one man's freedom to shoot the guns of his choice.

We need the old gun laws back in place when I was a teenager. Those regulations were designed to protect human lives while supporting responsible use of guns. Hunting and self-defense were primary reasons to own guns then (see my previous column, AUGUST , 2012 "How we got gun un-control"). Weapons designed smaller and smaller with larger and larger capacity for better concealment and more convenient slaughter of massive numbers of people, such as the Bushmaster 223 and newly marketed high-capacity handguns used in this and recent mass murders, were unknown then. What military weapons did exist were far larger. Yet working models were rightly kept out of the hands of the consenting general public. That was the right mindset.

As a nation, we have somehow lost our common sense when it comes to weaponry. We have stiff government regulations covering access to driving cars, purchase and use of drugs, and handling of dynamite and fireworks. Such regulations keep our children safe from deranged people or dangerous deadly devices of all kinds—except for guns.

Years ago, public will resolved to reduce deaths from car accidents. We decided as a collective society that we were losing too many human lives to motor vehicle tragedies. We took a multifaceted approach to reducing the loss of human life, including improved road design (shoulders, guard rails, banked curves), car design (safety glass, gas tank placement), and legal safeguards (speed limits, DUI laws). The result of these efforts was a drastically reduced death rate from that of the 60's and 70's.

Over the same time period that auto transportation became safer, advances in gun technology have combined with legal relaxation of gun regulations to increase the ease and efficiency of death-delivery. Ironically, our advanced American technology, with ongoing handgun design improvements, has now made mass murder alarmingly easy and efficient. While we regularly recall toxic bottles from China or ineffective child care seats, our nation has chosen to deregulate guns. This is in no small way related to a massive media onslaught from the NRA and the gun industry. Marketing has been astonishingly effective in encouraging people to overcome common sense when it comes to the safety of our most precious little citizens.

Cholera used to kill lots of people. So did automobile accidents and urban fires. We've been able to address and reduce the senseless loss of life associated with these hazards. What seems to be missing in this situation is a rational discussion of strategies to solve the problem. Our nation is stuck in a national hysteria that has hamstrung our access to a broad-based solution. Rand Paul, a prominent politician, just sent me an email wanting me to fear that Obama, the United Nations, and our federal law enforcement people are now conspiring together to confiscate my guns. Paul's many followers are claiming last week's tragedy has nothing to do with guns. Cars don't kill people? People do? It's like saying cholera and tuberculosis had nothing to do with germs.

So no, just restoring rational gun safety regulations to consistency with our own history and with that of other developed nations of our planet will not alone solve our half-century plague of gun homicide. But it would be a good start toward a rational, investigative science-based discussion leading to real changes. The gun industry and the NRA could restore themselves to their role in our nation as advocates for safety and government regulation of our arsenal of weaponry, and my guns will be accessible for any inspection. But this won't happen under their current leadership. This is not the time for President Obama or other federal government officials, religious leaders or gun industry representatives to shrink from rational dialogue. Let's work together toward restoring the safety of our children and our own capacity to access basic, American common sense in the face of tragedy.

This ends the column as published in the Big Horn County News. Further information:

2010 Advent column, "Strengthening America Against Evil":

http://greenwoodback40.blogspot.com/search?q=advent

BACK IN 1990, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) issued this warning: "The religious community must ... take seriously the risk of idolatry that could result from an unwarranted fascination with guns, which overlooks or ignores the social consequences of their misuse." Two decades later, about 660,000 more Americans have been killed by guns, with a million more injured. Continued on this link: http://sojo.net/magazine/2013/01/9mm-golden-calves

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/11/jared-loughner-mass-shootings-mental-illness

http://audio.commonwealthclub.org/audio/podcast/cc_20121101_gunviolencepanel.mp3

A rational approach:

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13358-four-ways-to-stop-gun-violence