Lessons Repeated

The pictures of Sikh families outside their temple awaiting news of loved ones are chilling to us all.  Of course, maybe we excuse ourselves from feeling bad about this shooting because we're not ready to get worked up about another round of inexplicable American violence.  After all, the Aurora shooting was just a few weeks ago.  How much hand-wringing and agonizing can one nation handle?

The morning of the Aurora shootings, I wrote a post about our willful national refusal to engage in responsible gun control.  Then I signed a petition at the Brady Campaign website, wrote some letters to my members of Congress, folks who already favor good gun control laws, and listened in horror as gun advocates explained that guns aren't the problem here.  I suppose it won't be long before some NRA advocate explains to me that if only some of the people at the Oak Creek Temple in Wisconsin had guns with them, this event wouldn't have been so violent.  This needn't be so difficult folks: let's ban the sale of assault rifles and let's limit ammunition purchases.  Let's not extinguish more lives in pursuit of some kind of twisted second amendment freedom that doesn't feel like freedom at all to families who have lost the people they love.