New Clear Vision

Challenging the Symbolic Politics of Hate

by Devon G. Peña

The ongoing debate on gun violence is certainly long overdue. As it unfolds within the mainstream media, it also strikes me as a discourse filled with revealing blind spots and shameful silences.

Blind spots and silences in the gun control debate

Let me start with some of the blind spots: Largely absent in this discussion is the fact that the majority of victims of gun violence are poor or persons of color. It is seldom noted that young black men are constantly under assault every time they step out, especially in any state like Florida with a “stand your ground” statute. It is seldom mentioned that young black and Latino males are already targeted by white men who can concoct any unfounded allegation of “feeling threatened” to justify shooting these young men.

It does not help matters that many of these killings are at the hands of the police. Silence surrounds the problem of police violence against people of color yet it has long been endemic. Proposals to put armed guards and police in schools will certainly not make the parents of black or brown students feel any safer since many school authorities have been sued and held in contempt for blatant racial profiling and harassment of students of color. (more…)

Stories of Courage and Nonviolence

by Robert C. Koehler

In the end, perhaps, this is bigger than personal safety. It’s about rescuing our humanity.

Two images compete for my attention as I write this, a month after Newtown, a week after the shooting at a high school in Taft, Calif., with hundreds of murders in between. One image is of Robbie Parker, father of slain 6-year-old Emilie, offering public condolences to the family of the shooter and pleading, through his tears, “Let it” — the murders of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School — “not turn into something that defines us, but something that inspires us to be more compassionate and humble people.”

The other image is of Americans flooding gun stores from coast to coast, buying semiautomatics and other weapons in the wake of feared new gun laws. (more…)

Letter of Termination to the Second Amendment

by Erin Niemela

Dear Second Amendment,

I write this letter with compassion and empathy, because what I’m about to say may hurt your feelings. We’ve had a good run — I remember shooting beer cans off my neighbor’s porch like it was yesterday. I remember the bad times, too — weapons procured in your name have caused untold tragedies. We’ve had a long, turbulent history, so there’s no reason to delay the inevitable.  Second Amendment, you’re fired. Your services are no longer necessary. You’re just too old to do the job you were originally meant to do. Antique, ancient, out-of-date, passé, out-moded, a relic, old.

Aging isn’t really the issue here. Age normally comes with distinction, wisdom, guidance and worldly understanding, all of which should be eternally appreciated by youth worldwide. The issue is that you and your comrades at the National Rifle Association tried to pass off a “good guy with a gun” speech as the result of such wisdom. With all due respect, the only people gesticulating in fervor to a speech like that are my son and his “Yo Gabba Gabba!”-loving, 5-year-old friends. (more…)

Establishing a New Consciousness About Gun Violence

by Robert C. Koehler

“But my instinct was that if someone is shooting at you, it is generally better to shoot back than to cower and pray.”

This is the hidden argument for guns as America’s primary peacekeepers — that the debate comes down to gun ownership vs. helplessness.

Jeffrey Goldberg’s 7,000-word essay, “The Case for More Guns (and More Gun Control),” which ran in the December issue of The Atlantic — just prior to the Newtown killings — came down, for me, to the above sentence.

He made a number of quasi-reasonable points, the main one being that there are 300 million guns in America right now and it’s simply too late for gun control to be effective: “Only the naive think that legislation will prevent more than a modest number of the criminally minded, and the mentally deranged, from acquiring a gun in a country absolutely inundated with weapons.” (more…)

Following Newtown, What We Can Do to Heed the Warnings

by Michael N. Nagler

The wisest man I had the privilege of knowing in my life once said, “There is no nation, no matter how powerful, that cannot be destroyed by hate.”

The latest tragedy — and I sincerely hope it will still be the latest when you read this — has been unparalleled in its violence. Because the true measure of violence is not in the body count but in the violation of the sacred life that we hold most dear, for example in our innocent children.  It has also been unusual in the confusion that still surrounds what exactly happened.  Like most of us, I at first found myself poring over the sketchy reports, trying to understand how it happened, to piece together the story.  But then I stopped. (more…)

“O that there were some virtue in my tears . . .” – Shakespeare

by Winslow Myers 

One of the Dalai Lama’s first principles is something he calls “universal responsibility.” However quick we are to place His Holiness on a saintly pedestal, it is only because the threshold of our own responsibility sometimes seems so very low — especially at this moment of reflection upon the massacre of the innocents in Newtown.

From a tearful President on down through the powerful talk radio demagogues to ordinary citizens, we all bear a share of responsibility for the climate of violence that is the context for the tragedy in Newton. I’m as responsible as anyone because I haven’t yet written my representative concerning my strong feelings about gun control. Great Britain endured 58 firearm murders in 2011, while America had 8,775. Great Britain banned modern handguns altogether in 1997 and studies show a slow but steady decrease in crimes involving handguns in the UK ever since. (more…)

Something’s Wrong with the World — Can We Set It Right?

by Robert C. Koehler

“Evil visited this community today,” the governor of Connecticut said, though he might have been more accurate if he had quoted Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

This may be the hardest truth of all to swallow. But the point-blank murders of 27 people, including 20 small children as they sat in their classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary School — in Newtown, Conn., as safe and secure as any community in the country — shattered, at least for some people, the illusion that all our troubles are out there, beyond our borders and our exceptionalism, and that safety requires heavily armed protection from an incomprehensible “other.”

In one of the safest communities in America, we couldn’t protect our 6-year-olds and our 7-year-olds, despite the fact that we have been waging a “war on evil” for the past decade-plus. (more…)