How Many Children Have to Die?

How many children have to die?

The reports are still coming in, but authorities in Connecticut are talking about 20 dead children in a kindergarten classroom. This follows on the deaths in an Oregon shopping center. This is just one week in America.

I spent my early years on a farm, took a gun safety class, and have walked, after the harvest, through cornfields looking for pheasants.

But I taught at a university two blocks from Compton. In one classroom the woman on the far left's father had killed the sister of the woman sitting on the far right. I knew this one couple at school who shared something. Both of their brothers were in prison for murder.

Two days after John F. Kennedy died, a professor in my political science class told us more people were killed by guns in Dallas in one year then died of gunshot wounds in the entire British Isles. We have more guns per capita now than we did in 1900.

Every time a legislator supports gun control, the NRA, with all their gun manufacturer money, tries to destroy his career.

Our youth watch bloodier and bloodier movies until they are desensitized to gun violence.

God bless America. Some days it's hard to believe we're the greatest country on earth. When they finally get the body's counted in that kindergarten classroom, someone will create a prayer wall, or maybe a statue. Then we'll all go around, once again, pretending that our society works perfectly.