After Uvalde

I am tired of the way we use the term “tragedy” to describe mass shootings and terrorist incidents.?We have heard it in news broadcasts reporting on the mass murder of 19 elementary school children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas this week.?

The word “tragedy” serves to distance us from the event.?To insulate us from the raw and dreadful reality of what has occurred.

I prefer that we would use other words.?Stronger words. Words like “atrocity,” “mass murder” or “carnage.”??Something which calls out the horrible soullessness of the acts.?Something which signals that an enormous wrong has occurred.

It is all part of a dismal American ritual.?First the carnage and then the commentary.?Expressions of sadness and sympathy, calls for "thoughts and prayers," mixed with some political accusations.?And, finally?a resigned hopelessness.??

Likewise, I am tired of the political rhetoric which inevitably emerges from such events.??From one side we hear that America is “an armed camp and where campers are prone to violence” that “guns are evil” and that “gun owners are a basket of ignorant, deplorable people.”??????On the other side we hear that “Second Amendment rights are absolute and anyone who believes differently is un-American” and “Molon Labe, if you dare !“ and “limitations on gun access leads to totalitarian control.”?

I reject the idea that we should choose sides shouting slogans, shaking fists and escalating rhetoric.?

Yes, I do believe that individual gun ownership is a lawful right.?Why ??Well, the Supreme Court said so in the Heller and McDonald decisions.?But, no I don’t believe that it is an absolute and unqualified right.?The Supreme Court also said that.??The difficult question becomes how we make the adjustments and establish the qualifications that preserve rights while limiting access to some or all firearms for some people.?

True, "the devil" is in the details.??But the devil was also in Uvalde, Texas earlier this week.?In the subway in New York City last month and in Buffalo, New York earlier this month.?And if you listen carefully, you can hear the devil chuckle whenever we say that “the issue is just too difficult to deal with.”

If you want to talk about difficulty, talk to families in Uvalde, in Buffalo or go back to talk to some of the people who were visiting Las Vegas in 2017, parents from Stony Brook or the kids at the high school in Parkland, Florida.?

I have good, responsible friends who own guns as well as the same kind of friends who want nothing to do with guns. I am not a member of the NRA or any “pro-gun” or “anti-gun” organization.?I am simply someone who has too often and for too many years seen the results of?violence and believe that we need to push back to reduce the terrible, needless human damage.

Let’s stop pretending that America will somehow become a universal “gun free zone.”?At the same time, let’s recognize America cannot continue to be world’s top venue for peace-time mass shootings: a condition that shames and weakens our nation.?

Time for smart, responsible people to abandon entrenched political battle lines and construct a sustainable civic truce which will both acknowledge and respect rights and reduce the number of people who become targets for mass murder.