So Now What?

So now what?  Fuming last night, my husband said, "Everyone's so worried about gun control.  Then you have this.  What's the point of worrying about guns when a lunatic can do this."

I've been thinking about it.  And, to me, it all comes back to the availability of materials that can kill. It's true, we're never going to be able to legislate mental illness, or those who want to kill.  And they will always be around. I suppose guns rights activists, dare I say it, are right.  If someone wants to massacre, they'll find a way to do it.

But do we have to make it so easy for them?  This morning it was reported that even the slim background check legislation is in danger of failing, as more Republicans are now saying they will oppose it.  So really, how far have we come?

I was naive thinking Newtown would change minds.  It's scary to me how very little the brutal killing of 20 innocent children has changed minds.  I truly believed, again naively, that the idea of children exploded, with their guts hanging out, would cause even the Wayne LaPierres of the world to stop and reconsider.  Silly me.

Instead, it made more people go out and buy guns.

Maybe you can't link Newtown and Boston.  Maybe there will always be lunatics and ways for them to get their hands on killing material.  Probably the bomber yesterday didn't know there were kids in the crowd (a dead 8-year-old and a 3-year-old with a "grievous" head wound), and didn't care.

But with the availability of so many killing machines, how could we ever think our most precious possessions, our children, could ever be safe?

Maybe I'm crazy but it seemed to me, growing up, that killers stayed away from schools and churches and places where innocent people gathered.  Now anyone's fair game.

My son was three months old when 9/11 happened.  We'd planned to go away that weekend and we still went.  I remember a woman saying to me as I carried him inside the hotel, "He's the hope of the future."  But here we are, almost 12 years later, and nothing has changed.


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