The President of the NRA was on
Face the Nation today. He cited the example of Israel in order to make
his case as to why putting armed guards in all our schools is a good
idea. Apparently, Israel did just that in their schools and succeeded
at reducing attacks on students
Israel - seriously, Israel? The analogy is absurd if not downright laughable.
Israel
is a country which, through its geography and history, is in a
perpetual state of war against organized external enemies. There are
soldiers with machine guns on just about every corner. Children there
grow up prepared at any time for mass mobilizations of citizen-soldiers
to defend their country. To be there is to sense the immediate
possibility of real violence at any time and any moment. And their kids
feel it too.
Is
that the kind of country that we want America to be? Sadly, that is the
kind of America many kids in our urban areas have today. But also in
our suburbs, in our ex-urbs, in our country and mountain hamlets, and in
every single one of our kindergarten and first grade classrooms?
Yeah??
You ok with that? Does that not bother you? Do you think that that is
just way things are and you had better "man up" and arm up or be at
risk of being an irresponsible father, or mother, or school principal or
teacher or class psychologist? And if you are ok with that, then I
reckon you are in the vast minority of parents in our country. The
majority have silently let you produce ever more violent movies and
video games, let you flood the streets with killing machines that can
fire 100 high impact bullets without the need of reloading, and let you
de-fund public mental health care.
And
who are our enemies? Well...it is the kid next door. The kid who has
hidden mental health issues, who, like most kids, finds refuge in his
room playing video games, and who has easy access to a smorgasbord of
assault weapons and high-round clips of ammunition. It is the college
or grad student who has lost the abilty to discern between reality and
nightmare, who has become a "loser", who desires to extract himself from
obscurity and get known. It is the otherwise good son of a single
mother who sees nothing but dead ends in his life and likes the easy
trappings of dealing drugs and the "brotherhood" of gang life.
And,
here is the sad truth that we ignore because we all have been guilty in
allowing the culture of violence and guns to fester in our society...
it could be ANYONE.
Our
enemy is not the PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran...it is ourselves and
our unwillingness to change. It is special interest groups who work on
behalf of gun makers to sell drums of ammo and cheap handguns, it is the
entertainment industry who knows that high body counts equals high
profits, and it is our healthcare system that has treated mental health
like it treats the poor - only to be seen in emergency rooms.
The
NRA' s position, that everything else except guns, is responsible for
Columbine, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Portland, a street corner every night
in Chicago, and for the daily funerals of six and seven-year olds and
their teachers and administrators the last week has brought to a small,
beautiful town thirty minutes from where I live, only exposes them as an
unecessary side show from the necessary discussions we should be having
about real societal change.
Their
evoking of Israel as a good example of what our policies should look
like can only lead us to ask - who stands to benefit from us, from our
kids, fearing our neighbors and fellow Americans so much that we have to
put citizen soldiers in all our classrooms and eventually on every
street corner in the US? If you think that our kids will benefit, go
ask someone who grew up in a war zone how "secure", they felt. My guess
is that the majority of you won't need to ask. The answer is right in
front of you. On Face the Nation this past Sunday.
Posted and written by Ted Muftic, a Muftic Forum contributor
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