Since yesterday, I have been trying to make sense out of a senseless tragedy. Despite the fact that I lost innocence long ago, I feel that I'm still desperately clinging to this false hope that all people simply make mistakes and that people aren't intentionally malicious. It's rather silly to hope for something like that so I can justify what happened as just a mistake - perhaps selfish, too - but in a world where heinous acts are committed every day, I feel that it allows me that sense of innocence again, the innocence I haven't had since I was a child. Ignoring the situation in its entirety will not do anyone good. But sometimes it's rather nice to pretend that everything's just peachy when things slip and shatter to pieces before you silently bend down and pick each one up, not even sure of what you're doing. You just feel like you had a huge dose of Novacain and when it finally wears off, it just sort of dawns on you, and you can't stop the grief that breaks through the floodgate.
It makes you wonder why God hasn't finished writing your final chapter yet.
The thing I hate is the fact that I am not surprised. Enraged, yes. Saddened, yes. But not surprised. Nothing surprises me anymore. In some ways, it's actually rather nice; it's better than finding out for the first time that the world goes beyond your nice, neat little cul-de-sac. It's better than finding out that there are
real problems that matter more than the fact that your pink crayon is missing or Mommy won't let you eat another cookie because you've already had six. But I still wish it could surprise me nonetheless.
I sort of took a hiatus on this blog after I realized that no one really reads it. It just didn't feel as important to me after a while, and with the start of school and band competitions, I decided to just stop blogging altogether. After all, who would want to read the rants of a Republican teen, meaningless (
The Care and Well-Being of Christi) or not (
Abortion)? But after what happened, I decided that posting something like this on Facebook (as I was going to do) probably wasn't the best idea. I will, however, post a link to this on there once I'm finished writing this. Then I will wait patiently for someone to come and scream at me about how stupid I am or how I belong in the kitchen or something.
The last two posts I wrote were also about guns; the last one being about the massacre in Aurora and the one prior to that being about gun control. I'm probably wasting my time writing yet another post on this. So I'll try not to make it too long. I'd just like to bring a point up.
A friend, Stacy, said that banning guns would be like putting a Band-Aid on a gaping, gushing wound. Trying to ban them wouldn't fix the problem; instead, it'd make us feel better, like when a kid scrapes his knee while learning how to ride a bike for the first time and his mom kisses it. The kiss didn't completely heal the cut. All it did was make the boy feel better. Similarly, banning guns will do nothing but make us feel good, like we did society a favor and we can just leave the issue alone. When we talk about banning guns, we fail to think of the consequences. We don't think of how a father can no longer protect his wife and children when someone breaks into his house with a 9mm. We don't think of how people use other things to kill, such as knives and baseball bats. We don't think of how firearms will still continue to be distributed illegally to criminals so that, like the defenseless father, will have the advantage. We don't think of the people who use guns simply for recreation. And we definitely don't think of the people like
this woman who managed to defend herself with her gun.
If you're one of the people who doesn't like reading and skimmed through this whole thing, I'll be nice and summarize it for you: gun control doesn't work. Period.
