Sometimes it is hard to find a persuasive piece that doesn’t insult the folks who most need persuading (no matter our views, most of us don’t respond well to an essay that begins, “Okay, look, you moron...”)
But when I shared this essay from Salon.com on gun reform with a conservative friend, we actually started talking, and found (to our amazement) that we had much in common.
It starts off like this:
In the days after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, there was one thing that all of us--gun owners and non-gun-owners, Democrats and Republicans--did the same.
We stared.
We watched our little girls as they skipped into school in their sparkly headbands and princess sneakers, backpacks banging against the backs of their legs because they themselves were so tiny. We watched our boys at their basketball games, forgetting the scoreboard and just watching them, their knobby knees and puppy energy, their exuberant fist-bumps and crooked grins. We were struck by how big they wanted to be, and how small and fragile they really were.
And we tried to figure out what to do--what to do about gun violence in America.
Judging from some news outlets, you might have thought there were only two choices, each on farthest outposts of the spectrum: (a) arming every man, woman, and child to the teeth with as much hard-core weaponry as possible, or (b) piling every single gun in America onto the U.S.S. Kum-Ba-Yah and sinking it at sea under a wreath of daisies.
Both of which are, of course, ridiculous. But it’s easy to be distracted by the shouting between the outermost fringes, and not see the acres upon acres of reasonable, fertile ground between them.
The article is then divided into the following sections:
1. You don't have to like President Obama, not even a little bit, to support common-sense gun reform.
2. Nobody is coming to take anybody's guns. No, really.
3. A few seconds don't matter. Except when they do.
4. The U.S. doesn't have the market cornered on crazy people.
5. The Second Amendment is going to be just fine, thanks.
6. The NRA is not God.
and
7. The lack of a single elegant solution is not a valid excuse for doing nothing.
To me, the most striking section was this:
The U.S. Doesn't Have the Market Cornered On Crazy People.
Of the 25 worst mass shootings in the world in the past fifty years, guess how many happened in the United States. Five? Six?
How about fifteen. (And country that came in second--Finland--had two.)
Most of us agree that better mental health care will help make our society safer. And most of us also agree that American movies and video games have become too violent.
But there are people with mental illness all over the world, and the entire planet is awash in American movies and video games.
Yet somehow we seem to have a monopoly on mass shootings... and the number of gun murders in the U.S. is more than nineteen times higher than that of other developed nations.
If every nation has unbalanced people, and every nation has access to violent American video games, it doesn’t make sense to place all the blame on those two factors.
We differ from other developed nations in one important way: Our gun laws are far more permissive, by a long shot. We aren’t a more violent people per se, but when we do feel violent, it’s so easy and handy to get our hands on a gun--and then what could have been a simple assault winds up being a murder, or a double murder, or much, much worse.
Please give it a read, and consider forwarding it to friends and family (and maybe your senator, too). There's so much reasonable middle ground on this issue. Here's hoping our leaders can find it and move forward.