Throughout my time as a student of political science, I learned the value of not taking political sides on issues unless you really believe in them. It makes it easier to engage in debate when you aren't necessarily sold on a perspective. It compels you to dig into things like political principle, moral guidance and religious history when you haven't yet found your place on either side of a line.
And then one day it dawns on you that you have in fact chosen a side. That as hard as you've entertained all the angles of an issue with your mind, your heart has chosen an opinion for you. Sometimes this realization comes on slowly – with every debate on the issue, you find yourself more readily able to concoct a rebuttal to points made in defense of what soon becomes the opposing perspective. Or sometimes it happens with a bang – a breaking news alert that something has gone terribly awry and a certain perspective on the issue can be blamed.
I for one am a child of the former when it comes to gun control. With every gun incident in the news, be it victimless or classifiably mass murder, every interview on Fox News, every congressional hearing and every bar stool debate, I've become more and more obsessed with the issue.With every passing day, it consumes me because with so many detrimental things on this planet that we as Americans cannot directly control – civil wars that aren't ours to fight, the manifestation of unbeatable diseases in our loved ones – I feel we should know better than to sit idle in the face of ones we can.
Then there are the victims of the latter – the ones who cannot wrap their heads around something that seems so obvious to others simply because there's nothing real to hold onto beyond our Constitutional right to bear arms. They have been distracted by other wars while the smaller domestic one on gun violence more quietly blips on the radar around our country. They have been overwhelmed by partisan thought-leaders, often influenced by pro-gun lobbies, to the point where they cannot prioritize the tragedy of untimely bullet-induced deaths over the threat of re-adapting our founding fathers' words to better suit our times.
I choose the word victims for these people because they are not to blame for their fate. We all have our own minds that work in their own mysterious ways. And as someone who rarely feels compelled to take a side on an issue, I completely understand how easy it is to feel paralyzed and overstimulated by our political landscape.
But in the wake of the heinous tragedy that took 27 lives in Connecticut last week, one that was brought on by a citizen's ability to obtain a high magazine assault rifle, that citizen's subsequent choice to expose their mentally disabled child to that rifle and that mentally disabled child's resulting access to and ability to effectively use that rifle, we no longer have a choice. There is no longer an option. We - You - can't sit this one out.
We are citizens of a nation that values life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and there is no way to reconcile those values with the rapid, vicious slaughter of 20 pre-schoolers and their defenseless teachers. Even down to the granular, Constitutional law level of this debate, there is simply no argument supporting that this is what our founding father's would have wanted. Not just because of the nature of the murders and the many other senseless ones we've witnessed as of late, but because they never would have defended our nation had they thought we would decimate ourselves so heinously from within 200 years later. It wouldn't have been worth the fight.
If there is a silver lining to this darkest of hours in America, it is this: We have now seen everyone from congressional leaders to defenseless pre-schoolers find themselves in the cross-hairs of preventable evil. And if people really are the ones who kill these people, then there has never been a more obvious moment to burn the bridges between those people and their guns.
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