Guns Aren't the Problem

Plenty of law abiding people own these, including a lot of soccer moms.

                


     Today a terrible thing happened.   A disturbed young man shot his father in New Jersey and then proceeded to seek his mother, a kindergarten teacher in Newtown, Connecticut,while she was working at the Sandy Hook Elementary School..  He proceeded to kill six adults and twenty children, before eventually taking his own life.
       As the mother of a child who passed in childhood, I have some idea of the depth of the sorrow and loss of the parents of those children, and tonight I am praying for them all.
                       It took CNN and other outlets only about five minutes before they politicized this act and turned it into an appeal for tight gun control.   This is very interesting because Connecticut has some of the most restrictive firearm laws in the country.  So does New Jersey.  The young man was already breaking the law by being in possession of a weapon while under age. Secondly, his weapon was likely not legal in that state, and definitely not legal to have in his possession within a school zone. It's also possible that the rounds he used in killing his father were outlawed in NJ, as many of the better rounds are restricted to active law enforcement use only.   I grew up in the Northeast and I remain painfully familiar with the laws there, and the places in which I can't be safe by bringing my own weapon and chosen ammunition. Since this young man broke tons of laws and in addition, wore a bullet proof vest,also illegal there, one might wonder if additional laws would do anything at all.
                      It took President Obama no time at all before he emerged on television in tears promising gun control, but not today.   Is he insane ?   Chicago is a place where guns are tightly restricted and yet parts of it remain a bloodbath.    Virginia is a place in which we enjoy fairly fair gun laws, and our murders, rapes and robberies appear to be sharply decreasing.  Murders and robberies still occur in Australia, yet guns were outlawed long ago.
                     If you wish to protect those in schools, then license five people from each school as Special School Concealed Weapon Holders and train them in all 50 states. Allow them to take out anyone who comes to a school shooting.  The simple act of having Special School Concealed Weapons Holders in schools will stop attacks, and may well stop some terrorism, which according to US intelligence, is coming down the pike thanks to Al Qaeda.
                    Guns protect people like me,and my children from crazy people who would abduct, torture and murder us. Taking them away from law abiding people like me will do NOTHING to stop acts like today.  This young man ignored a myriad of laws.   If guns are outlawed, then only outlaws will have guns.

Reflections on Sandy

Note nurse in gurney. She is holding a sick neonate.

   

Lets pray that all the sick newborns, newborn babies, children, and sick adults who must be relocated during their illnesses fare safely and well.

 


     Here in my own rural area of Virginia, despite heavy rains, winds, and some snow from this peculiar storm, we are fine, and so are our animals.   Thank you to people from Russia, Belgium, the UAE, and Nova Scotia who have inquired as to how we are faring.
           This morning I have been watching television and noticing so many things with regard to evacuation and disaster preparedness.   New York and New Jersey have been badly hit, and the infrastructure there is likely not to recovery for weeks.  I saw something this morning which interested me there.  New York University Medical Center had a situation where the level of the hospital which housed their back up generators during the outage had flooded.  This necessitated an evacuation of the hospital including the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.  In my youth, when I rotated through the NICU, if we evacuated, we did so with all babies in incubators.  The news program I saw yesterday showed NICU nurses in scrubs being removed from the hospital in a gurney, clutching tightly a small baby with nasogastric tubes and oxygen masks intact.  This was interesting to me because this is not how we would have performed an evacuation.  The more I thought about this, the better idea this sounded.  Holding an infant tightly will decrease stress, stabilize blood pressure and pulse and contribute to security. Holding the infant will also help to naturally absorb bumps which could occur as an incubator or gurney navigated streets or curbs during the evacuation. I have been thinking and breathing disaster preparedness and evacuation for twenty-five years, and still each day, I learn or are exposed to something else.
           The second thing I heard annoyed me.  Good Morning America had a child psychiatrist on to help urban parents deal with "unstructured time" due to mass cancellations in the storm.Have we, as a culture, fallen so far that we need a professional to tell us how to deal with our own children when school is cancelled?   It's one thing to deal with a child's feelings of anxiety when a disaster occurs.  It's quite another to be at one's wits end because you have no idea how to redirect the attention of the child you brought into the world.  Perhaps the answer is not to overbook your child every spare minute, and learn to talk to him about his hopes, his fears, and his wishes for the future.  Not everything about a disaster is entirely bad.

         Lastly,  I never tell anyone what they should believe or to whom they should pray. However, I would be less than honest and less than who I am if I were not honest about the fact that I pray unceasingly to Jesus Christ, and that the honor and glory for everything that I do that's any good in the world, goes to Him. Therefore, I am sending this prayer out for everyone, Christian, Muslim, Jew, or Agnostic who is adversely impacted by this rare and complex storm.


   Heavenly Father,

             Please help those displaced and effected by Hurricane Sandy to find support, encouragement and safety in this confusing and frightening time.   May they feel supernatural caring and support from you and from those on Earth who are entrusted with Earthly help here.  May they have their medical problems addressed, and find their fears addressed as they realize that they have been granted a continued opportunity to learn and laugh and play in this schoolyard of a world you created for us.  Please address the practical, as well as the loss, and the bewilderment and sorrow.   For those who have lost a loved one, please be with them, and provide to them the love and solace you so graciously provided to me, following the loss of my young son and of my father.     Thank you for the blessings that we know to thank you for, and for those of which we are so blissfully unaware.   In Jesus name I pray.
           Amen.