SPECIAL EDITION ESSAY

It's Time -- Long Past Time    

By Harry T. Cook 

7/21/12   

Harry T. Cook

What happened in a Colorado theater on Friday is another of those unspeakable things about which we must absolutely speak. Roger Ebert, writing for the New York Times within hours of the catastrophe, said that somewhere even then was another demented soul ready to spring into action, lest the Colorado assassin get all the available limelight.

One wishes that it wouldn't take a massacre to stop a political war such as was being waged by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Both found the grace to shut it down at least for a day or two.

In effect, Ebert said the two candidates -- one with the bulliest pulpit in the world -- should find a bipartisan way to tell the National Rifle Association, its gun lovers and fawning politicians that enough is enough and that Americans won't take it anymore.

I mean, Aurora, Colo., is not Homs in Syria or some ungovernable tribal area in Waziristan. It's a pleasant, wholesome suburb of one of our country's great cities where people live in peace and love taking their kids to the movies.

No, friends. Americans of sound mind must step up and draw the line. Now. Now, lest the dead and wounded in the theater slaughter will have suffered and died in vain, let us get on the phone, go online, uncap our pens and communicate with the Congress, our state legislatures, our governors, our city commissions and village councils with a single, simple message: CONTROL GUNS. DO IT NOW.

Despite the U.S. Supreme Court's recent ruling on the Second Amendment, anyone who understands the English language knows perfectly well that the clause referring to "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" refers to that "well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State."

There was no security whatsoever in that Colorado theater the other night. There should have been, and there should be -- in every public place in America.

To the God-and-guns crowd, we need to say that any imagined deity whose holy writ could be perceived by warped minds as condoning the unregulated possession of weapons of mass destruction is a deity without which humanity would be better off.

Yes, I said "weapons of mass destruction." Saddam didn't have them. We had them. We have them. Several of them were used by a deeply disturbed young man to kill at least a dozen innocents and no doubt more, as injuries turn into deaths.

There is only one question at this moment, and it is this: Does any normal, stable human being want to be a citizen of a nation that allows such weapons to be as available as a Big Mac to anyone with the cunning to steal or the money to buy one?

The answer must be no.

Aurora is the goddess of the dawn in Roman mythology. Maybe we can rally around the idea of a new dawn, not only for Aurora, Colo., but for the United States of America and make it the beginning of a new day by demanding of our lawmakers that they enact laws that will come closer to the guaranteeing "the security of a free State."

I invite comment from any who read this essay.