It’s impossible to miss, because it’s the hottest news topic right now: Gun Control. News, Radio, TV, and internet. Inescapable.
A day or two after it happened, I was talking with a friend, and made note of the shooting at Sandy Hook elementary. My thoughts were that this was really going to bring down a lot of strength behind the initiative to tighten gun control, and fire arms registration. He said that it was the only issue politicians were ignoring because no one wanted to talk about it. That it was the ultimate career killing topic. I was curious to see if he was right.
It turns out that he was wrong. This is the hot political topic right now. How to deal with guns in America.
I want my blog post to be somewhat short today, because lets face it, I could write 300 pages of my thoughts on gun control, and guns in general. I will keep it short ( I hope). First off though, because this is a sensitive subject to people, I want to be really clear that I think what happened is awful. Regardless of why, or how, it was a horrible event, and it hit a lot of people really hard.
To me, I find Sandy Hook tragic in more ways then you might expect though. My reason is simple for the attitude that we take as a culture to an event of this nature. The idea of 26 children being gunned down in cold blood is horrific. The real kicker is that the US government is responsible for things like this on a daily basis far off in that mythical land we call the Middle East, that only shows up on our doorstep when we watch an episode of ‘24’ or ‘Homeland’. A psycho gunning down innocent groups of people is beyond anyone’s control at the onset. Drone missile strikes along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border that kill 26+ innocent civilians on adailybasis is most definitely within the control of the people running the very country we live in. Yet, the mass of people and power behind gun control in America is at a fever pitch, without any focus put on who the government kills or why. Do you see where I’m drawing a line of hypocrisy here?
And here are some more numbers to think about. If you wanna talk about tragedies happening on our American soil, then take a look at the city of Chicago. In 2012, their Gang Related deaths were at 228. If you divide that by 12 months, that is 19. Just in Chicago alone we are looking at a Sandy Hook-level shooting everymonth. That is just in one American city, let alone all the cities in the US with serious gang/crime issues. Yeah, gun crime is a serious problem alright, and it has been for a long, long time now.
It’s not that anyone situation is worse, better, or more appropriate for gun control at all. My point is that it saddens me that thousands of innocent people, each year, are swept up as casualties due to crime and guns in general, all across our country, but this is what had to tip the iceberg for the country to gain a conscience. As if Columbine or Virginia Tech weren’t enough. Don’t even get me started on the Trayvon Martin case (which I would quickly like to add was perpetrated by someone who legally acquired a gun). Still sad to me that none of these events got the president to put together a committee on how to solve this issue until now.
Yes, we need to clean up our mess of a gun-control situation. Yes, we need to come up with a plan to make sure guns don’t land in the hands of civilians who will use them to hurt innocent people. With that in mind, it would be awesome to take that same approach with how we treat our neighbors and our own citizens across the board.
-Nik