A Week Later

The point is, it makes no sense. Not to rational people anyway. There's nothing about shooting young children multiple times that is supposed to make sense. It's an act of brutality the likes of which our nation has never seen.

There have been two times in Jeremy's life when his life hung in the balance. At six weeks of age, we discovered by accident that he had a heart defect. We didn't realize it until later, but our cardiologist let us know that we were 2 hours away from losing him. Several months later, he had a bad reaction to his heart medication and had to be flown on a Flight-for-Life helicopter to Lutheran General Hospital. (I was not allowed to accompany him.)

In both instances, I was sick with fear and grief. I am aware that this is only a small measure of what the parents of those children must be feeling. I was deeply affected by this tragedy. I was still impatient with my kids because I'm human; at the same time, I understood that those parents would have given everything to be impatient with their kids just one more time.

Back in August, just after the shootings in Aurora, Colorado, I blogged about how I felt there needed to be stricter gun laws. A comment was left saying, "if stricter gun laws are made, people will just find new ways to break them." (I'm paraphrasing a bit.) The gist of the argument is a collective shrug of shoulders that's akin to saying "boys will be boys."

I don't feel like that's an appropriate response to this. I was guilty of posting (and engaging in discussions on postings) about the need for stronger legislation on gun control. To be clear, I don't believe we should ban all guns. I understand that people hunt for game or to sustain their families. Farmers and ranchers use guns to help protect their flocks and herds.

My real problem is that people are not being honest about the purpose of guns. There were people posting things about Timothy McVeigh and John Wayne Gacy. They both, according to the posts, killed more children than the gunman in Newtown.

I am disturbed that we need to invoke the name of a terrorist and serial killer to try and minimize what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary. I am disturbed that none of my right-leaning friends want to verbalize the truth; guns are instruments of death.

When you head into the woods with a gun, you are not hoping to tickle the deer. When you use a gun to protect yourself in your home against an invader, you are saying that your life is more valuable than theirs. It's a zero-sum game, really. One person is going to die.

Yes, people kill one another with any number of instruments. One FB friend pointed out, the terrorists hijacked planes on 9/11 with just box cutters. Another said, when drunk drivers kill someone with their car, should cars be banned?

I will address both instances. First, after what happened on 9/11, flights were grounded for a week. Ten years later and I can't board a plane with so much as fingernail clippers. Anytime the TSA is found asleep on the job, we hear about it. There's an investigation. People are held accountable. Changes are made.

As for the drunk driver, they are held accountable. Driving privileges are just that-granted at the behest of the government. Failure to follow the rules means that one's license can be revoked. The person who kills someone with their car while drunk can be held criminally responsible. They can serve jail time.

The gun violence in America seems only to be skyrocketing. My husband, who majored in Political Science in college, informs me that the forefathers intended the Second Amendment as a way to give states the ability to form militias. Let's remember, back when the Constitution was framed, it probably took about 5 minutes between shots to reload a firearm.

I assert that the framers didn't intend for every Tom, Dick and Harriet to own a gun. Further, I believe they would be rolling over in their graves to hear the crimes against humanity being perpetrated in the name of the Second Amendment.

I return to my earlier posit; guns are used to end lives. Cars can end lives when used outside of safe parameters, when one does not follow the rules of the road, when the driver is distracted, etc. Cars are not manufactured for the purpose of killing people. Adam Lanza used the guns in exactly the way they were intended.

Anyone who buys a gun should know that the gun is a weapon of destruction. Even if someone is shot but not killed, a bullet can do far more damage to the human body than a knife, a length of rope or a lead pipe. Bullets shred organs on contact, shatter bones, lodge themselves deep into the body and cause ongoing damage.

Case in point? In China, the same day as the massacre at Sandy Hook, a man injured 22 people with a knife. Injured. Not killed, maimed, paralyzed, disfigured, but injured. If Mr. Lanza had entered that school with a knife, we would not be having this conversation. He would not have been able to kill 26 people with a knife in such a short amount of time. It just wouldn't have been possible.

The other post I kept seeing was that if just one person was carrying a concealed weapon, they could have ended the conflict sooner. Police and military personnel are trained extensively, for years, on how to use their firearms. Beyond going to target practice, they serve in real-life situations and have the opportunity to hone their skills.

I don't believe, outside of these two scenarios, that civilians are adequately trained or ready to fire a weapon at a moving target in a sea of smaller moving targets while under duress. I don't want an armed guard at my children's school. (I also can't get any of my right-leaning friends to tell me how we would pay to staff this position. Schools are already struggling to educate our children, I think the additional burden would break them.) I have faith that the police are the best option for protecting me against intruders or other criminals. I don't want anyone's (and I mean anyone's)blood on my hands. My fear is that even if I were trained appropriately, I could hit the wrong target. That's called murder and I don't want to give up my freedom for a bad decision.

(Also, please note that there were armed guards present at Columbine High School and they weren't able to stop the tragedy there.)

Now. The other issue our country doesn't want to address is mental health coverage and administration. We do not want to talk about mental health issues out loud in a public forum. We stigmatize people with mental health issues, make them the butt of our jokes, disinclude them from a discussion about mental health coverage and administration and then wonder why they don't seek help (and receive help). I struggle with depression. I can take as much medication for it as I want, but going to counseling is a logistical nightmare.

There's no infrastructure to help me. I am a housewife, I am involved in a couple of moms groups, but I hesitate to reach out for help. I feel like I'm burdening people by asking them to watch my kids. So I suffer, mostly isolated. There are no support groups for moms with depression. I'm not saying this to solicit help, I'm simply saying it is difficult for me, with health benefits, to seek treatment aside from pharmaceuticals.

How much more difficult is it for someone who has to work 3 jobs to put food on the table? For someone who works in corporate America, who is afraid it'll be viewed as a sign of weakness to seek counseling? For someone in the military, whose every move is documented and who is watched like a hawk by their fellow soldiers? No one wants to be in a foxhole with someone who's suicidal.

We need to have a frank discussion about mental health advocacy and administration. We need to strip away the stigma related to these issues. We need to let people know that it is okay to struggle with these issues. We need to stop the ridicule and the bullying and come to terms with the reality that we are, as a nation, very sick.

So this issue is two-pronged. I was disappointed that Wayne LaPierre blamed everybody else for what happened last Friday. I have started seeing some very frank PSAs about the dangers of smoking. I think if we had PSAs running with someone shooting a watermelon to demonstrate the power that guns hold, people might think twice about using them thoughtlessly.

Of course, what it comes down to is money. Those PSAs would never air; the gun lobby doesn't want anyone to slow the profits for the companies that it represents. That's what I find most disturbing. I am all for capitalism but I despise blind greed. I would have respected the NRA if they had accepted some amount of responsibility for what happened. They manufacture weapons that are designed for causing death (either human or animal). I feel like that's an honest assessment, not propaganda.

Finally, I want to speak out against those who say that this happened because God is not in the schools. I think this is an even more hurtful statement than people realize. Just because we are not praying at school doesn't mean that God is not there. I have plenty of Christian friends who teach in public schools. They pray for their students on a daily basis.

There were teachers at Sandy Hook who sacrificed their lives for the lives of countless innocent children. Isn't this a demonstration of God's love? Doesn't this show that God poured his grace on some of those children? I think it's heinous that Mike Huckabee is given free reign to spew vitriol about God not being there when he was standing next to each and every person there.

What's even more, I remember at least twice in the past two years that there were shootings in churches. If I'm correct, that's God's house. People invite him there every week. They visit church to commune with God. How is it, then, that the shootings happened there? By the previous statement's logic, God wasn't in those churches.

We will never eliminate murder in a world of imperfect, broken humans. There are no easy answers to this sickness. I firmly believe that violence begets violence. The NRA, the media, etc., have bred a culture of fear. The only thing that I know that replaces fear is faith and there is only one person in whom I feel my faith deserves to be placed. Even if we lived in a country where everyone acknowledged Jesus as their savior, we would still be having to deal with these kinds of issues. King David, who was known as a man after God's own heart, committed murder. Christians are not immune from this kind of tragedy and, as such, we shouldn't try to sell a bill of goods to people that says anything like that.

Ultimately, we can't apply our limited human understanding to something like this. It doesn't honor the memory of these fallen babies. We can only honor their memories by doing whatever we can to prevent this from happening again.