Gun Control: Now!

How many more will it take? Columbine High School, Washington, DC. , Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora.  When will we act?

Thank you, Michael R. Bloomberg, New York City mayor for asking the two political candidates to address gun control. Now. Not later. Now.

He wrote in an op-ed in today’s  Daily News:

“Every day, 34 Americans are murdered with guns. That’s 12,000 innocent people killed each year with guns, many of them possessed illegally.

During the next President’s term, if we do nothing, 48,000 people will be murdered with guns — nearly as many Americans who were killed during a decade of fighting in Vietnam. Yet neither presidential candidate has offered a plan to lower the death toll, which continues to rise.

Less than a week after Aurora, the two candidates are back to politics as usual, attacking each other on gaffes and trivialities. If not now, when is the time for them to outline their solutions to gun violence?”

According to the Star-Ledger today, “we are the most heavily armed people of the world, per capita.  Americans use guns more often to kill each other than citizens of any industrialized nation.”

There’s no good time for a death. My Great -Aunt Sylvia died last week at age 100. I remember telling people about her; I had to cancel some meetings to attend her funeral. The death of an old person isn’t a tragedy; it’s a celebration of a life. Yet as someone said to me, who had recently lost her 90-year-old father, “there’s never a good time to lose a parent.”  My cousin Robert lost his mother. For my mother, she lost her oldest living relative, making her the family matriarch.

This week was the one year anniversary of my cousin Abigail Burg’s untimely death from a jet skiing accident.  She was 24. Her parents and extended family struggle every day to make sense of her death and find solace in the gifts she gave instead of the life she’s lost.  I remember going to the funeral and one of my sisters saying how at least she wasn’t murdered or killed in a terrorist attack.

Accidents and illness happen. Some are lucky, like Aunt Sylvia to live to an old age.

And some, like the 34 people killed every day, like the 12 victims massacred in Aurora, Colorado, are murdered thanks to the easy access to guns and ammunition our nation condones.

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