Where is Safe

So now it has come to this. A midnight showing of a movie is not safe. A place where people. often young people. go excited to be the first to experience a new movie, to do something fun and hopefully create a memory, is a place where a madmen can decide to make himself famous or as one should say infamous.

My son went to the midnight showing of Batman Thursday night here in Bangor. I did not think twice about his safety. Who would? As I said to his Mother on Friday what can you do, put them in a bubble, lock them in a room?

A few years ago when their was a spate of school shootings I dropped something off one day for my daughter then in second grade and as I spoke to the nice older lady receptionist in the school I realized that there is no place that is safe. As I walked into school and saw the sign that said Visitors must check in at the office, I pictured this nice sixty year old lady jumping on someone who walked in with a semi automatic rifle.

The point is that as humans and especially at parents we want to feel like what we do makes a difference. That if we do the right things we can keep our children safe? We cannot. I suppose we could become an armed camp. Consider this however, think how much people complain about how tedious it is to get on a plane since the increased measures since 9/11? What do we do at movie theaters and shopping malls? Metal detectors? It will not work.

Living in the world we live in we need to understand that the chances of an individual heinous act affecting you is lower than perhaps it has ever been, but any illusion that you can realistically protect yourself is gone.

The fact is if someone does not care about their own life and what happens to them they have the ability to create a massive amount of destruction and harm. The American people will not, in the long term, wish to live with the level of precaution that would be necessary to negate this fact.

We can sit and discuss what would posses someone to do something like this? We can never know? We can talk about the culture, violent video games, movies, television, the fact that this young man had a semi automatic assault weapon legally, and talk about our crass, violent, culture. None of it matters. It is where we live and the likelihood of our culture changing back to a softer fifties culture is gone. Can small changes be made. Sure? Should we examine our values and what creates the circumstances that brings these events, sure. Let us now though think about the victims and their families.

How many times this summer has my son gone to a midnight showing to a movie. Three actually? If he did not come home from that movie, if he endured something so unthinkable how would I feel. I would feel helpless. We all are helpless in the face of an evil like this? You cannot predict it and the very nature of its randomness makes us feel even more ineffectual.

I am a moderate. I am not a member of the gun lobby and I do not understand how the NRA can justify someone having an automatic assault rifle as a freedom that was guaranteed by our forefathers. I think the NRA is far cry from the organization that my father and your father supported decades ago that talked about responsible gun ownership and the desire of the NRA to limit weapons purchases. Find an article or history of the NRA and you will see that the last thirty years has created a total change in the philosophy of the organization.

Still I have friends who are members of the NRA and believe in gun rights and they will tell me sincerely that if someone had a gun with them at one of these events as they occurred, the gunmen would be stopped right away. And they are correct.

Watch an episode of Bonanza and notice that everyone carries a firearm. If you raise a firearm you know that the people you are firing on will be people who have weapons of their own.

I do not know the answer. Blaming any one idea or group will solve nothing. It may well be that the only answer is talking to each other and coming up with real dialogue that will bring people together with an answer.

The American people are overwhelmingly and good and caring? They also, however, have short attention spans, and are very easily manipulated by rheotoric from both sides of the political spectrum.

I just want to send my children to a movie or the mall without fear of some nut with a gun? Is that too much to ask?