If Not Now.....When?

If Not Now…When?

 

On last Friday, December 14, I was honored to be asked to be a pallbearer for a democratic stalwart here in Howard County. Frank Chase lost his battle with cancer, and succumbed to it on Tuesday, December 11. It was a solemn yet humble ceremony. Our prayers and thoughts are still with his wife Carole, and his family. Little did I suspect , that at the same time that we honored Frank…..all hell was breaking loose hundreds of miles up the road in Newtown, Connecticut.

I stopped at home after Frank’s burial, right before the repast. When I logged into Facebook I saw all of these posts about a shooting in an elementary school. I immediately tuned into CNN, and the news just got progressively worse. Children had been slaughtered by a mad man….who was actually barely a man. He systematically snuffed out the lives of twenty small children, six female staff members, his own mother….then himself. As I watched all of this unfold…thoughts of the murders in Aurora, Colorado immediately came to mind (see Why Batman Can Wait), as well as the more recent shootings in Portland, Oregon. But not only those shootings…. I thought of the weekly shooting sprees in Baltimore, that are recounted in the news every Monday morning.  Shootings and killings in DC and PG county that occur frequently.. There was even a shooting at a Taco Bell in Columbia earlier this year.

So what does one thing have to do with another? What does the slaughter of twenty innocent children have to do with a domestic dispute in Baltimore that ends with an ambulance trip to shock-trauma. The common denominator is access to guns. The bottom line is how many more of these incidents do we have to do through before something is done?  As President Obama said during his speech at the memorial for the victims on last Sunday….we need to stop this.

I’m hoping that the President will make a bold move. That bold move has to include gun control. And gun control has to be a ban on assault weapons held by civilians. Period….no exceptions. Only law enforcement and the military have the need to have an assault rifle. As a civilian, I do not have a need to walk around Main Street in Ellicott City, with an AK47.

Although I am retired from the military, and I know how to use and maintain weapons, I have no particular love for them. I am definitely a supporter of the second amendment which states that each American citizen has the “right to bear arms”. I support hunters and marksmen, if that is what they choose to do. But the proliferation of guns and assault weapons in our society has gotten ridiculous.  Crime and loss of life caused by these weapons is so unnecessary. Background checks, the Brady Law….they are all futile attempts to get guns off of the street, which have not worked. Gun shows are still prominent throughout the nation, and the sale of guns since the Connecticut incident has soared.

The whole incident in Connecticut is another stark example of man’s inhumanity against man. Except this time it involved women and children.  Two guys having a gunfight in an alley in is one thing. Mowing down twenty innocent souls is another.  Something has to be done, and it has to be done before this incident is no longer on the front pages.  Our leaders, starting with the President, have to be serious and resolute about banning assault weapons for civilians. If it is not done, we can expect tragedies like Newtown, Connecticut to continue. And in a few months….we will be grieving more unnecessary loss of life.