NEWTOWN TRAGEDY

The news bulletins tell you that a “gunman” has entered a school and killed 20 children and 6 adults.

Simple statistics but not so to assimilate as they crash into your uncomprehending brain.

The details trickle in.  The children are very young; 5 to 10 years old. (Would it have been less tragic if they had been older?)

You learn that he used two hand guns and a 222 Bushmaster, a semi-automatic assault rifle that can be purchased in US gun stores for under $400. A rifle with a muzzle velocity of 3200 ft/sec, and an effective range of 600 meters.  A very effective weapon for killing 5 year olds.

You learn that aside from three children who were still alive, the police needed no medical assistance....all the others were dead. All struck by more than one bullet.

You learn that he first killed his own mother, that when he got into the school the first person to die was the very brave principle who put herself between the madman and her children

The details pile up. You try to assimilate them all, to understand, to make sense of it.  WHY? Is the thought that first come to your mind.  Why kill children?  If he wanted to end his own life, why take children with him?

Slowly, however, your mind recovers somewhat from the initial shock and you begin to think about what must have taken place in those classrooms.  That is when the real horror begins to dawn on you.

That’s when you express admiration for the police for having the foresight to have the surviving children hold hands and close their eyes are they were led out of the school.

But the horror doesn’t end there.  You learn that the gun lobby response is to suggest that the answer to guns is more guns, that had teachers been armed, the death toll would have been much less.  No suggestion that maybe, just maybe, the average citizen doesn’t really need a high-powered assault rifle. Of course, he still could have killed them all with the two registered handguns, couldn't he.

But gun control isn’t the real answer anyway, is it? If people want to kill, they will find guns.  And it’s when you finally hear the “good people”, even the President, who should know better, suggesting gun control as the answer to these tragedies that the real horror becomes apparent… because in that moment, you realize that this is not the last tragedy you will hear about, that there will be more… and you wonder how long it will take for people to wake up to the fact that its their very way of life, their “culture” that is fundamentally sick.

This is a culture in which individual freedoms and profit trump all other concerns. This is a culture that idolizes greed and selfishness, a culture that has been well trained by members of the Rand Corporation, among others.

And the really sad part is that this miasmic culture has spread its poisonous, selfish economic attitudes throughout the world.  Their tentacles probe into every society on earth, corrupting and poisoning whatever they touch.  It’s doubly sad to realize that this country, that considers itself to be the world’s policeman, behaves very much like an immature, selfish, spoiled child... not the kind of policeman I would like to see on my block.