Pieces of the Puzzle

The call for gun control following the Newtown, Connecticut shooting, while producing the expected backlash from gun enthusiasts and Constitutional fundamentalists, has also brought reminders that limiting access to assault weapons and mega-magazines won’t eliminate massacres. Improved school security is a natural component, though the challenge is finding ways of making schools safer without turning them into fortresses.

There are those who blame violent movies, TV and video games for poisoning people’s minds. And then there’s the issue of mental health. There are a lot of unstable people out there – including people who seem fine today but could go off the deep end tomorrow if their buttons were pushed. The now-viral blog post, “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother” details the struggles of a woman trying to deal with a mentally disturbed and sometimes violent son, and how few options there are for helping him, or even controlling him, short of jail. Civil liberties often interfere with what seem like wise and timely intervention efforts.

While gun control proponents may be focusing on only one piece of the puzzle, tossing all the other pieces on the table in a big heap should not be an excuse for paralysis. It’s true that people kill people, but why should the marketplace make it easy for them by supplying assault weapons and huge bullet magazines? It’s logical to start with gun regulation. Difficult as this issue is politically, it’s actually the easiest one for us to get our heads around at this moment. Adam Lanza’s real mother owned guns, including the Bushmaster assault-weapon wannabe, to which her son was able to get access.

Guns do have their function. It certainly reasonable for those concerned about self-defense to have a means of doing so – as long as their own need is reasonable (there’s that dangerous R word again).

But if you want to talk about the really big picture, why are guns the American symbol of power to the chronically powerless, and how can we change that perception? Once we find that puzzle piece, many of the others will fall into place.