Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker on "the truth, plain and simple," which makes America a shocking exception to the rest of the civilized world, when it comes to the issues of gun control and gun violence:
And now it has happened again, bang, like clockwork, one might say: Twenty dead children—babies, really—in a kindergarten in a prosperous town in Connecticut. And a mother screaming. And twenty families told that their grade-schooler had died. After the Aurora killings, I did a few debates with advocates for the child-killing lobby—sorry, the gun lobby—and, without exception and with a mad vehemence, they told the same old lies: it doesn’t happen here more often than elsewhere (yes, it does); more people are protected by guns than killed by them (no, they aren’t—that’s a flat-out fabrication); guns don’t kill people, people do; and all the other perverted lies that people who can only be called knowing accessories to murder continue to repeat, people who are in their own way every bit as twisted and crazy as the killers whom they defend. (That they are often the same people who pretend outrage at the loss of a single embryo only makes the craziness still crazier.)
And he's right. And I'm beyond tired of hearing some fellow Catholics and many right-wing evangelicals trot out the abortion issue when tragedies like yesterday's tragedy in a grade-school occur--as if they really care about the lives of children following birth, or about life issues in general, as they kick and scream about their right to bear arms.
(An exercise for readers: go to Google images, google "gun collection," and see what you come up with. As you click on the pictures your search retrieves, notice the name of the country in which these gun collections are maintained. The name that comes up over and over again.)
No comments:
Post a Comment