Right to bear arms bearing sour fruit

The constitutional right of Americans to bear arms is increasingly beginning to bear sour fruit. Last December 14, a 20-year-old teacher’s son opened fire inside a Connecticut elementary school, killing 27 people, including 20 children, his mother, and his own self.

President Obama was driven to tears as he expressed outrage over the senseless attack and ordered flags flown at half staff. But it will take more than tears to wipe away one of the most tenacious blemishes to tarnish America and its way of life — unmitigated senseless killings.

While America is no stranger to challenges and crises, whether domestically or overseas, the increasing regularity with which it has had to deal with the senselessness indicates there is something terrible and wrong that is silently gnawing away at its collective soul.

At the University of Texas in August 1966, a former marine sharpshooter murdered his wife and mother then killed 14 people and injured close to three dozen others before getting killed by police.

In July 1976, at the California State University, a library custodian armed with a rifle he bought at a convenience store started firing away inside the library where he worked, killing seven of them. He is still alive today after a successful defense of insanity.

At a Stockton, California elementary school in January 1989, a man armed with an assault semi-automatic rifle killed five school children and injured dozens of others before turning the gun on himself.

In Columbine, Colorado in April 1999, two friends armed themselves with automatic weapons and murdered 12 students and a teacher as well as injured 24 of their schoolmates before killing themselves at the scene.

In April 2007, at Virginia Tech, a disturbed English student embarked on what was to become one of the deadliest shooting rampages in America and eventually killed 33 people before turning his gun on himself.

There are a lot more mass shootings similar to and happening in between those mentioned above, but the cited examples were chosen randomly to represent particular decades going back to the Sixties.

While shootings such as these are not confined to America, it is in that country where they happen with alarming regularity, and there are those who now say gun control laws should be effected and the Constitution amended to repeal the Second Amendment (right to bear arms).

But I do not thing the right to bear arms is the sole culprit in making America vulnerable from within. I am increasingly being convinced that American democracy allows too much freedom to Americans for their own good.

For instance, right from childhood parents already impress on their children that they are free to do whatever they want: Be your own person! Go your own way! It’s none of anybody’s business what you do with your own life!

To a certain extent, this might sound very attractive, especially when one is young and is just starting to savor personal independence. But there is no absolute freedom to do anything as anyone pleases. It is not true that one’s business is nobody’s business.

Maybe, if you live in a cave with only the bats, snakes and scorpions as company, then you may do what the hell pleases you. But if you are part of a larger community whose own idea of rights are bound to intersect with yours, you better be careful in your actions.

In other words, America needs to discipline itself in order to be responsible, otherwise there will be no end to seeing some self-righteous American, believing that the world owes him an audience, do whatever he wants to do, whatever that means, no matter the consequences.