Following the events of the Trayvon Martin case at the beginning of this year, I wrote a serious piece where I said the following:
I have never been, nor do I ever expect to be, an advocate for firearm bans – a position that runs counter to most of my stances and is especially curious to many since I have never even handled a gun. … Yet, even in the face of school shootings, drug wars, suicides, and other atrocities committed with guns, I still don’t support gun bans. Perhaps, like several of my other ethical positions, I would prefer to get to the root of the problem and fix that – I don’t know.
President Obama came to Newtown for a vigil, where he gave a decent speech about the tragedy that took probably the youngest set of lives so far. In it, he said the following:
We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and that is true. No single law, no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society, but that can’t be an excuse for inaction – surely we can do better than this. If there’s even one step we can take to save another child or another parent or another town from the grief … then surely we have an obligation to try.
It pains me greatly to say this but what happened in Newtown jarred my view. I am deeply against banning anything because I think it’s reactionary and doesn’t solve problems. However, my “pain” isn’t anywhere near comparable to what the parents of those children, the friends and families of the adults must be going through. Is clinging to the right to bear arms an excuse for inaction? Do statistics about gun ownership and other countries with tougher or lax gun laws even matter at this point? I am working through this but my inner debate leads me to believe that I’m probably going to ease up on my anti-gun-ban stance in the coming weeks.
Regardless of that, one thing that I hope *for sure* comes from this is a complete redefinition of how we view mental illness in the United States. I have a sibling with a mental illness and one of the most frustrating things I’ve encountered is how a lack of funding means only two possible outcomes: mental hospital or jail. My sibling recently had a long streak of being okay end – we’re talking several years – and it ended abruptly. There was no change of medication (in fact, I think for those several years, no medication was being taken) so clearly it had to have been something that happened yet no doctor wants to spend any time talking about the cause: it’s fifteen minutes and then you either get sent on your way or you get a prescription. It’s a sickening timeline. This article does a pretty good job of pointing out the seriousness of the issue:
Have a good evening and be safe.