PICAYUNE —
The headlines say President Obama has “taken on the gun lobby,” but actually, he has taken on our culture of violence, including the violent rhetoric that accompanies any attempt to alter it.
“If Americans of every background stand up and say, enough; we’ve suffered too much pain and care too much about our children to allow this to continue — then change will come,” Obama told the nation this week. From what wisdom I’ve acquired in 50 years, he’s right. Change requires both the will and the effort to cause change. Do we have it in us?
According to the UPI, in February the U.S. Senate will take up a bill to deal with gun violence. Finally, we are having a national conversation about how to reduce mass killings and what actions we can take to save lives one at a time.
Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, told National Public Radio, “I think it’s great that we’re having this conversation today, and this day is a long time coming.”
For 11,478 Americans in 2012, including 20 schoolchildren and six adults in Newtown, it comes too late. It comes too late for Gabby Giffords, whose life was permanently altered by a madman’s bullet. It comes too late for James Brady, the former White House press secretary who was severely handicapped by Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin.
Giffords and Brady (who turned 72 this year) both lead gun-control organizations. They remind us that it’s not just those the bullets have killed who matter. The wounded matter. The survivors matter. The families matter.
In fact, our national character matters. Our Declaration of Independence states that among our inalienable rights are “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Gun violence, the culture that fosters it and the rhetoric that praises it, deprives us of those rights.
Obama’s press conference struck the right balance between the “individual right” reading of the Second Amendment and the Constitution’s mandate to “provide for the general welfare.” The president acknowledged the controversy and respected the concerns of all parties involved, then, in addition to proposing legislation to reinstate the ban on assault weapons, immediately signed 23 executive orders. Some facilitate background checks of potential gun buyers, making it easier for gun dealers to be part of the solution. Some provide resources to schools, facilitating the hiring of a security guard or mental health counselor.
These mostly administrative directives, well within the president’s power to direct the operation of existing federal programs, were based on common sense and represented consensus. They were the result of broad-based conversations and represent the will of the people.
NBC News said, “In fact, most are administrative— publishing letters, writing memos and appointing administrators.”
But many on the right want to use our national conversation about gun violence as yet another opportunity to demonize Obama. Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky says Obama has a “king complex,” although he’s issued fewer executive orders than any president in 100 years.
The NRA, in particular, has let the dogs out. It produced an Internet ad that attacked Obama for allowing his daughters to have Secret Service protection, which is federally mandated. Mike Barnicle, appearing on the MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” broadcast, called it “pornographic.” Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the co-hosts of the show, were so stunned and horrified by the ad, they were speechless for several seconds.
Scarborough couldn’t believe the NRA did not understand that any president’s children had, as he put it, “a target on their backs.” Both he and Brzezinski condemned the NRA as “fringe,” “extremist” and not the organization it used to be.
New regulations and laws alone won’t stop all gun violence and protect all our schools and children. And, as Jerry Henry, executive director of GeorgiaCarry.org, said on CNN, we need to enforce the gun laws already on the books.
BClearly, more needs to be done. The president’s proposals include universal background checks, banning assault weapons and capping magazine capacity. They also include funding for police, for research on gun violence, for school counseling and for security. He wants to both strengthen gun tracking and promote safe gun ownership. Several directives address the national mental health crisis and its intersection with gun violence.
No program will be 100 percent perfect. Columbine had armed guards in the school. Shooters in Aurora and at Virginia Tech were on mental health officials’ radar, but deaths still happened.
Because we can’t do everything doesn’t mean we should do nothing. The “right to bear arms” is not absolute, as even the NRA acknowledges.
It is time we stop the personal attacks, stop the paranoia, and work together to protect the rights of our children— beginning with the right to grow into adulthood.
(Donna Brazile is a senior Democratic strategist, a political commentator and contributor to CNN and ABC News.)
Opinion
Gun debate a long time coming
- Opinion
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Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.” -
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist
Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.
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VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008. -
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists
When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”
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Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing. -
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered. -
1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun
The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral. -
Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.
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Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.
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Multiculturalism is not rational
By Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist
Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley. - More Opinion Headlines
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