I haven't blogged about Newtown because what do you say?
No, this shouldn't have happened. This should never happen. It feels wrong to minimize what this community has gone through by discussing the communities that go through this every day. A 7 year old child sitting in their classroom on a bright winter morning should not be murdered. Neither should a chid peacefully sleeping in her home. Or sitting in a car. Or walking down the street. Or playing on the swings. Thousands of our children have been senselessly murdered in the name of our second amendment rights. These rights are themselves a fictional construct of powerful special interest groups on both sides of the idealogical aisle.
Every year, every moment, we place a fairytale above a child's life. I want to believe Newtown is a tipping point. I don't want to be disrespectful by asking why it would be. Is it because the children are mostly white? Is it because they are mostly wealthy? Is it because they were killed together? The last time I thought a child's death was going to be a tipping point was when 7 year old Aiyana Jones was murdered for sleeping on her sofa. I don't know why I thought Aiyana would change us. She wasn't different from all the other children needlessly killed by the culture of violence we celebrate. In fact, she wasn't killed by a random criminal at all, Aiyana was shot to death in her Disney Princess sheets by a police officer. A few months before that I thought it was going to be the death of 6 year old Makayla Sitton. She was murdered in her bed by a cousin brought to her home for a holiday. By 2011 when Christina Taylor-Green was assassinated for attending a speech by someone she admired I'd given up on America and mass violence.
These are three children out of hundreds and thousands. Children have been killed since Sandy Hook. Newtown was not an aberration in any fashion unless you consider being forced to face the deaths of our children is an aberration. It doesn't hit home. What does hitting home even mean? We want to see the faces of the children, we want to hear their stories. By this we mean pictures of them happy and healthy and whole. Stories of the love their family shared and the shock they leave behind. We want to whistle past the graveyard they lie in. Long after we've moved on, long after we've turned to the next mass shooting and ignored the bodies piling up in single or double or triple numbers around us, the first responders will still see the faces of those children when they close their eyes. Their images won't be happy or healthy and they certainly won't be whole. The damage done by the weapons used at Sandy Hook is the sort that stays with you for a lifetime. These men and women will be dealing with this for the rest of their lives, just as the families of the children will.
America, I think we will deal with this for about five minutes. Then we will turn away, as we always do. There is a fairy tale in our country that video games kill people. Movies kill people. Films kill people. Mental illness kills people. Anything but guns. It's never guns. It's never our easy access to weapons of war, weapons designed to kill each other as quickly as possible. This morning in a good neighborhood where this sort of thing doesn't happen (and what does that mean, really, except that lives are not equally important) a woman went for a bike ride. A man she knew stopped her. They had an exchange of words. He shot her to death and escaped. What if he'd punched her? Knifed her? What if he'd not had the power of the gun in his pocket, the secret knowledge that her life belonged to him just on the basis of his own whim. Would she be alive? Would Jordan Davis? Would Trayvon Martin?
I don't know whose cold dead hands will finally make America drop their weapons. For my kids, for your kids, for all the kids, let's go ahead and drop them now. We can't stop evil but we can disarm it. That's what fairytales are supposed to teach us. To want more. To expect better. To turn away from evil and embrace good. Let's open a different book. Please.
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