The good guys.

I was born into a family of first responders. As I mentioned in my last post, my father was a policeman. My mother was a critical care nurse before she became a Physician Assistant. My brother is a paramedic, and he was a professional firefighter before a severe injury ended his career.  Growing up, I was very aware that while I often had my nose in a history book or a novel, the other members of my family were quietly trying to redress the real brutality and suffering and loss that had come to prey on the lives of actual flesh-and-blood people - but also to elevate our collective potential for kindness, hope, and generosity.

And so after Newtown, I prayed hard for the first responders. The surviving children and school staff will surely be traumatized by their experiences in the building, but the first responders are the ones who had to see the carnage as a whole. They are the ones who will have to live the rest of their lives with the images of twenty bullet-riddled first-graders, of bloodied classrooms with crayon drawings on the walls and toys lining the shelves, seared into their memories. They are the ones who will surely grapple with the guilt of not getting there soon enough, of not managing to save the two children who were still alive and rushed to the hospital, even though the rest of us know that they did absolutely everything they could. They are the ones who will have to remember the faces, the tears, the desperation of the parents. To us, these first responders are heroes. To themselves, they may always be not quite heroic enough.

One Newtown story has particularly stuck with me. Bryce Maskel is a 7 year old boy who was able to escape from Victoria Soto's classroom, although he was not spared the loss of his beloved teacher or several good friends. He also lost Yoshi, his favorite stuffed toy, when he ran from the school. Later, he told his mother that he thought Adam Lanza had shot the little green dinosaur. And he missed him, because he had taken him to school every single day. So imagine his joy when Fairfield Police Lieutenant Mike Gagner found Yoshi - after exhaustively searching for him amidst the crime scene - and put him back in Bryce's arms alongside his own state trooper teddy bear, which he had been awarded for bravery.

Mike Gagner is one of the good guys. And so were Michael Chiapperini, 43, and Tomasz Kaczowka, 19, two volunteer firefighters who were killed by bullets from assault weapons while responding to a house fire on Christmas eve. Those weapons belonged to Michael Spengler, a 62 year old man who was convicted and jailed for 16 years for killing his grandmother with a hammer and throwing her down the basement stairs. One of the weapons he used to trap and murder the firemen was a .233 semiautomatic Bushmaster rifle. Sound familiar? It should, because it is the same weapon that Adam Lanza used to massacre 26 innocents in Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Adam Lanza was clearly a deeply disturbed young man, and it is eminently possible that the American mental health care system failed him. It is also possible that our culture failed him, that his parents failed him. This article, and this one, and this one, and surely many more, attest to some sense of national anguish over these questions. And thus I do not believe that guns are the only problem, the only cause of our crisis. I believe we need a comprehensive solution to the startling routinization of violence in this country, and I believe that black-and-white thinking will only make us both less safe and less kind.

But the fact remains that Adam Lanza was able to access a military style weapon and load it with enough bullets to murder every single child in Sandy Hook Elementary School. And this same weapon was easily available to Michael Spengler, who the system actually caught. Michael Spengler, whose murderous tendencies, whose depraved nature, were firmly established in the criminal record, still managed to kill a few more good guys. How can this be possible in 2012, in the United States of America?

The following passage from a piece in the International Business Times is sadly telling:

While it is true that Spengler’s acquiring weapons legally would have been next-to-impossible in New York, a state with some of the strictest gun laws in the country, the same could not be said had he committed his murderous assault 200 miles to the southwest in Ohio, where judges are more lenient in reinstating former felons’ gun ownership rights.

Or Spengler could just have traveled to the nearest gun show and purchased weapons through a loophole that excludes these expos from checking criminal backgrounds. Regardless of his revoked gun ownership rights, it’s easy in America for a psychotic ex-convict to illegally acquire weapons (or in some cases petition for gun rights reinstatement) because states have vastly different approaches to the right to keep and bear arms.

This means any laws passed by one state to prohibit ex-convicts or people with serious mental problems from legally acquiring weapons are useless if other states have gun shows every few months, or have judges who liberally reinstate gun ownership rights to those with past violent crime convictions, or have fairly easy petition processes for gun-ownership reinstatement to felons.

This piece fails to mention the Internet loophole, which allowed James Holmes to purchase an arsenal of weapons, ammunition, and tactical gear without raising any alarms, which he then used to slaughter 12 innocent people in a movie theater in Aurora, CO in July 2012.

So how can Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association (NRA) stand in front of us and tell us that violent criminals are the problem, that more armed guards - more "good guys with guns" - are the solution? In Webster, NY, our system failed to protect some of our very best good guys even though we already knew that Michael Spengler could easily become the kind of "madman" so many gun rights advocates say will always exist, and therefore make us powerless to fight mass murder. There are already those arguing that firemen, like teachers, should be armed with bazookas, grenades, and M-16s when they do their jobs each day - just have a look at the comments from the IBT article linked to above.

Addressing violence with violence cannot be the answer. I fear for our country if a known violent criminal can legally, or at the very least easily, acquire a weapon whose sole purpose is to cause maximum damage in the shortest possible time period. But I am truly incensed by the idea that there are many individuals in this country who would rather live with these loopholes and even add more guns, rather than consider the idea that some new restrictions might potentially have an impact - all because they fear losing their assault weapons themselves. All because they are unwilling to make any individual sacrifices, even small ones, for the good of their friends and neighbors and fellow countrymen. It saddens me that there is so little trust even among law-abiding citizens in this country, that political fear-mongering about the Second Amendment now trumps common sense and goodwill. I can only hope that if twenty murdered first-graders couldn't make Americans brave enough to have this conversation, then maybe our dead first responders - those who uphold the common good at grave risk to their own lives - will get them talking. And even more importantly, get them listening.

My father.

When I was born, my father was a policeman in our small suburban town just a little ways north of New York City. Several years later, he opened a gun supply store, and his main clients were other first responders and sportsmen like himself. My brother and I used to sit on the floor behind the display cases, making "sculptures" out of used bullet casings and pretending we knew how to answer the customers' questions. Sometimes, my father took us to the shooting range and taught us how to aim and fire, how to clean guns, how to assemble and disassemble them. I still remember the small, silvery Colt handgun, the weight and coolness of it, and my pride when I hit a bulls eye on my very first try. My father, who owned that Colt and many other firearms, was a self-identified conservative, a gun collector, and a member of the NRA. He proudly displayed a Confederate flag bumper sticker on the back of his beat-up black Pathfinder. At the same time, he made sure to hang a massive American flag from our front porch every Fourth of July - the biggest on the block. This was because my father was nothing if not a patriot.

My father was what some today might refer to as a "gun nut". But he was also the kindest, gentlest man I knew. When I was little, he would wait in the car to drive me home after school, always holding a favorite snack - usually a chocolate croissant from a local bakery and an Arizona iced tea. When I got older, he would often leave notes saying "I love you," or pieces of paper with a simple heart drawing, on my steering wheel to find when I left school in the afternoons. In the days after he died, we discovered that he had purchased and personally delivered a huge package of toys to the local children's hospital. We found letters between him and leaders of Native American reservations in the Dakotas, where he had been quietly donating warm clothes and boots for years. He was so beloved in our town that even the baristas at the local Starbucks were brokenhearted at his death, and they all signed a coffee cup - his usual Venti - to be buried with him.

In the aftermath of Newtown, with the memories of my father's life and death still an integral part of my daily existence, I struggle with the question of how he would have reacted to the slaughter of twenty first-graders, six educators, and a mother in a town forty-five minutes away from where he raised his own children. He died about a year and a half after the Columbine massacre, and I still remember his quiet grief as we watched the once-unthinkable (now all-too-familiar) scenes of chaos and anguish as students streamed from the school with their hands above their heads. My father may have loved guns, but he loved them at a time when we couldn't imagine the many young men who would exploit their access to them to massacre innocent people in schools; in universities; in movie theaters; in malls; in museums; and at political meet-and-greet events.

My father was a staunch defender of the Second Amendment. I would not be surprised if he thought that guns in homes, or more armed guards in schools, were part of the solution. We would have debated these ideas rationally and calmly, because my father was not prone to rash anger or jumping to conclusions.

While I can never know for sure, I can make a choice. And I choose to believe that my father would not have reacted like Philip Van Cleave of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, whose resistance to a renewed assault weapons ban is based, at least in part, on the fact that they are "fun" - the "Ferrari" of firearms. Or like this man who commented on an Avon Patch piece:

I'm real sorry that this happened, I'm not the cause of it and it makes me cry as much as the next guy. To tell you the truth I will never give up my guns or clips. I don't have any assault weapons. I do have a couple semi automatic handguns. One with a high capacity clip. I'm not giving up my guns just to make you feel good at night just not going to happen.

My father was a father first, a father above all. He could not have seen the faces of those twenty Newtown children without thinking of his own babies, whom he always tried so hard to protect. Even if he thought assault weapons and high capacity clips were cool, he would never have placed his own fun above the well-being of the nation he loved. He would never have abrogated responsibility like the men quoted above - he would never have rested on the idea that he didn't pull the trigger, and thus it was not his problem. Because, again, he was a patriot. My father tried hard to be selfless, and yes, if it made the parents in this country "feel good at night" to know that ordinary citizens could not access military-style weapons, then he would have been willing to give them up if he owned or sold them. He would have made that personal sacrifice for the greater good. This is how I choose to remember him.

An explanation.

My father was killed in a tragic accident when I was sixteen years old. At a memorial tree planting several months later, I read the following poem to the mourners:

Do not stand at my grave and weep,

I am not there; I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow,

I am the diamond glints on snow,

I am the sun on ripened grain,

I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the morning’s hush

I am the swift uplifting rush

Of quiet birds in circling flight.

I am the soft starlight at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry,

I am not there; I did not die.

This poem has always brought me great comfort, and in the aftermath of the Newtown shootings, it has returned to me again and again. I pray for comfort for those twenty seven lost souls and for their loved ones, for their brokenhearted community, and yet I am so overwhelmed by the thought of their grief. I cannot even begin to imagine what those left behind are feeling, experiencing, and enduring - or what they will continue to endure in the days and months and years to come. I myself feel shocked, confused, and angry. I cannot turn away from the media coverage. I cannot stop thinking about Newtown.

Every mass shooting in this country horrifies and saddens me, especially since I myself almost experienced one. I was at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on the June day in 2009 when an 88 year old neo-Nazi stormed the entrance and opened fire, killing one of the guards while they returned his fire. I heard several "popping" noises and I thought nothing of it - I assumed it was a child banging on a metal pole in the room. But as people started to scream and run, I realized, in complete disbelief, what was happening. I was in the gift shop, which is close to the entrance and could have been the first stop for the shooter had he gotten past the guards. Not knowing what was happening or where he was, I piled on top of a group of school children at the very back of the room, hoping the nearby bookshelves would provide us some cover. We were just trying to hide. I remember thinking "please God, give my mother comfort," and "I hope it doesn't hurt"; I tried to think about seeing my father again. I tried to prepare to die. But after an agonizing ten minutes, law enforcement officials came into the room screaming at us to run, and we evacuated. I was lucky that day. My mother has not had to read that poem and think of me. The family of that brave guard, Stephen Tyrone Johns, cannot say the same - but because of him, myself and countless others are still alive.

But now, Newtown has cracked something in me. After my experience at the Museum, after Columbine and Virginia Tech and Tuscon and Aurora, and every shooting in between, I can no longer sit in passive horror and watch these massacres keep happening. I can no longer passively endure the sadness as the names and ages and faces of innocent victims continue to scroll across my television screen. I refuse to accept that this is unpreventable, that we are powerless because there will always be crazy people in the world, that freedom and safety are mutually exclusive. I cannot tolerate arguments for more weapons, careless and hypocritical accusations of "politicization," or the all-or-nothing thinking that undermines any attempt at a meaningful national dialogue.

It is clear to me that we are not living up to "the better angels of our nature," as President Lincoln implored of us. Instead, we accuse, we dodge responsibility, and we refuse to ask the hard questions and demand real answers. It is unacceptable and unforgivable. It is time to stand up and be brave and do whatever we can do to stop this. It is time to honor our nation's victims by coming together in solidarity against senseless violence. We must do more, we must do better, than simply to stand at their graves and weep.