Trying to Make Sense of the Senseless

The following editorial was published in the Crescent City Jewish News on July 11:

The very public killing of two black men at the hands of white police officers in Baton Rouge and in Minnesota and the horrendous assassination of five white Dallas police officers by a crazed lone gunman in retaliation – all seemingly captured on videotape – was just another typical bloody week for America.

Coming on the heels of the tragic shootings in Orlando last month and the disturbing killings in San Bernadino, in Charleston and the rioting in Ferguson and elsewhere last year, we might think that our nation’s tolerance for pain would be near the breaking point. And yet we would be wrong. 

Within our republic there are occasional challenges to authority and peaceful coexistence that all too frequently resort to the use of guns and the spilling of innocent blood. We seem to accept this as a necessary byproduct of a free and open society. As President Obama so quickly and rightly pointed out, the black man who thought that killing white police officers would accomplish his goal was no less a racist than the white man who felt compelled to kill the black members of the prayer group in Charleston. Bullets are the least racist of all items on earth. They care not what target they strike and the only color they see is red. 

We have seen so much violence throughout our history. It is a sad commentary played out time and time again. It began with the revolutionary fervor of our young nation, broke out into full-scale civil war, continued in the shoot-em-up creed of the Old West, was part of the gangster era of Prohibition, shaped our outrage during the turbulent period of the Sixties when our leaders became targets and has continued in shopping malls, cinema houses and, sadly, in schoolhouses like those in Columbine and Sandy Hook. 

In an average year over 17,000 American children and teens are shot in murders, assaults, suicides and suicide attempts, unintentional shootings, and by police intervention. Of that number nearly 2,700 kids die from gun violence and over 1,600 children and teens are murdered. The saddest statistic of all is that all of these are preventable. 

Stopping the squeezing of a trigger finger begins with changing the neurons of a brain that reasons that taking a life will improve life. The mourners left behind and the broken and paralyzed victims of the violence that shatters their lives will attest to the fact that killing is morally wrong, reprehensible and need not be tolerated by right thinking Americans. 

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has guaranteed our right to bear arms in the necessary defense of our families and our country. However, it should not be interpreted as a right to callously kill those whom we find too vastly different from us or with whom we cannot accept for whatever reasons. Heed the admonition that such a philosophy of hate loads those very rifles and guns that mow down our most precious of gifts, the lives we treasure most including our own. 

The time for a national debate on gun violence is long overdue. The cycle of violence will continue to take from us our mothers and fathers, our brothers and sisters and our children as we await the next breaking news event. Left unchecked this will become the sad epitaph on the experiment called American freedom. Haven’t we suffered enough? At what point do we advocate for change? The stakes are far too high for us to maintain the status quo and our children’s lives literally depend on what course of action we decide today. Do we pray for peace, acceptance and tolerance or do we stand idly by and let our inaction load the muzzles that are aimed at the heart of our democratic republic?