Moving on without forgetting

I've been having a hard time figuring out how to blog post-Newtown. I want to write about Christmas and the mundanely hilarious but it's difficult to switch from a gun deaths to Santa Claus without feeling dismissive and ridiculous.

Gregory Gibson, whose son Galen was killed by a college shooter in 1992, wrote this:

In the wake of Galen’s murder, I wrote a book about the shooting. In it I suggested that we view gun crime as a public health issue, much the same as smoking or pesticides. I spent a number of years attending rallies, signing petitions, writing letters and making speeches, but eventually I gave up. Gun control, such a live issue in the “early” days of school shootings, inexplicably became a third-rail issue for politicians.

I came to realize that, in essence, this is the way we in America want things to be. We want our freedom, and we want our firearms, and if we have to endure the occasional school shooting, so be it...

More horrible still — to me at least — is the inevitable lament, “How could we have let this happen?” It is a horrible question because the answer is so simple. Make it easy for people to get guns and things like this will happen.

Gibson feels gun control is the answer and I agree at least in part. But even if it isn’t, we have to figure out a meaningful, effective way to address the issue of gun violence in our country. We can’t just exchange stories about how hard it was to drop our kids off at school, cry into our collective coffees, and then do nothing.


You know the Serenity Prayer?  “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”

We've lost our wisdom. We’ve got this notion into our heads that gun deaths are a thing we cannot change. That it’s okay to mourn gun violence, finish mourning, and then move on in the same way we would after a natural disaster. 

Gun deaths fall firmly under the category of “courage to change the things I can.” Obviously all 350+ million Americans can’t be held personally responsible for every single random act of violence. But our laws, cultural climate, and general grasp of Serenity are things we can change.

My yelling individually on a blog ad nasuem doesn’t really make a difference. But I can write my congressperson, sign petitions, and, perhaps most importantly, view this as my problem. You should too.

If we want to, we can change this.

I'm going to move on. But I'm not going to forget. I'll blog about the mundane and soak in the everyday joys and inconveniences of life. And when my politicians and community leaders fall back into treating our national gun violence problem as a political third rail I will say, "No."