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Home » NEWTON MASSACRE: IF NOT NOW, WHEN?

NEWTON MASSACRE: IF NOT NOW, WHEN?

by | Dec 16, 2012 | Jewish, Politics, Spectacle, Wars

Updated (Feb. 2013)

Violence Has a Price.
As Arne Naess would have said:
EVERYTHING COUNTS - LET US USE EVERYTHING WE HAVE TO STOP THIS.


May Their Deaths Not Be In Vain!

Noah Pozner, 6 – Pozner Family Photo/AP Photo

 

Emilie Parker, 6 – Emilie Parker Fund/Facebook

 

Jack Pinto, 6 – Pinto Family

More pictures (and short bios) on the ABC News website

BESIDES DIRECT LEGISLATION, SOME IDEAS:
In Newton, CT at Adath Israel, Rabbi Shaul Praver knew two of the kids shot (execution style): Why can’t games in our culture be about peaceful things, nice things. I don’t buy the idea that only violence sells; violence sells because someone chose to sell that product.
About violence: we learn this in a subtle but powerful way as children, whether it is the plastic gun we are given as a three year old or the many computer games that are all about killing. I encourage the people that make these games to reconsider.
YOU CAN MAKE AN INCENTIVE ABOUT THE CHALLENGE OF UNDERSTANDING WHAT IS AT THE CORE OF A CONFLICT AND COMING UP WITH A REMEDY – THAT TAKES INTELLIGENCE. ANY THUG CAN PULL A TRIGGER AND KILL. THERE IS NO INTELLIGENCE IN THAT.
LET’S MAKE GAMES THAT MAKE US BETTER, NOT WORSE.

In Forbes Magazine, Rob Waters:
The nation’s leading public health agency was effectively barred from making recommendations on a public health problem that constitutes one of the leading causes of death of Americans. The law remains in effect, and it’s had a chilling effect on research, says David Hemenway, professor of health policy at the Harvard School of Public Health and director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.
“Compared to the size of the problem, there has been far too little research on gun violence,” Hemenway said in an email.  “Part of the reason is the pressure the gun lobby has put on funders. The Center for Disease Control, for example, is almost afraid to say the word ‘guns.’”…
In a small village in Henan province in China, a distraught man went on a rampage, attacking children at an elementary school with a knife. Twenty-two children were wounded, some of them seriously, but all of them survived because only one of the attackers had access to guns…
Despite the gag rule imposed on the CDC by Congress, some studies on the impacts of gun ownership have emerged over the last two decades. They suggest that owning guns makes people less safe, not more, and that adults and children who live in states with lots of guns are more likely to become shooting victims…
The question now is whether people across the country will demand change and put an end to the stranglehold the NRA has gained over Congress, the CDC and the national discourse. If not now, when?

In Haaretz, Alan Dershowitz
Maybe this is finally the time. Maybe the gunning down of 20 small children by a man with a gun designed only for mass killings will shake Americans from their perverted love affair with automatic and semi-automatic weapons. Maybe some responsible legislators will think more about the children among their constituents than about the money they receive from the National Rifle Association…
The truth is there for everyone to see. The United States has more guns per capita than any other first world country. Indeed we probably have more guns than we do people. We also have more gun crimes, more gun murders, more gun injuries, more gun suicides and more gun accidents than any first world country. This is neither coincidence nor mere corollary. The easy availability of guns causes gun deaths.
Sure people kill, but people with guns kill more efficiently, and people with semiautomatic guns kill even more efficiently, and people with automatic guns and large ammunition clips kill yet more efficiently and quickly. It took Adam Lanza a mere matter of seconds to end the lives of so many innocent people… Guns turn temper tantrums into murder, depression into suicide, and a family member wrongly suspected of being an intruder into a corpse.
If not now, when? How many more Newtowns must families endure before the law finally comes to the rescue of gun victims? If these killings don’t stimulate change, I fear that nothing will.

In New Yorker magazine
I can walk into a gun dealership and purchase a .50 caliber rifle of the sort that U.S. snipers use in Afghanistan. In fact, I can buy six or ten—there is no limit imposed by law. …
gunbroker.com, reported two billion dollars in sales this year…
The gunman in Aurora was able to shoot seventy people in under two minutes because his AR-15 had a one-hundred-round drum…
he gun lobby is hunkered down, confident that the profound sense of urgency many of us feel right now will diminish, and we will soon return to our familiar, dystopian status quo. All they need to do is wait out the furor, as they have so many times before. We can only hope that President Obama doesn’t choose to do the same.

In The Economist, “The Gun Control That Works: No Guns”
… To be crude, having few guns does mean that few people get shot. In 2008-2009, there were 39 fatal injuries from crimes involving firearms in England and Wales, with a population about one sixth the size of America’s. In America, there were 12,000 gun-related homicides in 2008…

We mourn... we deplore...

After a few tears, the defense mentality, and the addiction to shortcuts (and climaxes) returns.
That indefensible sense of self...
Alabama, two more shootings the same day, and the next day at Newport Beach, 50 rounds at a shopping mall...

Tarantino said he was tired of defending his films each time the nation is shocked by gun violence: "tragedies happen" and blame should fall on those guilty of the crimes... BUT he also has said To me violence is a totally aesthetic subject... I find violence very funny.

Tears and concern are not enough, it is time for action.

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