Shortly after the Sandy Hook school massacre, I had a letter published detailing my concerns about America’s gun culture.
Once again our flags are lowered to half staff, people wring their hands, and the news starts to fade as we endure another massacre.
On Valentine’s Day a mentally disturbed person, known to local authorities, perpetrated an assault at a school with an armed guard on the premises.
As survivors and students across the country beg for changes to our gun laws with chants of “never again” they are mocked with galling vitriol by NRA-inspired internet trolls (“Conservatives mock Parkland victims,” Salon, Feb. 21).
As I contemplate American gun culture, a sacrosanct religion, I wonder if any of its disciples have lost loved ones to gun violence.
I listen to their political lobby hiding behind the Second Amendment, turning politicians into jelly and preaching that gun control will lead to the elimination of all gun ownership and to the eventual loss of all personal freedoms.
Contemplating the Second Amendment when it was drafted at a time when it took five minutes to load a rifle with one bullet, I wonder if the drafters envisioned a technology that allows a military assault-style weapon to fire five bullets in one second and end up in civilian society.
Can we as a civilized society empathize with people who have lost loved ones to gun violence, the number of which has exceeded the total loss of all Americans in all the wars we have fought? (“Lessons from the Virginia shooting,” New York Times, Aug. 26, 2015).
Can we love our most valuable resource, making children’s lives our highest priority?
Will this tragedy fade into oblivion like all that have come before?
Bart Kavruck,
Port Townsend