For the past week or so, I have tried my best to come up with the words to write about Sandy Hook. The evil that beset the town of Newtown, Connecticut last week shook this country to its knees.
When President Obama spoke of the tragedy in the White House Briefing Room last week, he held back tears and frequently paused while speaking to gather himself. To hear about the deaths of 20 innocent kids and six adults is enough to shake anyone’s foundation.
It is unnatural, inhumane, and just aberrant.
Since that sickening point in America’s history, we have had a little time to digest our new diet. It consists of school and movie theater shootings, kids wearing bullet proof backpacks, and daily thoughts of the safety of your kids.
When we send our little ones out the door to the bus stop or drop them off in front of their schools, too many parents will wonder about the thought of receiving a phone call about their child’s school being on lockdown due to a dangerous threat.
To put a personal touch on what’s happening, my wife now has trepidation of entering a movie theater. As we talked about taking our two-year old to see her first movie, she calmly stated that she’s no longer interested in visiting one of America’s beloved institutions: A movie theater. Her reasoning is that the danger and uncertainty going on today is something that has forced her to decide to stay away.
Is this how we will start to live our lives? Steeped in fear because of what we see, hear, and experience?
If that’s how it is going to be, then it is time that we start to make some changes.
The first needs to be our gun laws. There is no need for any individual to hoard assault weapons. I know that we have war zones in this nation, just check the “wild 100’s” in Chicago, but the least that we can do is reinstitute the ban on assault weapons.
President Obama is asking Congress to do just that, and require background checks on all gun sales. Speaking of that, why is it legal for any human being to purchase a gun without going through a vigorous background check? If I try to grab a job at a bank or even at the local Publix, I am subjected to a background check.
In order to purchase a weapon, I can simply head on down to the local gun show and buy one. The “gun show loophole” allows for sellers to vend from their personal collection without requiring the record of the sale or a background check.
Also, retailers such as Wal-Mart should be banned from selling guns and ammunition. There should also be a moratorium on ammo purchases from E-Bay.
There is no reason that the sale of something so dangerous should be so easy. We’ve made it harder for citizens of this country to vote than to buy a weapon for “personal protection.”
If we are truly serious about stopping the next Sandy Hook or “Batman shooting,” or Tucson shooting, then we have to get serious about making somber sacrifices.
Next, we really need to visit how we market and sell violent video games. Yeah, I know, I sound like the Congressman going after rap music because of its lyrics, or the pastor wanting a ban on Metal Gear Solid.
By no means am I suggesting we rid our culture of those games, but we need to alter the way they are sold and fed to our youth.
So many young kids are enamored with mowing down an entire fleet of men with a MINIGUN, or tossing grenades into a building housing terrorists, all from the comfort of their living room sofa. The coolness of watching these men die on your 50-inch LED TV screen is vastly different from witnessing these atrocities in real life.
Most kids who play these games religiously will turn out to be fine. They will have no thoughts of shooting up their gym class or walking into a restaurant full of people to target innocent faces.
But there is also the one – that one. Once an unfortunate event happens, we find out that the kid who pulled the trigger enjoyed playing Call of Duty Black Ops 2.
Are video games to blame for this new wave of violence? No. Can we do something a little different to possibly change our future circumstances? Absolutely.
Just like everyone else, I hope and pray that we can avoid another tragedy of this nature, but we can’t do that without changes. I’m not sure if altering the way video games are marketed to kids will do any good, but I’m willing to see it changed for a possible positive outcome.
-JH
