Honoring Newtown: The Truth That No One Wants To Hear

“And it’s true we are immune / When fact is fiction and TV reality,
And today the millions cry / We eat and drink, while tomorrow they die.”

Before I really get into the issue at hand, let me make it clear where I stand on gun control. Although I am usually pretty far to the left on social issues, I tend to lean towards the center on gun policy. Some people believe that every citizen should retain the right to own a weapon with which to defend his or her home and family. I am willing to hear that argument out.

However, Connecticut’s Chief Medical Examiner Wayne Carver reported that all 20 children succumbed to multiple gunshot wounds from the “long rifle,” which was a Bushmaster .223 M4 carbine rifle. Although reports still vary as to whether or not the shooter legally acquired this particular gun, the weapon in question is legal to own in the United States. To me, this is mind-blowing. There is no feasible reason why any person outside of the armed forces would need to a gun so powerful. This weapon was made with the express intent of slaughtering as many human beings as possible in the shortest space of time. This is a not a defense weapon. This is a killing machine.

It is an embarrassment to our country—where in the past year alone, we suffered 10,728 handgun related deaths in contrast to Canada’s 52—that it required the brutal murder of 27 innocent souls before we even began to consider having this discussion. When our second amendment was written, it was written with muskets in mind. Our founding fathers never considered that the human race would create machines that could kill others with such efficiency. When children are dying, it is time for something to change.

As a friend of mine said before, we cannot legislate away insanity. We cannot administer a blanket ban on all guns and expect that to be the answer. I do not think we should take a measure this extreme, as I believe it would be both largely ineffective and detrimental to our civil rights. But people need to talk. Clear boundaries must be set to ensure the safety of our people. Following this tragedy, there hasto be some sort of rational discussion in Washington regarding this kind of issue, as well as another important point: mental health care.

The funding and beneficiary requirements of mental health care are subject to the whims of governments, and people often do not know when they are entitled to mental health care services. I know from personal experience that finding any kind of therapy, never mind the level required caring for someone as sick as the Newtown elementary school shooter, is extremely difficult. It requires money, research, and exorbitant amounts of time. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a mere 7.1 percent of all American adults receive mental health services, and most of these Americans’ care is covered by private insurance. Children, poorer, and more elderly Americans are covered through public insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, and an additional ten percent are uninsured. And even with health care insurances, out-of-pocket costs for both inpatient and outpatient mental health services remain staggeringly high. The National Alliance on Mental Illness reports that Connecticut’s public mental health system currently provides coverage for less than one in five Connecticut residents with a serious mental health problem. The other four may not be able to afford to pay for those services on their own, particularly since mental health issues tend to disproportionately affect poor people.

On the other hand, a typical handgun can be purchased for anywhere between $250 and $500. The semi-automatic rifle in question costs between $700 and $2000. And contrary to gun lobby hysteria regarding President Obama, gun ownership has actually been rising over the past four years, as has the use of guns in violent crimes. And the Bushmaster .223 M4 carbine rifle in particular—the weapon that gunned down 26 innocent souls in an elementary school yesterday—is available all over the Internet. My eighteen-year-old brother could buy one tomorrow.

Does anyone else see a problem here? Because I truly believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with a country where instead of offering easy access to mental health care, we offer easy access to guns.

And now I want to make my final point: the necessity of politicizing human tragedy.

The first prediction Dudley Brown of the Denver group Rocky Mountain Gun Owners made upon hearing of this tragedy was,  “They’re going to use the bodies of dead children to push their agenda.”

I initially could not believe my eyes upon reading Dudley Browns words: I consider them a disgusting and twisted take on what gun control advocates are actually trying to do right now.

By blatantly attempting to shame us into silence, Mr. Brown reveals a tactic that has been prevalent in the Right for several years now. On an interesting Daily Show expose around a week ago, political commentator and Comedy Central satirist Jon Stewart presented his audience and at-home viewers with a lengthy montage of Fox News video clips, where guests and anchors expressed all of the reasons why, when discussing gun control, the timing is always inappropriate. Mr. Stewart voiced his concern that if the Right continued to tell their viewers over and over that “Now is not the time,” we would face another tragedy before gun policy discussions had even been brought to the table. One week and 27 dead later, we can all conclude that Stewart was correct.

Although the scope and magnitude of this tragedy should never be undermined, that does not change the fact that now is the time to speak. Otherwise it will first be too early to talk politics, and then too late. In a country where our media thrives on emotion, the timing will never seem right: this makes it simple to just keep pushing the political aspects of this issue further and further into the background, which is exactly what gun associations want us to do. Even now, in the wake of such horror, it is too easy for my generation to log onto their Twitters, type 140 sad characters or #PrayForNewton, and consider their work to be done.

It is the holiday season. Who wants to talk about gun control? Why not leave the “heavy stuff” to the politicians, while we catch up on reality TV and gossip? This is why it really drives me insane is when people like Brown try to imply that by politicizing this issue, we are somehow disrespecting the deceased and their families. This is the sort of backwards thinking that entirely undermines progression, and makes it laughably easy for associations like Rocky Mountain Gun Owners and the NRA to bully others into staying silent on these issues. And in our silence, they have won.

So if you are somebody who believes that by turning this tragedy into a political point, I am the one dishonoring the dead, I say to you this:

The people pushing for gun control today, in the wake of such tragedy, have not let anybody down.

You let these families down, as you looked on through years of school shootings and movie theatre massacres. You, as voters and as the American people, chose to turn a blind eye to these tragedies—you mourned them for a day, or maybe a week, but then you carried on. The mainstream news outlets turned their focus away from these tragedies, and subsequently, so did you.

I am not dishonoring the dead by politicizing this issue. You have already dishonored them by not ensuring them safety in their schools, by not offering adequate mental health care to them or their families, and now, by indirectly administering Adam Lanza the assault rifle and other weapons, with which he took 27 lives, ended 27 futures, and killed 27 dreams.