Shooting in Newtown
Temple Beth Jacob
December 21, 2012
Like everyone else, I’ve been
thinking about the shootings last Friday in Newtown, Connecticut. It is a deeply sad event. Unlike everyone else, it seems, I feel
deeply cynical and without much recourse.
In a complicated situation I recoil from the simple pieties that people
feel they must spout and I struggle to find some hope.
I’m afraid my deepest cynicism comes from the calls for us
to learn this time. This time we
will do something, people say. But
that’s what we said last time and the time before that. I fear that this time will be like the
last time in that people who don’t understand guns and gun culture will call
for their banishment, people who like guns will feel attacked, nobody will be
willing to discuss or spend public money on mental health initiatives and the
NRA has circled the wagons with a simple call for more weapons and armed
security at every school every where.
People already have staked their positions firmly in concrete. Some want to ban guns which will never
happen. Others see any regulation
of anything having to do with firearms as an attack on nothing less than
liberty and our way of life which is absurd and overwrought. We’ll see if the murder of 20 children
along with 6 teachers and one mother is enough to shock enough people to create
political will.
The President seems motivated. Despite fears and dread that once he became President he
would seek to ban all sorts of firearms -the NRA openly said candidate Obama
had a “secret plan”- this president has done almost nothing regarding gun
control as he pretty much promised.
It is not his issue either because it isn’t or he doesn’t feel he has
the political will do anything about it.
Before this past election I read similar fevered worries that now the
President would ban all the guns because he doesn’t have to stand for
re-election anymore. My belief is
that no such thing nor anything like it would have happened. But now, maybe not. The President is talking tough. Sort of tough. We’ll see what happens.
I’m also cynical at the outcry. For the parents, for the friends, for those directly
connected, there will never be enough tears. I understand the terrible sadness and thinking of the young
lives lost is awful. There is a
reason the Jewish tradition is to create headstones in the shape of a cut down
tree for those who die young. It
is a symbol of a life never able to grow, never able to flourish. We cry for those who cry but I can’t
get past the idea that we cry for the unusual circumstance, for the terrible
uniqueness of the situation and not for what is truly sad because where are our
tears when children die in ones or twos?
Where is our outrage when an Oregon mall got shot up or when a movie
theater is shot up? Where are our
tears for these people the President mentioned on Wednesday during his press
conference? He said:
Since Friday morning, a police officer was gunned down in
Memphis, leaving four children without their mother. Two officers were
killed outside a grocery store in Topeka. A woman was shot and killed inside
a Las Vegas casino. Three people were shot inside an Alabama hospital.
A four-year-old was caught in a drive-by in Missouri, and taken off life
support just yesterday. Each one of these Americans was a victim of the
everyday gun violence that takes the lives of more than 10,000 Americans every
year -- violence that we cannot accept as routine.[1]
And
yet we do accept them as routine though we shouldn’t. Aydan Perea was four years old and got caught in a drive by gang
conflict shooting. His death is,
sadly, a local Missouri story because his death happened alone. There is no moral distinction between
Aydan and the 20 children in Newtown.
There is no difference between one child and 20 children being murdered
aside from volume. They are
equally tragic, equally awful with no distinction other than we only seem to
become emotional when the scale overcomes us. We can, it seems horrifying to say, handle Aydan dying and
any number of children dying if they don’t die all at once.
One study “by the US Center for Disease Control, and
published in the American Journal of Pediatrics, studied injuries to persons 14
years of age and younger from 1993-2000. In that time period there were fatal
gunshot injuries to 5,542 children, averaging 1.89 per day.”[2] Another one from 2010[3]
offered this: “The researchers
analyzed data on nearly 24,000 gun-related deaths among children 19 and younger
from 1999 through 2006. That included about 15,000 homicides, about 7,000
suicides and about 1,400 accidental shootings for the eight-year period.” Accounting just for the homicides,
that’s an average of 1875 a year or 36 per week or five every day. Yet we don’t weep. We don’t even know. But if you really want a good cry, if
you really want to weep, imagine five parents you know having their children
die by murder. Then imagine the
next day five more of your friends have their children murdered and then again
the next day and then every single day.
How many days until you become outraged?
I am horrified by the murders in Newtown but outraged when
people suggest as they always do that they didn’t think it could happen
here. It can happen here. It is already happening here and
everywhere in this country every single day. Every single day.
And failing to know that or simply accepting that is truly
grotesque. But who knows, perhaps
now, with such a volume of death, maybe now the political will can be
found. Maybe.
I’m cynical at the opinions some have been brazen enough
to raise, that these deaths, terrible though they are, shouldn’t cause us to
act emotionally and begin creating legislation and policies that regulate
guns. The usual argument that “guns
don’t kill people” is out there and that “gun-free zones are useless” is out
there and that “if only more people had weapons then a lone shooter wouldn’t have
the freedom to wander the halls” is out there. All of these are specious and either ignorant or
intentionally missing the point to distract us.
I’m cynical at how the arrogant notion of American
exceptionalism seeps into even cooler heads that allows to come up with all
sorts of reasons for these shootings except the one that would let us look at
our society as a whole and wonder if there is anything larger at play,
something that might be embarrassing that we don’t want to look at because
exceptional countries don’t have systemic problems.
I’m nauseated at the cruelty people toss when they divine
that these deaths are the result of prayer not in the public schools as Mike
Hukabee offered. And I understand
the need to comfort but I shake my head when pastors and our President say that
these children have been called home.
No. Their souls may live on
with God but they were not called home as though playtime was over. Indeed, they will never be called home
again. There will be sermons this
week noting how Joseph consoled his brothers saying, do not worry and do not be
sad; all my troubles were from God who wanted me to suffer so that I could
arrive at this point. The message
is that God has a plan even with apparent cruelty. The difference is that Joseph wasn’t murdered. Whatever lesson he took from his trials
didn’t require that he die to learn it.
But I’m hopeful that there is more talk than usual. It remains to be seen if this outrage
becomes just another story soon to be forgotten. Time will tell.
I’m hopeful that even though it takes the deaths of 20
very young children, six teachers and one mother, a obscene requirement, people
seem outraged over this more than usual.
I’m hopeful because I have no choice but to be that Vice
President Biden will pull together some sort of policy agreement where all
sides of the debate can find the strength to compromise.
In the meantime, we must do something. Most importantly we need to talk to our
elected officials particularly on a Federal level. For this we must wait until January 3 when the new Congress
is sworn in and our new Representative Sean Maloney assumes his office. I worry that the moment will have
passed but if we can maintain our outrage for just two more weeks, our first
call January 3 should be to his office and demand that Congress work to create
meaningful gun regulation that respects gun owners but limits accessibility and
that mental health receive more research money and more street level clinics
for people to turn to. But we must
tell them something else. Wayne
LaPierre of the NRA today gave his organization’s first response.[4] He came out with passion and fire
proclaiming the need to have more guns.
He called for every school in the entire country to have an armed guard
at the entrance by the time school opens in January. He avoided legal arguments and turned the tables on the
emotional argument. Instead of
banning assault rifles to project children, why didn’t we have a weapon in the
hand of a guard at the entrance?
Those children would be alive if they had.
Wayne LaPierre lives in a world where mass shootings will happen. He lives in a world where the mentally
ill will attack us. He lives in a
world that presumes criminals will open fire with assault rifles. He begins his assumption that your
child will come under fire.
When we call Congress, when we talk with our friends, we
must reject that world. I have a
vision where assault rifles are not presumed to be available to all who
want. I have a vision of a world
where an elementary school is not assumed to be under fire. We do not have to buy into LaPierre’s
world view. Things can
change. Crime is down in this
country. Have you been to Times
Square? Where you there in the
70s? I was. It has changed. Crime does not have to be a
presumption. We must reject the
paranoid frame of mind that has given up on a peaceful society. Wayne LaPierre has given up. You do not have to.
We must stand up to and decry outrageous chatter and bluster and
false premises. We will never get anywhere with loud nonsense. I fear the opposite will happen. The strident will scream, the
reasonable will tire and the issue will be forgotten until the next time and
there will be a next time.
But we must hope because if we don’t believe we can make a
change then we admit that we live in a world where mass shootings happen as an
ordinary occurrence. I don’t want
to live in that world. I’m cynical
but I have hope.
