In light of Friday’s tragic movie theater shooting, both President Obama and Mitt Romney reflected on themselves as fathers and pulled all political ads from Colorado. Both forcefully asserted that this is not a time for politics, not a time for campaigning.
However, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY), anti-gun violence groups nationwide and MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry voiced a difference of opinion, that now is precisely the time to discuss gun policy in America.
On Friday’s Rachel Maddow Show, guest host Harris-Perry spoke to former New York Times columnist and senior fellow at the Demos Center for Public Policy and Advocacy Bob Herbert about the growing problem that gun violence is becoming so commonplace that it “feels almost ordinary in so many cities.”
Herbert: “Since Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were murdered in 1968, more than a million Americans have been killed by gun violence, that’s through homicides, suicides and accidental shootings. This is an insane level of violence. And the frustrating thing is, we have these terrible stories like the one you’re covering tonight and really, in another 24 to 48 hours, we’ll be on to something else and nothing really will be done about this.”
Harris-Perry: “I suggested that part of what we have to do collectively, we’re going to have to have faith in one another…How do we figure out how to not turn on each other? How not to start putting up, everywhere that we go, a metal detector. How do we find a civic faith in one another?"
Herbert: “It requires leadership and I’m not sure where that leadership is going to come from because I don’t think it’s going to come from our elected officials at the highest level of government so maybe, you’re talking about civic faith, maybe it has to come from the local level. But you have to have people out there making the case, like you’re talking about this evening, bringing in their friends and neighbors and relatives to say we need to make a stand, we need to get together…the sort of thing that Toqueville talked about that I think America once had but we seem to have been losing.
It really gets back to civic leadership, it has to come from the local level. Someone has to step forward, make a stand and stay with it…Gun violence in America is part and parcel to the character of the United States. We have 100,000 people who are shot every year. Three people who are killed every hour, which means that three people are going to be killed by gun violence over the course of just this television program. This is something that goes beyond just one wacko with a gun or some insane individual.”
Christian Science Monitor
The National Rifle Association released a statement saying, “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families and the community. NRA will not have any further comment until all the facts are known.”
The NRA opposes any restrictions on gun rights, and remains one of the most influential political lobbying groups in the country.
Leave a Comment:
This is another victory for the NRA bullies. This is another free advertisement for the right to bear arms. This is another victory for the manufacturers of guns and those whose philosophy is about the obliteration of others who stand in the way of their means and ends and culture.
We have yet to understand that these are the many socially dysfunctional people among us who harbor hate for others who lack empathy and compassion because of their very existence. These are people who do not want the law to act on their behalf when it does not justify their acyions because the law is an impediment. Yet these same people use the law like their own personal armor to defend and hide behind their evil acts.
We must understand that laws as imperfect as they are is a means by which we address situations but these persons who would do these evil double dip because they have enacted their own judgement on others and now come to the law to enact another judgment for them against their victims.
We must devise a means by which these persons feel the wrath of their own evil. This is not about vengeance this is about ensuring that when one uses a gun to do such acts that they understand the same fear and intent of their own actions and that they too can be made to scream, feel pain and suffer just like their victims because behind all of this is the act and philosophy of the bully.
We need to deal with this matter with great urgency and it is not about the NRA or the shooting Cheney, its is our wicked urge to inveigh ourselves on others with impunity.
All deaths are someone's tragedy. I love that we're pulling together as a nation even it is to mourn these losses. I hate the smiling photo of the alleged gunman. I know we're all innocent until proven guilty, but I just want to thank MH-P Show for showing, though a much younger photo, of the alleged gunman. THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!
While the shooter face has been shown ad nauseum I'd much rather see the faces of those we've lost and read or hear their stories rather than more of the same of alleged perpetrator's story. I'm sure there are people who will need to study whatever his motives are because not even the NRA or anyone can support the right to take ANYONE's life from George Zimmerman or James Holmes. No. Not ever. People without weapon's lives should never be taken under any circumstances for any reason I can conceive.
But that's just me - I have a small imagination for evil design.
Thank you!
Well, I'm just checking off my list for travel the states where these massacres take place: Arizona was one, now Colorado is gone. Who wants to be in a place where so many demented people have every opportunity to stage and act on their fantasies?
In most big cities, sites where violent crimes are likely to occur are well known to everyone. But in these semi-rural, unsophisticated areas that live off the idea of being in 'the frontier' violent acts seem random because there is very little in the way of a social order or social matrix in which the madman's conduct would have been known, monitored, perhaps moved into preventive care. The extreme narcissism now bred into our young people ends, taken as it sometimes is to the extreme, in them saying, "If I'm going to die, it's the end of the world anyway, so I'll take as many with me as I can."
But gun control in the USofA? Forget it. Americans live their everyday lives as so predictable, so routinized that they secretly crave the excitement the thrill such horrendous events bring. You can never legislate a collective death wish.