Thursday, January 31, 2013

"Too many children are dying"

 Gabby Giffords on Jan. 7, 2011, the day before she was shot in the head:


 Warning: Get out your hankies.



I am enamored with the way Mark Kelly's lips are moving as his wife reads her statement, just as an encouraging parent's lips would move when his child was reading aloud.

How much their lives changed the day Giffords was shot. How little has changed in gun control laws.

Some gun advocates say there's nothing that can be done to curb gun violence, between the current interpretation of the Second Amendment and the sheer number of guns already in circulation. The public is supposed to just "deal with it."

A country that survived a civil war and two world wars, that sent astronauts to the moon, does not just "deal with" problems. It solves them.

Giffords is absolutely right. We must do something about gun violence. Her peers did nothing even when one of their own was shot. If twenty dead children, buried for a month, are not enough to get Congress to act to curb violence, then the leadership of this country has lost its way.