Twelve killed, fifty-eight injured. Thirteen years three months after
Columbine.
With his red dyed spiky hair casting a low shadow on the
screen, the odd looking fellow seated in the first row of Theater 9 slipped
out. He left through the emergency
exit, propped the door open and returned as a lone gunman strutting into the
darkened theater armed like a soldier clearing houses in urban Iraq. With nothing but malice in his mind, he
emptied one magazine after another firing each new bullet faster than he could
blink his eye. People fell. Some fell for their final time. Others didn’t know if help would come
in time. Some of the lucky ones crouched
under the relentless strafing.
In the adjacent theater 8, some patrons thought the gunfire
was a scene from the movie until bullets penetrated and killed or maimed while
a shrill alarm pealed a warning.
Fear gripped many – sometimes for themselves and sometimes for
protecting a baby or a lover. Heroism
rose as ordinary folks carried the injured to safety and the un-hit stepped
into the live fire zone to search for friends or family or to help stricken strangers
lost in the chaos.
Heightened by such heinous acts, the gun debate raged with
strident screaming. Renewed calls
for gun controls were countered by well-worn arguments about guns being a
protected right; glib assertions that restricting guns wouldn’t stop acts of demented
malevolence.
The Second Amendment to the Constitution reads, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a
free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be
infringed." My freshman English teacher might have
come unhinged had I submitted such a sentence as part of my work. Nonetheless, the sentence remains
un-amended in our Constitution. Now,
over two centuries after the well-intentioned words were written, we can’t come
close to agreeing about what they mean.
If there were any way to parse the words consensus would, by now, have been
reached. The US Supreme Court has
ruled that regulation of guns is a limitation on federal power but does not
apply to the states. The Court has
also ruled (5 to 4) that individual citizens have a right to own a gun. The right is subject to regulation but states
cannot remove the right.
After parsing the
Second Amendment the visceral debate turns to statistics. Opposing sides quote data about the
number of guns in circulation and whether killings rise or fall with the number of guns.
Comparisons are made about violent deaths in America to deaths in other
countries with different gun laws. For those who are Tweeters, the day after
the Aurora massacre, Jason Alexander posted a long persuasive essay filled with data to
advocate for tougher gun control.
One of his readers posted a longer response refuting his statistics and rejecting his
conclusions.
As a people, we are
divided about guns. Guns are only
one of the many issues that send us to our respective corners in the political boxing
ring. For many, there is simply no
reason to have any gun of any kind available to an ordinary citizen. For others, the Second Amendment means
every citizen has the right to own any type of gun including the most heinous
assault weapons. There will never
be a creative interpretation of the Second Amendment or some compelling statistic that brings these groups
together.
It is correct to say
that even the tightest of gun control laws cannot prevent another Columbine,
Virginia Tech, or Aurora. It is
equally correct to assert that easy access to weaponry makes the use of such
weapons more likely by people who are unbalanced or malevolent.
The Constitution is our foundation for law. It describes
who we are and what we believe as a people, as a nation. About guns, we cannot agree on how to change the words nor on what the current words mean – stalemate. Yet, allowing such a polarized stalemate to stifle work on
underlying problems is more dangerous than any gun.
It’s critically
important to bring initiatives for helping citizens who suffer from mental
maladies. We should
ignore shrill voices that drown passionate pleas for solving problems that
cannot be reduced to one side versus another. When events are conscripted to harden the extremes, we must ignore
the noise and find the core that describes consensus. We won’t find the answers written on the face of our
Constitution. Laws always need
updating and interpretation. They guide our actions and reveal
to the world the nature of our character.
I don’t know, but
suspect, that among those who died or were injured in Aurora, there were some
who espoused support for gun control, some who opposed it, and some who never
gave it much thought. The injuries
and deaths were inflicted by a deranged person not by a poorly worded sentence
in the Constitution nor a fuzzy, divided interpretation of it.
State by state, gun restrictions
supported by a majority of citizens should be enacted. In every state and federally, laws to
identify, treat and serve the mentally ill should be written and given a high
priority. The polarization about the right to own a gun should go
silent while we act on the changes that might prevent the next Aurora - dutiful self-governance.