Sensible changes in gun laws

When the cursor sits there on the screen, blinking, I rarely panic. I’m never at a loss for words. No writer’s block for me, ever.

This morning was different. The cursor seemed threatening. It was challenging me. It said “what do you have that makes any difference in the grand scheme of things, Christine?” And the answer, she wrote, is nothing.

But that doesn’t mean I won’t write, because silence implies consent, and I do not consent to anything that happened on Valentine’s Day.

I do not consent to people blaming guns for killing children.

I do not consent to people crediting teachers with guns for saving children.

I do not consent to people pointing the fingers at the political party they don’t belong to, claiming they have the blood of children on their hands.

I do not consent to people telling other people how they should feel about death or constitutional amendments.

To me, the Florida high school shooting is equal parts tragedy, farce and opportunity. The tragedy is obvious, in that young people and their teachers are dead. In the level of horror, this doesn’t surpass Newtown, but that’s cold comfort. Children are dead, and they were murdered at school, and the school was in a safe zone, and children are dead. The dirge remains the same, just sung in a different key.

The farce is the way people are politicizing the tragedy even though they always say, at the end of these horrors, we shouldn’t engage in the blame game.

The opportunity, one we shouldn’t have waited for and one that shouldn’t have cost 17 more lives, added to the ones that have already been lost over the years, is the chance to finally say once and for all that whatever the hell we were doing up to this point didn’t work.

Hunting should not be considered a sacrament, so you don’t have the right to stockpile an arsenal of weapons that should only be used by soldiers. You want to blow the face off of Bambi, you have a right to do it, but you don’t get to employ weapons that would take out an ISIS terror cell to do it.

You’ve been treated for mental illness and are still in therapy and taking psychotropic drugs? We feel your pain, get better, but until then you don’t have the right to own or use a weapon. Period.

You have a criminal background, including a few DUIs because, gosh, who knew a six pack of beer could make you blow twice the legal limit, you don’t get to own a gun until you go through five years of drug tests.

And no, we don’t want teachers coming to school with guns, and shut up about how the best way to stop bad guys with guns from killing people is to arm good guys.

And you there, smirking because you think the Republicans are whores to the NRA, let’s try a little identity politics shaming with your side of the aisle.

If we’re going to blame an organization that promotes responsible gun use and ownership for sick, sadistic teenagers and their suicidal tendencies, let’s go out and blame all of the undocumented immigrants out there when one of them happens to murder a young woman named Kate.

How does that work for you? How is that sweet symmetry, and sense?

And those of you slamming on Donald Trump might want to realize that he’s taken infinitely less money from the NRA than that bastion of liberal “wokedness,” Bernie Sanders.

And Democrats who are all about protecting innocent children from being murdered, let’s see you explain your blind and lockstep support for late-term abortion.

What’s that? Apples and oranges? I’m sorry, but the apple of a monstrous teen who managed to stockpile some guns is directly related to the orange of him being mentally diseased. Go ahead and blame the NRA if you want. I’d be happy if the group dissolved into the ether, because I’m sick of their noise.

But don’t forget to point the finger at mental health advocates and libertarians who absolutely refuse to limit the rights of the mental ill if it would protect those of sound mind and body, most especially children.

There are my thoughts. I’ll leave you with your own.