It’s a long way from Sandy Hook to Georgia

It’s been 16 months since 20 children and six adults were killed by a crazed gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn.

Since then, there have been at least 44 more school shootings in this country, killing 28 people and injuring 37, according to a survey published earlier this year by anti-gun groups Moms Demand Action and Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

And yet those statistics fail to include both the lesser-known and high-profile mass shootings at military bases, malls and other public places in the near year and a half after a groundswell of public outrage took America in a direction toward more firearms regulation.

That outrage, however, has seemingly suffered an outage, all but fading from the front porch of the American consciousness except for an ardent few. There are no more presidential proclamations promising action, no more bipartisan coalitions grabbing headlines to rein in the purchase of assault rifles, to demand longer waiting periods, lengthier and more stringent background checks, or even limiting who can carry what, when and where.

In most cases, albeit for the most liberal of states, the president, the Sandy Hook parentage and the public have been beaten into submission, defeated on almost every front in this battle for the Second Amendment.

That is exactly what it was made out to be — an un-American war waged by liberals against the fundamentals of the Constitution, man’s right to protect, defend and arm himself.

How can a person argue with that? It’s all true, difficult for even the most liberal gun-grabber to stand up against. I hear it: chip away at one piece of one freedom, and it’s a landslide waiting to occur.

I respect it, even if I don’t agree with it. Shoot, I’ve got to live in this country, too, and if we can’t agree on our need for absolute freedom, what can we agree on?

But it’s as difficult as all hell not to look around and see absolutely no attempt to share a middle ground, to find some sort of commonsense consensus of how to make sure certain types of firearms don’t get in the hands of the wrong people.

In fact, it seems to be going in very much the opposite direction of late. When Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal signed the Safe Carry Protection Act of 2014 this week, it was an example of a state leading the way to step back in time, instituting a set of conditions that would not be out of place in 19th-century America.

I cannot fathom how a fellow American or a resident of the state of Georgia would need to arm himself in a store, in a restaurant, in a church, in a bar, for crying out loud.

And the thing about this law, like so many similarly archaic state gun laws around the country, there is absolutely no need, only the want. There is a difference — need is based on necessity and even utility; want is based on will, on testing conventions and provoking reactions.

Someone else’s need to strap it on anywhere at any time does not make me feel safer. I’m not learning any lessons here. There’s no personal growth for me or anyone else. Guns intimidate, no matter the intention. And while they are static objects that behave consistently, the men and women who carry them are not, they do not, even in the best of circumstances.

What could this country become if the same type of energy applied to very narrow goals like expanding gun rights, tightening our borders, defeating taxes or looking for socialism in every darkened corner was turned toward more benevolent aims like ending poverty, ending homelessness, increasing charity, strengthening education and health care, giving our planet a chance to recover from draining it of its resources, even just being a little kinder and gentler to each other?

Apparently we need strife as a motivating force to get anything done; conflict is the catalyst for winners. The hippy dippy concerns of a society built on altruism cannot stand without the narrow skirmishes that fuel the noise machine, drowning the low hum of peace and love, and replacing it with the shrill dissonance of dissent and division.

The great state of Georgia has shown us how a state — and by extension, a country — prioritizes itself, where it holds the most value. That is far scarier than any gun carried into any school.

This column first appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, April 25, 2014.