Never Again (and again and again and ...)

In the wake of the Dark Knight Rises theater massacre, the people who are calling for sane gun laws have really missed the boat. Surely they must know how we already started to implement such laws following the Columbine High School shooting.

Following that unspeakable tragedy in 1999, Americans put aside their differences to come together and pass laws that made it more difficult for, say, some crazy asshole to shoot up a movie theater. The sensible reforms included enforcing a ban on assault weapons and making it more difficult for people to arm themselves to the teeth.

The most heartening is that we reacted quickly as a society to find a solution to violence that respected Second Amendment rights while decreasing the senseless gun violence in our country. Citizens, corporations and politicians put aside their own interests back then to solve a problem that could have become much worse.

Then, when subsequent mass murders occurred, we took further action to prevent future tragedies. When a gunman killed children at an Amish schoolhouse in 2006, we implemented further measures to close any “loopholes” in our previous laws. After the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, the worst mass shooting in American history, lawmakers and regular people took a hard look at our society to diagnose the problem of random violence in America and take concrete steps to address it in extralegal means. So by the time another isolated incident occurred such as the Fort Hood massacre, we were able to deal with it with common sense and without hysteria, scapegoating and grandstanding.

So people who call for sane gun laws and preventive strategies today must have been living under a rock because we already did all that. It is heartening to know that after a tragedy, we only needed to say “Never again” once.