Sandy Hook Massacre

Like everyone, the Sandy Hook massacre has shaken me deeply. I can't think about it for long without weeping: my middle son just turned 6.

But I have 2 points: (1) This could finally be the "9/11" type event that changes our culture to reject the "unlimited guns." The case I use as a model is smoking. When I was a kid, smoking was everywhere and completely accepted. Then something happened, thank God, and it became socially unacceptable to smoke. Bam, it was done. I'm hoping that this is what happens with guns now.

(2) This leads to my second point. I will now say, without fear of stidency, that I believe we should consider a person who owns a gun a potential murderer. WHat I mean by that is that the biggest fallacy from the gun-nuts is the belief that you can somehow divide the population into 'good people (who should own guns)' and 'bad people (who shouldn't get guns).' As the Treyvon Martin case showed us, the gun-nuts have convinced people that the way to distinguish these two populations is by race. The nuts basically make the bigoted case that blacks shouldn't have guns because they are automatically criminals and everyone else is not. Naturally this view is evil and it got exposed in that case.

After Sandy Hook, we should just admit: everyone who owns a gun is on the verge of being a murderer. What difference is there between Adam Lanza, may his name be cursed, and his mother? His mother owned the guns he used for his massacre. The NRA would claim that you need to keep guns to protect yourself, but those very guns were what killed her.

Again, what separates a gun-owner from a "potential murderer." A gun can only do 1 thing, it can only be used to kill. A knife cuts bread, a car is crucial transportation, a gun just kills. Sure, there a sport where the goal is to kill animals, and we're OK with that for some reason, but is that "sport" so necessary for America that it means I need to accept a few massacres a year? Deer hunting is so important?!?

I've said in many different places that the experience of Jews in the Diaspora is that we're more afraid of our neighbors than we are of the government/police. I think everyone in America needs to have that view too. The US government is not my enemy. It is my representative. And I want that government to protect me from gun-owners. Punto final.

We will know, there will be many signs, before the government gets too powerful that we need to arm our citizens. I cannot imagine that there's a cogent argument out there to say that Americans owning guns have helped our country in any way, at least in the past century. Anyone?