SHOOT GUNMAN SHOOT!

BY SUNNY THOMAS

The real tragedy in the Connecticut shootout, in which 20 school children below 10 and eight others, including the Principal, died is that it could happen again next week. The tragedy has a script, written by an Invisible Hand, as it unfolds: after killing his mother, Adam Lanza, the assailant, went to his Alma Mater, Sandy Hook Elementary School, to finish his ignoble mission. 

Unless America addresses the root-cause that triggered this tragedy – the gun culture and the alienation of the individual from the mainstream – Connecticut will be re-enacted not only in the other states but the rest of the world which America leads by example.  

When President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 followed by two other assassinations in two years – that of his brother, Senator Robert Kennedy, and the civil rights leaders, Martin Luther King – the stage was set for abolishing guns in private hands. That did not happen because the Americans who mattered thought it their inalienable right, like the freedom of the Press, to own a gun as status symbol. It is not the poor and lowly middle class Americans who want the gun but the rich and the powerful. But democratic lobbying, which is the art of manipulating the media, makes it look as though every American is clamouring for his fundamental right to own and shoot at will – the ultimate in freedom! 

The intriguing thing about the gun is that if you don’t control the gun, the gun will control you. If America does not control the gun, the gun will control America. That Adam Lanza  came from a broken family is only part of the story. His mom, Nancy Lanza, had a true passion – a passion for guns – which is well known in the neighbourhood where she lived. She had acquired several types of guns and  proudly displayed them to her visitors. No one knew how she earned her living but she was affable to strangers and even generous.   

That’s not all. She took her children religiously to shooting ranges near Newtown, a suburb of New York city, where a community of gun enthusiasts lived. There she taught them the art of shooting (butchering)  – just in case – knowing little she herself would be her son’s first victim. She enjoyed visiting the bar and displaying her bravado, and that’s the kind of life she set before her children as example.  Her older son Ryan had left her and is living alone. 

After the gun culture comes the money culture, the cult that worships money. Crass materialism that destroys the very foundation of society can only lead to mass alienation as is happening in the affluent society. ‘Greed is God,’ said Gordon Gecko, the god of the Wall Street. 

‘I create nothing. But I own. We make rules. War, peace, famine, upheaval. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now you are not knave enough to think that we are living in a democracy, are you buddy? It’s the free market. And you are a part of it. Stick around pal, I’ve got a lot to teach you.’ 

We live under the spell of Wall Street and Walmart – and we are willing to change ourselves to the plastic culture they impose on us! Plastic money, plastic heart, plastic desires! Life is a big shopping binge, and when we go burst, we booze, buy a gun and shoot! Soon our seared conscience will ask, Whose children are they, any way? 

  

(Courtesy: globalmediaschool.com)