by Kimberly A. Cook (Twitter@ WarriorTales)
(Soapbox Alert)
I posted my blog Friday morning about the mall shooting in my neighborhood and walked downstairs. The report about the Connecticut mass murder and suicide blared from the radio. Words cannot begin to express the tragedy of this event.
In coaching my fellow military veterans to write about their ordeals during war and peace, recalling those images and memories can produce laser sharp pain. Getting the events out in the light and open air does help heal the wounds. Writing down what happened puts the author back in charge and takes away the feeling of being a victim; the writer gets a measure of distance and takes back their personal power. This process will take a long time for the victim’s families and the small survivors in Connecticut.
There are many debates now about how this could happen and what we must do as a nation to stop it from occurring again. As an Army soldier I fired an M-16 on automatic and semi-automatic. No one outside out of the military and law enforcement needs that much fire power. Bambi is not carting an M-60 machine gun around in the woods.
Our national gun culture and lack of mental health resources has been outstripped by the increase and sophistication of rapid fire weapons. Before anyone starts talking about the “right to bear arms” in the Second Amendment, let’s put that in perspective. When our founding fathers wrote that clause they were using muskets. It takes time to reload a musket. Those learned men could not have imagined or predicted the carnage of modern-day firepower.
It may take a village to raise a child, but it is going to take a nation to keep children and their families safe from getting killed in future classrooms, shopping malls or at the movie theater.
When it’s easier to get an assault weapon than a Twinkie in this country, our moral direction is floundering.
We need to look hard at ourselves and what we want our families to face in the future. We have found the enemy and it is all of us who don’t take action and allow another horrific shooting to slide on by. Not anymore. Contact your Congressional representatives and Senators and let them know assault weapons are bad for children and other living things. We’ve had enough and lost too many futures.
We can be the change that makes sure future young and bright lives are kept safe, whether in school, a movie theater or at the mall.
(The best blog post I have read on this topic is from CNN Senior Political Analyst David Gergen. Read it here http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/17/opinion/gergen-gun-culture/index.html?iref=allsearch)
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