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| Neil Heslin and a photo of his son murdered at Sandy Hook testifying in front of a Congressional Committee |
It really was a tale of two cities in the US this past week
when the effects of terror played out in front of us all to see. While one
showed the powerful and admirable resources of the state in hunting down and
capturing dead or alive of the perpetrators, the other showed the mind-boggling
failure of a bunch of egregiously self-centered elected officials to pass
legislation to help prevent the recurrence of a kind of terrorism that affects
the country every single day. You can all guess that the first city is Boston
and the tragedy of last Monday’s marathon bombing. The second however is not
just one city, but nevertheless is epitomized by the horrific murder of twenty-six
people, mainly young children in Sandy Hook late last year. It is in fact every
city in the United States, from Boston to San Diego and Seattle to Miami. It is
the kind of terror borne in the barrel of a gun and played out in the homes and
on the streets of the United States that has taken the lives of over three
thousand people since one man walked in to that elementary school in
mid-December and proceeded to murder everyone in sight.
I am in no way trying to belittle the shocking deaths of
three people and the maiming of nearly two hundred more last Monday. Both
examples I have taken are of violence a government, an elected representative
should do their best to make sure never happens again. But I couldn’t control
my rage looking at the result of the Senate vote where a bill to implement
background checks on gun buyers was defeated in a 54-46 vote. It stunned me and
then hearing the voice of Neil Heslin, whose six year old was murdered in Sandy
Hook, my emotions went from overwhelming sympathy to a personally previously
inconceivable sense of anger that has led me to write this article. I am not
alone. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, a woman who miraculously survived
being shot in the head at point blank range at a mass shooting a few years ago
penned a heart-wrenching piece on the failure of the vote on Wednesday. It was
not a lament but the combination of anger and frustration of a woman who fought for her
life after being shot and tried her best to prevent that from happening to
herself and others again.
The result of the vote has been spinned by all sides of the
political spectrum but I want to make my feelings on it clear and simple. Both
Boston and Sandy Hook are examples of terror and therefore in my mind
terrorism. While one will result in the full gauntlet of the state security
apparatus being implemented which will affect every single individual in the
country; from increased patting down at airport security, more intrusion on our
privacy and the curtailment of liberty, the other will allow a tiny minority to
go about and buy weapons to kill any individual they want with the flimsiest
(if any) restrictions. And they do it every day.
Now one can go on about the semantics of terrorism. It is a
word saddled with fierce emotion and like many words is almost a term for a
whole spectrum of ideas but is dominated by a certain kind. Boston is an
example of what we take for granted as terrorism. But what do you call the
actions of a gunman in a school, the fear in the hearts and minds of young
children as their teachers barricade doors from an evil man and tell the kids
they love them so the last overwhelming thing they sense before death is not
the brutally sharp piercing of a bullet in their bodies as their lives wilt
away? This is just one example. What is it called when someone walks in to a
cinema and proceeds to shoot at innocent people watching a movie? The list goes
on. The actions are not just to kill but to instill terror.
On Wednesday, Congress prevented the curtailment of a form
of terrorism that happens on a daily basis in the United States. It was a bill
that was supported by ninety percent of Americans yet it came down to the
opinions of a simple hundred individuals in the gilded halls of Washington. In
failing to pass the most basic forms of background checks, something even prior
to the tragedy of Sandy Hook that brought about the bill in the first place
seemed common sense; these fifty self centered puppets of vested interests
failed a nation and its people, not to mention the legacy of those children who
lost their lives in December. They have taken the survival of their own
political lives over the survival of countless thousands who in the future will
be murdered in cold blood by guns. It is not just about the children of Sandy
Hook, but of future children who will grow up to take a gun and shoot dead the
innocent future children of others in the United States.
While Boston brought to us a form of terrorism we have not
seen in the United States for years, many of us and most certainly a lot of
lawmakers fail to see the terror the unrestricted use of guns has on a nation. Nevertheless
it is a crime that politicians have not been accounted for in their failure to
prevent from happening on a daily basis. So with the same determination they
have shown in the past in preventing traditional terrorism and the unity of
belief after Boston, they must do their upmost to prevent people from killing
and maiming innocent citizens with guns.
