Why Does It Take Dead Children for Americans to Change?

Posted on December 15, 2012 at 8:00 am by Bob Cesca

Ezra Klein:

Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not. But that’s unacceptable. As others have observed, talking about how to stop mass shootings in the aftermath of a string of mass shootings isn’t “too soon.” It’s much too late.

We’re a reactive society — not a proactive one. It always takes an obscenity like this for us to start talking and doing. Sadly, the same goes for the climate crisis and so many other things.

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  • Victor_the_Crab

    But nothing will change due to gun violence because there are way too many disdainful asswipes who’d rather see little children get gunned down than to have any restrictions placed on owning guns or to have any intrusive background checks that would delay a person’s right to accquire guns

    I mean, just read into what such disdainful asswipe has to say:

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/connecticut-shooting-armed-teachers-gun-advocate_n_2304654.html?utm_hp_ref=connecticut

    • KABoink_after_wingnut_hacker

      That moronic response is so typical of these despicable blockheads.

    • incredulous72

      Here’s my take on this whole “things will never change” idea.

      It is asswipes like this man that get a microphone or a camera shoved in their face to defend their point of view. It doesn’t mean their point of view is in the majority; as a matter of fact we know it’s in the minority. But in tragic circumstances such as these, they are sought out to go on national television to defend their POV and then they proceed, with NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER to push the idea that if teachers are armed to the teeth, it would have “if not prevented, then perhaps minimized” this horrific event.

      BULLSHIT.

      Bottom line, there is a fraction of delusional, crazy gun advocates out there that believe this nonsense. MOST gun owners themselves don’t mind stricter gun laws; they know it ultimately protects their own gun rights. But the minority screams the loudest so is thought to represent the majority IF NOT CALLED OUT.

      The problem is, those that support stricter gun control are divided between those that want to outlaw the right to bear arms completely and those that just want stricter laws so that incidents like these are fewer and farther between if not eliminated completely. We need to be unified on this subject in order to get better laws on the books.

      And for the love of pete, we need to stop being so damn intimidated by these NRA assholes. They have no real argument on this issue except, “2nd Amendment rights!” and “more of a mental health issue than gun issue!” arguments, which are not arguments at all; these are excuses.

  • agrazingmoose

    There is a good op-ed in the NYT this morning. It is written by a man whose son was shot to deal on a college campus in Western MA 20 years ago. He said that he worked hard to change gun laws and came to the conclusion that Americans are willing to put up with the collateral damage as long as 2nd amendment rights are protected.

    His point was that we should not ask ourselves why these things happen. They happen because we choose to let them happen.

    • http://drangedinaz.wordpress.com/ IrishGrrrl

      He is right and it is sickening. I made the mistake of engaging with as swipes on Yahoo. I basically told them that WE are the reason and WE have to accept that WE let this happen and WE are the ones who have to be willing to talk about it. None of our other basic rights do we refuse to put some limits on but this one we leave wide open.

  • http://profiles.google.com/olivpit Olivia Pitts

    And why do you think dead children will make America change?

    • agrazingmoose

      Well, I apologize up front for being so callous, but these are upper middle class white children. Maybe that is what it takes in the end.

      • http://profiles.google.com/olivpit Olivia Pitts

        Good point, but not enough have died yet or maybe just not the right children have died yet to make a difference. We have a great amnesia in this country. It will be half forgotten by the new year and completely by March.

  • GrafZeppelin127

    Guns can only be used for three things: to kill, wound, or threaten. Other things can also be used for those purposes, but guns serve no other purpose.

    I think most people understand that. Even when they make those ridiculous, illogical assertions that if we want to control guns we have to ban cars, silverware, hockey sticks and flower pots too.

    What a gun does is give the person who wields it power over others. Not because of what the gun can do, or even because of what he can do with it. Because he can do it at very little risk to himself. Attacking, let alone killing, another person with a blade, a blunt object, or one’s bare hands is difficult, dangerous, messy, and very personal; the victim has some power there, even if it’s less than that of the assailant. With a gun, however, one can attack or kill easily, from a distance, indiscriminately, without (literally or proverbially) getting one’s hands dirty, and without yielding any power to the victim. What a gun does is “stack the odds” in favor of the assailant and greatly reduce, if not eliminate, his risk. Guns make people feel powerful, because people with guns can threaten or inflict harm without putting themselves in any danger.

    What makes guns dangerous is not so much what they do, or that bad people might use them. It’s that they reduce or eliminate the risk of doing bad things.

    • http://drangedinaz.wordpress.com/ IrishGrrrl

      Absolutely correct. I learned during my defensive tactics training that the act of stabbing someone is much more psychologically difficult than the act of shooting. Stabbing someone is a very violent, personal, messy and physically difficult act (for the untrained person and most people arent trained on how to stab someone efficiently). In fact in any stabbing the perp is usually someone the victim knows and/or someone who is pathologically angry. Shooting one can remain relatively detached and it only requires the ability to point and put the slightest pressure on a trigger. And with the use of automatic weapons with magazines your aim can completely suck so that doesn’t matter either. Killing with a gun is much, much easier than any other method.

  • http://www.politicalruminations.com/ nicole

    I don’t want to hear about “second amendment rights” anymore.

    I want someone to stand up on the national stage and say “ENOUGH. The Second Amendment is about the Common Good. It is NOT about arming individuals with combat weaponry.”

    • http://drangedinaz.wordpress.com/ IrishGrrrl

      A good point on the intentions of the 2nd amendment, common good.

  • http://phydeauxpseaks.blogspot.com Bob Rutledge

    The first three comments are spot on. There could be a coordinated nationwide massacre-geddon wherein the population of the US was literally decimated*, and there still wouldn’t be any appreciable change in gun laws, because decades of derision regarding people actually being educated about things (because an uneducated populace is much more easily duped into voting for “values” instead of, you know, actual governance) has made the voting public — taken as a whole — imbecilic.

    Any meaningful change will take a generation or so, and only then if the next generation is actually fucking taught stuff, like History and Reason and Cognitive Deduction. And by then the world will be totally fucked because humans are too stupid and greedy to stop destroying the environment.

    I’ve may have been suppressing my inner misanthropist for too long. :)

    (*decimate: : to select by lot and kill every tenth man of )

    ETA: Graf’s comment is also very good, but not on the same point as the first three. ;)

  • http://twitter.com/PeterBWest Peter Bockenthien

    Gun violence? That was actually assault weapon violence. I’m not at liberty to disclose how it came to be that I took up an asshole’s jeering comments to prove my manhood by firing an assault weapon that was illegal at the time. I will say that I was in my physical prime, and had fired guns before with my Dad’s supervision.

    One doesn’t fire an assault weapon with accuracy in mind. One pulls the trigger and hangs on for dear life or that monstrosity is going to buck right out of your hands and shoot a few holes into you before the trigger can release. And it would’ve were I not warned about it beforehand, the only fair warning I received that day.

    That weapon destroyed my arms; I was so freaking sore for 3 days that I kept thinking I must’ve been shot.

    Today, I actually miss handgun violence. I’m not afraid of the rednecks, nor hunters, nor handguns. It takes quite a bit of cool collectedness to be effective with a rifle or handgun. And quite a bit of planning to carry it out. I’ll take a pissed off redneck with a rifle any day over anyone on anti-depressants armed with an assault weapon or vehicle or whatever, as long as I have some good rocks nearby. Turns out that I’m very accurate with throwing rocks thanks to Old Yeller.

    And yet I would not want for a second to have a semi-automatic rock thrower because of the carnage it would cause; it couldn’t possibly be as accurate as I am, would be expensive and clunky to haul around.

    We don’t need a ban on guns. We do need a ban on assault weapons. And we need to make gun ownership very restrictive. Absolutely no one on meds can have guns.

  • trgahan

    Too bad any regulations (or attempts at regulations) in 2013 will likely be an issue the GOP can hang around the Democrats necks as in 2014 and turn midterms into another 2010. President Obama pushing for gun regulations would only confirm the greatest paranoid fears (the minorities coming to take your freedom!) of the right wing base.

    A free and open assault weapons market has become a fundemental pillar of right wing politics. The gun rights movement has long gone beyond hand guns and hunting rifles. It is all about getting military grade weaponry in the hands of average citizens.

    • http://phydeauxpseaks.blogspot.com Bob Rutledge

      Not that I really expect any meaningful change to happen (see my previous comment), but…

      President Obama pushing for gun regulations would only confirm the greatest paranoid fears (the minorities coming to take your freedom!) of the right wing base.

      … so fucking what? The “right wing base” is well under 1/4 of the voting public. If they’re so goddamn fond of their assault weapons, then let them grease up and sodomize themselves with them. If the rest of the goddamn voting public would get up off its HFCS-laden ass, put just the slightest bit of rational thought into things, and VOTE, then things might get better.

      But no. Lack of education, petty quarrels, ego-stroking, “Biggest Losvivor So You Think You Can Race Idol Brother‘s on the teevees, Martha! Fetch me a Miller Lite, yeehaw!!”, and a whole fucking litany of other excuses doom us all.

      • incredulous72

        Not to mention, considering what happened in 2010 with liberals sitting on their asses not voting and allowing the tea party to take over, I don’t think they would be so quick to “teach Obama a lesson” by boycotting another election. Many of them in numerous states are suffering the consequences severely for that stupid stance.

  • muselet

    Bryan Fischer and Mike Huckabee are terrible human beings.

    –alopecia

    • D_C_Wilson

      They certainly are. What they saying is that if only the kids had prayed more, god would have saved them.

      Assholes!

  • swift_4

    Not so fast, Ezra. No change has happened. You will notice the gun nuts have gone into turtle mode on this one. That’s in their playbook, too. They stay silent until the actual legislation comes out, months from now, then it quietly gets killed in committee.