Thank you, President Obama. [View all]

[Plaid Adder]

Dear President Obama,

I am always ready with the critique when the occasion arises, so on this horrible occasion, I want to say: thank you for what you said at the Newtown vigil.

I have been, since Friday, attempting to put something into words about this. I gave up many times because I was too angry, because all I wanted to do whenever I saw one of those 30-year-old pro-gun arguments pop up was to grab the person making it, shake that person, and scream, "HOW MANY MORE PEOPLE IN THIS COUNTRY HAVE TO DIE FOR YOUR BULLSHIT?!"

I have been trying to understand this horrible thing that keeps happening ever since Jonesboro, ever since Columbine. I have written about it here and there but of course nothing I write makes a difference to anyone.

However, in your eighteen minutes at Newtown, you finally said some things that I have known for a long time and which I honestly thought I was never going to hear from a high-level American politician. Such as:

1) This is not and cannot be acceptable.
2) Something can be done and something is going to be done. I think we can all guess what one of those things is going to be.
3) Periodic mass shootings at schools, movie theaters, malls, and temples are not a price we should be willing to pay for whatever "freedoms" the second amendment is supposedly protecting.
4) Yes, it is a complex problem with many causes. But we can do better than this.
5) Yes, it is impossible to prevent every act of gun violence. But we can do better than this.
6) Yes, politicians have been afraid to touch gun control for fear of the political and, let's face it, the potentially violent consequences of getting on the wrong side of the gun lobby. Colleagues of mine on both sides of the aisle, get your statesman pants on, because we can do better than this.
7) If we can't do better than this we have just failed as a nation, a government, and a society.
8) The lives and saftey of our children are more important than our guns.

All right, so I'm paraphrasing, and making explicit some things that were only implied. Still. Thank you for implying them.

This is leadership. It is something you are uniquely qualified to do. Unlike the rest of us, you can change things by standing up there and saying all of this. So thank you.

There are many "debates" that we don't have any more because the arguments that were on the wrong side have finally become so patently invalid and so obviously unjust that nobody is willing to make them in public any more. We no longer debate, as people in this country once did, for real, seriously, whether slavery is morally justifiable or not. We no longer debate whether women deserve the right to vote. Someday, God willing, we will no longer debate whether climate change is happening or that action needs to be taken to stop it. And what I hope is that your speech is the beginning of the end of the "debate" about whether or not the fact that our country is awash in unimaginably lethal weapons is related to the fact that these unimaginably lethal weapons kill so goddamned many of us and our children.

I have a five year old child. Her world needs to be better than this.

And you are right. Once you have a child, you are connected to all children. Once you have a child, to hear of the death of any other child is suddenly so much more horrible than it was before. Because you feel, it is not an intellectual or ethical thing, you feel the life being sucked out of you as you imagine yourself as that child's parent. Some people very close to me lost an infant a few years ago and I will tell you that just being in the same room as a parent grieving for a child is enough to burn your heart to cinders. I do not know how they lived through it; I do not now how the parents at Sandy Hook are living through it. I do not know how the parents who lose children to gang violence, to drug violence, to all the ways in which poverty becomes danger, live through it.

And the only thing that will make me feel any better is to be able to hope that after this, something will finally be done to ensure that fewer and fewer people in this country have to live through it.

I know there will be people flocking to the comments to tell me how guns are not the problem. I do not care. For me, the 'debate' is already dead. Water is wet, slavery is wrong, women are equal to men, the climate is changing, and the harder it is for people to get their hands on guns in this country, the less often we and our children will be shot to death.

You will be facing much more serious resistance in the coming months. I hope you are ready for it. I am going to try to believe that you will, and that this will make the rest of our elected officials a little stronger than they have been.

Thank you,

The Plaid Adder