For most of us, safety is something we take for granted. We assume that, after a day at work or leisure, the people we love will return home in the evening unharmed as they always have.

In the America we live in today, that assumption is false.

Our culture is awash in violence. There’s violence, both real and imagined, twenty-four-seven on television and on the Web. Our children play games (yes, they’re called games!) with cruelty and violence at their core. The fact is that we live surrounded by a constant loop of violent images. We stare at the images, at once fascinated and then repulsed, and then pretend that the reality of violent chaos will never stain our own doorsteps.

We’re certainly a clever lot, are we not?

Nature and nurture have provided us with a deep storehouse of psychological tricks to guard our perception of safety, even as we’re confronted daily with the shootings, the suicides, and the mayhem. We tell ourselves the story that the cruel disruptions of violence are something that happens only to other people—never to us. To keep the reality at bay, we fool ourselves into believing that violence visits only those unlucky enough to have been born or descended into the most dire of life’s circumstances: poverty that crushes the spirit, the foulness of racism and ethnic hatred, the traps of sectarian violence, the tangles of historic discontent.

One of the greatest tragedies of our time is that we find ourselves in a cycle of violence that has become institutionalized in the halls of Congress and upon the benches of the Supreme Court. We and our politicians cower before a powerful and well-funded gun lobby that claims that the right of some citizens to amass arsenals of military-style weapons is more fundamental than the right of the rest of us to be safe in our homes and our public places.

And then we’re forced to confront the face of Richard Martinez.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nho1ghfS9k4

There he is on the evening news pleading with us to wake up. There he is. Someone just like us. There he is, yet another grieving father who finds himself dragged into the sad and never-ending parade of parents whose children have been taken from them.

Richard Martinez’s cry of pain should be ours as well. And yet it isn’t. Mr. Martinez will go off to live in his own hell of grieving for the cruel and unnecessary death of his twenty-year-old son Christopher. The gun lobby and the NRA will continue to pour money into the coffers of politicians. And we—the public, the paralyzed public—will go on, believing that the descent into violence is irreversible. That nothing can be done.

And make no mistake about it. It is that presumption of powerlessness that is the greatest and most foul abdication of all.

I am sick to the bone watching politicians and religious leaders meeting with the bereaved families, offering up their rehearsed condolences and then returning to Congress or the pulpit and doing nothing. I am sick to the bone seeing yet another tearful candlelight memorial, yet another stack of wilting flowers and scribbled notes outside the school, the parking lot, the courthouse, the movie theater.

What has happened to our belief in the fundamental right to safety? Have we forgotten—or been made to forget—that one of the most revered of our documents—our Declaration of Independence—enshrines our right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”? Can we not all agree that without safety there is no life? That without safety there is no liberty? That without safety there is no place to pursue our happiness whatever that may be?

It seems we have completely forgotten the power we have to organize, to speak out, to protest, to insist that our politicians listen to us. I cannot help but wonder who we are —the “we” that is the 97-percent majority—that we continue to accept in near silence the obscene parade of carnage.

It is time to remind ourselves that the words enshrined in the Declaration of Independence became the road map and rallying cry for the great, progressive social movements in American history. The suffragists, the abolitionists, the foot soldiers of the civil-rights movement—all believed in the fundamental truth of those words and fought for their right to claim them as their own.

The question is: Will we summon the courage to follow in their footsteps?

The post Gun violence: We’ve abdicated our power to stop the madness appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Progressives, can you imagine Rachel Maddow shying away from a story high on the liberal agenda. I couldn’t until the evening of Friday, December 14,  following the horrendous massacre at SandyHook Elementary School in Newtown, CT. I had watched CNN much of the day following the shooting and then the CBS Evening News. They talked about the terrible tragedy; the pain and suffering of the families; the shame on America factor. What they didn’t directly talk about was gun control. It was as if it was a hot potato, and they didn’t want to touch it.

None of that surprised me, although it did disappoint me. However, I was sure that Rachel Maddow would address the issue head on – at the top of her evening show. No such luck. She started off reading a series of quotes about how horrible the disaster was. Because she often takes a circuitous route to cleverly get to her main point, I still had hope that she would make the issue of gun control the top story of the evening. It didn’t happen that way. It wasn’t until the second half of the show that she dedicated a few minutes to perhaps the most important factor of the incident; that we have way too many guns in our society, and we have shied away from enacting legislation to limit them. We have even been skittish about talking about guns. However, I thought that she would – in a big way. She didn’t. To her credit, she began her next show on Monday, December 17 with extensive examination of the gun control issue.

It wasn’t until the next morning that I found a public figure directly addressing the gun control issue. Marian Wright Edelman, director of the Children’s Defense Fund, made it clear:

Once again we are faced with unspeakable horror from gun violence and once again we are reminded that there is no safe harbor for our children. How young do the victims have to be and how many children need to die before we stop the proliferation of guns in our nation and the killing of innocents? The most recent statistics reveal 2,694 children and teens were killed by gunfire in 2010; 1,773 of them were victims of homicide and 67 of these were elementary school-age children. If those children and teens were still alive they would fill 108 classrooms of 25 each. Since 1979 when gun death data were first collected by age, a shocking 119,079 children and teens have been killed by gun violence. That is more child and youth deaths in America than American battle deaths in World War I (53,402) or in Vietnam (47,434) or in the Korean War (33,739) or in the Iraq War (3,517). Where is our anti-war movement to protect children from pervasive gun violence here at home?

Howard Kurtz of the Daily Beast later told us:

Gun-rights activists had remained largely quiet on the issue since Friday’s shooting, all but one declining to appear on the Sunday talk shows.

David Gregory, the host of “Meet the Press,” said NBC invited all 31 “pro-gun” senators to appear on Sunday’s show, and all 31 declined. All eight Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee were unavailable or unwilling to appear on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” host Bob Schieffer said.

Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, was the sole representative of gun rights’ activists on the various Sunday talk shows. In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Gohmert defended the sale of assault weapons and said that the principal at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who authorities say died trying to overtake the shooter, should herself have been armed.

“I wish to God she had had an M-4 in her office, locked up so when she heard gunfire, she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands. But she takes him (the shooter) out, takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids,” Gohmert said.

Anne Flaherty of the Huffington Post wrote, three days after the shooting:

On Monday, Sen. Joe Manchin, a lifelong member of the National Rifle Association, said it was time to discuss gun policy and move toward action on gun regulation. The conservative West Virginia Democrat said Monday he agrees with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has advocated banning the sale of assault weapons.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said she will introduce legislation next year to ban new assault weapons, as well as big clips, drums and strips of more than 10 bullets.

“It can be done,” Feinstein told NBC’s “Meet the Press” of reinstating the ban despite deep opposition by the powerful National Rifle Association and similar groups.

Bloomberg said Obama could use executive powers to enforce existing gun laws, as well as throw his weight behind legislation like Feinstein’s.

President Obama’s initial reaction was to dance around the issue of gun control. Perhaps this is necessary because he doesn’t want to give Republicans any additional reason to be upset with him and to shy away from a reasonable compromise on the Fiscal Cliff issue. He is well aware of the problems with guns, after three years as a community organizer in Chicago and now a witness to the record-breaking level of gun violence in his home town. While he may have reasons to shy away from the issue, at least in the short run, the media has no reason. Thanks to Marian Wright Edelman and others who had the courage to open the dialogue. Shame on CNN and CBS and probably a number of other outlets in the mainstream news.

The post It took too long to start the gun control debate appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Go figure. Republicans have made a bogus issue out of the September 11, 2012 incident at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.  They sabotaged the nomination of Susan Rice to become Secretary of State even though she is eminently qualified.  As tragic as it was, the number of Americans killed in Benghazi was four.

On December 14, 2012, a gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut and killed close to thirty people, including his mother as well as eighteen to twenty children.

He didn’t do it with a knife; he didn’t do it with his fists; he didn’t do it with illegal biological or chemical weapons. He did it with a gun. Yet, what do we do?  John Boehner tweeted that flags at the U.S. Capitol will be lowered. I’m sure that will prevent further gun carnage.

Even Democrats, including President Barack Obama, have been reluctant to take on the gun lobby. During the administration of President Bill Clinton, eleven kinds of assault weapons were banned. The law was allowed to expire, and assault weapons are back on the streets. Now we have Sandy Hook to add to the lists of Aurora, Columbine, Tucson, and others.

Is there something wrong with this picture? Boehner and others can’t let go of Benghazi. No public figure pontificating on it had his or her “feet on the ground” there. They don’t know what really happened. At the same time, we have hundreds of witnesses to the shooting massacres within the U.S.

Our priorities are way out of whack, even for Democrats. Let’s grow some cajones and at least ban assault weapons.

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