Hope

My Dad's Bluebird House

"When the world says, 'Give up,' 

Hope whispers,

 "Try it one more time."

NEW YEAR'S: THE DEADLIEST DAY OF THE YEAR

New Year’s is around the corner and, when it comes to alcohol-related fatalities, it’s the most dangerous time of the year. Not only is there typically a spike in driver and passenger deaths starting at midnight on New Year’ Day due to excessive drinking, but even walking home while intoxicated that night can be dangerous. According to a study published in Injury Prevention, more pedestrians are killed by vehicles in the US on that day than on any other day of the year -- and more than half of them have high blood alcohol concentrations (BACs). Clearly there is much that people still need to learn. 

I don’t think that very many people set out to get drunk and then drive or walk home -- but too many people think that they’re "fine" and "only a little buzzed" when their BAC is actually far beyond the US legal driving limit of 0.08. And it’s all too easy to overindulge when you’re counting down "10!... 9!... 8!..." with a crowd of friends.

How is it that we can be so smart yet make such wrongheaded assessments about our own level of drunkenness? We’re not all college kids, after all. Shouldn’t we be better at knowing our limits by now? To get some answers, I called Samir Zakhari, PhD, director of the division of metabolism and health effects at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who explained why it’s often easier than you realize to trick yourself.

HOW WE FOOL OURSELVES

• We lose track. Yes, this sounds silly -- but there are several reasons why this can happen even to a usually cautious person. If you’re drinking something that you’re unfamiliar with -- a special concoction like a holiday punch, for example -- you may have no idea how much alcohol one serving contains, said Dr. Zakhari. Plus, those sweet, fruity mixtures (not to mention spiked eggnog!) can mask the taste of alcohol and make you think that there’s less in them than there is. In addition, some wines and beers are stronger than others (for instance, microbrewed beers usually have a higher alcohol content than common brands such as Budweiser), said Dr. Zakhari. Also, "generous" bartenders and "gracious" hosts may refill your glass far more often than you realize. All of this means that on party night you need to be extra alert when tracking your consumption and monitoring your head. While a buzz makes us feel "good," that same buzz impacts ability and judgment when driving or walking.

• We chug too fast. Alcohol will affect your brain and other tissues until it has been fully metabolized by your body. Your liver can process only so much alcohol per hour -- in a healthy adult man, about one drink an hour (one drink being 12 ounces of beer or five ounces of wine or 1.5 ounces of liquor), and in a healthy adult woman, less than one drink an hour. "When you drink more than that, your liver can’t keep up. The result is that the alcohol lingers longer in your bloodstream, where it can affect every organ and tissue and be more harmful to your health," he said. "And alcohol in the bloodstream is what impairs your judgment and makes you feel drunk." So sip your drinks slowly, and you’ll be more likely to stay sober. And if you’re lightweight or haven’t eaten much protein or fat shortly before drinking the alcohol, then the alcohol will get to your bloodstream even faster -- meaning your BAC will get higher, you’ll feel even more drunk and you’ll be even more impaired. So eat up before you grab a drink.

• We choose riskier mixers. Bubbly drinks, like champagne or liquor mixed with sodas, hit harder, because carbonation makes alcohol get to your bloodstream faster, so you become more impaired when you drink those types of beverages. Alcohol mixed with energy drinks is also a recipe for disaster. Energy drinks often contain an enormous amount of caffeine, which can mask -- but not block -- the effect of alcohol. As a result you may feel alert, but in reality, your judgment is impaired and your reflexes are dulled.

• We overpour. When you pour yourself a glass of wine, are you measuring out five ounces or are you filling the glass? Many glasses can easily hold two servings! And if you’re drinking pints of beer on tap, do you know that a pint is actually 1.3 drinks (compared with a 12-ounce bottle or can)? Many people don’t, which means that most people may be undercounting their consumption, said Dr. Zakhari.

Dr. Zakhari has a favorite saying that he believes sums up nicely what we need to know about drinking -- he calls it "the four Ds." "When people start drinking and they drink slowly, they are 'delightful.' When they continue drinking, they become 'devilish.' Then, if they keep going, they get 'delirious' and, sadly, sometimes that leads to 'dead.' So when you’re drinking this New Year’s, you need to know which 'D' to stop with!"

Source(s):

Samir Zakhari, PhD, director, division of metabolism and health effects, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.

Wishing you a SAFE and Happy New Year!

The Lives Unlived in Newtown

The Lives Unlived in Newtown
By SARA MOSLE

 

A memorial near the Sandy Hook Elementary School.
 (Marcus Yam for The New York Times)

ON A COUNTRY HIGHWAY IN THE TINY TOWN OF NEW LONDON, TEX., sits a small tea shop and a museum that houses the collective grief of a community that lost its children. On the afternoon of March 18, 1937, the London Consolidated School exploded a few minutes before classes were to be dismissed. An odorless cloud of natural gas had leaked from a faulty heating system into the building’s unventilated basement and ignited, most likely from a spark from the school’s shop class.

According to witnesses, the school appeared to blast off its foundation and hover in the air before collapsing again, generating clouds of ash and debris that plowed across the schoolyard. Scores of mothers, who had been attending a P.T.A. meeting in the nearby wood gymnasium, staggered out into a blizzard of whirling papers and pulverized mortar. When the dust settled, approximately 300 people were dead, nearly all of them children.

How does a community recover from such a loss? It’s a question we ask as we struggle to pay tribute to the 20 children and 6 adults massacred at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. This issue of the magazine is devoted to “the lives they lived.” To a parent, the childhood of a 6- or 7-year-old is rich beyond measure. But the incomprehensible horror and grief at the death of a child is also for the milestones not reached, the moments unshared. In Newtown, it’s for the lives unlived we mourn.

For those who lost loved ones at Sandy Hook, the sorrow is beyond our capacity to know or comprehend and will take a lifetime to work out. The year after the 1937 school explosion, a memorial service was canceled because emotions were still too raw. It took another year for the town to erect a cenotaph. Some families sued the school superintendent and school board, as others struggled to forgive and forget. Memory of the tragedy went underground until 1976, when one of the few youthful survivors of the explosion began to place ads in newspapers around the country asking if anyone else remembered. This led to one reunion, and then to more. It wasn’t until roughly a half century after the explosion that the teahouse and museum opened.

The tragedy in New London was the first of its kind to become a worldwide, communal news event. Because new technology allowed for the same-day transmission of news photographs by wire, people around the world were riveted by the images of first responders lifting limp children from the rubble and the miles-long line of hearses carrying child-size caskets to back-to-back funerals. Schoolchildren in Brazil and Poland sent letters of sympathy.

In our day it has taken no time for Newtown’s tragedy to touch, and implicate, us all; it belongs to neighborhoods, cities and towns, and not just ours but other nations’. In this public sphere, where our shared grief, though well meaning, is anything but private, the rush for answers is more frantic and fraught, prompting immediate and galvanizing conversations about why we haven’t taken more steps to protect our children.

In the months before the 1937 explosion, state fire regulators tried to raise the alarm about the perils of natural gas, but it took the death of schoolchildren to impel politicians to act. Within days of the disaster, Texas legislators went into emergency session to promote the addition of a “malodorant” to natural gas, which has since saved countless lives.

Now, after Sandy Hook, there are renewed pushes for the regulation of semiautomatic weapons and provisions for providing better health care services for the mentally ill. The hardest work of grief belongs to the shattered families, but we have yet to determine what their loss will mean for America.

At the funerals for the children who died in Newtown, a nation wept as we heard how Jessica Rekos loved horseback riding and James Mattioli enjoyed singing at the top of his lungs. The details seem heartbreakingly ephemeral, soon swallowed by the maw of time.

Yet as you wander the exhibits at the London Museum today, what is most indelible are not the newspaper headlines or monumental shifts by politicians but rather the totems of individual, irreducible love: a boy’s pocketknife painted with red nail polish, a girl’s paper dolls clipped from the Sears, Roebuck & Company catalog. They once belonged to children who, like the dead in Newtown and other billions who have graced this earth, still have no double.

*Sara Mosle writes the Schooling column for The Times, teaches at St. Philip’s Academy in Newark and is writing a book on the school explosion in New London, Tex.

Article appeared in on 12/30/2012

Bill Moyers on Gun Violence, Newtown, and Sandy Hook

Bill Moyers on Gun Violence, Newtown, and Sandy Hook

Ring in the New Year with Savory Puff Pastry Bites

Red Pepper Asiago Gougere Cheese Bites

Share a little warmth with these cheesy, savory puff pastry bites.

Goes well with New Year's Eve Black Eyed Peas.

Ingredients:

1 cup water
1/2 cup butter
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
4 All-Natural Eggs
1 1/2 cups (6 ounces) shredded Asiago or Parmesan cheese (Reserve 1/4 teaspoon cheese.)
1/2 cup finely chopped red bell pepper
1 1/2 Tablespoons finely chopped fresh basil*

Heat oven to 400*F.  Line baking sheets with parchment paper.  Set aside.

Place water and butter in heavy 2-quart saucepan.  Cook over medium heat until mixture comes to a full boil (6 to 8 minutes).  Reduce heat to low; stir in flour and garlic salt.  Vigorously  mix until mixture leaves sides of pan and forms a ball.  Remove from heat.  Add 1 egg at a time, beating well after each addition egg, until mixture is smooth.  Stir in 1 cup cheese, bell pepper and basil.

Immediately drop dough by rounded teaspoonfuls onto prepared baking sheets.  Sprinkle each with the 1/4 teaspoon  remaining reserved cheese.  Bake for 20 to 22 minutes or until golden brown.  Serve warm.

*Substitute 1 1/2 teaspoons dried basil leaves.

Make-Ahead Baking Tip

To make ahead, bake as directed.  Cool completely.  Place cooled bites onto baking sheets; place into freezer until firm.  Place frozen bites into resealable plastic freezer bags.  Freeze up to 2 months.  To reheat, heat oven to 350*F.  Place frozen bites in single layer onto ungreased baking sheets.  Bake for 8 to 10 minutes or until heated through.

Protecting Pets

Bitterant placed in antifreeze to protect pets

Dec 26, 2012 3:06:00 AM by RJ

A bitter flavoring agent will be added to all antifreeze and engine coolant manufactured for sale for the consumer market in the United States, a change voluntarily proposed by the manufacturers.
The Consumer Specialty Products Association (CSPA) had partnered with the Humane Society Legislative Fund to pass laws in seventeen states to require the addition of bitterant. "Today, all major marketers are placing the bitterant in antifreeze in all 50 states,” said Phil Klein, executive vice president, legislative and public affairs for CSPA. 
"The Humane Society Legislative Fund applauds them for taking this important step to help protect our pets, kids and wildlife in every state,” added Sara Amundson, executive director of the Humane Society Legislative Fund.
Anywhere from 10,000 to 90,000 animals are poisoned each year after ingesting ethylene glycol, according to Amundson. This highly toxic substance used in auto antifreeze and coolants smells and tastes sweet, making it attractive to animals as well as children. One teaspoon of antifreeze or engine coolant can kill an average-sized cat.
By adding the bitter-tasting denatonium benzoate to antifreeze and coolant sold directly to consumers across the country, the manufacturers hope to drastically reduce the number of poisonings. Denatonium benzoate has been used in common household products and as an anti-nail biting formula for decades in the United States.
"It is vital that consumers continue to read the labels and follow label instructions on the proper use, storage and disposal of antifreeze," said Klein, executive vice president, legislative and public affairs for CSPA.  

Photo: Gizmo is a rescue cat and his owners keep him away from anti-freeze and other possible poisons by storing them responsibly. 

Peanuts Holiday Countdown 2012

Send in the Clowns

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Send in the Clowns

December 22, 2012

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

WHEN thinking about the state of the Republican Party, I defer to a point that the Democratic consultant James Carville made the other day: “When I hear people talking about the troubled state of today’s Republican Party, it calls to mind something Lester Maddox said one time back when he was governor of Georgia. He said the problem with Georgia prisons was ‘the quality of the inmates.’ The problem with the Republican Party is the quality of the people who vote in their primaries and caucuses. Everybody says they need a better candidate, or they need a better message but — in my opinion — the Republicans have an inmate problem.” The political obsessions of the Republican base — from denying global warming to defending assault weapons to opposing any tax increases under any conditions, to resisting any immigration reform — are making it impossible to be a Republican moderate, said Carville. And without more Republican moderates, there is no way to strike the kind of centrist bargains that have been at the heart of American progress — that got us where we are and are essential for where we need to go.

Republican politicians today have a choice: either change your base by educating and leading G.O.P. voters back to the center-right from the far right, or start a new party that is more inclusive, focused on smaller but smarter government and market-based, fact-based solutions to our biggest problems.

But if Republicans continue to be led around by, and live in fear of, a base that denies global warming after Hurricane Sandy and refuses to ban assault weapons after Sandy Hook — a base that would rather see every American’s taxes rise rather than increase taxes on millionaires — the party has no future. It can’t win with a base that is at war with math, physics, human biology, economics and common-sense gun laws all at the same time.

Do you know how troubled this party is? Two weeks ago, the former G.O.P. Senate majority leader Bob Dole, a great American, went to the Senate floor in his wheelchair to show his support for Senate ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of People With Disabilities. Nevertheless, the bill failed to win the two-thirds needed for ratification, because only eight Republicans dared to join Democrats in support of the treaty, which was negotiated and signed by George W. Bush! It essentially requires other countries to improve to our level of protection for the disabled, without requiring us to change any laws. It has already been ratified by 126 countries. But it failed in the Senate because Rick Santorum managed to convince the G.O.P. base that the treaty would threaten U.S. “sovereignty.” Santorum stopped just short of warning that space aliens would take over our country if we ratified the treaty.

Because they control the House, this radical Republican base is now holding us all back. President Obama was moving to the center in these budget negotiations. He reduced his demand for higher tax revenues to $1.2 trillion from $1.6 trillion; he upped the level at which Americans who would be hit with higher taxes to those earning $400,000 a year from $250,000; and he made his own base holler by offering to cut long-term spending by lowering the inflation adjustment index for Social Security. It seemed that with a little more Republican compromise, Obama would have met them in the middle, and we could have had a grand bargain that would put the country on a sounder fiscal trajectory and signal to the markets, the world and ourselves that we can still do big hard things together. That will have to wait. Now the best hope is some mini-, crisis-averting, Band-Aid.

The G.O.P. today needs its own D.L.C. The Democratic Leadership Council was founded by a group of Democratic governors and activists, led by Bill Clinton, in 1985 to lead the party back to the center from a failing leftward course that had resulted in it being repeatedly shut out of the presidency, except after Watergate. I asked Clinton’s pollster, Stan Greenberg, what Republicans could learn from the Clinton/D.L.C. experience.

“There is a lot of pain,” said Greenberg. “You can’t change the party without pain. You can’t just make some head-fakes to Hispanics.” The D.L.C., he noted, started by building an organization over 10 years and by running more centrist Democrats “in the primaries.” It didn’t just wait to pivot to the center in the general election. It fought for and educated the Democrat base in the primaries, by D.L.C. candidates running in support of free trade, Nafta and welfare reform. “With Clinton, we won the primaries in a way that defined us, so that he could run in the general election as the candidate of broad appeal.” That fractured the party and produced Ralph Nader, which cost Al Gore the 2000 election. But after losing that election, said Greenberg, the Democrats came together around a moderate-left core and did not engage “in dysfunctional primaries.”

Republicans need to go through a similar process of building new institutions and coalitions to support candidates who can move the party back to the center-right. Today, all their institutions, from think tanks to Fox TV, said Greenberg, “are reinforcing the trends that are marginalizing their party.”

Unfortunately, we don’t have a decade to wait for a G.O.P. D.L.C. Some leaders in that party need to stand up for sane compromises right now.

The Scourge of Concealed Weapons

December 22, 2012

The Scourge of Concealed Weapons

As the nation’s leaders devise new gun control strategies following the Connecticut shooting, they should look for ways to strengthen state laws that govern the possession and use of firearms. In too many states, these laws are weak and, in some cases, seem almost designed to encourage violence.

Over the years, states have made it increasingly possible for almost any adult to carry a concealed handgun in public, including on college campuses, in churches and in state parks — places where people tend to congregate in large numbers and where, in a rational world, guns should be strictly prohibited.

Some state legislators like to argue that citizens must be allowed to arm themselves because law enforcement cannot be trusted. Others offer the 2008 Supreme Court ruling on the Second Amendment as justification for these laws. But that decision recognized only a narrow right of “law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home.” And it came along well after most states had begun to weaken their controls.

A more likely cause for this shift are the very forces that have undercut efforts to enact strong and sensible national laws, namely, the incredible power of the pro-gun lobby and its profitable allies in the gun manufacturing industry. The assertion on Friday by Wayne LaPierre, the vice president of the National Rifle Association, that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” was as much a sales pitch as it was a restatement of the organization’s perverse philosophy.

Whatever the reason, the regulatory landscape has changed enormously in the last few decades. In 1981, 19 states prohibited individuals from carrying a concealed gun in public, and 28 states plus the District of Columbia gave law enforcement agencies discretion to issue permits only to people who had a real need to carry a hidden gun. All but a few states took this cautious approach.

Nowadays, however, there are four states that require no permit at all to carry a gun, and 35 states have permissive “shall issue” or “right-to-carry” laws that effectively take the decision of who should carry a weapon out of law enforcement’s hands. These laws say that if an applicant meets minimal criteria — one is not having been convicted of a felony, and another is not having a severe mental illness — officials have no choice about whether to issue a permit.

Some states go even further by expressly allowing guns where they should not be. Nine states now have “carry laws” that permit guns on campuses; eight permit them in bars; five permit them in places of worship. In Utah, holders of permits can now carry concealed guns in elementary schools.

Among the arguments advanced for these irresponsible statutes is the claim that “shall issue” laws have played a major role in reducing violent crime. But the National Research Council has thoroughly discredited this argument for analytical errors. In fact, the legal scholar John Donohue III and others have found that from 1977 to 2006, “shall issue” laws increased aggravated assaults by “roughly 3 to 5 percent each year.”

The federal government could help protect the public from lax state gun laws. For starters, the Fix Gun Checks Act, proposed last year in Congress, would close gaping loopholes in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System and make a huge difference in identifying many people who should be denied permits under “shall issue” laws yet slip through the state systems.

Similarly, Congress could require that states set higher standards for granting permits for concealed weapons, give local law enforcement agencies greater say in the process, and prohibit guns from public places like parks, schools and churches. It could also require record-keeping and licensing requirements in the sale of ammunition, and strengthen the enforcement capabilities of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The one thing Congress absolutely must not do is pass a law requiring all states to grant legal status to permits from others; that would undercut states that have relatively strong laws and would turn a porous system into a sieve.

President Obama has promised to unveil a new gun control strategy soon. It is likely to include a renewed effort to ban the sale of assault weapons like the one used in the Connecticut massacre, as well as other familiar measures. But the strategy will be incomplete unless Washington becomes actively engaged in making sure that the states stop allowing guns to get into the wrong hands.

Anatomy of a Murder-Suicide

A memorial to the victims of the Dec. 14 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

December 22, 2012

Anatomy of a Murder-Suicide
By ANDREW SOLOMON


SUICIDE is not as newsworthy as homicide. A person’s disaffection with his own life is less threatening than his rage to destroy others. So it makes sense that since the carnage in Newtown, Conn., the press has focused on the victims — the heartbreaking, senseless deaths of children, and the terrible pain that their parents and all the rest of us have to bear. Appropriately, we mourn Adam Lanza’s annihilation of others more than his self-annihilation.

But to understand a murder-suicide, one has to start with the suicide, because that is the engine of such acts. Adam Lanza committed an act of hatred, but it seems that the person he hated the most was himself. If we want to stem violence, we need to begin by stemming despair.

Many adolescents experience self-hatred; some express their insecurity destructively toward others. They are needlessly sharp with their parents; they drink and drive, regardless of the peril they may pose to others; they treat peers with gratuitous disdain. The more profound their self-hatred, the more likely it is to be manifest as externally focused aggression. Adam Lanza’s acts reflect a grotesquely magnified version of normal adolescent rage.

In his classic work on suicide, the psychiatrist Karl Menninger said that it required the coincidence of the wish to kill, the wish to be killed and the wish to die. Adam Lanza clearly had all three of these impulses, and while the gravest crime is that his wish to kill was so much broader than that of most suicidal people, his first tragedy was against himself.

Blame is a great comfort, because a situation for which someone or something can be blamed is a situation that could have been avoided — and so could be prevented next time. Since the shootings at Newtown, we’ve heard blame heaped on Adam Lanza’s parents and their divorce; on Adam’s supposed Asperger’s syndrome and possible undiagnosed schizophrenia; on the school system; on gun control policies; on violence in video games, movies and rock music; on the copycat effect spawned by earlier school shootings; on a possible brain disorder that better imaging will someday allow us to map.

Advocates for the mentally ill argue that those who are treated for various mental disorders are no more violent than the general population; meanwhile an outraged public insists that no sane person would be capable of such actions. This is an essentially semantic argument. A Harvard study gave doctors edited case histories of suicides and asked them for diagnoses; it found that while doctors diagnosed mental illness in only 22 percent of the group if they were not told that the patients had committed suicide, the figure was 90 percent when the suicide was included in the patient profile.

The persistent implication is that, as with 9/11 or the attack in Benghazi, Libya, greater competence from trained professionals could have ensured tranquillity. But retrospective analysis is of limited utility, and the supposition that we can purge our lives of such horror is an optimistic fiction.

In researching my book “Far From the Tree,” I interviewed the parents of Dylan Klebold, one of the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre in Littleton, Colo., in 1999. Over a period of eight years, I spent hundreds of hours with the Klebolds. I began convinced that if I dug deeply enough into their character, I would understand why Columbine happened — that I would recognize damage in their household that spilled over into catastrophe. Instead, I came to view the Klebolds not only as inculpable, but as admirable, moral, intelligent and kind people whom I would gladly have had as parents myself. Knowing Tom and Sue Klebold did not make it easier to understand what had happened. It made Columbine far more bewildering and forced me to acknowledge that people are unknowable.

When people ask me why the Klebolds didn’t search Dylan’s room and find his writings, didn’t track him to where he’d hidden his guns, I remind them that intrusive behavior like this sometimes prompts rather than prevents tragedy and that all parents must sail between what the British psychoanalyst Rozsika Parker called “the Scylla of intrusiveness and the Charybdis of neglect.” Whether one steered this course well is knowable only after the fact. We’d have wished for intrusiveness from the Klebolds and from Nancy Lanza, but we can find other families in which such intrusiveness has been deeply destructive.

THE perpetrators of these horrific killings fall along what one might call the Loughner-Klebold spectrum. Everyone seems to have known that Jared Loughner, who wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords and killed six others at a meet-and-greet in Tucson in 2011, had something seriously wrong with him.

In an e-mail months before the shootout, a fellow student said: “We have a mentally unstable person in the class that scares the living crap out of me. He is one of those whose picture you see on the news, after he has come into class with an automatic weapon.” The problem was obvious, and no one did anything about it.

No one saw anything wrong with Dylan Klebold. After he was arrested for theft, Mr. Klebold was assigned to a diversion program that administered standardized psychological tests that his mother said found no indication that he was suicidal, homicidal or depressed. Some people who are obviously troubled receive no treatment, and others keep their inner lives completely secret; most murder-suicides are committed by people who fall someplace in the middle of that spectrum, as Adam Lanza appears to.

So what are we to do? I was in Newtown last week, one of the slew of commentators called in by the broadcast media. Driving into town, I felt as though the air were full of gelatin; you could hardly wade through the pain. As I hung out in the CNN and NBC trailers, eating doughnuts and exchanging sadnesses with other guests as we waited for our five minutes on camera, I was struck by a troubling dichotomy. People who are dealing with a loss of this scale require the dignity of knowing that the world cares. Public attention serves, like Victorian mourning dress, to acknowledge that nothing is normal, and that those who are not lost in grief should defer to those who are. When I stopped in a diner on Newtown’s main drag, I did not sense hostility between the locals and the rest of us but I did sense a palpable gulf between us. We need to but cannot know Adam Lanza; we wish to but cannot know his victims, either.

In a metaphoric blog post called “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” a woman in Boise, Idaho, who clearly loves her son but is afraid of him worries that he will turn murderous. Many American families are in denial about who their children are; others see problems they don’t know how to stanch. Some argue that increasing mental health services for children would further burden an already bloated government budget. But it would cost us far less, in dollars and in anguish, than a system in which such events as Newtown take place.

Robbie Parker, the father of one of the victims, spoke out within 24 hours of the shooting and said to Adam Lanza’s family, “I can’t imagine how hard this experience must be for you, and I want you to know that our family and our love and our support goes out to you as well.” His spirit of building community instead of reciprocating hatred presents humbling evidence of a bright heart. It also serves a pragmatic purpose.

My experiences in Littleton suggest that those who saw the tragedy as embracing everyone, including the families of the killers, were able to move toward healing, while those who fought grief with anger tended to be more haunted by the events in the years that followed. Anger is a natural response, but trying to wreak vengeance by apportioning blame to others, including the killer’s family, is ultimately counterproductive. Those who make comprehension the precondition of acceptance destine themselves to unremitting misery.

Nothing we could have learned from Columbine would have allowed us to prevent Newtown. We have to acknowledge that the human brain is capable of producing horror, and that knowing everything about the perpetrator, his family, his social experience and the world he inhabits does not answer the question “why” in any way that will resolve the problem. At best, these events help generate good policy.

The United States is the only country in the world where the primary means of suicide is guns. In 2010, 19,392 Americans killed themselves with guns. That’s twice the number of people murdered by guns that year. Historically, the states with the weakest gun-control laws have had substantially higher suicide rates than those with the strongest laws. Someone who has to look for a gun often has time to think better of using it, while someone who can grab one in a moment of passion does not.

We need to offer children better mental health screenings and to understand that mental health service works best not on a vaccine model, in which a single dramatic intervention eliminates a problem forever, but on a dental model, in which constant care is required to prevent decay. Only by understanding why Adam Lanza wished to die can we understand why he killed. We would be well advised to look past the evil against others that most horrifies us and focus on the pathos that engendered it.

Andrew Solomon is the author, most recently, of “Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity.”

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on December 23, 2012, on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Anatomy of a Murder-Suicide.

Peanuts Holiday Countdown 2012

Concrete Ways to Turn Back the Gun Lobby’s Agenda

By the Editors of Bloomberg View - Dec 17, 2012

Hours before Adam Lanza used his mother’s semi-automatic rifle to commit mass murder in a Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school, the Michigan Legislature passed a law to allow concealed weapons in public schools and day-care centers.

The juxtaposition shows just how difficult the politics of gun control will be. Yet the basic concept is simple: The people who want most fiercely to obtain and use guns include many of the same people whose access to guns society most needs to restrict. In the mass shooting in July in Aurora, Colorado, the killer’s actions were lawful almost until the moment he began firing. If the preparations of mass murder are legal, then the law is an accomplice to madness.

Whether the Newtown shooting marks the peak of such madness or merely a gruesome landmark on the trail of sorrow depends in part on the weeks ahead. In state capitals and in Washington, advocates and legislators must quickly seize the initiative. Is this politicizing the tragedy? Yes, it is. But no more so than the campaign to push guns into every corner of American life -- including the corner bar. The retreat of gun control is over.

In his eulogy for the dead of Newtown, President Barack Obama said he would “use whatever power this office holds” to stop the violence. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, whose own life was scarred by gun violence, has promised to introduce a ban on the sale, transfer and importation of assault weapons, along with a ban on ammunition clips, drums and strips that hold more than 10 bullets. (Lanza’s held 30.)

Engagement Needed

We support Feinstein’s proposal, and we eagerly await the president’s agenda. What matters is that they contribute to a politically coherent long-term strategy for regulating guns. That will require politicians to make shrewd decisions and voters to remain engaged for the duration. It’s good to know that a Democratic president is paying attention and that California’s senior senator is on the case, but success will be measured by Republicans and Midwestern states.

Arguably no part of this work is more important than establishing, once and for all, a system of comprehensive background checks. Brady Law background checks have stopped more than 2 million gun sales since 1994. It is impossible to know if lives were saved as a result, or how many. Still, one-third or more of gun sales remain unregulated in the secondary market, which includes not only gun shows but also private sales between individuals. (The Columbine killers obtained their guns this way.) No gun should be sold in the U.S. without the buyer’s identity being checked against a national database.

This is not controversial. According to a survey released in July by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, even 74 percent of National Rifle Association members support criminal background checks. (Michael R. Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP, is the co-founder and co- chairman of Mayors Against Illegal Guns.)

A background check wouldn’t have prevented the Newtown massacre. No such cure-all exists or ever will. But Feinstein’s ban on high-capacity magazines might have slowed down the slaughter, potentially saving lives. And it would prohibit future sales of certain military-style assault rifles.

The shooter in Aurora bought his arsenal legally. No red flag was raised in the process of his rapid acquisition of three very powerful guns and more. Unless we are heedless of public safety, we owe it to ourselves and our children to do all we can to prevent 30,000 deaths and 100,000 shootings a year. More comprehensive background checks, with an alert system for suspicious behavior, is a good start.

The gun lobby, however, led by the NRA, has devoted itself not to closing dangerous loopholes, but to creating them. The “Stand Your Ground” laws enacted in Florida and elsewhere at the NRA’s behest all but legalize mayhem, provided it’s committed with a gun and without witnesses. The shooter need only claim he or she felt physically threatened before firing.

Narrow Campaign

Similarly, the widely successful push to bring guns into schools, churches, bars, sporting events -- essentially every public venue in American life -- is part of a narrow political campaign that romanticizes and fetishizes firearms, all the better to sell them. In all of these instances, we are told the right to carry a gun is paramount to all others, including an employer’s right to maintain a safe workplace.

For sensible gun laws to succeed, that runaway agenda must be checked and the NRA’s marketing of fear and loathing must be consistently, publicly repudiated. This doesn’t involve hunters or sportsmen -- who shouldn’t have their Second Amendment rights abridged. The gun industry now cultivates consumers interested in “tactical” military-style weaponry. Meanwhile, the industry’s top spokesman, NRA Chief Executive Officer Wayne LaPierre, sells a hefty side of paranoia, intoning darkly about “a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment.”

Gun crackpottery might be more easily ignored if the U.S. hadn’t produced 1 million gunshot victims in the past decade, even as crime broadly declined. Anyone who doubts the influence of culture on the gun debate should take stock of the silence emanating from the NRA after the Newtown tragedy. Likewise, on Dec. 16, NBC’s “Meet the Press” invited 31 senators on the show to articulate their pro-gun rights views. According to host David Gregory, all declined.

The fight for sensible gun laws won’t be won in Washington alone. It will take place in Tallahassee and Lansing, Denver and Hartford. It will take place in towns and villages -- and voting booths -- across the country.

Like race relations or gay rights, gun regulation will be a product of cultural change along with legal reform. The entire nation has a role to play. The first move, however, belongs to Washington. Mr. President?

To contact the Bloomberg View editorial board: view@bloomberg.net.

Peanuts Holiday Countdown 2012

Gun Control Reform Is Long Overdue

"This is insane.  It is madness that we continue to allow such bloodshed to unfold, occasioning predictable dismay while the gun lobby keeps ensuring that the rules never change."

Excerpt taken from article, America Grieves:  Tragedy At Sandy Hook 
Peter S. Goodman is executive business editor of The Hufffington Post


Wayne LaPierre, NRA President and like minds of the NRA are interested only in the sell of guns and ammunition, not in the protection and safety of innocent children and individuals.  Why would any individual need to own or use an assault rifle or gun with high capacity magazines and drums? 

Peanuts Holiday Countdown 2012

Peanuts Holiday Countdown 2012

After Newtown, There Is No Place For Parents To Hide

December 21, 2012

Lisa Belkin Senior Columnist on Life/Work/Family, The Huffington Post


This tragedy -- this massacre, this slaughter -- is different because there is no place to hide.

We humans seek shelter, safety, escape. When threatened we run, and when someone else is threatened, we create elaborate protective layers to distance us from the victims.

That could not have been me, we tell ourselves. I never would have brought my child to a midnight showing of "The Dark Knight Rises." I would not have left my kids with a disgruntled nanny. I am not Sikh. And I don't live on an Army base. I never go to that part of town.

We aren't stupid. All of us know in the deepest, most vulnerable corners of our hearts that these statements are excuses, not truths. Yet, we put our fingers in our ears and hum, so that all we hear are our own voices. We are vaguely aware that our insistence that "we would never" sounds like blame and judgment -- smug and self-righteous.

But really we are all terrified.

"Every parent knows there's nothing we will not do to shield our children from harm," the president said last night. "And yet we also know that with that child's very first step and each step after that, they are separating from us, that we won't -- that we can't always be there for them."

When Adam Lanza stormed the Sandy Hook Elementary School, he obliterated all the places to hide. The children not in his sights turned out to be safe behind desks and in closets, but the deaths of the 20 first-graders who crossed his path make clear the simple, horrifying truth.

Their parents can't hide anymore either. No parent can. There is nothing left to conjure from our desperate imaginations that separate our children from the ones who were dropped off for just another day of school Friday morning. There is no way to point blaming fingers at the parents here. So we have to take the blame ourselves.

"We come to realize that we bear responsibility for every child," Obama said, "because we're counting on everybody else to help look after ours, that we're all parents, that they are all our children."

They are all our children. We can't hide from that. And backed against the wall, with nothing separating the parents who have lost from the parents who someday could, we find ourselves finally staring down that reality.

There is only one kind of safety for us now -- that of numbers. Together we need to refuse to accept the fact that children in the U.S. are 13 times more likely to be killed by guns than children in any other industrialized nation. Together we need to insist that mental illness is no different than breast cancer or heart disease, and its victims deserve more treatment, research and compassion. Together we need to insist that our Constitution not preach to us of the way things were, but help us make things the way they should now be.

Our hiding spots are gone, wiped out in a few moments by a 20-year-old with a semi-automatic weapon. We won't get them back anytime soon, which leaves us frightened but also determined. Because the goal should never have been to find a place to hide. The goal should be to live in a world where we don't need one.

A conservative case for an assault weapons ban

OP-ED
A conservative case for an assault weapons ban

If we can't draw a sensible line on guns, we may as well call the American experiment in democracy a failure.

An assault weapon similar to the type used in the Newtown, Conn. shooting.
(Joe Raedle / Getty Images / December 18, 2012)

By Larry Alan Burns
December 20, 2012

Last month, I sentenced Jared Lee Loughner to seven consecutive life terms plus 140 years in federal prison for his shooting rampage in Tucson. That tragedy left six people dead, more than twice that number injured and a community shaken to its core.

Loughner deserved his punishment. But during the sentencing, I also questioned the social utility of high-capacity magazines like the one that fed his Glock. And I lamented the expiration of the federal assault weapons ban in 2004, which prohibited the manufacture and importation of certain particularly deadly guns, as well as magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.

The ban wasn't all that stringent — if you already owned a banned gun or high-capacity magazine you could keep it, and you could sell it to someone else — but at least it was something.

And it says something that half of the nation's deadliest shootings occurred after the ban expired, including the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn. It also says something that it has not even been two years since Loughner's rampage, and already six mass shootings have been deadlier.

I am not a social scientist, and I know that very smart ones are divided on what to do about gun violence. But reasonable, good-faith debates have boundaries, and in the debate about guns, a high-capacity magazine has always seemed to me beyond them.

Bystanders got to Loughner and subdued him only after he emptied one 31-round magazine and was trying to load another. Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter, chose as his primary weapon a semiautomatic rifle with 30-round magazines. And we don't even bother to call the 100-rounder that James Holmes is accused of emptying in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater a magazine — it is a drum. How is this not an argument for regulating the number of rounds a gun can fire?

I get it. Someone bent on mass murder who has only a 10-round magazine or revolvers at his disposal probably is not going to abandon his plan and instead try to talk his problems out. But we might be able to take the "mass" out of "mass shooting," or at least make the perpetrator's job a bit harder.

To guarantee that there would never be another Tucson or Sandy Hook, we would probably have to make it a capital offense to so much as look at a gun. And that would create serious 2nd Amendment, 8th Amendment and logistical problems.

So what's the alternative? Bring back the assault weapons ban, and bring it back with some teeth this time. Ban the manufacture, importation, sale, transfer and possession of both assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Don't let people who already have them keep them. Don't let ones that have already been manufactured stay on the market. I don't care whether it's called gun control or a gun ban. I'm for it.

I say all of this as a gun owner. I say it as a conservative who was appointed to the federal bench by a Republican president. I say it as someone who prefers Fox News to MSNBC, and National Review Online to the Daily Kos. I say it as someone who thinks the Supreme Court got it right in District of Columbia vs. Heller, when it held that the 2nd Amendment gives us the right to possess guns for self-defense. (That's why I have mine.) I say it as someone who, generally speaking, is not a big fan of the regulatory state.

I even say it as someone whose feelings about the NRA mirror the left's feelings about Planned Parenthood: It has a useful advocacy function in our deliberative democracy, and much of what it does should not be controversial at all.

And I say it, finally, mindful of the arguments on the other side, at least as I understand them: that a high-capacity magazine is not that different from multiple smaller-capacity magazines; and that if we ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines one day, there's a danger we would ban guns altogether the next, and your life might depend on you having one.

But if we can't find a way to draw sensible lines with guns that balance individual rights and the public interest, we may as well call the American experiment in democracy a failure.

There is just no reason civilians need to own assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Gun enthusiasts can still have their venison chili, shoot for sport and competition, and make a home invader flee for his life without pretending they are a part of the SEAL team that took out Osama bin Laden.

It speaks horribly of the public discourse in this country that talking about gun reform in the wake of a mass shooting is regarded as inappropriate or as politicizing the tragedy. But such a conversation is political only to those who are ideologically predisposed to see regulation of any kind as the creep of tyranny. And it is inappropriate only to those delusional enough to believe it would disrespect the victims of gun violence to do anything other than sit around and mourn their passing. Mourning is important, but so is decisive action.

Congress must reinstate and toughen the ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

Larry Alan Burns is a federal district judge in San Diego.

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

This Is What Six Looks Like

Jennifer Rowe Walters (Mother and preschool teacher)




I am not really a major cryer. I mean, don't get me wrong, I cry -- when it's appropriate to do so. Funerals. The occasional wedding if it's particularly beautiful or meaningful. Schindler's List. Things that normal people cry at. I am definitely not an over-cryer. I don't cry at commercials or cheesy Hallmark movies or at the drop of a hat. And, when I do cry, there's usually a beginning and an end. I cry. I get it out. I stop. Normal crying.

However, since I first started to understand the magnitude of what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday morning, I have cried a lot. I cried when I heard the terrible news. I cried when I went to pick my son up early from school. I cried when I told my husband what had happened. I cried when I talked to my girlfriends about it. I cried at church when we prayed for each victim by name. Off and on for going on three days now, I have cried. And this is despite going out of my way to not watch anything about it on TV or read too much about it online. I'm actively trying to avoid it, but I still find myself crying more than usual.

I mentioned this to a friend last night and she said that she couldn't seem to stop crying either. When I asked her why she thought that was, her answer was, for me, a revelation. She said, "I think it's because we know what six looks like. We see it every day... in all its glory." And she was right. Because, you see, this friend and I both have a six-year-old child. I, a six-year-old son. She, a six-year-old daughter. Both are in first grade. Both, I imagine, so heart-breakingly similar to those 20 kids who were so brutally and senselessly killed on Friday morning. And we do, indeed, know what six looks like. We do see it every day. In all its glory. We see the good, the bad and the ugly. The beautiful and the infuriating. It's in our face. We live it and breathe it.

We know what six looks like. We know what it smells like. How it can go from the fresh scent of shampoo and soap to the musky aroma of "dirty child" in what seems like minutes. How it resists getting in the bathtub... and then resists getting out half an hour later. How sweet its hair and skin and clean jammies smell when it sits on your lap and asks you to read it a bedtime story. We know the unmistakeable fragrance of the occasional accident in the middle of the night caused by too much milk and no last-thing-before-bed visit to the toilet.

We know what six looks like. We know what it sounds like. How it cries and whines. How it sings and laughs. How clever it is and how much more clever it grows every day. How it sounds out words on signs as we drive past in the car and how happy it is when it gets them right. How annoying it sounds when it teases its little sister and how kind it sounds when it soothes her when she falls down and hurts herself. We know how lovely the words "Mommy" and "Daddy" and "I Love You" sound in its six-year-old voice.

We know what six looks like. We know how it tastes. How picky it is. How it thinks chicken nuggets or macaroni and cheese are gourmet foods. How much it loves candy and cookies. How it tolerates broccoli and carrots. How it absolutely abhors Brussels sprouts. How it thinks French fries are a vegetable. How it thinks chocolate milk was created by God himself. How it thinks pizza is its own food group. We know that six is happy when it finds "I love you!" written on a napkin in its lunch box at school.

We know what six looks like. We know how it feels. How big it's getting. How fast it outgrows its clothes and how it's no longer a baby, but not quite yet a big kid. We know the weight of six in our arms. How we can barely carry it anymore, but try anyway because we can't quite bring ourselves to accept the truth. We know how easily six gets its feelings hurt if someone says just the wrong thing or if this friend or that one doesn't want to play with it or it gets in trouble at school. We know the velvety softness of six's skin. We know the still-silkiness of its hair.

Yes, we know what six looks like. We know six's gap-toothed smile and its gangly arms and legs. We see how it jumps and dances. How it twirls and runs. We know how funny six is. How absolutely charming it can be. We know six's terrible jokes. We know how obsessed it is with "Minecraft." We know its crooked "S" and its backwards "3." We see how it teeters on the cusp of the world of books and all the joys of reading, but how it's not quite ready to fall in yet. We see how six can't decide if it wants us to stand beside it or not. We watch it take two steps towards independence and one step back towards us every day. We know how sturdy and strong six is... and yet how frail and fragile.

We know what six looks like. How beautiful it is. How precious. How brightly it shines with promise. How much it looks towards the future... toward 7,8,9... How much it looks like forever.

We know what six looks like and can only in our worst nightmares imagine how devastating its loss in this senseless and evil way would be. We can only barely imagine the wreckage and the despair and the utter hopelessness that would be left if six were brutally and suddenly taken from us. We know we couldn't bear life without it.

Yes, we know what six looks like. And we know that, to us -- like it must be for those other mothers and fathers in Connecticut -- six is the whole world.

Peanuts Holiday Countdown 2012

Peanuts Holiday Countdown 2012

DEATH OF THE INNOCENT

No lullabies needed here,
These are no children sleeping
But death claimed; tragic slaughter.
Someone’s son, someone’s daughter
Laid here in some dark corner,
Mischief hands have been at work,
Devil’s deeds for all to see
Along the road of history;
No one to claim innocent
If this should happen again
In some other time or place
By other cruel hands than those
Who committed this foul deed:
They have killed, but death has freed.

Poem By: Terry Collett 
Submitted: Feb 15, 2008

Need a Quick Party Mix?

Steakhouse Chex® Mix

Prep Time:15 min
Start to Finish:15 min
Makes:26 servings (1/2 cup each)

Ingredients

4 cups Rice Chex® cereal
4 cups Wheat Chex® cereal
2 cups bite-size cheese crackers
1 cup bite-size pretzel twists
6 tablespoons butter or margarine
3 tablespoons steak sauce
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon ground red pepper (cayenne)
1 cup French-fried onions
1 cup salted peanuts or try mixed nuts in the place of the peanuts
1 tablespoon onion powder
2 teaspoons garlic powder

Preparation Directions

1. In large microwavable bowl, mix cereals, crackers and pretzels.
2. In 2-cup microwavable measuring cup, microwave butter on high about 40 seconds or until melted. Stir in steak sauce, Worcestershire sauce and pepper. Pour over cereal mixture; stir until evenly coated.
3. Microwave uncovered on High 4 minutes, stirring after 2 minutes. Stir in onions and peanuts. Sprinkle with onion and garlic powders; toss until evenly coated. Spread on waxed paper or foil to cool. Store in airtight container.

Nutritional Information
1 Serving: Calories 160 (Calories from Fat 70); Total Fat 8g (Saturated Fat 3g, Trans Fat 0g); Cholesterol 10mg; Sodium 270mg; Total Carbohydrate 17g (Dietary Fiber 2g, Sugars 2g); Protein 3g % Daily Value*: Vitamin A 6%; Vitamin C 2%; Calcium 4%; Iron 25% Exchanges: 1 Starch; 0 Other Carbohydrate; 0 Vegetable; 1 1/2 Fat Carbohydrate Choices: 1 MyPyramid Servings: 1 tsp Fats & Oils 
*% Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet.

Arianna Huffington and Newtown Massacre...

Arianna Huffington

Newtown Massacre: What We Don't Need Is a 'National Conversation' -- We Need Action

Posted: 12/17/2012 11:07 pm

On Sunday night, President Obama spoke at an interfaith service for the victims of the horrific elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn. Not surprisingly, it was a poignant and moving speech, hitting all the right notes:

Here in Newtown, I come to offer the love and prayers of a nation. I am very mindful that mere words cannot match the depths of your sorrow, nor can they heal your wounded hearts. I can only hope it helps for you to know that you're not alone in your grief, that our world, too, has been torn apart, that all across this land of ours, we have wept with you. We've pulled our children tight.
The sad, horrible, tragic fact is that none of what we are witnessing is surprising. Shocking, yes, but not surprising. After all, we know this cycle all too well. It's one of the defining features of modern America. We have a mass shooting. We're sickened as we see it unfold. Then we're saddened as we learn the particulars about the victims. Our politicians somberly express their condolences. Many of them will mention something about how we really have to do something about this. A few will mention the need to examine our gun laws, only to be immediately rebuked and told that this is hardly the time to get "political." The discussion is put off. Services are held. Then the nation moves on, even if the town and the families involved never can. And then we do it all again in a few months. Or weeks.

It's time to finally break this well-worn cycle. And this time we can feel that the public is determined not to follow the bloodstained script.

Our reactions to these tragedies are not a zero-sum equation. Feeling anger doesn't mean we can't also feel sadness and grief. And it's clear that millions of us are furious that 20 innocent children have been added to the lengthy roll call of victims of gun violence, and of our failure -- actually, our refusal -- to break this cycle.

You could see this anger in the reaction -- especially on Twitter and other social media -- to the Obama administration's first statement on the tragedy. "There is, I am sure -- will be, rather -- a day for discussion of the usual Washington policy debates, but I do not think today is that day," White House spokesman Jay Carney said hours after the shooting, touching the usual base of implying that it somehow dishonors the victims to have the temerity to discuss the factors that contributed to their deaths. And note that not only were we not supposed to talk about policy now, but the expectation was that when we did, it would be the "usual Washington policy debate." Again, this wasn't a surprising statement. That's what's usually said. And it usually works. But this time it hasn't. This time the public wants action -- not business as usual in D.C. "I have to wonder if Jay Carney is aware of how perfectly he's parroting the NRA's talking points," said Mark Glaze, director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns. "That's exactly what they say after every mass shooting. 'It's not the time.' But the time never comes."

Later on Friday, perhaps reacting to the public demand for action, the White House tepidly went a little further. "As a country we have been through this too many times," the president said in a statement at the White House. "We're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics."

"Meaningful action" -- a wonderfully vague phrase that, in Washington parlance, usually means the exact opposite of what it would appear to mean. The pushback on that flaccid phrase was immediate, as well. "Calling for 'meaningful action' is not enough," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. "We need immediate action. We have heard all the rhetoric before. What we have not seen is leadership -- not from the White House and not from Congress. That must end today. This is a national tragedy and it demands a national response." And the next day, on Meet the Press, Bloomberg hammered home the point again. "It's time for the president to stand up and lead," he said. "His job is not just to be well-meaning. His job is to perform and to protect the American public."

And so on Sunday night, in Newtown, the president stepped up the rhetoric:

We can't tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change... In the coming weeks, I'll use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens, from law enforcement, to mental health professionals, to parents and educators, in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this.
But, again, notice the language: "Whatever power this office holds." Well, the presidency holds many clearly delineated powers, but much of the presidency's powers lie in what the office holder chooses to make of it. Let's hope he'll approach this threat -- one that killed almost 32,000 Americans last year alone -- with the same assertiveness.

In his speech, the president asked, "Because what choice do we have? We can't accept events like this as routine."

Actually, we do have another choice -- the choice to do nothing and allow more innocent victims to be sacrificed. In fact, that's the choice the White House has made so far. As Charlie Savage reports in The New York Times, the administration shelved proposals its own Justice Department came up with to improve background checks in the wake of the shooting of then-Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. The proposals included things like making sure agencies reported those listed as mentally incompetent to the FBI, increasing mandatory minimum prison sentences for "straw buyers" who buy guns for those who fail a background check, and requiring private gun dealers to do background checks. As Savage points out, many of the measures could have been done by executive order, but "the proposals were largely filed away without action."

Clearly, the White House did make another choice. Though it would be wrong to accuse the administration of not doing anything. As Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski notes, "during his first year in office President Obama signed into law more repeals of federal gun policies than President George W. Bush did during his eight years in office." As the president himself boasted in an op-ed two months after the Giffords shooting, "my administration has not curtailed the rights of gun owners -- it has expanded them, including allowing people to carry their guns in national parks and wildlife refuges." In the same piece, he also called for "the beginning of a new discussion on how we can keep America safe for all our people."

But an authentic version of that discussion -- not the ersatz one we have after every mass shooting -- would include an honest examination of why so many Americans feel the need to own guns. And why politicians in turn feel the need to brag about expanding access to guns. It's hard to imagine how guns could be any more accessible than they already are. America currently has nearly 300 million guns owned by civilians. And another 4 to 7 million hit the market each year. Here are some other sobering statistics:

• Nearly 100,000 Americans are wounded or killed by guns each year.

• The secondary costs associated with gun violence (judicial, medical, security) are estimated at $100 billion a year.

• Since Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were shot in 1968, more than a million Americans have been killed by guns.

• Children aged 5 to 14 are 13 times more likely to be killed by guns in American than in other industrialized nations.

• Of all children killed by guns in the 23 richest countries, 87 percent are American children.

• There have been five mass shootings since Obama took office, three of them since July.

• And as Nicholas Kristof points out, more Americans get killed by guns every six months than have died in Afghanistan, Iraq, and every terrorist attack in the last 25 years combined.

And, of course, it's just the mass shootings that make the front page. The everyday gun violence that would be national headlines in most countries is just standard local news here. In the shadow of the Newtown shooting, here's what's also happened across our country in the last few days:

• Indiana: A man who owns 47 guns threatened a school.

• Alabama: A gunman wounded three in a hospital and was killed by police.

• California: A man fired 50 shots in a crowded mall parking lot.

• Nevada: A man murdered his wife and then killed himself at a hotel.

• Illinois: One man was killed and two women wounded in separate shootings.

• North Carolina: A man killed his wife and his mother-in-law.

Just another couple of days in America. And these tragedies don't even elicit the usual political platitudes. We just accept them as part of our daily lives.

Despite the carnage, some even claim that more guns are the answer -- that if, say, if we armed the 7 million teachers in America, we'd all somehow be safer. Mother Jones actually looked at 62 -- yes, 62 -- mass shootings in the last 30 years: "In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun." And since 2004, when the assault weapons ban expired, seven of these mass killings involved assault weapons.

Studies cited by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, show that more guns lead to more violence:

"We found that across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides."

"After controlling for poverty and urbanization, for every age group, people in states with many guns have elevated rates of homicide, particularly firearm homicide."

"We found that states with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide."

And according to the Brady Center, those who own a gun are 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault.

Nancy Lanza, the mother of the Newtown shooter, and his first victim, is a case in point. "She prepared for the worst," Marsh Lanza said about why her former sister-in-law owned multiple guns. But, as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, "Nancy Lanza's weapons did not prepare her to defend against the worst, they prepared her to be destroyed by the worst -- along with her neighbors and several small children."

And more lives are going to be destroyed as more and more states make owning and carrying a gun easier. Eight states now allow guns in bars. Louisiana allows them in churches. In Missouri it's legal to carry a gun while you're drunk. In Kansas, you can carry your weapon in K-12 schools. And the day before the Newtown shooting, Michigan's legislature passed a law allowing people to bring guns into schools, classes, dorms, and stadiums.

The standard-issue excuse is that there are always going to be crazy people and stricter gun laws won't prevent them from attacking. But stricter laws will prevent those attacks from being so deadly. The same day as the massacre in Newtown, a man attacked a school in China. Twenty-two children were injured, but none were killed -- because the assailant was armed with a knife, not a gun. As James Fallows writes:

That's the difference between a knife and a gun. Guns don't attack children; psychopaths and sadists do. But guns uniquely allow a psychopath to wreak death and devastation on such a large scale so quickly and easily. America is the only country in which this happens again -- and again and again.
And yet, as Nicholas Kristof points out, we regulate all sorts of things that aren't nearly as deadly as guns. "Why can't we regulate guns as seriously as we do cars?" he asks. "The fundamental reason kids are dying in massacres like this one is not that we have lunatics or criminals -- all countries have them -- but that we suffer from a political failure to regulate guns."

This week, millions of Americans will be traveling to see their loved ones for the holidays. But for 30,000 of them, this will be their last holiday season. We know with a Nate-Silver-level of certainty that 30,000 Americans will not ring in 2014 because they'll be victims of gun violence.

Another certainty: that more and more Americans are ready to reject this grisly status quo. Less certain is whether President Obama will lead the way.

All too often on this issue, he has shown a gift for eloquent rhetoric, but no follow-through with specific "meaningful actions." We all know what actions need to be taken -- starting with a ban on the sale of weapons that are only good for mass murder.

The best way to honor the victims of Newtown is to take a clear-eyed look at everything that led to their slaughter. Especially the fatalistic conventional wisdom that says we'll never be able to prevent this from happening again. And again and again and again and...