The Inexplicable

I’ve started this entry a few times now and I still don’t know what to say.

Newtown is the last place you would expect anything like this to happen. If you were to picture every stereotype of quintessential New England, you’ll get something resembling Newtown. In the immediate aftermath, I feel like a lot of people didn’t understand that this wasn’t the south Bronx where this happened. It’s the kind of place where you’d aspire to raise your family.

Maybe it’s because I’m a parent now. Maybe it’s because I was a teacher. Either way, this one really hit me. Since I started teaching preschool in 2007, my oldest kids are around 9 now.  The youngest from my toddler class just started Pre-K. I know these kids – I could have taught any one of them.

And then to think that there are so many families who were looking forward to a weekend filled with some final Christmas shopping, maybe wrapping presents, and now they’re planning funerals. And they’ll see those presents and their hearts will break because they can’t bear to part with them and they don’t have the strength to put them away. Every time they see them, they’ll think of the excited faces they pictured on Christmas morning. Christmas will never, ever be the same.

I can appreciate how a person might be pushed so far that he finally lashes out at the people who have tormented him, often taking innocent lives in the process through some deluded belief that they’re perpetrators as well. But this is simply beyond the realm of my understanding.

What could have possibly made him believe that these children deserved that?

A day has yet to go by that I haven’t shed some tears over it. Saturday was the hardest though and I just lost it and squeezed Pippa until smacked my head and tried to wriggle out of my arms.

As for the gun control debate. The numbers speak for themselves – the US has significantly higher numbers of gun deaths each year than any other Western nation. The problem is that we choose to be deaf to what those numbers are telling us. The argument that cars, knives, pencils, or any other inanimate object should be outlawed is facetious. A gun is meant to kill and injure. It is the entire reason for its invention. The purpose of a car is transportation. Misuse of a car results in injury and possible death whereas CORRECT use of a gun results in injury and death. The fact is that a gun enables a person to kill while maintaining physical and psychological distance from the victim, enabling larger numbers of victims and less psychological impact on the killer. Human beings are programmed to abhor the taking of a life, to be repulsed by it. We’ve developed the weapons we have specifically to put distance between combatants. So in a very real way, whether we’re conscious of it or not, we think of the guns as being the killers, not us. The knife, the spear, the sword, the lance, the arrow, the catapult, the cannon, the gun, the bomb, the missile, the drone…. we get farther and farther and the enemy becomes less human and we have less and less responsibility of the killing of another human being. So as much as we want to say that guns don’t kill people, the whole reason we use guns and other longer range weaponry is because we mentally push the blame onto the weapon instead of ourselves.

So for now I’m done with that argument. I will not have firearms in my home and Pippa will not spend time in any home that has them unless I can be assured that they are properly locked out of reach of little hands.

~Liz