OP-ED: Waiting for inaction
Earlier in the week, more than a dozen children were sent to a Parkland, Florida high school by their parents. They went to school seeking education and a way to better themselves. Most of them were preparing for college careers, careers that were cut short in a hail of bullets. Their parents must now prepare to bury their children. Sadly, their lives were cut short by an apparently angry, mentally disturbed former student, whose reaction to his lot in life was to pick up a weapon and kill them and any adults that got in his way.
Why he did this seems unimportant when the gravity of the grief felt by the parents, siblings, grandparents, friends and other loved ones is measured. How he did this has become an all-too-familiar response. Even though he wasn’t legally able to own a handgun due to his being a teenager, he simply walked into a store and purchased an AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle that can shoot as many as 45 times a minute.
He was able to do this even though he had made several comments both at the school and outside suggesting he was thinking of using violence at his school with a gun. Of course, it’s not illegal to think about killing people, but when one expresses the idea over social media such as Facebook (which he apparently had done), we all have to wonder aloud as to what level a threat must rise before it triggers a response from the FBI or local police.
The killer was expelled from the school for making what we perceive now as genuine threats. While some may point to the recent death of his mother as having pushed him over the edge, the fact is there are thousands of teenagers who lose their mothers each week and the desire to shoot innocents is hardly a common occurrence.
So, over the next few days we will watch as loved ones put their children into graves, several of these being members of our own Jewish community. Bullets don’t discriminate after all and, while any child’s untimely death is a tragedy, we are saddened that people we know or may be connected to will have to deal with this on a personal basis.
And the pushback from Congress has already started. Democrats are decrying the lack of gun control, while Republicans are claiming it’s too early to propose legislation.
Ultimately, neither side will have the upper hand and, as it happened after Las Vegas, after San Bernadino, after Orlando and after Sandyhook, nothing will happen to prevent this from happening again. We are conditioned to tons of outrage and a surfeit of prayers and good intentions. In the end, though, unless someone takes a bold step towards meaningful legislation to stop the spread of guns from being placed in the hands of mentally ill criminals, everyone will remain in harm’s way. That means your sons, your daughters, your mothers, your fathers, your siblings and your grandchildren are at risk and, apparently, expendable.
This is not a question of maintaining a strong militia. We need to keep our Constitution strong and the Second Amendment, but we need to rein in the alarming number of weapons that violate its spirit. We believe these include semi-automatic and modified automatic weapons. These are the weapons of choice for mass murderers and we need to do something.
The fact is we continue to wait with little hope in our hearts that anything will improve. The latest victims are dishonored by our inaction. God help us all. In the words of the great Hillel, if not now, when?
