Am I Safer Knowing About Guns in the 'hood?

Do I feel any safer knowing one of my neighbors has a permit to own a handgun? Not really.

Even if I knew for sure he, or she, actually possessed a revolver or pistol, I wouldn’t feel any more secure. 

Nor do I feel any less secure. Here’s an interesting fact—over the near 30 years in our current neighborhood, the only two homes burglarized were ostensibly protected by alarm systems. And by dogs. So much for high tech and man’s-best-friend protection systems. I’m always amazed people don’t employ the simplest and most effective security system—lights that automatically turn on and off. Don’t people realize a completely dark house any time from sunset to at least 11 pm is an open-for-business invitation to house burglars?  

Since the tragic shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., there’s been lots of talk for and against tightening gun control laws, everything from doing nothing to restricting the sale of semi-automatic military-style weapons to placing limits on the size of ammunition magazines. Some schools have added armed security guards (about one-third of all public schools already had armed security). 

Our local paper, the Westchester Journal News, published a map pinpointing all holders of handgun permits in the county. The map does not reveal addresses where long guns (rifles or shotguns) may be present. Curiosity finally got the better of me, so I checked out our subdivision. I counted three homes certified to pack heat, with another two on a nearby street. 

In a recent Op-Ed piece in The NY Times, David Cole, a professor of constitutional law and criminal justice at the Georgetown University Law Center, wrote, “The right to bear arms typically invokes the romantic image of a cowboy toting a rifle on the plains.” True enough. But I seem to remember in Westerns featuring Wyatt Earp, Marshal Dillon or some other sheriff the rule of the lawman in charge was everyone had to surrender their firearms if they wanted to walk around town. When did we adopt a laissez-faire attitude toward gun possession in public, so much so that states seem to be falling over each other in their rush to permit open and even concealed weapons in public spaces including bars, schools and houses of government? 

It’s really rather depressing that so many care more about the right to bear arms than providing our fellow citizens with quality medical care, education and enough food so they and their children don’t go to bed hungry.

Pillow Talk: Speaking of going to bed, after reading my post on sleep habits, a representative from Anna’s Linens filled in more details about the company’s survey. 

Seems I’m not the only person who sleeps with three pillows—35% said they sleep with three or more, though they did not elaborate if they configured them to their body as I do. Another 45% sleep with two pillows; 20% rest their heads on just one.

The survey also found 18% sleep in their underwear to go along with the 8% who sleep in the buff and the 74% who wear pajamas.

Debt Service: Maureen Dowd in The Times wrote about Senator Michael Bennet (D-Colo) the other day. Bennet was one of eight senators to vote against the bill to prevent the country from slipping over the fiscal cliff. Like many who want to curb spending and lower the national debt, Bennet argued against saddling the next generation. He told Dowd, “I think if we can get people focused to do what we need to do to keep our kids from being stuck with this debt that they didn’t accrue, you might be surprised at how far we can move this conversation. Washington politics no longer follows the example of our parents and our grandparents who saw as their first job creating more opportunity, not less, for the people who came after.”

I wonder, what do Bennet and those like-minded mean when they say “kids (are being ) stuck with debt that they didn’t accrue”? Of course children didn’t vote when they were young. Their parents did. They voted for presidents and congressmen who passed on to us such benefits as Social Security. Medicare. Medicaid. The interstate highway system. NASA. Food and drug safety programs. OSHA. FEMA. A national park service second to none in the world. 

Creating opportunity for the next generation doesn’t just means the chance to make lots of money. It means being able to enjoy life, to be safe in your place of employment, to not worry about the surety of your food and water supply. Are there too many regulations? Probably, in some areas. Should we remove all regulations. Absolutely not. Let’s stop with the rhetoric and start and real discussion about what we expect from government and how to pay for it. Tax rates are at an all-time low. Let’s be grown up and realize if we want protections and services we need to pay for them. 

Can Evil Be Contained?

Can you stop a lone gunman? Can you stop a sole terrorist? After evil has been released, can you put it back into Pandora’s box?

Some people ask, how could anyone kill innocent children? The truth is, such depraved behavior should not surprise us. Brutality, senseless and premeditated, is universal. It’s been with us since Biblical times (read the story of Dinah and the slaughter her brothers wrought on the helpless, infirm males of Sechem—Genesis 34). Or Pharaoh’s dictate to slay the first born of the Hebrews. Think we’re more humane in our “enlightened” age? Not if you’re familiar with our treatment of Native Americans. Or Africans brought here into slavery. Or if you’ve followed the individual and collective torments afflicted by Hitler, Stalin, Mao and their legions, by Lon Pol, Slobodan Milošević, Yasser Arafat, by drug cartels, Muslim extremists, African warlords who, terrifyingly, arm children only slightly older than those killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School, to kill others. 

It’s not an exhaustive list, just an exhausting one as we contemplate how in the name of religion or nationalism or some –ism that is meaningless to most everyone else, carnage is condoned and, given technological advances, made more efficient with weaponry available to almost anyone, a “modern convenience” unimaginable just decades ago. 

Adam Lanza, by increasing accounts, was a troubled young man who should not have had access to guns, let alone the firepower his mother stored in their home. Adam was not able to conquer our most basic instinct to harm, to inflict superiority over another. Restrictive gun laws won’t prevent another tragedy, though the frequency of incidents might be diminished. They will happen. Too many guns already are out there. Too many unstable males (have you noticed these shootings are never perpetrated by females?) are not supervised and can easily get their hands on guns. It’s ironic that 17 years ago the State of Connecticut shut down a mental health facility, Fairfield Hills State Hospital, that might have housed Adam Lanza in the very community he has shaken to its core, Newtown. 

Israel has shown that while all terrorist action cannot be eradicated a pro-active approach to security can shield citizens from most danger in public places. Perhaps an answer for our school systems, at least for grades K-12, is to have single-entry facilities monitored by an armed guard. Yes, it would be costly (my guess is $50,000 per school building). But would it be more onerous than having to live through another massacre? Are we saying we are prepared to live by an actuary’s calculations that it’s more cost efficient to endure another mass murder than staff a security guard who most likely will never have to engage his protective skills?

The solution is not foolproof. Several times a week I walk into our local high school on my way to instruct students in the English as Second Language study hall. There’s a security desk outside the administrative offices. Once, maybe twice, I have been stopped by the guards. We’re just too trusting a society; 99.99% of the time, it makes no difference. But all it takes for disaster to strike is for the .01% to sneak through carrying a semi-automatic gun stocked with an oversized ammunition clip. 

The gun lobby believes armed deterrence is an answer. It believes all adults should carry weapons, even concealed guns, even on school grounds. I prefer letting trained professionals handle security. It should be a service we are all prepared to fund. 

Newtown Memories

Have you ever been to Newtown? Gilda and I have, she more than I. As pained as everyone is about the unspeakable tragedy that overwhelmed the nation there Friday, a deeper anguish, I believe, may be felt by those who can personally relate to that beautiful, picturesque Connecticut community.

We lived in Connecticut from 1973 through mid-1977. While Gilda was earning her nursing degree from the University of Bridgeport from 1973 to 1975, she spent a five-month semester in a training rotation at Fairfield Hills State Hospital in Newtown. It was a psychiatric center with some 4,000 patients at its peak use. The state closed the hospital in 1995. The 100-acre site was turned over to the Town of Newtown in 2004. 

From our apartment in Seymour, Gilda would drive up to Fairfield Hills on Route 34 alongside the Housatonic River, past the village of Sandy Hook which is part of the Town of Newtown. Weekends, we would sometimes retrace that route as we explored western Connecticut around Danbury and further north, up to Litchfield. Western Connecticut back then was dreamy in its small town, Americana appearance. White colonial homes surrounded well-groomed village greens, at the side of which usually stood a stately Congregational Church, its spire reaching majestically to a blue sky. Rarely did you pass a traffic light. Of course, Newtown and the whole region have changed in the near 40 years since we traveled those bucolic roadways. The last time we visited Newtown was in 1993. Dan’s traveling all-star soccer team participated in the one-day Memorial Day Kickoff Tournament. Among the trophies still housed in his room, I found the jersey patch he received that day.

Like most parents I wanted to reach out and hug my children when they came home Friday. Alas, they are grown and have homes of their own. I talked with them, but it was not the same. 

Swept into the sadness of the tragedy was the feeling of futility experienced by many first responders, including nurses and doctors on the scene and in area hospitals who eagerly waited to tend to the wounded. But only two frail, soon to be lifeless, bodies emerged from the killing field. The medical professionals were told to go home. Eleven years ago on September 11, Gilda waited with other nurses and doctors for the injured to arrive at Manhattan’s Beth Israel Medical Center. They waited the whole day in vain.

This country is in denial. Margaret Brennan of CBS News, who grew up in nearby Danbury, said on CBS-2 Saturday, “There isn’t a gun culture here. It’s one of those small, New England towns you go to to avoid the city, and things like this don’t happen.” But how do you explain that Nancy Lanza had five guns at home, including two high-powered revolvers and an assault rifle her son used to kill 26 innocents in cold blood at short range? 

Guns permeate our society. They are so readily accessible. Remember, the Columbine shooters used guns from one of the parents. We are a culture that denigrates teachers but upholds and lauds the right to carry arms, openly in public and increasingly on school grounds.

Why do so many begrudge teachers better pay? Why don’t we realize teachers are professionals we entrust to mold the future of America? Why don't we realize that when unimaginable horror confronts our children, it is a teacher who protects them, sometimes with his or her life?

Perhaps the most heart-wrenching visual of the entire massacre was not the line of children running to safety, or individual pictures of the deceased, but rather the wooden sign hanging in front of the Sandy Hook Elementary School that simply and invitingly stated, “Visitors Welcome.” No more can such an earnest sentiment be expressed, not in Newtown or anywhere else in America.