The Talking Drum: A Shameful Day In Washington

Americans fight for the right to bear arms and carry consealed handguns. The only possible target of a handgun is another human.

ON APRIL 17, 2013, and the President of the United States has stepped outside of the capital building. He is delivering the bad news. The laws that have been proposed to help stop criminals and the mentally ill from acquiring guns and assault weapons have been blocked in the Congress by a minority of senators.

These laws were created partly in response to a tragedy in a small community named Newtown. A young man walked into a first grade class with an assault rifle and proceeded to gun down little children. Twenty babies died on that day. The nation and even the World was shocked by such an act of obvious insanity.

Questions were asked. The same ques­tions that are always asked, like; “How could this happen?” “Where did such an obviously in­sane person get access to such weapons of hu­man destruc­tion?” “What would motivate a person to com­mit such a hei­nous crime?”

The president recalled the time when he went to comfort these families in the midst of their loss. He said, “Something must be different now, we’re gonna have to change.” So he returned to Washington and went to work, pushing for legislation that would come to answer some of the questions that we have posed again and again in this country.

On April 17th, he had to admit defeat. Even though the major­ity of senators supported the new legislation and 90 percent of the people of the nation supported the legislation, it could not pass the house of representatives and the president, perhaps correctly, pointed the finger squarely at the members of congress who did not have the courage or the political will to stand up to the “gun lobby”. He called them out for shooting down “common sense legislation” designed to address this problem.

So much for the rule of law, so much for democracy, so much for the system of political rule that we are told to rely on to pro­tect us from the forces of evil within our society and within our­selves. If the government cannot take the most obvious step of keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally unstable and the criminal, can it do anything to solve the problems that we face in modern society?

The honest answer to that question is no. It is not reasonable to expect the system that caused the problem to bring the solution to the problem. It would be like asking a lion to solve the prob­lem of big cats preying on antelope in the bush. Why would we expect a deliberative body to place restrictions on guns when that same body created and passed the second amendment that states that every US citizen has the right to carry those same guns?

If we look in another direction we can see even more. The gun manufacturing industry in the US is huge. According to Statistic Brain’s Firearms Statistics web page, the firearms industry pro­duces more than 3.4 million guns each year. Nearly nine hundred thousand of these guns are pistols, which have no other purpose than to kill human beings. This industry generates 11 billion dol­lars in revenue each year. Given these statistics it seems clear that someone is buying a significant number of guns. Can we really blame congress when the people of this nation are supporting an 11 billion dollar industry that is putting almost a million hand­guns on the streets of our nation each year? That’s more than one new handgun on the street every hour of every day.

Of all of the things the President said in his speech, perhaps that is the statement that carries the honest truth. We can’t look to Washington to solve a problem that we ourselves have created. The only way that we can ensure the safety of our children, our mothers, our fathers, our sisters and brothers is to look to our own quality. Each individual must find with­in themselves the strength to fight the evil within. If we are going to change anything in our society, perhaps we should change the values that we hold. We must accept the fact that human life is more valuable than the right to carry the means to end it. We must be­come a society of people who support the development of human genius. We must dedicate ourselves to the preservation of all life rather than the power to end life.

I urge the people of this nation to think very seriously about the values that we hold. Perhaps then we will have a chance to hold our children in our arms in happiness rather than in sorrow, and we’ll no longer see their lives bleed out from the wounds of our discontent.

We must become the solution to our own problem. We must adopt values that give us a reason to preserve life, a set of val­ues that can build a society where innocent children can live and grow in safety. Without these values, we are subject to the whims of human emotion and the manipulation of corporate machines that have no motivation except the preservation of monetary profit. A corporation that makes money by building and selling devices designed to kill, can only survive if killing is legal and acceptable behavior. In this nation, even though every person at some point in their lives has recognized that killing is wrong, we seem to have the idea that we should have the right to own the means to do it. This doesn’t make sense, and the only entities that gain from this nonsense are the corporations that manufacture and sell the means for the destruction of life.

Guns are just machines. A gun is no more dangerous than the human that holds it. This is true, but why build such a machine if it is not meant to be used? This is the question that we should ask ourselves about the corporations that profit by building the tools to destroy life. We do not need to blame these corporations. We just need to stop buying their products. The corporations will either find new products to sell or cease to exist. The problem comes when these same corporations begin to proactively build a market for their products. Imagine what these corporations would do to achieve this. Any increase in violence, fear and destruction would improve the likelihood that more guns would be sold. The solution that we must find must include the ability for each of us to resist the violent tendencies that exist in each of us. Only then will we find a solution to problems like the Newtown Massacre.