PAST TIME TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT GUN VIOLENCE

I don’t think I ever worried about whether my two children would be alive to return home from school at the end of the day.

They graduated from high school in 1998 and 2003, and we lived in an extremely upscale community. We were concerned about things like drugs, but survival was way down the list.

And if that seems like a different world, consider my high school years that ended in 1967. One of the extracurricular activities in which students could participate was the Rifle Club.

Times have changed.

Actually, to be fair, the whole school shooting thing started when my younger child was still in school. Columbine in April 1999 wasn’t the first, but it was the big one that brought the problem into the spotlight.

Two misfit kids in the Denver suburbs murdered 12 of their classmates and then killed themselves, becoming almost instantly famous in the process.

That was a pretty big number until December 2012, when 26 children were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. Then in 2018, 17 died at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in south Florida.

These two shootings in particular have had such an impact that they have driven the gun nuts to the edge of madness. Instead of their usual arguments about violence in moves, television and video games being the cause, their argument about these two events is that they didn’t really happen.

That’s right. They claim both shootings were faked to make legitimate gun owners look bad and make it easier to erode Second Amendment rights.

And of course these are the people who claim it’s the Second Amendment that makes all our other rights possible.

A lot of it comes down to racism. Until about 50 years ago, even the National Rifle Association never claimed there was an unrestricted right to gun ownership.

What changed?

Urban rioting in the ’60s and increasing ownership of guns by black people had a lot to do with it. All of a sudden, we were back to a society where white men had to protect the women-folk from those big black bucks who were always looking to rape them.

Of course it wasn’t true.

The gun issue has become just another way plutocrat Republicans get working-class people to vote against their own economic interests and keep taxes low for billionaires.

But all those guns in the home are hardly good things. Groups like Sandy Hook Promise work hard to correct misinformation about the connection between parents having guns in the home and the death of children by gun violence.

Sadly, too many people think we are the only really free country in the world. But most of western European nations are free, and they don’t murder their children. In fact, our own murder rate of all types is ridiculously high compared to other free countries.

The problem is a very simple one.

English comedian Eddie Izzard nailed it when he was talking to a New York audience about how gun violence is declining everywhere except here.

“Do you people realize there are other countries?”