I open up my computer and what do I find? Two more stories about shootings or attempted shootings in the United States! Yes, I know, it’s unbelievable, right? The first happened in California in the parking lot of a mall (yes, another mall). A man apparently opened fire into the air and ground 50 shots before local police took him down. Thankfully no one was hurt. The second was a teenager in Oklahoma who was conspiring to shoot up and blow up his high school and was trying to get other kids in his school to help him. Thankfully he was caught before anything could happen.
But guess what? This all happened on Friday, December 14th, 2012! The same day as the Newtown massacre. Three separate shootings and attempted shootings, all in one bloody day! Am I the only one who’s getting the picture here? We’ve got a problem with guns, with people having machine guns, with people with obvious pyschological problems getting machine guns, and with people refusing to admit we have a problem and refusing to take care of it.
Now, I don’t believe God is trying to send us a message like Mike Huckabee does. For one thing, God usually sends a bona fide prophet who performs a few cool miracles before He does any sort of punishing, and usually that’s with a plague. But if He were to send a message, it would probably be something along the lines of, “You’ve got a problem with people using weapons to destroy the lives I’ve put on this Earth! Go and fix it now!” I think that’s a message we can all take to heart, right?
So I call on everyone reading this blog and living in America to contact your representative, your senator, your governor, hell, contact the President, just tell them they need to stop all this gun-toting craziness! This isn’t Rambo or The Terminator, where everything’s make-believe! It’s real-life, and there’s no Bruce Willis going to come swinging in and save us all! We have to do this ourselves, maybe by banning assault weapons in private homes or by changing confidentiality laws so that if a doctor/therapist fears a patient may commit a crime, they are obligated to report it.
We could also have special presentations in school on healthy ways to relieve yourself of stress and other problems, or assemblies to talk about mental illness and how to recognize the signs of it. Either one of these would be great strides to stopping gun violence. And like I always believe, a better education makes one less likely to commit a deadly crime, so if we fund education more and the Army less, it’d be a real help.
Thanks for reading, let’s get to work!
Rami Ungar The Writer 