This Mother’s Day, eight American mothers will wake up having lost a child to gun violence the day before. Another eight mothers will go to bed having lost their children to gun violence on Mother’s Day.
by Shannon Watts, Huffington Post
This Mother’s Day, eight American mothers will wake up having lost a child to gun violence the day before. Another eight mothers will go to bed having lost their children to gun violence on Mother’s Day.
This American epidemic, which has become a public health crisis, goes unaddressed by vocal minority of elected leaders in Washington who seem unwilling to act, either out of cowardice or self-interest.
After the mass shooting of elementary school children in Newtown, I thought Americans would finally stand up and say, “enough.” Twenty children and six adults had been slaughtered in the sanctity of an elementary school by an assault weapon designed for the battlefield. The horror of it was almost too much to believe or comprehend. This has to be the tipping point, I thought. This has to be what moved us as a country to change.
But it wasn’t. Twenty dead first-graders weren’t enough to advance even the weakest of legislative measures.
We have talked for decades about trying to put an end to senseless gun violence by keeping these weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of people who should not have them, including convicted criminals and the clinically insane. This should be something we can all agree on. Our presidents have talked about it for years too, so much so that their speeches weave together as though they were written by the same person.
The vote that failed in the Senate would have been a small step in the right direction, and simply expanded background checks to cover all gun sales. It was a common sense measure, one that 90 percent of Americans, including a majority of the members of the National Rifle Association, supported.
Yet it failed…