This past Saturday the first anniversary of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School was commemorated. Despite the solemn observances in Newtown, in Washington and in many other cities and towns across the country, the undeniable fact is that Congress of the United States has failed to do anything to prevent a repetition of that tragedy from continuing to occur time and time again.
That sad reality was driven home the day before at Arapaho High School in Centennial, Colorado. The high school is only 13.7 miles from the Century Movie Theater in Aurora, Colorado, where on July 20, 2012, during a midnight screening of the film The Dark Knight Rises, James Eagan Holmes, dressed in tactical clothing, set off tear gas grenades and shot into the audience with multiple firearms, killed 12 people and injured 70 others. The incident at Arapaho High School also called to mind the Columbine High School shootings in 1999 in which two senior students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, armed with two 9 mm firearms and two 12-gauge shotguns, murdered 12 students and one teacher, injured 24 other students, caused three other people to be injured while attempting to escape the school, and then committed suicide.
A year after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a billboard near the Massachusetts
Turnpike outside of Fenway Park in Boston now depicts the extent of
this country's indifference to the problem of gun violence in our
culture. The billboard reports that, since the Newtown massacre,
approximately 32,833 Americans have been killed by guns.
In an article in The Boston Globe ("Pike antigun billboard tracks gun deaths post-Newtown," December 14, 2013), Peter Schworm reported that John Rosenthal, the founder of Stop Handgun Violence - the group that sponsors the billboard -stated that the total numbers will rise by 83 every day based upon national estimates of gun-related deaths and that, of that number, eight of the daily deaths from gun violence are children.
For those Americans who have not yet become insouciant or overwhelmed by the magnitude of this senseless and indefensible violence, the numbers need to be viewed in historical perspective. In December 2012, The Tampa Bay Times, in its "PolitiFact.Com" series, citing a study published by the Congressional Research Service on February 26, 2010, which it supplemented with data for deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan taken from the website icasualties.org. It reported that 1,171,177 Americans had been killed in all of the country's conflicts from the Revolutionary War to U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that "another 362 deaths resulted from other conflicts since 1980, such as interventions in Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Somalia and Haiti..."
By contrast, the newspaper observed, based upon data from The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and FBI figures for 2011, that 1,384,171 Americans had died as a result of gun violence including homicides, suicides and gun accidents. Of that total, the Violence Policy Center, in a 2012 study, found that "Firearms are the second leading cause of traumatic death related to a consumer product in the United States and are the second most frequent cause of death overall for Americans ages 15 to 24. And homicide, usually involving a gun, is the leading cause of death for black teens and young adults ages 15 to 34."
Statistics, because they are compilations of dry data, cannot convey the depth of the misery and travail behind the numbers. For every victim of gun violence, the survivors - family, loved ones, friends and neighbors - will continue to suffer from the lingering effects. The sadness, anguish, anxiety, distrust of others and fear that gun violence engenders will remain with them all throughout their lives.
Aside from the devastating and harmful personal consequences, there is more than anecdotal evidence that the magnitude of the daily slaughter has caused ordinary Americans to lose confidence in the ability of this country's political institutions to address this epidemic of gun violence; and that the fear and distrust that is sown by gun violence has contaminated our public square and impaired our capacity to engage in rational and civil political discourse.
A timid, fearful people are a people who are collectively too cowed to imagine or to demand rational answers to an irrational policy. They thus become prey to the fear mongers and demagogues who profit from the status-quo. When children are the victims or witnesses to the carnage caused by senseless gun violence, the consequences are perhaps even more profound: if, as future citizens and leaders, they are too traumatized or inured to the violence around them, the violence will become even more pervasive and accepted. At that point, he United States would devolve into the dystopia depicted by Anthony Burgess in his gruesome novel, A Clockword Orange.
In District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), Justice Scalia, in his concluding remarks in a 5 to 4 decision, piously proclaimed, "We are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country, and we take seriously the concerns raised by the many amici who believe that prohibition of handgun ownership is a solution. The Constitution leaves the District of Columbia a variety of tools for combating that problem, including some measures regulating handguns..... But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table."
Sadly, Justice Scalia failed to remember that the most fundamental duty of any government is its duty to protect and defend its citizens against harm. A judiciary and a political system that have elevated an abstract right of the few to possess weapons that kill and maim innocent citizens is one that has issued a declaration of war of against its own children and its future.
