Maybe now is the time
Public
This post is of course immediately prompted by the school shooting in Connecticut, but the general issue is one I've been turning over in my mind for quite a while. Whenever there's a tragedy on this scale, there's a (mostly) unspoken rule that there should be a "decent pause" before discussions begin on anything other than mourning the dead. I'm not so sure this should be the case; at least, not always. If you wait, you run the risk of seeing the tragedy as an isolated, historical event, a terrible accident that could have happened to anyone. By that you also risk failing to learn any lessons that might be there for the learning.
I don't mean to open a specific debate on gun control here, since (as I've said before) this is one of the few issues on which the Transatlantic divide remains a chasm. My views, as you all know, are utterly moderate and middle-of-the-road by British standards -- yet wildly extreme by American standards. I very nearly set comments to be disabled for that reason, but I'll leave them on for now, at least, and see how we go. But maybe now is the time for Americans to be discussing such issues themselves -- precisely because the images and the memories are still hot and painful.
Edit: Comments now frozen. Not because anyone was offensive, but simply because the discussion started to veer off into detailed descriptions of hunting, something I'm not comfortable having on this blog. All the comments have been left up, and will continue to be so.
This post is of course immediately prompted by the school shooting in Connecticut, but the general issue is one I've been turning over in my mind for quite a while. Whenever there's a tragedy on this scale, there's a (mostly) unspoken rule that there should be a "decent pause" before discussions begin on anything other than mourning the dead. I'm not so sure this should be the case; at least, not always. If you wait, you run the risk of seeing the tragedy as an isolated, historical event, a terrible accident that could have happened to anyone. By that you also risk failing to learn any lessons that might be there for the learning.
I don't mean to open a specific debate on gun control here, since (as I've said before) this is one of the few issues on which the Transatlantic divide remains a chasm. My views, as you all know, are utterly moderate and middle-of-the-road by British standards -- yet wildly extreme by American standards. I very nearly set comments to be disabled for that reason, but I'll leave them on for now, at least, and see how we go. But maybe now is the time for Americans to be discussing such issues themselves -- precisely because the images and the memories are still hot and painful.
Edit: Comments now frozen. Not because anyone was offensive, but simply because the discussion started to veer off into detailed descriptions of hunting, something I'm not comfortable having on this blog. All the comments have been left up, and will continue to be so.