My Grandchildren and Elementary School

    Anna Rose and Caroline Jean, two of my grandchildren!
     I love them so much!

I’ve got four grandchildren in public elementary schools. I couldn’t help but think of them today when the news broke out of Newtown, CT.
by Charlie Leck

Think of it!
We’re talking here of little children. They were in first grade through fourth grade. Don’t you feel rage? Sickness? Exasperation?

I don’t know when I’ve felt so low – so totally miserable! They could have been my grandkids. They are someone’s grandkids, you know. Try to put yourself in that grandparent’s place. Try to understand how you’d feel – how angry and desperate you’d be.

I want to scream and litter the air with four-letter-words. I want to shout from the rooftops that I hate f--king guns with all my might. I hate them! Yet, the gun crowd would be quick to remind me – using their f--cking worn out clichéd rant: “Remember, it is not guns that kill people! It is people who kill people!”

Today I want to take their god damned posters opposing gun control and shove them down their god damned throats. I want to kick them in the gut and drop them to the ground. I want to stand above them and scream down at them: “That could have been my grandkids in their elementary school! And you want to keep selling powerful guns – automatic murder machines – to virtually anyone who walks through the door and asks for one.”

Oh, my God! We are a seriously disturbed – deeply insane – nation! Civilized nations don’t do this. They don’t put powerful murdering machines in the hands of idiots and maniacs!

This afternoon, not long after the news broke about the murders of those little children in Connecticut, Greg Sargent wrote in the Washington Post…

“If today’s shooting won’t prompt action, nothing will!”

Nothing will! You see, guns are too much a part of the f--cking American culture. Our founding fathers had no way to foresee what would happen to America. They didn’t know it would become such a gun society when they penned the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. They had no way of knowing that the “people” would so misunderstand what they were writing about. They had no way of knowing how powerful guns would become!

A grief-stricken President addressed the nation today. Did you see him? How he refrained from weeping, I will never know. I wept as I watched him.

Couldn’t we, at least, have a decent, unbiased discussion about the matter? Couldn’t we try to better understand the second amendment? Couldn’t we figure out how to get guns out of the hands of dangerous people? Couldn’t we limit the power and repetitiveness of guns that people use?

I tremble this evening because I know that this could have happened in the school that my grandchildren attend. I’m so angry that I’m ill. I want to throw up! I want to scream!

I read a news story last week about a grandfather who had a powerful gun in his house because he was afraid of invaders. In the night, he heard someone scuffling at the back door of his house. He got his gun. He saw, in the dim light, someone outside the kitchen door, trying to enter. He aimed and pulled the trigger. He killed his granddaughter, who lived with him and who had secretly slipped out for the evening to meet up with some of her friends.

I can’t imagine!

There must be something we can do! Isn’t there something we can do?

Twenty small, elementary school children died today. They were at their school – in their classrooms – when a deranged young man entered their school carrying a powerful gun, equipped to fire and frequently. He killed his own mother, who worked at the school, several other adults and 20 elementary school students – kids like my own grandkids.

Oh, my God, what are we to do?

_________________________

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