Gun Control Thoughts Wide-Ranging

Last Friday was a day for strong emotions: anger, sadness, shock, fear, disbelief.

I don’t suppose those emotions have softened much in a few days, and I don’t suppose they should have.

It’s also been a time for the searching of souls, and I’ve heard from more than a hundred people in phone messages and phone conversations, through email and via Facebook on the topic of what might be done to prevent the kind of violence that tore apart Newtown, Conn., last week.

Here’s a sampling of perspectives:

♦ What was the legitimate need for the assault rifle, gruesomely destructive bullets and extra-capacity clips used in Newtown?

♦ Not one single gun ever got up and walked around and killed someone.

♦ We can never stop all the violence, but we can sure try to prevent some of it, and with sensible gun control laws, we would.

♦ An armed man is a citizen. An unarmed man is a subject.

♦ Guns are not the only things that kill people. Will we ban rocks and knives and box cutters and bowling pins and candlesticks?

♦ It is our deplorable mental health system that repeatedly fails the mentally ill and the innocent victims.

♦ We are the freest country in the history of the world and with that comes a lot of scary things.

♦ If you can promise me no one will ever be hurt by a gun again I will gladly remove my pistol from the safe and watch APD melt it into a pile of metal.

♦ That more people don’t speak up, that most of our legislators refuse to take action, is our nation’s great shame.

♦ Connecticut already has some of the toughest gun laws around, so tougher laws wouldn’t have helped.

♦ The situation in this country, with near saturation of guns, many of which are military human-killers, is insane.

♦ We live in an “any guns, anytime” culture.

n Gun-control laws do not control crime because crimes are not committed by guns; they are committed by criminals.

♦ We are not just a bunch of disconnected individuals; we are a nation. We need gun control laws that reflect that reality.

⋄  What’s worse – a small number of young men going berserk with guns or a berserk society performing a million abortions a year?

♦ Dealing with the mentally ill and thugs in this country is where you should start your crusade, not with blaming the millions of Americans who never perpetrate a gun crime.

♦ There will always be crazies in the world. They are not the criminals. The criminals are those who insist the nation resist any form of gun control.

♦ This country is still living in a Western mentality that says that we must be armed to the hilt.

♦ The programming and manipulation of children with auditory and visual images of death in this country is facilitated by people like yourself and your industry who make a living bombarding them with your greed to hash and rehash tragedy.

♦ Even if it were remotely possible to make it illegal to own a gun, that would only hinder a responsible, legal gun owner like me.

♦ Cain killed Abel with a rock. Do you blame Cain, or the rock?

♦ We all give up some things when we enter into the social contract. That’s the bargain we make in living here and living with each other.

♦ If multiple bullets in the dead bodies of twenty 6- and 7-year olds is not enough to get gun advocates off their high horses of “gun rights,” then I don’t know what is. NO MORE!

♦ As a society we don’t value life, children or adults.

♦ There are MANY issues in play here, not just one of guns. Mental health, family instability, desensitization to violence through various media (TV and video games) just to name a few. It is way too easy to just blame the existence of firearms.

♦ It’s a political issue just like health care and everything else, and as long as lots of money is available to line pockets, I see no change.

♦ We’ve left God out of our society, so why should this surprise us?

♦ I’m afraid stopping all gun sales now will be like closing the barn door after the horse is out. Trying to take away guns from owners now would surely be civil war. I believe this country is now reaping what it has sown.

It’s clear the Newtown shooting hasn’t brought people together; we are still very much in disagreement on the fundamental causes of these kinds of massacres and what it will take to move to a safer place.

For my part, I’ve listened a lot in the past week and I still can’t separate a shooting spree conducted with a powerful rifle and high-volume magazines that allows 26 people to be killed in a few minutes – hundreds of rounds fired – from a discussion of reining in the types of weaponry that makes that possible.

I agree violent media and untreated mental illness need attention, but they’re not the common denominator in all of these shootings – only guns are.

And I agree that God – and meditation and poetry and kindness – are in too short supply in our country and shifting toward them is something we should strive for while we work on cutting back on the availability of assault weapons.

I believe we can respect the Constitution, regardless of one’s reading of the intent of the Second Amendment, and still give up assault rifles and 30-round ammunition magazines that allow a massacre like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary.

I haven’t heard anyone suggest getting rid of all guns. Or any of the guns that most law-abiding citizens own – rifles taken on deer-hunting trips, turkey-hunting shotguns or the handguns kept in glove compartments or safes or dresser drawers.

But 30-round magazines that allow a spray of 30 bullets before reloading and can kill a crowd in a minute? Assault weapons like the Bushmaster .223 that Nancy Lanza had in her home? If you don’t know what that gun looks like, Google it. And then ask yourself whether any private citizen in this country needs one and should have one.

If we can all drop our postures for a moment, I think the simple and honest answers are no and no. Without access to these guns and magazines, gun homicides would not stop but many of them would be prevented.

If Lanza, a gun-lover, hadn’t been able to buy that particular rifle, her son wouldn’t have been able to take it and blast his way through a locked school door and we’d all be having a happier holiday.

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Leslie at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.

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— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal