Newtown didn't change anything in the way that many people think. This despite the fact I still sit up and try to understand why this person did what he did and cannot. I literally cannot comprehend the destruction of thought process and collapse of our deepest instincts against harming children and innocents that lead to that event.
The changes Newtown has wrought is to heighten the contrast between those who feel guns are evil and those who feel gun ownership outweighs that evil. This is a process that will resolve itself. Even if to do nothing more than return to an uneasy balance of the two sides glaring at each other and spoiling for a fight.
The culture war being waged right now has many parallels with the Temperance Movement that led to Prohibition in the 1920s. Society needed to blame "the demon rum" for the ills they were observing. After a decade of that era's equivalent of the Drug War and its striking parallels to today with a thriving black market, use of violence to settle disputes, widespread turf wars over liquor bootlegging and near limitless money and lastly widespread civil disobedience, the harms of this policy were recognized by society-at-large and the Will of the People was exercised again.
The fact we have a magnificent historical case study in how trying to implement such controls in the belief that if we simply ban the thing, whether by law or by Constitutional amendment, that the problems was caused by the thing will disappear being ignored is amazing. If you truly believe that banning guns will cause gun violence, or any violence for that matter, to end, well, I have a one-horned horse I'd like to sell you.
Before I owned a gun, I had no real opinion on them. They were a distant and unknown thing. I knew they existed but never knew anyone, at least openly, who owned one and I knew nothing about them. It was only later when I decided to buy one did the blinders lift and did a new culture appear before me.
Many of those who emote against guns refuse to see that culture. To them, those who would own a gun are deviant in some way. They must be! Newtown is proof of that deviancy. "Look at the evil that guns have wrought! Children were killed!". Not by an evil man. No, by a gun. Like it walked in there all by itself.
Even those confronted with the question of without guns, "How would a woman defend herself against a man holding a knife to her throat while he was unzipping his pants?", usually gets no response or a blank stare. Or some lame platitude of "She should call 911 and the Police will come to stop it.". I can only shake my head in disgusted wonderment.
Calling 911 worked well in Newtown, didn't it?
Newtown did change things. For a generation that were children leading up to 1994, this feels like a new thing without realizing they are treading well-marked paths. So they can't understand why people can't go along with their "common sense approaches" and are shocked at the resistance. For those that have been around longer, this is either an opportunity to be exploited or yet another battle to be fought. And only one side can "win".
Newtown changed things because it is highlighting the cultural divide over guns vs. no guns. In many ways I find the highlighting of this event the worst sort of base manipulation. There are other shootings in the country. Children do die in them. But they are the wrong socio-economic type, in the wrong place and often, the wrong shade to be photogenic on the news. I would ask how some of these people in the media can look themselves in the mirror but I realize it would require them to actually poke their heads above the surface of their cesspool to take a peek. When you're lower than slime, seeing it drip from your head is too much of a reminder of how empty moral bankruptcy can make you.
Will Newtown change this country? I think it will but in an uneasy way. It is merely the latest turn of the knob on the fire that is causing this culture war to simmer and heat up. I'm worried about it boiling over into open violence. Not in the insurrection sense but in the continuing breaking of bonds. At what point does emotion and belief cause someone to turn from their friends or neighbors of years solely over this divide? To begin to truly enclave ourselves based on belief and ideology. To draw red, blue and purple lines on a map and start a process making these enclaves real from a legal and contract perspective.
How long before we see private corporations and enhanced HOAs that require a code of conduct that includes bans on gun ownership, submission to the group belief system and enforcement of same? Admittedly, some have already tried but so far it remains unenforceable thanks to our Constitutional system. As our freedoms and rights to do what we want gets weaker and weaker, how long before that weakness in individual freedom translates to strength in the collective to suppress us further?
How long before instead of burning crosses on lawns we get burning schoolhouses symbolizing "one of the hated ones lives here, an evil gun owner"? The publishing of the gun permit list in New York is a symptom of this process. A formalized process of bigotry, hatred and dehumanization under the guise of "the public's right to know". No different than a sex offender registry. At least those in the sex offender registry did something legally and morally wrong to get there. I didn't.
Unless I was asking for it. Wait, we were talking about guns, correct?
D.K.
