(Article changed on December 16, 2012 at 14:19)
(Article changed on December 16, 2012 at 10:41)
On the evening of the day twenty innocent elementary school
children along with several more adults, including the principal and the school
psychologist, were gunned down by a madman with an assault weapon, I went out
to a movie to escape from my emotions.
I chose badly,
the latest James Bond movie, Skyfall, featuring an aged Bond (Daniel Craig) and
a downright senior M (Judy Dench), still in action as well as laser-edged
one-liners, hanging off the grapevine of death, swinging into one lion's jaws
after another's. And out again, time
after time.
There is an
interesting regression in the area of weaponry, from assault rifles to antique rifles
and finally, finally, the coup de grace is delivered by a knife in the back thrown
expertly from about ten feet away. Wham!
Earlier there's
even a William Tell-type scene that Bond aims away from while his nemesis
scores the apple. The poor sex object/target survives into the next bout of sadism.
Two and a half
hours of escape into fictional gun violence from real gun violence.
Even as I write
this, another news item reports that a gunman who appeared in the cardiac
department of an Alabama hospital fired when the police came to nab him,
injuring two of them before he was killed. A cardiac unit? None of the patients
were affected, according to the brief article.
I have nothing
new to say about the evils of the legal possession of firearms--assault weapons
or otherwise. Both contribute to making this country the world's murder capital
by far. Not only has possession of assault weapons been legalized recently, along
with all the other forms of firearm, but all are being used for multiple
murders, eight of them this year, with former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords the highest profile, shot in the act of serving her people.
I still don't
worry when attending public events, though fear of terrorist attacks sometimes
assaults me when I descend into subways.
Also in the news
today, obscurely positioned, was a report that the National Rifle Association,
that megaPAC that keeps weapons dealers thriving, canceled a
festive event it had planned for yesterday evening. Nice of them.
But why did they
cancel it? Aren't they at the front of the defensive crowd every time a massacre
occurs, every time murder is committed by means of guns, the easiest way to
kill? Gun silencers make things even easier to off someone in a fit of insanity
or after careful planning. Aren't they, the NRA, the ones who point to the
Second Amendment, the right of individuals, in the setting of militias, to keep
and bear firearms? Keep and bear them? Does that mean commit assaultive murder
with them? Back when the Constitution was written, military and gun technology
was so primitive that you had to reload, which took about half a minute (I'm no
expert on the subject, relying on experienced drawn from tv shows and movies)
before every shot.
Instead of canceling their event, the NRA
folks could have held a vigil of sorrow with lighted candles. Remember how the
streets of Teheran were filled with people holding lighted candles on the
evening of 9/11?
Instead of
canceling the event, that local branch of the NRA, wherever it is, could have
reconstrued it as a meeting to figure out what can be done to prevent such
atrocities in the future, if they don't want to ban guns of any description.
They are the National RIFLE Association, after all. Why not revert to that
original concentration, just as the James Bond film retrogressed in forms of
violent assault from all sorts of fancy firearms to a knife in the back?
One of the news
articles that reported the atrocity noted that even though capital punishment
doesn't decrease the number of murders in this country, according to one study,
communities with fewer guns experience fewer murders than those with
comparatively more guns.
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