Gun Control is a Human Rights Issue

     Sometimes great minds really do think alike. 

    About a week ago, I began writing my autobiography and I mentioned My Lai a couple of times while writing about my childhood during the Vietnam War. I mentioned that the tide turned against the war when we began seeing the dead bodies of civilians, many of whom we'd killed, because it was the first war in which we got nightly accounts of our atrocities. If you want to turn the tide of opinion against the war, the people have to be shown the consequences of the actions, atrocities and war crimes done in their name.

     So I began tying that to what we're seeing, or rather, not seeing today. I've been kicking around a post that I've meaning to write since the Uvalde shooting. Then I get in my inbox a link from my friend Stan Banos, political blogger and photographer extraordinaire. It was to his own blog, BOATS (Based on a True Story). In it, he perfectly expressed what I'd only been thinking of writing.

     In his penultimate paragraph, Stan wrote,

     "It's time to show the children's bodies here at home- time to clearly, irrevocably show and expose the slaughter that these bought Republican shills are allowing to occur on a now regular basis. All we are ever allowed are their never ending torrent of fantasy induced excuses. They are well beyond shame, beyond reason. It's time to actually see the results of their words, their policies, their willingness to do absolutely nothing in the face of continued carnage!"

     He's absolutely correct, of course

     There's an old American phrase  "Seeing is believing." That's not just a hoary bromide. It references, whether or not it meant to, the strong American visual sense, one that's only gotten stronger, more insatiable and more discriminating than that of our predecessors in the 60s who had three VHF networks, snowy UHF and movies.

     After the nightmare that struck Sandy Hook Elementary nearly a decade ago, one with memories so indelible they actually tore the entire school down and rebuilt over it, one thing was missing from those memories- The carnage that Adam Lanza left in his wake. One of the first things to come out from Newtown was the NRA's, local law enforcement's and the radical, gun-clutching right wing's vicious insistence that the crime scene photos not be shown to the public.

     That was not out of any common decency for the public-at-large. They don't have common decency. And the reason they didn't want the photos to come out were nakedly transparent- They knew that they would be a game changer, a turning point.

     Adam Lanza used three weapons that day on December 14, 2012. One of them was a Bushmaster XM-15, a knockoff of the AR15 favored by American mass shooters. To put it simply but honestly, it's an assault rifle, the successor to the M16, that's built to inflict as much damage on a human body as possible and to kill large numbers of people in a very brief period of time. In a limited way, it's a weapon of mass destruction.

     Days after Uvalde, President Biden addressed the nation and gave us a few horrifying facts and statistics. He said parents had to donate their DNA so their children could be identified because facial features and dental records were rendered redundant. The president also informed us that more children are killed by guns each year than active duty police officers and active duty service members combined.

     Add to that the recent statistic that gun violence is now the number one cause of death of American children. Here's a somewhat dated graphic that's still illustrative of the number one problem in this country:

 

    I'm sure it's over 300 by now while the other nations' virtually nonexistent statistics have remained static.

    And however horrendous the Uvalde crime scene photos were, they must have been exponentially more horrendous at Sandy Hook, which all the juvenile victims were four or five years younger than the victims at Uvalde. Think of the damage that Bushmaster must have inflicted on their tiny bodies.

    That's why they didn't want the pictures to come out. That would've been the straw that broke Wayne LaPierre's back.

     To put it simply, gun control like the uncompromising kind we saw in New York City in the 60s and 70s is a basic human right that's being denied all of us who want it and especially denied our children. But gun nut activists and right wing politicians don't want you to see the photos and they certainly don't want you to remember that stringent gun control measures actually work. Look at Australia in 1996.

     After Port Arthur, in which 35 were murdered and 28 wounded in a mass shooting, brand new Prime Minister John Howard called on the Australian parliament to pass serious gun control measures that resulted in the ban of all automatic and semi automatic weapons as well as grabbing 650,000 guns in a mandatory buyback program.

     Oz hasn't seen a mass shooting since.

    They also don't want you to remember that after President Bill Clinton signed an assault rifle ban in 1994, mass shootings went down by 43%. When the Bush administration, typically, let it lapse in 2004, mass shootings went up by 243%.

   One more time: Gun control works. Don't let clearly insane and self-interested parties tell you otherwise.

   So do pictures, proof of the GOP's deliberate inaction on gun control, despite 90% of us being in favor of stronger background checks and red flag laws. Yes, they blame Democrats for not passing more gun control laws while tacitly leaving out the quiet part- That even while they're in the minority, Republicans bitterly oppose even the most tepid gun control legislation.

    So, Anonymous, if you're listening...