It's a lie that gun deaths are an acceptable sacrifice
By Alexandra Petri
The Washington Post
Loss comes in waves and is difficult to describe. At first the loss is the only thing you can see, snapped tight as a ripcord around your heart. Each absent thing is delineated against the background of what is there until what is missing is the only thing visible. But in time, the loss loses its sharpness, diffuses. The vanished footprints you used to see so clearly trail off into many paths never taken.
There is the old ache of looking alone at something over which your eyes used to meet other eyes, but there is the new ache of looking at something new a first time and knowing you will never know what they would have thought about it, that it is guesswork from here on out. And then there is the ache of watching the hole in the world close, like a wound, when there ceases to be room made for what is absent.
Imagine being careless enough and cruel enough to allow someone to punch such holes in the world deliberately, repeatedly, in the name of a lie. The lie is that we have no choice in this matter. The lie is that any effort, however common-sense, to restrict firearms or lower the capacity of magazines, is part of a vicious scheme to strip you of your freedoms. The lie is that this imaginary, vast conspiracy is more to be feared than these deaths that occur so frequently that we are almost out of synonyms for horror. How do you tell someone he is a sacrifice worth making to preserve this lie? How do you tell a child?
On Sunday, at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, a 19-year-old opened fire on the crowd, wounding 12 and killing three. One of the dead was a 6-year-old boy.
Wayne LaPierre of the NRA said in 2018, after the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, For them, it is not a safety issue. It is a political issue. They care more about control and more of it. Their goal is to eliminate the Second Amendment and our firearms freedoms, so they can eradicate all individual freedoms. What they want are more restrictions on the law abiding. Think about that, their solution is to make you, all of you, less free.
How does a gun become freedom? The answer is another lie, a nameless, faceless, lawless threat. Laws bind you. They are unbound by them. Their laws, LaPierre went on, dont stop illegal criminals from crossing our borders every single day. Their laws dont stop the scourge of gang violence and drug crime that savages Baltimore, Chicago and every major American community.
No wonder law-abiding Americans, all over this country, revere their Second Amendment freedom to protect themselves more than ever. The gun is only necessary in the face of this manufactured, constant terror.
It is no coincidence that the same threat of the Other lurks in the shadows of all Donald Trumps words. This is the same racist, xenophobic horror that has whistled through his whole campaign and presidency, the threat of faceless rapists and murderers from elsewhere; the horror that shadows even Baltimore into an ominous place where no human being would want to live. It is to fight these ghosts that we must arm ourselves! Never mind those, here, who kill in the name of this same fear. We must protect this fear at all costs.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/petri-its-a-lie-that-gun-deaths-are-an-acceptable-sacrifice/
Kaiserguy
(740 posts)is one of worse organization in America today. The loss of any life to a gun is not acceptable nor should it be. Gun rights are not an absolute. There needs to be restriction on the kind of guns a person can own. No one needs an assault weapon period. These type of weapon if owned they need to be kept in a tightly control environment and used only in that location and should never be allowed off site for any reason. In no case should the right to own a gun ever take precedence over the right of another person life and safety.
dlk
(11,569 posts)keithbvadu2
(36,829 posts)Joe The Plumber: Your Dead Kids Dont Trump My Constitutional Rights To Have Guns
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/27/joe-the-plumber-guns_n_5397981.html
Doc_Technical
(3,526 posts)as long as those guns are revolvers, or lever action, bolt action,
or pump action long guns.
hack89
(39,171 posts)An admirable goal but alot of work before it happens