Mitch Albom: School shooting a watershed moment
Mitch Albom: School shooting a watershed moment
December 16, 2012
By Mitch Albom
Detroit Free Press columnist
Turn on the news.
We've become far too used to that sentence. It usually means something horrible has happened. We heard it when O.J. Simpson was being chased by police cars. We heard it when planes flew into the World Trade Center.
We heard it Friday, when a 20-year-old gunman walked into a Connecticut elementary school and began firing, doing something unimaginable: killing innocent children, possibly all first-graders.
When stories like these happen, they are marked not just by tears, fury, finger-pointing and hand-wringing, but something else: a noticeable shift in national attitude.
-snip-
But something will give. In a nation that can't agree on much, we all hold hands over the preciousness of childhood innocence. Every parent squeezed his or her child a bit tighter Friday night, and every one will worry a bit more when the school bell rings Monday morning.
Turn on the news. What place is safe anymore? When that becomes the national question, something's gotta give.
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Stuckinthebush
(10,847 posts)Rinse and repeat.
Very sad
kenny blankenship
(15,689 posts)they are other people's children in Pakistan and Yemen and Afghanistan and a growing list of places. We support Israel when it does the same in Gaza. We slaughtered unknown multitudes of Native American children with the gun to clear the way for our new shining city on a hill.
Childhood is no bar to the "bad touch" of American violence and never was. Watershed moment? Enough to pass a fairly symbolic and ineffectual assault weapons ban perhaps, but the Heller decision of the Supreme Court upholds the individual right to untrammeled access to instruments of slaughter. Two dozen dead first graders aren't enough to change that now, if all the other massacres that preceded it were not. America is a sick, violent society -suicidal in its domestic policies, homicidal in its foreign policy- and its sickness prevents the creation of sane law to curb its violence.
MinM
(2,650 posts)I wonder if he still is?
Current NRA Board member has advocated Obama's assassination on at least three seperate occasions