Platitudes are no cure

Newtown shootings demand action, not more talk

As the world looks to the U.S. in horror after the shooting deaths of 20 small children and six adults in a Connecticut school last Friday, the last thing it deserves to hear back is platitudes.

Always, after such events, Americans have mouthed platitudes, and then they’ve waited for the fuss to die down and for the horror to fade. Then, it all goes away until the very next time someone opens fire and mows down his fellow Americans at a shopping mall, a theatre, a school or wherever.

Depending which side of the gun control issue they emanate from, the platitudes run the gamut from, “We must take meaningful action,” — without ever going into any detail about what that action might involve — to “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” Or worse, “If only the teachers had been armed, this wouldn’t have happened.” As though the answer to gun violence is to create the circumstances for more gun violence, in a humourless parody of the precept of mutually assured destruction, which supposedly kept the nuclear-armed U.S. and Soviet Union from wiping each other out during the Cold War. There is a reason that the acronym for mutually assured destruction is MAD.

This time, the platitudes must stop. One need only look at the faces of the children who died in the gunfire at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, to know that they merit so much more than platitudes uttered in the heat of the moment — platitudes that will be carefully stored away soon, only to be trotted out again in the next mass killing. And, as long as people in power treat platitudes as solutions, the next mass killing is inevitable. In the photos of those baby faces, every parent in the U.S. saw their own children’s faces, and in the heart-wrenching photos of the distraught, weeping parents of Newtown, every other parent in the U.S. saw themselves.

President Barack Obama must do more than tell parents to remember to hug their children. He must take charge of the gun control issue so as to ensure that every child comes home safely from school each day — so that there is a child for parents to continue to hug, so that no more teddy-bear shrines are arrayed in front of schools where unthinkable tragedy has played out.

Obama can ignore the misguided, self-righteous wrath of the gun lobby because he no longer has to worry about garnering votes for the next election. He can set aside the platitudes and start figuring out how to curb America’s sick love affair with guns. He can ask, for example, why any civilian should ever be able to obtain weapons that should be reserved for the military, weapons that can fire dozens of rounds as happened at Newtown, and then he can set about dealing with that.

We do not presume to tell the U.S. how to treat the gun sickness that has arisen from the perversion of the Second Amendment’s clause about the right to bear arms. The issue is a broad one. It involves many kinds of guns and serious thinking about bans, licensing categories and the like. The turning point has come. There must be an end to platitudes and a beginning to action.