OPINION: 'As the saying goes, a picture is worth 1,000 words. We need a sea change for lawmakers to have the political will to put children before their careers and the gun lobby, and to get there, we need the…
When I was about 10 years old, my uncle, drunk and distressed — as most of my male relatives were in those days — put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He was found by his two pre-teen children, blood and brains all over the room. Naturally, they were never the same. How could you be after seeing such brutality?
I think it’s time to remedy that. I want the folks for whom guns are God and the legislators who bow at the altar of the National Rifle Association to see — as a Texas sheriff described to reporters — “piles of children,” bloodied and covered by the lifeless bodies of teachers trying to protect them. I want them to see tiny humans so destroyed by an AR-15 that they had to be matched to their parents by DNA samples because they were unidentifiable any other way.
Perhaps photos of the Uvalde classroom scene, blown up on banners and paraded in front of Congress, state legislatures, the NRA headquarters and corporate offices of gun manufacturers — like aborted-fetus photos in front of abortion clinics — could change hearts and minds so legislators finally do something about this insanity.
But research — controlled for things like poverty, race, age and other factors — has shown that the U.S. isn’t any more mentally ill than other developed countries, we don’t play more violent video games and we’re not more violence-prone. We also don’t have more violent crime than other developed nations, but our crime is more deadly because — you guessed it — we have more deadly weapons.
They can, however, establish federal gun policy like every other developed nation has, some as recently as last week , taking it a tiny step at a time. Raising the minimum age to purchase all guns to 21 and restricting the number of rounds a gun magazine can hold to six would be a good start, even though we also need permit-to-purchase programs, universal 10-day waiting periods, required gun safety classes and yes, banning high-velocity, high-capacity weapons such as the AR-15.