All of this news, day in and day out, is shocking and upsetting. Well, at least it is upsetting. How shocked can one keep being with all the constant bad news?
Yet the shooting spree this week that left 26 dead, including twenty children as young as six years of age, at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut shocked me most of all, as it no doubt did millions of people around the world.
Graphic courtesy of Yahoo! Images
It's not that the lives of mostly white American children and adults are more important than those of Afghan or Pakistani or Palestinian children and adults. It is that there is something fundamentally and profoundly sick about a single shooter entering a primary school of all things and killing children left, right and centre. It is shocking to the core - and always will be, whether it occur in Gaza or Kabul or Newton, Connecticut.
The obsession with protecting the Second Amendment right to 'bear arms' is a peculiarly and ferociously American obsession. And this week that obsession was, yet again, laid very bare, and very obscenely so.
There is NO fundamental right on this planet that affords the person to amass an armory of assault weapons and other such violent paraphernalia. Yet people will defend that right to the nth degree, and not only in the United States.
Offering protection and even unavoidable as weapons may sometimes be, but the ability to kill another human or an animal with any weapon of any type is de facto anti-life.
All the weapons and all the ammunition in the world are the very antithesis of what makes us human. They make a mockery of our humanity, and have done so since time began.
Will we ever learn? Will this bloodthirsty human race ever rise above its basest instincts? Never - after all, weapons define us. They always have.
Suffer forever the children and all the other innocents cut short by a weapon? Yes.
Do you get my point?
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