I think I’ve exceeded my tolerance level for mass shootings.
How about you?
There’s only so long that a person can witness madness without trying to stop it before acceptance of the madness become its own form of insanity. Imagine living in a city where each day you saw a person hit by an oncoming bus. After two or three days you’d be down at city hall, screaming, pleading for slower buses or more observant bus drivers or something, anything, to stop the carnage.
Why haven’t we done this when in comes to mass shootings? Why is this so difficult?
I have an oversimplified plan for ending the shootings.
Each of us get on the phone to our representatives in Washington, D.C. and say this: “End the shootings. Figure it out. Don’t explain your position to me. Don’t write me a letter. Don’t tell me you can’t do it. And don’t come home from work until it’s done.”
“Also, if you can’t accomplish this, please quit. We’ll hire someone else who can.”
Call every day and repeat the same message.
Is that unreasonable? Hmm. What exactly is reasonable about watching our fellow citizens, our friends or family members die because some nut job went berserk today with a weapon of war? What is reasonable about a government that can’t do anything to stop this?
It’s became glaringly obvious that the good people of this nation for too long have been far too reasonable on this issue. Now we’re paying for our reasonableness with our lives.
Too much of this issue has taken place in gun-control arguments over social media, in commentaries on television, in letters-to-the-editor, in posturing by elected leaders. And because citizens have approached this issue like we approach tax reform or offshore oil drilling, mass shootings become just another issue for politicians.
Check out your congressman’s website. Chances are you’ll find an “issues page,” that lists your representative’s positions. You’ll find “gun control” on the same list as “environment,” “free trade” and “immigration.”
But as they used to say on Sesame Street, one of these things is not like the others. Gun control, or the absence of it as it relates to the management of assault weapons in our society, kills innocent people, often-times children, nearly every day in horrific, nightmarish scenes straight out of the Dark Ages.
There is no other issue like it in this country, and nothing like it in any other advanced nation in the world.
It’s not up to hamburger flippers, construction workers, school teachers or doctors and lawyers to puzzle this issue out. It’s up to the men and women in power in Washington, D.C. who get paid good wages to hold our nation together.
We can acknowledge that the gun issue has many facets and that mass shootings like the one in Lakeland account for only a small percentage of all U.S. gun deaths.
We’re starting with one little piece – ending the mass shootings. They amount to random, public executions of innocent people. They are evil and unjustifiable under any circumstance. They make a mockery of American freedom by bringing terror to our public places.
We must go to Washington because the primary purpose of government is to protect people. And our campaign in Washington must not let up until the killings do. History tells us that nothing short of fierce and unrelenting pressure on national leaders will work.
(Citizens had called on Washington to end the war in Vietnam years before President Richard Nixon was elected in 1968 on a platform of ending the war. But more than 21,000 American boys died in the war while Nixon sought his elusive “peace with honor.”)
On the issue of mass shootings, there must be no foot-dragging. There must be no equivocating. The shootings must end, and sooner, not later.
Follow these links to get the addresses and phone numbers of your representatives in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate:
https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative
https://www.senate.gov/reference/common/faq/How_to_correspond_senators.htm
Call today. And every day. If you don’t, the next child gunned down for no damned reason may be your own.