Category Archives: assault weapons

For days now I have had an unshakeable identity I hadn’t felt for a long time, and that is that I am a Connecticut girl born and bred. However much I ventured off and adopted other regions, it all came back to Connecticut for me this week with the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. I think everyone felt this way. We all became Connecticut citizens at that moment.

I thought I could see my old neighborhood in the images. It looked familiar enough, all the parents and children, houses and trees. I saw my bucolic childhood. A time when no one locked doors. When no one other than hunters owned guns, and they took them away to wherever it was they went to hunt. While we were growing up the only guns we saw were in television shows, cop dramas and westerns, Dragnet and 77 Sunset Strip, Rawhide and Bonanza. In other words, when you saw a gun, you knew it was a toy.

And that is where I reached the end of the road in resemblance. No home then would have possessed assault weapons as this one did in Newtown, Connecticut. The Right to Bear Arms has become unbearable. Our children deserve the right to be safe. The British aren’t coming, and hunters can hunt in designated reserves where their arms are checked in, just as we leave our boats in marinas.

Gun control has long been an issue in my house. Twenty years ago when I was despairing over all the guns that were already out there, even if we could stop the sales tomorrow, my seven year old at the time said, “That’s easy, mom. They just have to stop making bullets.”

I knew she was right; if we wrap our heads around it, we can do anything. Now a woman of twenty-seven, nothing has happened in our nation in this regard. Nothing with the exception of more casualties. But just this week in the intro to her blog she wrote, “It seems like there is enough momentum to create some real change in the coming years.”(http://amadcity.com/2012/12/14/hope-take-two/).

Let’s topple the gun lobbyists who have held this country hostage for far too long. Let’s put our technology to the task. And let’s see that our country runs more like a National Park, realizing that we are at once both the caretakers and the precious wildlife.