It's Not Complicated, It's Common Sense

I keep shaking my head, No. News of the tragedy at Sandy Hook, images of our local community torn apart, causes me to shake my head from side-to-side, involuntarily. No. Driving to work in the morning, I hear the I95 DJ’s talking about the tragedy in Newtown, I gaze numbly at the road ahead and my head shakes, this can’t be. Watching the news, pictures of cherubic first graders, taken all too soon, there’s that movement again, No. Is this tragedy so big that I am subconsciously denying it ever happened? Like a child avoiding bad news? Am I just unable to get a handle on the fact that a lone gunman slaughtered all those kids with an assault rifle as if he was at an arcade? For most of us, that’s it, it’s unfathomable.

 

In trying to wrap my head around this inhumane tragedy, I’ve been visited by the many stages of grief. Eventually, I do what we Americans do, look for solutions to the problem. America has a problem if every couple of months some disaffected boy gets a hold of a machine gun and thinks it’s okay to commit mass-murder. We have to solve this problem, now. It’s bad, we have come to the point of knowing, how these things go. There’s a predictable pattern to the news coverage of a mass shooting and that’s just unacceptable. We cannot, as a society, become desensitized to a killing spree of this magnitude.  It’s time to do something about this. And we don’t need Congress or President Obama all we need is the American people. There’s such a groundswell of support for a sea change that we need to get it done, now.

 

We all agree there’s a problem. Look at a graph of the occurrences of  mass shootings and you will see, that by any measure, shootings like Columbine, The Batman movie, in Aurora, Colorado and now Sandy Hook Elementary are on the rise. Like a heart disease patient, who continues to have chest pain or shortness of breath, you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you, “If you want to improve your chances of survival, if you want to live your life with a healthy heart, I would recommend some common sense changes. You should eat healthy, exercise regularly, drink alcohol in moderation, decrease stress, quit smoking.”  That same doctor will tell you that this is not an exact science and other factors weigh into your heart-health but if you can do those things, you will clearly be increasing your chances of living a long life. Now you might still get heart disease or you might get shot while attending the midnight showing of Batman but at least you did something about the things you could control. There are things we can control, as Americans, to decrease the chances that some young man will commit mass murder in your home town. We should do these things, now.

 After each mass shooting we see what pro-gun people call a knee-jerk reaction. The pro-gun lobby claims people are politicizing the tragedy. News flash, this is a political issue. Were anti-war protesters politicizing the Vietnam War? Were our Revolutionary forefathers politicizing the Boston Massacre? Yes they were, because it is a political issue. Finally, the American people are saying, enough is enough.  Our society is saying that, in the name of those innocents at Sandy Hook, we have had enough. There are things we can do as a society to at least decrease the chances that these mass killing sprees will happen. Now don’t get me wrong, some nut might still get a gun and shoot up his place of work but like that heart patient, there are things we can do, as a society, to decrease the chances that mass killings will happen. I’m no expert on psychology, I’m not a statistical wonk, I've read a few articles and researched charts and graphs about shooting sprees in America. And with my credentials as an American, with a little bit of common sense, I propose we try a few things that just might help. I know I am reiterating some things others have said but I felt compelled to do, something.

Decrease violence in the visual market place. Our children and young adults should not be bombarded with images of blood and slaughter.  Clearly most normal kids can watch a slasher flick or play “Call of Duty” and know enough to not shoot up their local elementary school. Sure most kids know it’s a game and will go about their daily routines but as we sadly know, sometimes there’s an outlier, an Adam Lanza in any random sample. These games are abhorrent and our kids should not be playing them, it HAS to desensitize all kids to the violence.  Do we notice that the shooter is always a boy? How many girls are playing Call of Duty? Think there’s a correlation? Who could argue that these shooter games weighed into these boys winding up in a crowded place with a machine gun? It had to be an influence, no? I would love to see video game makers stop making these games but independent of that, we can stop buying them. We didn’t have these games in the 50’s, 60’s or 70’s. Do we really think it's a coincidence that terror did not visit our country in this manner back then?  Shouldn’t we remove this variable on the off chance it just MIGHT cause these shootings? Aren’t we willing to stop smoking because it just might help our heart health? So why not try to quit violent video games, as a nation?

Another analogy might help: All New Yorkers are now standing away from the platform as the train is pulling into the station. Why? 5 million people commute on the subway every day. Multiply that times days in a week, then year, the probability that you will be shoved in front of a Brooklyn bound F train is miniscule. Yet we all stand away on the off-chance that some psycho might try to push us in front of the train. Statistically it makes no sense to have this fear, but it’s a simple solution that will take away the chance for  tragedy. And that’s what we should do to help decrease these killings; make the small changes that  might decrease the probability of this happening again. Decreasing the violent images our kids see, our society sees, is one of those changes, like moving away from the edge of the platform.

If kids are playing less video games, they’ll be outside, socializing. Were there less of these shootings when we were kids because we knew each other better?  I can’t help but think the “suburbanization” of our world, where it’s so easy to go about our days and only interact with people via a computer, has altered our society. We are becoming socially inept and in extreme cases, people hunker down in their basements, get trapped inside the scary world inside their head and eventually become Adam Lanza.  I know I am a hopeless romantic, and admittedly I know very little about the Lanza family dynamics, but if Nancy Lanza took Adam to visit his cousins? If she took him on hikes on our beautiful Connecticut hiking trails? If he joined the Boy Scouts or a church group or the Chess Club maybe he would have found a friend? Or if not, someone who would see the warning signs and get him some help? Or at least figure out how to stop him.
 

The mental health of the shooter is always part of the post-shooting discussion. As a school teacher, over the past 16 years, we have seen an excellent move in the right direction on anti-bullying. As you know, this was in reaction to the boys who perpetrated the shootings like Columbine. For a few years in the late 90’s, boys who were bullied were choosing to kill, for revenge. Because of this, our entire society now speaks a language of anti-bullying; there was a sea change. Today, teachers, students and parents are ultra-aware of the signs and evils of bullying. Now by all accounts, Adam Lanza does not seem to have been bullied; I daresay an outcome of Columbine. But something was clearly amiss with this young man. And there seems to be some commonalities with Adam Lanza and our more recent mass murderers. I can’t believe we now talk about them so cavalierly. We as a society should be more aware of boys who are at risk of falling off the deep end and into an elementary school with an assault rifle. We have to become better at identifying, diagnosing and treating the small percentage of young men who are in danger of becoming the next Adam Lanza.  Please hear me, I am not suggesting a witch hunt but a collective awareness, just like we had in the wake of Columbine for bullying. We should all be looking for the warning signs so that we can intervene. These boys are not social pariahs, we should not look askance at them, we should be reaching out to them, intervening, nurturing them and giving them strategies on how to maintain friendships and communicate with peers. If these boys had gotten strategies in early childhood on how to better interact with society, just maybe, we could have avoided these tragedies.

 
I am not for outlawing guns. In America, the right to own a gun is in the Constitution, based on how we are reading it. I would not tackle that Cowboy but I do say, if we go back to the analogy of the patient with heart disease, one of the common sense changes we should make is to ban rapid fire guns and high capacity magazines. I knew Dawn Hochsprung and she was one tough lady, there’s a reason she ran AT Adam Lanza and not away from him. If that skinny little boy had a handgun, she would have disarmed him, I know it. No matter how tough Dawn or anyone is, what chance do we have against countless bullets per second? Let hunters, and Americans who want a firearm to protect themselves, own guns. But let’s get rid of these killing machines. If you know of a retailer that sells these guns, these clips of bullets, boycott. Don’t shop at a store that carries these weapons, and let the owner  know WHY you are not shopping there.

The NRA is a powerful organization but there are only 4 million members. And a decent percentage, (George Stephanopoulos said 74%)  of members support a ban on assault weapons. We Americans are over 300 million strong, we don’t need the NRA, Congress or President Obama to get rid of these weapons. We have to use our outrage, in the wake of Newtown, to make this change.  Like Dawn Hochsprung, and her incredibly brave staff, we should be running towards this problem, it’s the least we can do. As Americans we should do anything to decrease these shootings: protest, boycott, start a letter writing campaign, submit editorials, reach out to our president, senator, representative, neighbor…Now we might not be able to end shootings of this kind but like the heart disease patient, shouldn’t we at least make changes to decrease the probability? Wouldn’t we live in a better country if we at least made some changes to decrease the chances that this kind of tragedy would be visited on another innocent American community? It’s just common sense.