Yes, we are and should be mourning the loss of life. Yes, we are and should be sending our thoughts and prayers out to families and friends of the victims. There must be healing. But as much as we should focus on the very real and devastating human tragedy, we cannot look past the unavoidable issues at stake.
Enough is enough. Too many people senselessly die because of wholly inadequate gun safety, a laughable system of regulations and controls, and poor implementation of the all-too-insufficient controls already in place.
While I have been fortunate not to have been directly affected by recent acts of gun violence, I have some personal experience with the impact of both poor gun safety and gun violence.
Sadly, over the years I’ve had friends and family severely injured because of careless gun safety and the easy access to weapons.
More recently, living in the Washington, D.C., metro area, I lived through the uncertainly and terror of having a sniper on the loose who was killing my neighbors. I recall the fear that came with the simple act of going to the grocery store or filling my car with gas while the shooters were still at large.
When the identity of the Virginia Tech shooter was revealed, I realized that the shooter and his family lived a few hundred yards from me and that several of his victims lived within our community as well.
I am not, as some of my political adversaries would undoubtedly assume, a stranger to guns or a “bleeding heart” urbanite liberal only familiar with guns in the abstract. I practically grew up with a gun in my hand in rural Texas. From a fairly early age, my almost daily routine included leaving the house with a gun in one hand and a fishing rod in the other. Safety and respect for human life was a regular discussion among friends and family members, though, and so I also learned the proper handling of deadly arms.
It is past time to stop hiding behind outdated excuses and policies that make acquiring guns so easy. While it is important that we continue to teach and preach safety, safety alone is far from enough. Protecting recreational and perceived personal safety freedom should not so easily come at the expense of the masses.
Access to deadly weapons is still entirely too easy for potential killers. The piecemeal system that we have protecting the general public from gun violence is not working if we continue to have incidents like those that continue happening at schools, workplaces and, of course, the latest massacre at a nightclub in Orlando.
Yet, we almost always find that the perpetrators of these acts gained access to their weapons quickly and easily, and that safety precautions that could have prevented their access failed.
While posting, tweeting and sharing your thoughts are useful ways to mourn and vent, we can and must do more. We must fight back against a society that is devolving to a market for hate and violence. We must let our elected officials, who have the power to change our laws and make us safer, know that we are watching.
They must know that we will no longer let them wiggle their way around this issue based on outdated logic about guns or hateful identity politics based on race or religion. They need to know that their jobs are on the line if they ignore our concerns about safety or spread hate out of political expediency. They must know that we will wield a weapon of change that everyone should have access to — our votes.
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