I
used to work with someone who would on rare occasions step into my office and
ask, “Can we talk?” I immediately knew something was seriously amiss and
therefore needed to be addressed in order to avoid potentially disastrous consequences.
One
of those moments has come for our nation. We seemed to have avoided the discussion
after the 13 were killed at Columbine in 1999, and the 32 at Virginia Tech in
2007, and the 13 at Ft. Hood in 2009, and the 6 in Tucson in 2011, and in 2012
the 12 in Aurora, Colorado, the 6 at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and
the 2 at the shopping mall in Oregon.
In
the aftermath of the 26 children and adults killed at a Connecticut elementary
school, people are asking, “When is enough, enough? Can we talk?”
The
killings happen in our schools, hospitals, houses of worship, and shopping
malls. No place is safe.
And
we are fortunate more have not been slain. Indeed, on the same day as the
Connecticut massacre, an 18 year old Bartlesville, Oklahoma man was arrested
for allegedly attempting to lure students at his high school into the
auditorium where he planned to chain the doors shut and start shooting. On the
day after the Connecticut murders, a man opened fire at a hospital in Birmingham,
Alabama, wounding a police officer and two others before being killed by
another police officer. That same weekend, a man fired 50 gun shots in the
parking lot of a crowded Newport Beach, California shopping mall, while in
Indiana a man who owns 47 guns was arrested for allegedly threatening to kill
as many people as he could at a public school.
This
is not a rural problem or a city problem: It’s everyone’s problem. Tom Mauser,
whose 15 year old son was killed at Columbine High School in 1999, spoke last
July of his futile efforts as an activist against such violence. “There was a
time when I felt a certain guilt,” he said. “I’d ask, ‘Why can’t I do more
about this? Why haven’t I dedicated myself more to it?’ But I’ll be damned if
I’m going to put it all on my shoulders. This is all our problem.”
He’s
right: It’s our problem. And we must address it.
Violence
seems to be woven into the fabric of our culture: From video games to movies,
we ingest a steady, daily diet of it. But political and cultural commentator, David
Brooks, speaking on “Meet the Press,” cited studies showing that the
perpetrators of these mass killings don’t seem to be spurred by violent video
games or films. “It’s a psychological problem, not a sociological one,” Brooks
said.
Why
these tragic events are frequently a part of the public scene is no mystery: It’s
a matter of statistics. There are some 300 million firearms in the US. Consider
that $1.6 billion has been cut from state mental health budgets, which includes
budgets for mental health services. Those numbers equate to a simple formula: The
less help available to mentally troubled people, multiplied by the availability
of guns, including assault weapons with high capacity magazines, equals the
proliferation of horrific events like the ones we have been witnessing. It’s
inevitable.
The
objection that even under the best of circumstances, with proper background
checks on purchased weapons and mental health care more available, what
happened in Connecticut and other places still could have happened, may be true
but should not deter us from enforcing more effective regulations that help safeguard
the public by trying to keep weapons out of the hands of those who are mentally
incapable of properly and sensibly handling them.
The
conversation won’t be easy, but it’s necessary, because violence has and always
will be an ever present reality and therefore must be checked.
In
the meantime, let us pause and pray, weeping with those who weep, comforting
the brokenhearted, protecting the innocent, and looking with hope to the
Healer, whose birthday we celebrate December 25.
And
as we do, remember what Fred Rogers’ mother would tell him when he saw
frightening things in the news. “Look for the helpers,” she would say. “You
will always find people who are helping.”
Let’s
be those helpers as we sit down together. We need to talk.
No comments:
Post a Comment