Lord knows that around the world there is no lack of opportunities
for peacemaking. We don't have to go looking overseas for conflicts to
resolve; within our nation a cry for peace rises to the heavens. Our
latest immigration bans and refugee quotas cut off the "other" we
perceive as a threat, but they don't protect us from the darkness that
lurks within our borders and within our hearts.
On October 1, Stephen Craig Paddock rained death down from a
hotel tower on a crowd of helpless people below, taking 58 lives and
wounding or injuring more than 500 others. Once again a preventable and
senseless human suffering was visited on hundreds of families.
"Thought
and prayers" will never be enough to help them recover from this
inexplicable violence. The indifference to such mayhem maintained by gun
rights absolutists such as the leadership of the National Rifle
Association and the shoulder-shrugging they purchase in has left
citizens exasperated and exhausted. If the slaughter of the innocents in
Newtown, Connecticut in 2013 was not enough to propel a national change
of heart, what about this latest massacre will do it? The higher body
count? The nature of the weapons used and the size of the arsenal
amassed?
Some describe this periodic bloodletting as the
price of freedom, fetishizing the Second Amendment's right to bear arms.
But people are also the sacred recipients of a right to life. The
purported threat of government tyranny needs to be rationally assessed
alongside demonstrable threats to life and liberty and the pursuit of
happiness that proceed from a gun-happy society: 33,000 deaths by
firearms a year; communities broken by gun violence; families destroyed
by it.
How do we put a stop to this suffering in a nation
that refuses to respond to a continuing epidemic of everyday gun
violence and its profoundly abnormal mass-casualty events? Campaigns for
broad gun-control edicts merely provoke a well-funded and persistent
resistance. Perhaps a gradualist reform would have better luck.
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