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Connecticut Shooting: When Is The Time To Talk About Gun Control?

Calum Hayes |
December 14, 2012 | 12:49 p.m. PST

Contributor

Screenshot of local news coverage. (Michael Juliani)
Screenshot of local news coverage. (Michael Juliani)
It is December 14, 2012. I have spent the morning speechless, watching reports come in detailing a shooting at an elementary school in Connecticut. A man in his mid-twenties, Adam Lanza, walked into that school this morning and opened fire. At least 27 people have been confirmed dead, 18 of them young children.

I just watched a woman describe sitting in traffic trying to get to the school, not knowing if her child was alive or not. I watched that same woman describe hearing police officers tell the ambulances that they would not be needed, that there was no one left. I listened as CNN detailed a young child describing the shooter walking into his classroom and shooting his teacher. That teacher was shot with a handgun, as was everyone else who lost his or her life.

The White House made a statement shortly after the shootings in which it said, “today is not the day to talk about gun control.” It is the same statement they made when Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot in Arizona in January of 2011. It is the same statement they made when they omitted the gun control discussion just days earlier, when a man opened fire at Clackamas Town Center Mall in Oregon, killing two. It is the same statement they made earlier this year by once again ignoring any discussion concerning gun control after a man killed twelve in a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado. This statement by the White House, this hackneyed, too often repeated statement, leads me to ask one question,

When is the time?

What more has to happen for this country to do something about gun laws? One of the individuals killed in the mall shooting in Oregon was a member of my church family, a man whose loss has shaken a community. Eighteen young children died this morning, their dreams never to be realized. 

When is the time?

In the days following President Obama’s reelection, gun sales hit an all-time high, over 20 percent higher than during the same time period last year. In Colorado, the state in which both Columbine and the Aurora shooting took place, the number of concealed weapons permits has skyrocketed. Permits that are now so easy to get that even second amendment supporters are uneasy. Permits that can be obtained simply by watching an hour-long video over your lunch break and then taking a free online test.

When is the time?

Those who support the second amendment often point to our right to defend ourselves. They speak to the idea that if bad people will find a way to obtain guns no matter what, it is only right that good people have a way to obtain them as well, for self-defense.

I ask you, when is the last time you saw a news story detailing a shooting in self-defense? The five-year-olds who will never go home to their parents after this morning could not have picked up a gun to defend themselves. Far too often we cling to the idea of defending ourselves without considering the fact that by doing so we are in fact increasing the number of people who we must defend ourselves from. There is no fathomable reason not to make it more difficult to obtain a gun. Your constitutional right to carry a handgun is not worth what I am watching on TV right now. Your constitutional right to carry a handgun does not recuse you from the conversation that must now take place. I have spent the morning listening to seven-year-olds have to talk about their friends and teachers being shot. Listening to seven-year-olds speak about unspeakable tragedies, the scope of which they clearly do not understand because they are seven years old

Too many times this month, this year, and this decade, I have woken up to breaking news detailing a mass murder in a public place. Too many times, I have listened to the White House say, “this is not the time to discuss gun control,” while watching survivors search for their loved ones. So I ask you, President Obama: 

When is the time?

 

Reach Contributor Calum Hayes here; follow him here.



 

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