Political Cowardice

 

American Madness

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who are hungry and are not fed, from those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. It is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”

Dwight David Eisenhower

          The events of the past couple of weeks, with mass shootings back-to-back, have been a wake-up call for me. The unspeakable horror of seeing night after night on the evening news footage of grieving parents, traumatized children, and shaken friends and neighbors has become as familiar to Americans as nasty political ads. We cry and pray and set up memorials and do everything except what needs to be done—get these guns off the streets. Instead, states like the one I live in, enact more permissive gun laws to please a small body of constituents who want to own arsenals and are willing to pay off politicians to have them. And then we watch as our children are shot in the streets and in grocery stores and in their own schools, and we say, “Oh, how terrible. How horrible.” How can this be? How can we not connect the number of guns and the permissive gun laws to the number of mass shootings, and the growing number of homicides in our cities? Why are our politicians so enamored of gun owners and gun lobbies that they are neutered by the fear of losing their backing? How can that be more important than the lives of our children?

          Wake up, America! We are living in a war zone of our own making. Until this changes, until realistic gun laws are passed in this country and assault rifles are taken out of the hands of individual citizens with no relation to the military or public safety, we have no right to speak about the human rights violations of any other nation. We are standing by while our people, our children, are shot dead because we have some deranged notion that we have the “right” to own an arsenal of deadly weapons. If I hear one more politician say, “It’s not the gun, it’s the mentally ill person who has it,” I will scream. The only mental illness here is pure greed and cowardice on the part of our politicians. They have the power to change this, but they are refusing to do it so they can stay in power—it’s as simple as that.

          Those of us who want this bloodletting to stop cannot remain silent. We must stand up and be counted. We must stop electing people who are beholden to the gun lobby, and we absolutely must demand that they get automatic and semi-automatic rifles banned from public sale. The fact that an 18-year-old cannot buy a drink in a bar, but can buy an AR-style long gun, is pure madness. So please, don’t call it a “right.”

                                                            In the Spirit,

                                                            Jane