Distraught survivors.
Photo courtesy of The Telegraph, Tuesday 18th December
The latest massacre in the USA was a terrible tragedy, but unfortunately, not the only one of its kind, rather just one more in a gruesome line of such disasters. The number of children who died make it particularly heart-breaking and I pray that they are now in peace. We will never make sense of their deaths, but we can make sure that they have not died in vain.
How?
By using this massacre as the impetus to make sure that it never happens again.
How long will the citizens of the USA allow this kind of thing to occur?
If that statement puts the guilt on every voter, then I am not apologising. It is your country, and I cannot believe that there are more voices in the gun lobby than there are of ordinary people who simply want to be safe. It’s time that those ordinary people spoke up.
This could quite likely be the best opportunity you may have for gun law change for a long time. There won’t be another presidential election for a few years, and the gun lobby are unlikely to be the people who vote for Obama anyway. Also, the man clearly has a heart and he has said quite clearly that it is time for change.
You, dear ordinary US citizen, must support him in that change and make sure that the changes are enough to actually make it extremely difficult for such a thing to ever happen again. Your gun lobby will fight to minimise the changes. It will be relatively easy to have a small change, a grudging concession to the parents of the dead children, but what you really need is a huge change.
The fact is that no one can feel safe in the USA so long as ordinary people are allowed to carry guns.
The right to defend yourself is not the same as the right to carry a gun.
The only reason you feel you need a gun to defend yourself is because you can’t be sure that the other person doesn’t have one. That’s why the guns need to be taken out of circulation.
They need to be made harder to get, and those that are out there need to be removed. The governments of USA and the USSR worked out some time ago that the only way to be safe from nuclear weapons was to get rid of them. They began a process of disarming. It is now clear that the USA needs disarmament within their country.
It can be done. It happened in Australia after our Port Arthur massacre. The Prime Minister of the time acted swiftly and decisively before people had recovered their complacency. Automatic weapons were removed from sale and taken away from those who had them.
In Australia, many kinds of guns are banned completely. No one may own a handgun and only police can carry one. Even a professional sports shooter can’t keep his gun in his own home. Only the army are permitted automatic weapons. Generally only landowners needing guns to keep down the population of feral animals are allowed guns. It is very hard to own a gun in Australia and we do not have regular massacres like you do in the USA.
Please America, make sure these children didn’t die in vain; make it the massacre that ended all massacres.
Speak up. Speak loud. Make sure that your voices are heard.
Call for nothing less than disarmament.
If you didn’t catch the article from the Huffington post that I posted on our Facebook page, take a look at it here. It’s called Eight Things More Difficult than Owning a Gun [in the USA].
Even more frightening is the fact that there has been an increase in gun sales in the wake of the massacre. http://www.policymic.com/articles/21023/ct-shooting-after-newtown-massacre-gun-sales-go-through-the-roof
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