Connecticut Shooting

I am exhausted.

As an American living in Europe, I feel I find myself almost monthly having defend my homeland's high gun death rate.  And then there's the latest high body count...  Europeans will not even LISTEN to you when you start to speak about the Second Amendment or the politics of Gun Control or the NRA or the fear of tyranny ...and the list goes on.

I find myself simply exhausted, tired, drained, etc.

There IS violence here, make no mistake, but someone with a grudge or a mental illness or just plain evil in his heart has a harder time acting on those impulses and harming the rest of us.

After spending so much time here, the situational awareness that I had when leaving the USA has disappeared.  I no longer look over my shoulder or even scope out potential danger spots in my neighborhood.  I am safe to walk my city at all hours of the day, even in some cases after a few drinks, without a heightened level of fear.

I used to think the above was making me frighteningly vulnerable, like a soldier who losses his edge at home before heading back to war.

Again, I find myself exhausted when I have to explain this to anyone here.  They just don't get it.  I hit them with the facts (and you can see the fear and disbelief in their eyes)...

a) The USA is saturated with firearms.  We have more than 300 million of them and more than 4 million more come into circulation every year.  Eradication is impossible.

b) There ARE gun laws.  But the gun show "loophole" allows gun sales WITHOUT a background check. SO the laws on the book become meaningless.

c) The mentally ill have a great many laws on their side and ability to buy guns is one of them.  We take medical privacy very serious in the USA, even to the point of making it easy for psychopaths and the violently deranged to gain weapons.

d) People have every right to defend themselves, their family and their property.  If people were shooting back in the Conn. tragedy perhaps less children would have been killed.  Law-abiding citizens need to be allowed to end these situations BEFORE they escalate especially in a gun saturated nation as ours.

I love my country.  I can not help but feel hot tears when I think of the senseless deaths visited upon her every day.  Now the evil death of children.  The greatest nation on earth has one of the highest levels of gun deaths in the world, and the highest in the Industrial World.  I know I will have to spend time this coming week explaining all of this to my students and friends.  And to myself.

I will soon be traveling to the USA and Canada for the holidays.  I hope to not be looking over my shoulder like a scared tourist.  Nor giving shrill denunciations at the dinner table.  

Again, as I reread what I have just read and I see the photos of the grieving and terrified parents, I feel exhausted.