(Any comments would be much appreciated.)
We are now two days away from Christmas and the people of Newtown Connecticut and
the entire nation are still reeling from the horrible tragedies that took place
at the Sandy Hook
Elementary school. So
much has unraveled since that terrifying day when dam Lanza killed twenty-six
people before doing himself in, many of those things I have covered here in
this blog. But one thing I haven’t been covering as much is the use of the tragedy
by politicians for their own purposes. I did say in an earlier blog that we
shouldn’t expect too much from politicians as they will only offer us sympathy
and promises with no real solutions.
The political tension in the wake of Sandy
Hook is rising as Democrats and Republicans are both coming up
with their own ideas as to how these tragedies can be prevented and how their
own agenda can be furthered. Republicans are saying that armed guards should be
present in all schools for protection, while Democrats are saying that gun
control laws are too lax and that further regulation of firearms and ammunition
is needed.
But this is the perfect time for either party to take a shot
at one another as well. In an article I found on Yahoo! News Grover Norquist
accuses President Obama and Democrats of using the Newtown tragedy to push their gun control
agenda.
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| Grover Norquist on ABC accusing Obama and Dems of using Sandy Hook for political purposes |
"We ought to calm down and not take tragedies like
this, crimes like this, and use them for political purposes," Norquist
told me on "This Week." "President Obama has been president for
four years. If he thought some gun control could solve this problem, he should
have been pushing it years ago."
I love that first part of the sentence, "We ought to
calm down and not take tragedies like this, crimes like this, and use them for
political purposes”, as Norquist himself is actually endorsing an NRA
recommendation to place armed guards in our public schools for protection. So
who should be calming down? The guys who want to regulate guns more, or the
guys who think armed guards should be in every school? In my opinion, both.
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| NRA recommends all schools have armed guards. |
When you’re anti-something, there is always going to be
another side to the issue, a pro-something side, like anti-gun/pro-gun, and
people who are anti-gun will call for the amount of guns to be reduced while
pro-gun people will call for a proliferation of guns. And after an event like
the Sandy Hook shooting the anti-gun folks are
going try to make you believe this happened because there are so many guns in
the country and they are easily obtainable, while the pro-gun people will try
to get you to believe the tragedy happened because there aren’t enough guns.
And now it’s time to point the fingers in the political world
and blame each other for taking political advantage of a horrible occurrence
even though both sides are doing the same exact thing.
How can Norqusit come out and accuse Obama and other
Democrats for using the Sandy Hook event to
push gun control laws when he and Republicans are using the event to push gun
proliferation? Norqusit says he thinks Democrats should “calm down” and not
turn this into a political hot button and at the same time saying that we need
to put armed guards in every school to protect our children.
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| Retired marine Staff SGT standing guard at local school |
Don’t both of those ideas sound the least bit alarmist to
you? I mean, how can we be so fearful as to put armed guards in our schools yet
tell others they need to clam down about the ease in which guns are
available? Or vise versa.
The gun control debate itself doesn’t seem to be centered
around a all out ban of hand guns or assault weapons, although those ideas are being
vocalized by politicians, but rather on the ban of extended magazines and high
capacity ammunition clips.
One writer believes that giving up these extended clips is
the real solution and that focusing on mental health is just a distraction.
FROM THE ARTICLE:
"I am for the banning of the
extended magazines and extended clips," Noonan said.
Editor and Publisher of The Nation
Katrina vanden Heuvel said that focusing on the mentally ill is a distraction
from the issue of gun violence.
"The mental illness argument has
been used to evade action," vanden Huevel said. "More guns and
bullets, more dead children."
The idea that more bullets and more guns equal more dead
children is absolute horse shit. According to this writer the ban of extended
mags and high cap clips will reduce the amount of children being shot up in
school violence. I hate this argument, because if I was out of my mind and
wanted to hurt somebody I DO NOT need either of those extended capacity
ammunition clips, PERIOD.
When we look at these shooting incidences we see that they
all have one major thing in common; they are all suffering from some type of
mental issue or some case of extreme anger in which case therapy or any other
type of help was not sought or was not successful. These events don’t just
happen at schools either, as proved by the recent shootings at malls and movie
theaters by deranged psychopaths who have no sense of wrong or right and simply
put are deluded individuals. The excuses, “I wanted to see what would happen”
or “I wanted to kill all the phonies” or “I was upset with the way my life was
going” or the excuses of people who have little to no moral compass or little
to no understanding of the consequences of their actions (unless of course they
do understand their consequences in which case they just don’t care or are
planning to off themselves anyway at the end of their deed).
I guess what I am saying here is that we shouldn’t get
caught up in thinking that only one side of the political spectrum is using
this event for political gain. They both are, and it is quite evident that they
are.
Norquist was right about one thing though, we do need to
calm down, all of us. Those who want guns in our schools for protection and
those who wanted to place regulations on firearms. The presences of armed
guards in schools won’t limit tragedies, and neither will a ban on high capacity
ammunition clips.
If we have armed guards in school surely they may not be
able to react quickly enough to each and every instance. The idea that a bad
guy with a gun can only be thwarted by a good guy with a gun is pretty
accurate, but what if the good guys couldn’t react in time and a few people
died?
The ban of high caps won’t do shit. As I said, if I truly
wanted to hurt someone I can do it without a lot of ammunition. If Adam Lanza
forced his way into Sandy Hook with only one
hand gun and a regular capacity ammunition clip he would have STILL KILLED
PEOPLE. Sure it may not have been as many, but the deed would still have been
done, nothing can stop that. And if an armed guard was on the premises maybe he
would have gotten to Adam sooner and only a few people were injured or killed,
but still the act was accomplished, people died.
Adam Lanza was in fact a troubled young man. According to
reports he hardly spoke to anyone and would rarely if ever look them in the
eyes. He was hiding from the world, descending into his basement room where he
would hide every day and immerse himself in the fantasies he created that he
was more able to cope with. He was truly a young man who was in need of some
serious therapy, which his mother tried to provide for him.
There are many people who knew Nancy Lanza that are being quoted
in news articles saying that Nancy was trying to find help or Adam, and a
conflicting report that she had considered to commit him to a mental institution.
With that being said, why are people trying to say that the
mental health argument is just a distraction from the real cause? The real
cause IS mental health, and this needs to be addressed in our country.
What I do find funny is that the Republicans are the ones
who are really saying that this is an issue of mental health rather than
firearms regulation, yet the Republicans are responsible for 4.3 billion
dollars worth in cuts for mental health programs.
So yes, this is very much a matter of mental health and it
should be treated as such. No need to go into a fear mongering campaign by
either trying to reduced or increase the amount of weapons available to the
general population. The more people who have healthy minds the less senseless
violence will occur.
SOURCES:
