Giffords and the gun violence hearings

How can there be any dissonance, any disagreement that we need to control gun violence after hearing former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords speak?

The Democratic representative from Tucson, Ariz., who survived a gunshot wound to the head in a shooting in January two years ago, eloquently, emotionally, begged lawmakers at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing Wednesday on gun control, to please act now.

In slow and halting speech, Giffords pleaded with the committee to stem gun violence now because “too many children are dying.”  She was referring, most poignantly, to the deaths of 20 children and six adults who were slain by a maniac at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Conn., on Dec. 14.  She also reminded the senators how every day a child, a young person is cut down from gun violence in America.

Giffords said, “The time is now.  You must act.  Be bold, be courageous.  Americans are counting on you.”

Joined by her husband, retired Navy captain and former astronaut Mark Kelly, described the effects of his wife’s shooting two years ago.  You can only imagine the love and pain the couple share from her near-assassination attempt.

“Gabby’s gift for speech is a distant memory.  She struggles to walk, and she is partially blind.  Her right arm is completely paralyzed,” Kelly said.

Think about it, how dramatically, how radically, and how devastatingly this couple’s lives were altered because of a deranged gunman using assault weapons that should never have been available in the first place.  And yet, how miraculously Giffords survived and has come back as far as she has.

In fact, just the day before Giffords’ testimony, Chicago honor student Hadiya Pendleton from Chicago, who attended President Obama’s inauguration, was gunned down blocks from King College Prep School, where she attended classes.  She was one of the students who performed in the school’s marching band at the inauguration.  She died after being shot in the back in a gang shooting.  Hadiya was just 15 years old.

Not so fortunate was Neil Heslin, whose 6-year-old son was shot dead in the rampage in Newtown in December.  “It’s not a good feeling.  Not a good feeling to look at your child laying in a casket or looking at your child with a bullet wound to the forehead.  It’s a real sad thing.”  The grieving Heslin showed the state Legislature in Connecticut a photo of himself and his son when he spoke so movingly at a Monday hearing on gun violence in Connecticut’s statehouse in Hartford.

But in the audience were gun rights advocates who had the termity to demand their Second Amendment rights — right in front of the suffering, mourning Heslin.  And it was ironic that for the nearly 2,000 people who attended the hearing, metal detectors checked to see if anyone might have a concealed weapon. I’m just saying.  Detectors to find guns at a hearing on a tragedy wrought by guns?

As Gabby Giffords spoke, and on the day right after Heslin testified, on Wednesday alone across the United States more gun violence raged.  Six people were shot in a workplace shooting in Phoenix, Ariz.  A white male in his 60s went looking for people at the office building and then fled the scene in a white SUV, according to police.

Then there was the shooting Tuesday in which the gunman not only gunned down a school bus driver, he took a 6-year-old child hostage in Midland City, Ala.  And no, it wasn’t enough for this psycho gunman to use the gun just one time to kill 66-year-old Charles Poland Jr. Poland was shot many times.

After shooting Poland, the gunman walked down the aisle of the school bus and grabbed a 5-year-old boy.

As of Wednesday afternoon the gunman/kidnapper was still holed up in a bunker with the child.  The gunman, identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center that keeps track of hate groups, said the shooter is 65-year-old Jimmy Lee Dykes, a Vietnam veteran with strong anti-American views.

So why in the hell did Dykes, described by neighbors as threatening and paranoid, have firearms in the first place?  Why was nothing done to stop Dykes earlier when he frequently shot at children and dogs entering his rural property?  Why was Dykes, a known society menace who was to appear in court this week, allowed freedom at all?  That his court appearance was based on an incident in December where he fired shots at a neighbor’s pickup that damaged Dykes’ makeshift speed bump on a dirt road?

I’m not done yet reminding you of the tragedy of gun violence.  Just this past Monday a doctor was shot and killed in Newport Beach, Calif. Apparently, Stanwood Fred Elkus, 75, the gunman, shot dead Dr. Ronald Franklin Gilbert, a urologist, at a medical office  in the affluent city in Orange County.  Elkus, a retired barber who suffered from prostate problems, was angry over his incontinence after recent surgery, according to neighbors.

The gun violence rages on.  More people die.  Since the Newtown massacre Dec. 14 there have been more than 1,440 people shot dead by guns.  Those are statistics from just a couple of months.  As we waste more time with hearings and continue listening to the horror stories from families, our friends and neighbors, another person will die by gun.  By the time you read this column there will be more bodies piled up, dead from gunshot.

Isn’t it obvious by now that we have a serious, deadly problem?  That the level of gun violence in America has reached catastrophic proportions?  That we have to seriously rethink Second Amendment rights?

Gabby Giffords, a victim of gun violence herself, is so right.  The time is now to end the gun violence.  Do you hear that?  NOW!

Sadly, it might take more bodies piled up on politicians’ doorsteps before they finally get the point and do the right thing to stop our Saturday night massacre madness.

Jodeane Albright is an award-winning blogger/columnist and the community editor for the Idaho State Journal.

 

Humans are both devil and angel

The first damnable thing is, it takes a tragedy to pull us together as a nation.

The second damnable thing is tragedy is the only thing that pulls us together anymore.

And the third most damning thing is we keep repeating these tragedies.

The Aurora, Colo., shooter, 24-year-old James Holmes, who went on a gun-toting rampage in the wee hours of a midnight showing of the latest Batman movie, “The Dark Knight Rises,” murdered 12 people and wounded 58 more at the theater on July 20.

It’s not that the numbers are so horrific — Norway’s mass killer, Anders Breivik, murdered 77 people on a small Norwegian island, in a country that has stricter gun controls than America does.  Ironically, this July marks the first anniversary of that massacre.  Internet tabloids such as TMZ claim Holmes was a follower of Breivik’s way of thinking.

Well, it doesn’t much matter what Holmes or, for that matter, Breivik thinks because I can guarantee you we’re going to see more of these massacres carried out.  Our society in particular, and the modern world itself are set up to create the circumstances that if someone wants to shoot and kill others, they will.  We just live in a violent era.

Strangely enough, it is not about gun control.  In other words, there is a certain futility involved in thinking that if guns were somehow controlled that would somehow create less availability of guns, and that the person or people using said guns would be less inclined to kill.

I know, I’ve totally lost my liberal credibility on this issue.  But the more I look at Holmes, the more I think about what Breivik did, the more you can buy guns anywhere and any way you want, legal or illegal — all you have to do is Google what you’re looking for, or go to your local Walmart — then how can you begin to control access to guns?

The far better approach is to counteract the society approach that wants guns in the first place.  And therein lies the core of why we keep having tragic shootings.

At that core is the human penchant for violence.  Now before you tell me that neither you nor me or nor your sainted mother are incapable of violence, let me warn you, we are all capable of violence.  I mean all of us.  It’s inborn, because if we didn’t have some violence we would have never evolved. Believe me, the hyena devouring the wildebeest on the African savannah is not making a moral issue out of it.  Only humans do.

I have two juxtaposed pictures in my mind on this: The first is the ape in the movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey.”  The ape discovers a bone, the eerie and ever-present monolith block is somewhere in the background, and in a blast of wonder and murderous ecstasy, the ape takes up the bone cudgel and kills the animal just outside the picture frame in the movie.

The other scene in my mind is a sweeter, and yet no less potent picture.  It’s an illustration in a program on public television I saw a few months past that shows a hominid millions of years ago reaching out to support another hominid who happens to be disabled.  In other words, the picture portrays that along with our aggression, our violence is the same feeling that produces compassion.

Does this mean Holmes, sitting in court with his bright orange hair and vacant expression deserves our compassion for what he did?  Does this mean he should be our example of why the death penalty should be waived?  Or brought back with vigilante vengeance?

And is the media responsible for a troubled young man collecting an enormous arsenal of weaponry over a period of several months plus booby trapping his own apartment with trip wire and explosives that could have blasted an entire apartment building into the next state?

There is no mistaking we are saturated with violent images.  We see them in movies, television shows, news programs, even cartoons.  They’re present in magazines and what you can read on the Internet.  I’ve long since grown numb to these gory images, and I can’t imagine why anyone enjoys them.  But would censoring these types of sights defuse a future Holmes?  I don’t think so.

I believe it comes down to what kind of society we want to be, and would we be willing to create a less violent, less murderous nation — or world.

Here’s what is so confusing: Thailand, which largely follows pacifist Buddhist teachings throughout its society, enjoys the “sport” of boxing, carried out to a particularly vicious level.  American boxers, by contrast, seem tame.

But boxing is violence.  It’s beating your opponent into insensibility.  Holmes was no boxer, no boxing enthusiast.  Still, he went on a massacre, killed a dozen people, left scores wounded, and no one wants to believe it.  And right after the killing spree the sale of guns in Colorado shot up.

Can any society across the globe end its violent traits, stop tragic massacres from ever occurring?  I don’t think it’s possible.  That’s because I am firmly convinced we are both devil and angel.  But don’t expect me to tell you which is which.

We will always have reason to commit acts of violence — that’s the entire purpose of any war — and we will always have reason to reach out to others with care and concern.  We will always reel in horror over bloodshed, and we will always try to keep it from happening again.  But, we will each time, bear witness to more tragedies.

Jodeane Albright is an award-winning columnist, blogger and the community editor at the Idaho State Journal.