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If
you were to write a dystopian novel that involved a mass shooting every day
followed by national leaders calling for thoughts and prayers for the families
of the victims, you would have chilling and sobering concept for a literary
endeavor. You might have trouble selling such a plot line to a publisher. It
might seem just too far-fetched to sustain a believable story – except that we
are there now in real life.
I
wrote earlier this year in “The Fires of Moloch Are Burning” that our
willingness to accept the loss of innocent lives due to gun violence should be
as abhorrent to us as the child sacrifices that were offered to the ancient Phoenician
god, Moloch. Instead, for the sake of
our “right to bear arms,” we seem to be afraid to pass sensible gun safety
legislation. “Our words say that we honor American freedom, while our actions
say that we live in fear and have so little regard for our children that we
will willingly feed them to our modern day fires of Moloch.”
Some Sensible Viewpoints
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My friend Jane Philips has a blog, Spiritually Speaking.
She writes the following on her recent post, Time
to Speak Up:
When we aggrandize
people who espouse more violence, when we sell our souls to the National Rifle
Association, when we block laws that would stop the proliferation of
semi-automatic weapons, we are inviting and even complicit in the violence that
is killing our children and turning our streets into bullet-ridden rivers of
blood.
People of conscience
have to become as vocal as those who are ranting about vengeance and hatred.
John Archibald speaks in a
similar vein in his op ed piece for the Birmingham News, "To Hell with the NRA; this country has to talk about guns."
To hell with the NRA,
which sows fear as a way to make sure as many guns as possible are bought and
sold and left lying around. To hell with the NRA. The influence is too great;
the rhetoric too wrong. We have to at least be able to talk about the
proliferation of guns and the proliferation of dead bodies they tend to leave behind.
I don't have the
answers. I don't know how to solve the problems.
But I know that prayers
for the victims don't bring them back or stop the next shooter from opening
fire. Not that there is anything wrong with prayers, but politicians who offer
empty ones one day and easy access to weapons the next need to examine their
faith. I know processions lead only to the grave, that gun buybacks are
feel-good but futile gestures. And as long as people and politicians are too
timid to question the deification of the gun, the more things stay the same.
So far this year, we have had 352
mass shootings in 334 days (that's more shootings than
days). It is time to offer more than “thoughts and prayers.” If
we want something better than a dystopian state for our children, we
need to hold our leaders accountable.
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I was thinking this morning that when the founding fathers wrote the second amendment in 1789, the guns they owned were muskets. I sincerely doubt they had a single thought for the possibility of semi-automatic weapons in the hands of everyday citizens. Jane Philips
ReplyDeleteYes. A hand gun and a hunting rifle are reasonable. Stockpiles of semi-automatic assault rifles are not reasonable.
DeleteThanks, Charlie for this great piece. Jane
ReplyDelete