My heart is broken for the families and loved ones bereft in Newtown, Connecticut, and for their town and school, for our nation, and for all humanity. I cried. We mourn.
My kids were both home yesterday. One is in preschool and doesn't go on Fridays, the other was home getting over strep throat. As the news spread around our crew at work we stopped for a while, and we shared a rare tender moment. Like most of America I felt both hopelessly angry and sickeningly lucky. A couple of the other guys had kids that age in school.
And 20 sets of parents aren't going to ever see their kids again.
My God. I am shaken still.
What are we going to do about it?
I'll tell you what I did. Neither of my kids know anything about it, yet. They and my wife don't watch TV during the day when they're home, and though she knew about it my wife chose not to mention anything about the tragedy to them. When I got home I concurred. Of course we will tell them about it. But instead I chose yesterday to have a lecture, on why guns are bad.
It went something like this (paraphrased):
They aren't bad like the plague. They're bad like a nuclear weapon. They are tools whose sole purpose is violence. The very act of using them for their intended purpose is inherently violent.
And violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. If you have to resort to violence that means you've done something wrong. (This meme I have reiterated for their whole lives)
A person who says "It's just better if everybody has a gun, that way everyone will be in a position to defend themselves" is actually planning on meeting violence with violence, and is a-ok with incompetence. They have given up on being competent. Incompetence has become the strategy.
Competent people see someone about to do something horrible, and convince him to stop, and to seek counseling.
Incompetent people have dreams of shooting someone in the head and becoming a hero.
Competent people see something deeply wrong with our country swimming in guns, and want to do something about it.
Some people are so incompetent they see more guns as the only answer.
For the record, yes I do talk to my kids that way. My oldest was unsurprisingly the more attentive of the two to my lecture, but my little preschooler may have heard the urgency about guns in daddy's voice, because she was paying close attention towards the end. The language was a bit different but the ideas were the same.
We need to get serious about this problem, and the first thing we need to do is freaking acknowledge that it is a freaking problem, and the second thing we need to do is discuss serious ways of doing something about it on the national stage. I feel I'm not learned enough on the matter, policy-wise, to make any concrete suggestions. I gather that the whole area is crudely drawn as a thar-be-dragons area on the MSM's and punditry's political map, and I know that the predominant map governing this matter was drawn in 1789, and has always been extremely vague.
What a fix.
But, going forward, by the grace of God and an inside straight, I will continue to do the first thing and discuss the problem with my tiny corner of the next generation. I think that's a good start, but I've no idea if it will be enough.