I can get outraged over hearing that Arizona, always first in fearmongering, keeps trying to make more guns legal in more places, including schools, but when I heard that North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey had plans to put police in all the city's elementary schools, I realized that it was not just about guns.
Here in South Carolina we love our guns. I'm hearing now that banning semi-automatics would cause harm to hunters. I imagine before semi-automatics all those deer and wild turkeys just about thumbed their noses at their stalkers. And when it comes to our government spending money on its citizens, you can forget about it unless we're talking weaponry.
Because this is the situation:
We have schools where we are unwilling to spend tax dollars to improve curricula, to pay teachers a living wage, to repair buildings. We have a state that cuts services to residents and cuts taxes to the point where its public employees are unable to earn a living wage and care for their families. We are at the top of the list of states for unemployment, teen pregnancies, school dropouts. We gift corporations with tax breaks and cut mental health services to the bone. Parents work two jobs, fearsome hours, and still struggle to make ends meet, while often unavailable for their children.
Yet our leaders jump at the chance of arming our schools. Guns is good. Cost is no problem.
The priorities of our leaders here in South Carolina have led us to where tax dollars go to prisons over schools, and now to school patrols rather than education.
Our elected officials value their weapons over our children, and their futures will reflect that in increased fear and danger.
If you haven't ever lived a life where you felt secure, it's harder to believe in yourself, to take risks, to go out into the world and live a happy, successful life.
And here in South Carolina we're not going to pay for a good school in a safe community where parents are confident they can take care of their children.
But we will pay our police to patrol the halls of your children's schools.
I was astonished last night to hear Rachel Maddow suggest that perhaps our debate on gun control should start with what is acceptable to the members of the NRA. Her point of course was that, unlike the NRA, a majority of its members support a ban on assault weapons and licensing of gun purchases.
I have an alternate suggestion. How about we start with banning guns and then debate which guns are safe and/or necessary? How about we approach gun control with the same fervor the right wing brings to "no new taxes?"
For God's sake, we are talking about the fact that yesterday 20 elementary school children were killed.
Our children are locked down in schools, have teachers who are trained in shooter scenarios and these children themselves are drilled for such a potentiality. Parents and children are searched going in to school, and there are strict rules about visitors.
How about this, folks: the shooter was the son of one of the school's teachers; how hard to you think it would have been under any circumstance for him to get in?
Or this: locking down the school and keeping out guns makes it safe only after the children arrive and until they leave.
This horrific incident seals the fact that guns in our culture make our lives -- and those of our children -- unsafe. There are no amount of rules that will contain gun use to those which are legal. They kill and they kill easily. Tuesday's killing in Oregon and yesterday's loss of lives prove that licensing is irrelevant.
It's time to stop avoiding, for sure. But it's also time to stop offering compromise. Let's just use Grover Norquist as our model for this fight. It's just that important.
