I read with interest the March 14 column about “Safe and supportive Schools for all,” co-signed by area superintendents.
As a public educator with nearly 20 years of experience working with high school students, I reflect on the fact that my career began the same year as the Columbine massacre. Since then we, as Americans, have completely failed to address the underlying means by which mass shootings are made possible: wide public access to assault weapons, promoted by gun manufacturers and defended as an unassailable right by the National Rifle Association.
So far — and even after Sandy Hook — the public response has been cowardly in the face of the NRA’s cultish guns-everywhere-all-the-time agenda and its tactics of misdirection, bullying and fear-mongering. Add to this the unspeakable cravenness of lawmakers who give platitudes to the dead while they do the NRA’s bidding, and NRA members who feel differently than their club’s leadership but who remain silent. At this point NRA dues are a kind of blood money.
The range of defensive measures, where instituted, have done little to stop mass shootings. Improved background checks, mental health screenings and better databases will not stop these killings because they do not address the tool that makes them feasible: the weapons. Don’t think so? It is impossible for a single attacker to sow the same devastation with a billy club or a knife.
Public ownership of assault weapons and all the paraphernalia that make them so horrifyingly lethal should be banned. Congress did it in 1934 when they outlawed the Thompson submachine gun. We can — and must — do it again. Those of us who refuse to live with massacres as a horrific but seemingly intractable part of our civic life must take action and it must be now. Defensive measures do not work.
The NRA succeeds because it effectively mobilizes its membership — who are far outnumbered by those of us who want effective gun control. The way to end this scourge is straightforward: mobilize. Mobilize now. Vote into office politicians who will ban and remove from circulation the weapons that make these massacres possible.
Matt Rigney
Williamsburg