First, the Boston bombing. Then the capitulation of the
United States Senate to the National Rifle Association. Then the explosion at
that fertilizer factory in Texas.
Death, disruption, shock, fear.
Knocked North Korea out of the headlines. I guess the “tense”
situation wasn’t so tense after all.
I don’t yet know what to make of the Boston Marathon
bombing. Were the perpetrators terrorists in the classic sense – or publicity
hounds? What was their beef and what were they trying to prove? How did they
obtain their weapons? Was it really necessary for the forces of law & order
to roll out every high-tech, paramilitary piece of gear in their formidable
arsenal to apprehend a 19-year-old kid? To lock down a major city? At what
point do common sense precautions become paranoid overkill? Will we lose even
more of our civil liberties because of what happened in Boston? Will we
acquiesce to more surveillance cameras, more electronic intrusion into our
daily lives?
Don’t misunderstand – I’m not discounting the victims or
playing down the carnage -- the photographs I saw in the on-line edition of the
Los Angeles Times were gruesome, horrifying, and every person killed or wounded
or maimed loves someone and is loved in return, is connected to someone whose
life will not be the same again.
What I’m remembering is the aftermath of 9/11, how the
country lost its collective mind, and how our political leaders curtailed our
civil liberties and launched two wars in the name of fighting Terror. Yes, the
crime in Boston was terrible, but an emotional overreaction might prove to be
worse in the long run. Cooler heads should prevail, but I suspect cool heads
will be very hard to find.
What happened in the Senate this week only proves the
failure of our democracy. The Senate touts itself as the world’s greatest
deliberative body, an institution where logic, facts, and reason prevail, but
the truth is that in the Senate all that really matters is money. When it comes to gun control, or, gun
safety as it’s euphemistically called, I expect to hear twisted, perverse
reasoning from Republicans; I don’t expect to see four senators from the
majority caving to their fear of the NRA.
President Obama made the speeches, shed the tears, said all
the right things to the right audiences, but when it came to the nitty-gritty,
arm-twisting that has to be done to pass legislation in our dysfunctional
democracy, he failed once again. Despite his reelection, Obama still hasn’t
located his cajones.
Not that any significant gun legislation ever had a chance
of passing the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, because the NRA
has a lock on that body. Voters want sensible gun laws, sensible restrictions
on who can buy and own a gun, but our lawmakers will continue to ignore us, no
matter how many children are killed, because they are scared witless by the
NRA, and the NRA is in turn beholden to 18th century thinking.
When I hear the NRA and its acolytes talk about the need for
citizens to own guns for the purpose of protecting themselves from depredations
by the government, I think of the Boston Police Department and all the
paramilitary equipment it deployed this week, the officers who looked exactly
like soldiers, the black armored vehicles, and I think of some idiot who
believes that owning a .12 gauge shotgun is going to protect him and his family
from all that firepower.
Good luck with that, pal.
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