My cold, dead fingers!

We have been watching with some interest what the gun segment of our society’s response will be to the horrific shooting up in Newtown, Connecticut that snuffed out the lives of twenty precious little souls. The National Rifle Association (NRA) has been largely silent on this event and its consequences for the future of how we regard the use and availability of guns in our society. The pictures of these children and the stories about their young lives have driven them to take this position.

One child was a professional football fan. He was six years old. He was also shot eleven times by the semi automatic Bushmaster that was the killers weapon of choice. Does anyone have any idea what a small child looks like after they have been shot eleven times by an assault weapon like this? The first responders who came to the scene, as voiced by Lieutenant Vance of the Connecticut state police, simply said that in his thirty nine years of duty that he had never seen anything like it in his life, and hoped that he would never see anything like it again. Vance said that it was the one memory that would not be erasable from his memory bank for as long as he lived.

And, yet, the gun proponents put up photos of gun posters on the internet that show where some guns are needed for home defense and others for other reasons, but, that one needs an assault rifle to protect those other guns from the outreach of an intrusive government who would like nothing better than to remove them all from the custody of these supposed patriots who are constantly vigilant in protecting the American way of life. And, in doing so, they have created an American way of death that is almost uniquely our own in the scope and density of how much slaughter goes on in this nation each and every hour of each and every day of the year..

The highlights, or lowlights depending on ones view of that way of death, are things like what occurred in Connecticut, or Aurora, Colorado, or in an Oregon shopping mall, or in some Virginia college classrooms, or in a secondary school in Columbine, Colorado, or in a church in Wisconsin, or in front of a supermarket in Arizona where an intrusive congressman from the super state is stopped cold in her tracks by a mind numbing monster who shoots her and a small child who later dies. Or, in a secondary school in Heath, Kentucky and so many other places that we can no longer keep track of them without a historical flow chart to show us the way of our sins.

The neoconservative right in its constellation of beliefs and dogmas fully embraces the gun nuts of this world and this nation and hugs them to its bosom! The left does some of the same things but not to the extent that the gun lovers are loved, in return, by those who would take us back to a time when most rights that we have today for so many simply did not exist. We have always had a bill of rights in this country, but, for so many, even though those rights exist on paper, they have never until the last thirty or forty years, had any real meaning for them. Black people had to fight and die and be killed by those with guns in great numbers as they followed the non violent teaching of Martin Luther King. Even King himself died by the hand of a man with a gun. How many women have been forcibly raped while having a gun put to their head or throat? How many times have we heard that other minorities have been found gunned down as they have gone about their business in life asking nothing but to be left alone? How many federal agents have been killed by those with guns either in the wilds of the mountainous east or the rugged terrain of the wild, wild west? How many law enforcement officers have lost their lives at the hands of gunmen over the last so many years? How many unarmed young black men have died at the hands of people who hide behind something called the stand your ground law?

It goes on and on and on!

One of the six year olds sacrificed on the alter of the need for assault weapons was described as the little CEO of her house, running around and seeing that everything was organized and in order there! And, we remember our own six year old step daughter back in 1988 when we were in Williamsburg, Virginia standing in the middle of a street in the colonial village making sure that she kept track of every member of her extended family as they trudged along from one attraction to the next.

The young are so sweet and innocent and they are generally filled with an unbridled joy and love that they spread around liberally to all who will let them experience the possibilities that a still expanding life view hold for them and everyone else. The old can relive the best that life held for them through the vision of a small child that might spark memories of a carefree time for them that is now long gone.

We see ourselves in our children and our grandchildren. We know a sometimes crusty eighty nine year old matron who will do anything to get to spend a few hours with her great grand daughters.

And, yet, here comes the right who still embrace the slogan that the only way that their guns will be taken away is if they are pried out of their cold dead fingers! And, in Newtown, Connecticut, there are twenty sets of cold dead fingers of the very young who are being buried this week. Those who have watched the funeral processions go by them have said that the expressionless features of still in shock loved ones numb with what has happened are always followed by the tiny caskets on their way to the final resting places of those who should have known nothing but a lifetime of boundless energy and love.

We are killing the very best parts of ourselves in defense of a belief system that has no foundation or need for being when we think of a government that the right has practically destroyed through thirty plus years of determined effort, the only part that it wants to leave unscathed being the military with its own killing machine. And, trying to make sense of it all might be as hard as trying to make sense of this piece since it is all so senseless after all!

There is a sickness and a cancer in this nation and if we do not do something about it, it will sooner or later kill us all as it consumes our souls and makes us numb to the increasing horrors that are being visited on each and every one of us in defense of something that, at its very essence, is soulless to its very rotten core! We are watching, each and every day, a slow motion national suicide in progress that will, before it is finished, take our souls and our futures away just as surely as it did a small Connecticut town who will never really get over what happened to it and those that it offered up to the world that a madman took away!

When we think about it really, is the freedom that all these guns are buying us really worth having at the cost that it is becoming to each and every one of us as we contemplate which child is next to go? The child inside of all of us is dying a really terribly hard death!

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.