Richard Cohen: America, Armed and Dangerous
[Richard Cohen is a columnist for the WaPo.]
I had a teacher in college who used to ask, Who discovered America? He would offer some choices. They were Amerigo Vespucci, Christopher Columbus or the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. The answer he wanted was the three ships with which eventually someone would have discovered the New World and without which everyone would have remained in Spain. It is no different with the tragedy in Tucson. Hate speech and madness were part of the mix, but it was the gun and our insane gun laws that resulted in six deaths. Until we come to grips with that, as a nation, we remain armed and dangerous.
The American culture, the American gun culture, insists on a constitutional right to bear arms - even concealed weapons such as a Glock 19 semiautomatic handgun capable of doing immense damage. A 22-year-old man, already hallucinating on the Internet, making no sense in his classes and booted from school for his strange ways, can buy such a killing device almost on the spot. If he is crazy, then so are we....
Read entire article at WaPo
I had a teacher in college who used to ask, Who discovered America? He would offer some choices. They were Amerigo Vespucci, Christopher Columbus or the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. The answer he wanted was the three ships with which eventually someone would have discovered the New World and without which everyone would have remained in Spain. It is no different with the tragedy in Tucson. Hate speech and madness were part of the mix, but it was the gun and our insane gun laws that resulted in six deaths. Until we come to grips with that, as a nation, we remain armed and dangerous.
The American culture, the American gun culture, insists on a constitutional right to bear arms - even concealed weapons such as a Glock 19 semiautomatic handgun capable of doing immense damage. A 22-year-old man, already hallucinating on the Internet, making no sense in his classes and booted from school for his strange ways, can buy such a killing device almost on the spot. If he is crazy, then so are we....