| | A beautiful five year old child, blond hair, blue eyes, smiling at us from her Kindergarten picture, loses her life because of willful fringe abuses of freedom. Unopened Christmas presents under the tree. Proms never attended. A walk down the aisle with her father that will never happen. Her own children never to be...
Her death, and deaths like hers, commonplace nationwide, an epidemic.
Surely we can do better.
Surely we can no longer tolerate such deaths.
Surely we can no longer turn our backs on her missing life.
Sure we are going to do something about these deaths -- and bring about change.
Because the willful act was the willful abuse of alcohol, and getting behind the wheel of an automobile, and drunkenly deploying a million ft-lbf dynamic event, crossing the thickly painted double yellow lines, and destroying a 5 year old child, her infant brother and both parent while sleeping peacefully on the way home from
Grandmas. Human beings don't accidentally take that first and second and third drink, those are willful acts.
Surely, we don't -need- access to 180 proof alcoholic beverages, or massive killing machines that can project a million ft-lbfs of destructive physical energy--so effiicient at killing that they do so in large numbers even when their intent is not to do so....
We -could- reasonably permit only 3.2 beer. We could limit access to vehicles capable of exceeding 20 mph to law enforcement and the military.
But we don't. We don't even talk about it. We don't even have national commissions to discuss such fringe behavior.
And yet, how fringe is it? Ask your self this. Every community in America has preventative DUI traffic checks. State cops pulling over lines of traffic, checking for the fringe abuse of freedoms, to try and minimize senseless deaths.
So, why isn't every community in America also having traffic stops looking for fringe damaged 20 year old children of devastating 'me first, kids later' divorces with guns, or whoever else is conducting such things as drug related 'drive-by' shootings? They -might- have detected and stopped this damaged human being in time. (And, why are automobiles any less an enabling element to a 'drive-by' -- or, in this case, the means by which this damaged human transported his aresenal undetected from home to school -- than the weapons themselves?
Well, of course we don't do that; because -these- events are so rare and so fringe that the efficacy of such preventative stops would be next to nill.
Still, in my son's HS, there is a full time armed guard, and has been for years. A madmen with a gun will be met by an armed guard in that school. The nation has plenty of ex military and law enforcement well trained in firearms, many of whom who be glad to volunteer for such duty. This is not a matter of cost, it is a matter of will. We place the guards at the places we wish to inhibit violence. We don't send out blanket stops looking for rare, fringe madmen, nor do we ban alcohol or automobiles, the real killers loose in our nation.
And yet...we regularly perform such -preventative- stops for the -real- epidemic, the DUI. But for the -real- epidemic, there is no national hue and cry for the prohibition of enabling alcohol and at least 'sensible' restrictions on the available mass and horsepower of automobiles to limit the impact of the inevitable fringe abuse of those freedoms. Tell us why anyone but law enforcement -needs- to travel faster than 20 mph on their way to hunting ducks with their .410?
Part of the current emotional response is claims that the 2nd Amendment is about duck hunting. It is not. It is exactly about individual rights, and the final defense against an unfettered local state, the mob. It is true that no individual or group of individuals(such as what happened in Revolutionary America)is likely to stand up against our modern standing armies. It is also true that our modern standing armies are unlikely to accept or carry out orders against the nation and constitution they are sworn to defend, especially if those orders are directed at their families and friends and neighbors. Except that we've already seen what the unfettered state is capable of in Nazi Germany and the USSR and Kampuchea and Burma and Iraq and Syria...
In case anyone wonders in the least what the unfettered state looks like, we need to look no farther than the coverage and emotional response to the latest fringe abuse of freedom by a damaged 20 yr old.
We blow right past "he was devastated by his parents divorce in 2009." That freedom -- the freedom to consider 'me and my happiness first' when discarding a child and tearing apart his family in front of him-- is far too widely accessed in America for any serious examination of that as a contributing factor to this damaged human being. We rationalize our actions with "the child will be happier outside of a home that is always fighting/unhappy" and that is complete and utter B.S. Many -- even most -- children -do- survive that crisis and come out whole, but few without scars from the deep stress of seeing their mother and father part ways.
President and Michelle Obama have -already- done the most important thing they can to bring change to this nation; they have provided an example of a mother and father staying together in a marriage and providing a safe haven in this world for their children to grow into fully formed adults. And as high as the divorce rates are in this nation for marriages in general, they are even higher for parents with special needs children, with some reports pushing 80% of such marriages ending in divorce.
We blow right by, ' he watched/played a lot of violent video games.' Why, I even heard a commentator say this morning, "...and there is not much we can do about that." Really? I guess we just have to live with such fringe abusers of freedom as a cost of out freedom. Well, at least some ot them; the ones we don't access, as in, the very definition of the unfettered state..
He shot his mother, who it is reported was in finance, in the face; a particularly personal form of killing someone, before driving across town in this affluent CT community to gun down the innocent children of other affluent parents. The tribe is on a desperate tear now to blame everything but the real causes of this fringe mayhem, and do the easy thing; infringe the rights of others that we do not exercise. That mass tribal hysteria is -exactly- what the unfettered state looks like.
The guaranteed practical impact of the current emotional debate is predictable and to be expected; skyrocketing sales this week of exactly the weapons that are being discussed to be banned. The manufacturers won't be able to run enough shifts for months. America is about to become awash in semi-automatic .223 rifles of exactly the kind abused by this fringe 20 year old.
As well, during the ten years of the Assault Weapons Ban between 1994 and 2004, there was never a period when it wasn't possible to legally obtain any of the weapons banned, including high capacity magazines. It had no impact, not even symbolic, and Columbine was right in the middle of that so called ban. Prohibition failed with alcohol, it has failed with drugs, and it would surely fail with firearms of any type, and the emotional urge to ban is having the practical impact only of flooding the nation with yet more of them.
Don't we care about innocent 5 yr old blond blue eyed children dead over senseless willful acts of fringe abuse of freedom?
Or, are we only selectively caring; some innocent 5 yr old blond blue eyed children are more politically abusable by vampire ghouls than others.
I would feel differently if I were the parent of that 5 yr old child?
Which one?
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