We can learn from New Zealand
On March 15, New Zealand experienced the worst mass shooting in the nation’s history.
A week later, the nation’s parliament approved a ban on all military-style semi-automatic and assault rifles, pieced together a plan to buy back the recently banned weapons, and ensured that there isn’t a rush to buy those weapons before the law is fully enacted next month.
This wasn’t a ham-fisted ruling by New Zealand’s ruling party, it was a law supported by the opposition as well as ruling parties.
And they are serious, allowing New Zealanders only three weeks after the ban takes effect to turn in their prohibited weapons.
It looks like the thoughts and prayers of those outraged by this massacre were directed appropriately.
While New Zealand has a different governmental structure than we do in the United States, governments, no matter what their form or substance, usually move with glacial speed.
Not this time.
In one day, New Zealand lost 50 human lives to a heavily armed lunatic — the equivalent of all of the gun homicides in that country over the last six years. The United States? We average about 30,000 gun deaths each year (although many of those are due to suicide). To put that into proportion, that is roughly the population of Cedar City.
Look, this ban does not mean it will be impossible for a shooter to take down a large number of people in New Zealand in the future.
But it is a much saner approach than suggesting that we arm everybody from preachers to teachers to protect us from these nutjobs. Similar measures have worked in Australia and hopefully will save lives in New Zealand.
It could work in the United States as well, you know, except we may never get the chance to see that because of the stranglehold the NRA has on our elected officials.
In 2016, the group gave more than $400 million in campaign contributions. It spends more than $5 million yearly on lobbying efforts to defend their spin on the Second Amendment, which scholars have debated inconclusively for decades now.
That money has lengthened the Congressional careers of many who care more about saving their jobs than saving lives.
So they talk a lot about thoughts and prayers each time a shooter opens fire on the innocent. They talk a lot about how improper it is to discuss stricter gun laws while the bodies are still warm and insist that dialog be shelved until the moment passes, even though the moment never passes. And they continue to hold their blood-soaked hands out for their payoffs from the NRA, which in turn would not be opposed to replacing the torch in Lady Liberty’s hand with an AR-15.
Reportedly, the American public is wising up and NRA membership is failing.
Still, they wield a firestorm of power, even when spewing propaganda intending to send us into spasms of fear.
In case you haven’t figured it out, contrary to NRA propaganda, not everybody in that club is in favor of free-range guns.
Contrary to NRA propaganda, every home does not need an arsenal to protect itself from the Deep State, a figment created in the dark minds that cloud the conservative perspective.
Contrary to NRA propaganda, there is not a preponderance of Americans opposed to gun controls. In fact, the opposite is true. According to the latest Gallup Poll, 61 percent of Americans would like stricter gun laws. Of course, according to the poll that matters most, 48 percent of American voters preferred Hillary Clinton, compared with the 46 percent who voted for Donald Trump.
In a perfect world, those numbers would matter. However, as we drift further and further from a perfect world, those numbers are meaningless in a place where reason has given way to incoherence.
The simple linkage of the words “gun” and “control” can launch waves of paroxysm among those who use fear as motivation and cynicism as a measure of judgment to defend a vague amendment from a distant time and place that was presumably written to provide for state militias. Unless you are a member of a state National Guard unit, you are no more a member of the militia than I am. You might don your G.I. Joe camo pants and shirt and you may carry a sidearm or semiautomatic rifle, but you aren’t part of any militia. You are, instead, a Rambo wannabe who has watched “Red Dawn” one time too many.
It is exactly this crowd of social misfits and miscreants that the NRA is counting on to defend it, support it, and keep it viable.
Enough is enough.
We can no longer turn off our conscience and allow these marauders free rein.
Until recently, the United States was looked to for leadership, calm, and strength.
We were once the moral compass of a war-torn world, the compassionate country that would rescue others from famine and disease, the place everybody wanted to be because we cared, we felt deeply, we were, well, the best.
Now?
We have succumbed to selfishness, greed, an isolationism, a rejection of core world values and aspirations.
New Zealand should be looking to the United States and asking for advice on how to eliminate these killings. Instead, the United States is the one looking on from afar, the kneejerk far right all hoping the New Zealand enactments fail because then they can say, “I told you so.”
Meanwhile, the death toll mounts, even peripherally.
Sadly, last Friday, 19-year-old Sydney Aiello took her own life.
Sydney was a graduate of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the site of what has become known as the Parkland Massacre that took 17 lives last year.
Sydney’s mother said the young lady was overcome with survivor’s guilt and was recently diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
She survived the attack, but she didn’t survive the aftermath. It was difficult, her mother said, for her as she tried to attend her college classes because she feared being in a classroom.
So add another victim to that list.
If it comforts you, keep Sydney in your thoughts and prayers.
But when you get up off your knees, march, protest, get vocal, and vote to end the senseless carnage going on in our country and resolve to rid us of those whose souls have been bought by the NRA.
Peace.
The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Independent.
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