And there we were, thinking that the best way to celebrate Mother’s Day was to give the Mom in your life something firearms related: a beginner’s class, ammo, a gun, something. Apparently not. “My children will bring me flowers for Mother’s Day, and I will be delighted, promises Heidi Stevens at chicagotribune.com. “Mother’s Day — despite its greeting-card roots — is my favorite holiday, because mother is my favorite role. It’s the thing I feel most like. I’m a writer and a daughter and a wife and a friend, but I go hours and days without thinking about the ways I inhabit those roles. Mother is with me always. Flowers, though, feel inadequate this year. They feel worse than inadequate. They feel distasteful.” And so . . .
Australia, as you likely know, has no right to bear arms written into the Constitution. Hughes acknowledged as much in his letter.
But why not amend ours, he wondered?
“We are astounded that the attitudes of many Americans is to fight fire with more fire, rather than to just put the damned fire out,” he wrote. “It’s time the U.S. lived up to its tag as the land of the free and home of the brave, and made a brave decision.”
I know his words — and my repeating them — will inflame the people who are incensed at the notion of further restrictions on gun ownership.
But I can’t think about the families I mentioned above, and the more than 1,000 other families touched by gun violence this year in Chicago alone, and not wonder whether he’s onto something.
Fighting fire with more fire isn’t working for us. How many more children’s lives will be shattered before we acknowledge as much?
By “fighting fire with fire,” Ms. Stevens is referring to armed Americans defending themselves by force of arms. I don’t suppose she’s familiar with even the lowest credible estimable of annual defensive gun uses per year: 50,000. Or the higher number of over a million. That’s a net positive, as our man Leghorn pointed out recently.
In addition, the vast majority of Chiraq’s firearms-related homicides are gang-related, crimes which do not involve “children” (even if you conveniently count teenage gang-bangers as children). Gun control hasn’t stopped the killing in the Windy City. Nor will it. How many more lives will be shattered before she acknowledges as much?