Too bad the ONLY tradgedies they care about are gun violence…..
Too bad kids killed wtih other innanimate objects are not as important to them.
===========

Shame on opportunistic anti-gun zealots
by Joe Fitzgerald
Copyright ? Boston Herald All Rights Reserved
Saturday, March 4, 2000

The fact it’s so predictable makes it no less annoying when anti-gun
zealots, opportunists that they are, shamelessly grab the coattails of a
tragedy and ride them for all they’re worth.
Before any other facts were known regarding the death of a Michigan
first-grader at the hands of a classmate this week, the fact her assailant
used a .32-caliber pistol was sufficient to send these self-serving
demagogues into a rage, blaming her murder on anyone who doesn’t share their
loathing of weapons.

It’s an illogical, unconscionable assertion, which guilt by association
generally is, but since it’s also good for a free ride on talk shows and
newscasts, fair play goes out the window.

Suppose that troubled boy had bashed her with a bat?

Suppose he’d dropped her out of a window, or pushed her off a roof?

We’ve seen all those scenarios in tragedies before.

Indeed, if he had killed her any other way than with a firearm, which
incidentally had been stolen, our focus would have been where it belongs,
i.e., on a very troubled kid, rather than on the way that trouble revealed
itself.

But what that trouble also revealed, it says here, is how, as a society, we
are reaping what we’ve sown.

It’s not the gun industry that glorifies savagery in films.

It’s not responsible gun owners who make a fortune depicting violence.

It’s not sportsmen who glorify hoodlums, turning gangsters into celebrities.

“It’s time we take a long, hard, serious look to see anew how often
innocent people are made to suffer for the kind of society we have allowed
to develop,” Pastor Albert Aymer suggested here in 1994, the night before
presiding over the funeral of his boyhood friend, Pastor Accelyne Williams,
75, who’d suffered a fatal heart attack during a mistaken police invasion of
his home in Dorchester.

Aymer, who could have joined the local chorus of race-baiters and
cop-bashers, chose instead to view a bigger picture from higher ground.

“By allowing society to get like this,” he said, “we become a part of its
creation. We like to think we’re not responsible for the way things are. We
like to think we had no active role in getting to this point. But no society
just happens. We all have roles to play. We either do something to prevent
situations, or we sit back and do nothing, and by doing nothing we become
participants through neglect.”

Where does a 6-year-boy get the idea that a gun is the way to settle a
schoolyard dispute? Where is that thinking formed? Where is that example
set?

Those are much more important questions than where he got the gun, but too
few people are willing to ask them because then they would have to deal with
the answers.

It’s so much easier to vilify the National Rifle Association, to
characterize gun owners as neanderthals, to insist all these problems would
somehow vanish if we just did away with the product.

And yet we know American lives are also wasted by alcohol, especially at the
hands of drunken drivers. Why isn’t there a similar outcry over the liquor
industry’s promotion of its own potentially lethal product?

Bullets aren’t the only thing killing kids today.

Booze is killing them, too, often by the car-full.

The difference is one’s politically incorrect while the other’s socially
acceptable, though neither matters when you’re dead.

Is Johnny Walker Red as much of a danger to your life and mine as Smith &
Wesson? You bet it is.

Is Miller Lite as great a threat to your well-being and mine as a Remington
or a Winchester? You bet it is.

Whether you’re talking firearms or firewater, it all comes down to who’s
using the product, and how.

That’s why the sooner we realize that what was in that boy’s hand is nowhere
near as important as what was in his head and heart, the sooner we might be
able to make some sense of it all.