Evensong
In the United States of 2012, it is easier to buy a gun than it is to get comprehensive mental healthcare.
This is where we are; this is what we’ve become, where the right to own a gun has become more important than the right for our children and our friends and family members who work in education to go to school and not have to fear for their lives in doing so. Owning a gun has become so holy to some that the price of needing security guards at elementary and preschools is not too high to pay.
When the US Constitution was written in 1787, wars were fought with muskets (which had to be reloaded for each. shot.), cannons, bayonets and swords. There were no automatic weapons, no .223 caliber rifles. Even after independence, the US, a weak, new-born nation, risked invasion from outside foes. Guess what? Almost two and a half centuries later, the US is the only reigning super power, and probably the last country on earth that will risk its destruction from an outside force.
I have had more than one friend come to me and talk of difficulty in getting treatment—and acceptance—for their mental health needs. It’s a bigger problem than just trying to find a doctor accepted by your insurance, assuming you’re lucky enough to have insurance. Playing video games and watching violent TV shows are not responsible for mixed up genetics or brain chemistry. They say in AA that the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one; too many people are afraid to come forward and ask for help, to acknowledge that maybe you need it. Think about this: if you had a physical disability/chronic condition, such as carpal tunnel would you hesitate to put that on your job application? Now, what if that disability was a diagnosed psychiatric disorder? Would you eschew contact with someone if they told you that at one point they’d had pneumonia or strep throat? What if they told you that at one point they had been suicidal or even attempted it? Answer honestly.
We did nothing after Jonesboro.
We did nothing after Columbine.
We did nothing after Virginia Tech.
We did nothing after Aurora — which happened less than six months ago.
Can we do something now? Please?
Can someone have the balls to stand up to the NRA and say ENOUGH ALREADY, say that Your right to own a gun does not come before everyone else’s right to ensure their children can come home from school?
Can someone have the balls to say ENOUGH ALREADY, say that access to mental healthcare should not be a privilege but a right, say that schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, depression are not joking matters, that you almost certainly know someone with a mental illness who is too afraid to talk about it for fear they’ll be stigmatized and lose their friends and loved ones?
Can someone have the balls to say to the media, It is no longer good enough to just be first, regardless of accuracy? I don’t know Ryan Lanza and I won’t presume to know what he is feeling, but I’ll ask you, dear reader, how well would you handle it if you were falsely outed as the instigator of a massacre?
Don’t sit there and say that you can’t do anything, because you can.
Write your congressman and senators. Do it by hand, because one handwritten letter was worth 500 emails when I was in middle school and a lot more people have the internet now than they did in 1999. Demand that your representatives in Congress have the balls to stand for something other than partisan hackery. Tell them that mental healthcare is every bit as important as physical healthcare and that owning a gun should not be more sacred than the ability of the children born in a country founded from the ideas birthed during the Enlightenment to go to school and come home safe, and yes, this applies to every schoolchild in every school district in the country, regardless of race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, mental or physical disability or socioeconomic status.
Don’t fetishize automatic weapons or the names of those who use them. Read news from responsible media outlets who do not interview children in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event that they are most likely too young to be able to emotionally handle.
Ribbons in your facebook profiles and retweets of ‘pray for the victims’ accounts are nice, but they won’t do anything. If you want to do something, DO something. Donate blood. Learn First Aid. If you can afford it, donate to victims’ families or their schools (and do not restrict your donations to just the Newtown families; many other school shootings garner far less media attention). Write your congressmen and women.
Because the tragedy isn’t so much that we knew the victims; most of us didn’t. The tragedy is now that none of us ever will.
In Memoriam
Charlotte Bacon, 6;
Daniel Barden, 7;
Rachel Davino, 29;
Olivia Engel, 6;
Josephine Gay, 7;
Ana M. Marquez-Greene, 6;
Dylan Hockley, 6;
Dawn Hocksprung, 47;
Madeline F. Hsu, 6;
Catherine V Hubbard, 6;
Chase Kowalski, 7;
Jesse Lewis, 6;
James Mattioli, 6;
Grace McDonnell, 7;
Anne Marie Murphy, 52
Emile Parker, 6;
Jack Pinto, 6;
Noah Pozner, 6;
Caroline Previdi, 6;
Jessica Rekos, 6;
Avielle Richman, 6;
Lauren Russeau, 30;
Mary Sherlach, 56;
Victoria Soto, 27;
Benjamin Wheeler, 6;
Allison N. Wyatt, 6
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Stats n’ Stuffs
RSS
Bannerific
4 Responses on Evensong
Sadly, I can’t see Congress acting. Too many fear the NRA and their political machine. Cross them and you are almost certainly defeated in Southern and Midwestern places regarding guns.
You are absolutely right on mental health treatment.
Thanks for this post Rebecca.
[Reply]
Damning the NRA won’t solve anything. The NRA preaches gun safety and training. Owning a gun for the right reasons and being able to use is in a manner that is safe and only in extreme circumstances. I’ve been a gun owner for 6 years and have never even drawn it in public let alone fire it. I’d like to think if I found myself in a mass shooting situation, I’d been much better trained to use my gun than the shooter his.
This is not about guns, it’s about the disturbed people that use them. Banning guns accomplishes very little, if anything. Just like banning marijuana has completely eliminated the drug in our country. Criminals are criminals for a reason-even if there’s a law that says they can’t have, or can’t do something, they’ll find a way to do it anyway. The NRA encourages safe and educated use of firearms, something that mentally deranged idiots care nothing about. Eliminating the NRA would be like eliminating Planned Parenthood – people would perceive it as a victory, but by doing so, one eliminates all the good that both organizations do for their communities and our country.
Mentally disturbed people need help and our country undoubtedly needs to do a better job at addressing those needs. And you playing judge and jury on who’s rights are more sacred solves nothing and only serves to create a more hostile environment where bipartisanship and cooperation are more desperately needed.
[Reply]
Rebecca G. Reply:
December 16th, 2012 at 1:10 pm
In no other industrialized country on earth are guns as freely available as they are here. Mental illness needs treatment but the US is the only country where the lack of mental health care combined with freely available weapons is so combined.
I have many friends who live outside the US — in Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Singapore and Malaysia and none of them can understand why we do not do more to restrict guns. They cannot all be wrong.
We restrict cars more than we restrict guns.
They are most definitely part of the problem and it’s foolish to think otherwise.
[Reply]
Sorry for posting anonymously, but I don’t want to run the risk of getting fired for my political opinions, so I don’t want anyone to be able to Google my name and find this comment.
Have you read what Larry Correia wrote at http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/an-opinion-on-gun-control/ yet? If you haven’t, he basically said everything I’m about to say, plus a whole lot more. It’s a very long read, so make sure you have about an hour free before you sit down to read it, but it’s well worth reading all the way to the end. Even if you vehemently disagree with him, keep reading to the end — you may find that the objections that your mind is raising are ones he’s anticipated, and answered, later in his (long) post.
Okay, so what I hear you saying (among other things) is that guns should be restricted more than they are, and that some types of guns should probably be banned. (You don’t outright say “banned”, but it’s heavily implied in the “owning a gun should not be more sacred than the ability of the children … to go to school and come home safe” part of your post.) My simple, one-word question to you is:
How?
If you’ve ever read Aesop’s fable of belling the cat (Google for “belling the cat” if you haven’t), you’ll recognize that I’m essentially asking the same question as the “But who will bell the cat?” question in that fable. Let’s say that we agreed that getting rid of all privately-owned guns in America would be a good idea. (I wouldn’t agree, but that’s beside the point right now). Precisely *how* would you accomplish this? By passing a law requiring people to turn in their guns at the local police station? Unfortunately, the kind of sick (expletive) who would shoot up a school full of kids is, well, not likely to comply with such a gun-roundup program. Okay, so if a voluntary-compliance program wouldn’t work, how about an involuntary program? Once where the police or the National Guard go house-to-house and confiscate all guns they find there? Again, a very practical problem raises its head, which is that — again — criminals don’t like complying with the police. (Which is why they’re criminals). And the problem with trying to take away guns from someone who doesn’t want to give them up is that, well, that person *has guns*. And if you’re trying to take them away by force, he’s very likely to *shoot you with those guns*. And criminals wouldn’t be the only ones shooting back in a confiscate-guns-by-force scenario: so would millions of other people who, rightly or wrongly, would see this as the first step towards tyranny. (Whether they’d be right is debatable; what’s not debatable is that there are millions of people who would hold that opinion, scattered *all over* the country). In other words, there would be millions of people who would be willing to get into shootouts with the police; millions of bloodbaths around the country. Are there even enough police in America to manage such a program? And if there were enough police to do that, would you want to live in that kind of police state?
There are other reasons why I think banning guns would be a major mistake. One of them is that the VAST majority of gun uses in America is in self-defense. (The numbers are in Larry Correia’s post; I won’t get into them here, because when I wrote out the details, this comment was getting WAY too long). If a woman with no weapon is attacked by a criminal (who’s usually a man) with no weapon, the most likely scenario is that the criminal will win. If she has some kind of hand-to-hand weapon (a knife, a baseball bat, a can of Mace or pepper spray — those are generally only effective within 10 feet, which in fighting terms is hand-to-hand range, since all it takes is one lunge with an outstretched arm and you can be stabbed by someone who was standing 10 feet away) and the criminal has a hand-to-hand weapon, again, the criminal usually wins those sorts of encounters. But a gun levels the playing field: it doesn’t rely on your size or your muscle power. A woman with a gun being attacked by a criminal with a hand-to-hand weapon will usually succeed in defending herself; even a woman with a gun being attacked by a criminal with a gun will usually succeed in defending herself! (That last point often surprises people, but it turns out that most criminals, when they see their intended victim drawing a gun, actually run away rather than fight. Case after case bears this out in actual experience.)
So, would it better if we could wave a magic wand and make all guns in the world disappear at once? Yes, it would. But that magic wand doesn’t exist. And no matter how much we might wish we could confiscate all guns, the practical question still remains: precisely HOW are you going to bell that cat?
[Reply]
Leave a comment on Evensong
RSS feed for comments on this post