Sandy Hook, 1 Year Later
Do you feel closure when relatives and friends ask if you miss an ex on their birthday, lost friends at Christmas or deceased parents on their anniversary, as if thoughts and memory shut down like government or shut off as easily as TV news producers forget Guantanamo never closed?
Is forgetting grandparents, Mom & Dad or old friends you fell out with, as easy as forgetting the most infamous American prison on earth? I mean, forgetting’s not as simple as using political power to close the George Washington Bridge, is it?
Closure is shattered with such questions, especially media calls to Newtown, Connecticut asking how it feels after a year, as though December 14, 2013 yielded the first memory of those gone or thought of those who must survive.
When the names are called every 9/11, chimes ring and bagpipes wail, do we get closure from television, or tread the pain alone still? Is there a seething craving denying closure, because the door won’t close without knowing why?
We may never know what Snowden knows, or what happened in 1963 Dallas, or why Katrina victims made it to the evening news but not to safety – and most have reasons for choosing not to know why snow storms/tornadoes/hurricanes are increasing in intensity while glaziers decrease in density.
We may never know the whole truth about many things, certainly not how less than one percent of Wall Street managed to steal one third of the world’s wealth without a Quantico interrogation, much less prison time in Cuba.
But this we do know: mass shootings and gun violence, at Columbine, Tucson, Aurora, Sandy Hook, Navy Yard and Arapahoe are as much acts of terrorism as the mass murder bombings in Oklahoma, Boston and on September 11, 2001.
We know people kill people, not guns: like people who sell Sig Sauer, Glock and Bushmaster; people who organize in groups like Gun Owners of America; people fighting for gun rights over human rights at The National Association for Gun Rights.
And yes, some of the people who buy legal guns without background checks become violent extensions of the people who people the NRA’s young guns government
•People immune to the rights of children to live in a gun free education zone
•People watching pretend violence on TV, pretending no common sight alignment with gun lobbyists
•People drinking real men drinks to forget the national gun safety is off
•People allowing death before its time to repeatedly dishonor our Second Amendment with profits stained by the blood of children.
AND We Know if there were no guns so easily available in this pre-holiday season anniversary, there would be more students teaching us about renewable energy, more teachers learning from their digitally savvy students and more Americans happy at home for the holidays.
We know as long as American corporations make a whopping profit off the manufacturing and sale of weapons like Drones, Russian AK-47s and the American M16 with 30 round magazines, Conservative cash will insist their Constitutional right to sell and buy more and more military style guns, out polls the Constitutional right of our teachers, parents, sons and daughters to life, free from fear.
We know
•Manning’s closure is Quantico, Snowden’s Russia, but Guantanamo lives on in infamy
•Since December 2012, more than 194 children 12 years old and younger have been killed with guns
•Without reasonable background checks and limitations of magazine size, people at corporations, fares and small gun shops play Russian Roulette with other people as targets
•Teachers, school administrators and children die when Sheriffs refuse to enforce the law
•Governors & gun makers blame the mentally ill, instead of the sane calculations of doing business.
We know, and without saying so, there will be no closure.