Late Night Chronicles 94: I Got Nothing

Again.

That word seems to be running through my head a lot today. As the full extent of the tragedy in Newtown has become clearer throughout the day, over and over that one tiny word running through my head: again. What kind of a monster does this? I can't conceive of what would make a person walk into an elementary school and gun down 20 children, all of them reportedly between the ages of five and ten years old?

I got nothing. I got no answers, no ideas, no nothing- and I expect I'm not the only one feeling that way today. In the wake of such unimaginable horror, I expect the natural instinct of everyone is to cast around for answers, to try and get some scrap of meaning out of this tragedy but I expect difficult days are ahead- for those involved and for the country as a whole as we try and come to grips with this awful problem that just won't go away.

I'm ambivalent about guns, I'll freely admit that. I didn't used to be. You go to high school in the mid-to-late 90s with things like Columbine going down and the idea of guns makes you very, very uncomfortable for obvious reasons. But I got older and I realized that the complexities of this issue are maddening and consensus is nearly impossible to find- but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have a conversation about it. At the very least, we need a debate. This tragedy demands that much from our leaders. Right now they can't seem to legislate their way out of a wet paper bag, never mind our financial crisis- so I'm not going to hold my breath about any new, sweeping, meaningful legislation but they can talk. They do a lot of that.

Gun control to me, falls down on one simple fact: criminals don't obey laws. There's no point in passing a law that the people that perpetrate these horrors are going to ignore anyway. Yet our Constitution wasn't intended to be a suicide pact either- and there's no such thing as an absolute anything to be found in it. When even free speech has its limits (you can't shout fire in a crowded theater, for instance) then the 2nd Amendmant too should be regulated and limited for the public welfare- especially in an age where firearms are more modern, more advanced and more deadly than anything the Founders could have imagined.

So let's go further, you say. Repeal the 2nd Amendmant- ban all the guns! But what do we say when the next shooting happens and more people die? The World isn't always nice, it's not always fair and sometimes it's downright mean and evil. There are always going to be monsters willing to do things exactly like this. And blanket bans on anything in this country have not, historically, worked out that well. (Prohibition, for example.) The last serious attempt at a ban on guns was probably the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban which from what I've been able to discover was little more than cosmetic. By the time it was set to expire, the gun industry was make guns that were virtually identical to the ones that Congress had been trying to ban in the first place.

There are no absolute freedoms in this country. Everything has its limitations. More people die on the roads than from gun violence in this country- and we require people to take a simple test to drive a car but not to own a gun? Gun show loopholes mean you can walk into a gun show and walk out with a gun- far too easily. Waiting periods should be mandatory. There are sane and sensible things we can do and we should do to make this country safer.

Will we do them? I doubt it. The President may have wiped a way a tear today but I wouldn't bet on him signing legislation anytime soon. (As this column pointed out.) Our leaders are all about talk these days, not action and when the next tragedy happens the search for answers is only going to be even harder.

But twenty schoolkids and six adults died today in Connecticutt. And I got nothing.

*Just as a post-script to this: I wish the media would leave those poor kids alone- and what are those parents thinking letting cameras get shoved in the faces of those kids? My kids would be at home under lock and key and I'd be thinking about home schooling them and possibly never letting them out of the house ever again on a night after something like this.