At these formal Cambridge events we re always asked to wear our gowns, heavy black polyester drapery

It doesn t matter what the publication is: one of those narrow-focused but heavily impactful fox car rental coupons New Yorker essays, the entire wikipedia entry, some profile of a murdered child s family asking where are they now?  You can read it a hundred times, top to bottom, from the description of the event to the investigation to the meandering account of the political responses, and it still feels as though there s something that must ve been left out, something greater to be learned.
fox car rental coupons More of them will begin to appear now that the one-year anniversary fox car rental coupons of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting approaches. I will see the headlines at grocery store newsstands when I am back in the United States for the holidays, nestled among the red and green aluminum flash of Christmas candy wrappers that persistently remind me how one year ago, families in Connecticut turned gifts over in their hands and wondered what to do with them now that their children had been murdered.
At these formal Cambridge events we re always asked to wear our gowns, heavy black polyester drapery that must be carefully managed. I lean back as a waiter serves my dinner, gathering fox car rental coupons the sleeves of my gown into my hands. When I straighten again, my supervisor says:
It isn t really a laughing matter, and of course, there is gun crime in the United Kingdom. (A friend of mine tells me one afternoon over tea and cakes that Nottingham is colloquially known as Shottingham for that very reason.)
fox car rental coupons There were 146 gun deaths in the United Kingdom in 2011, and none of them took place Nottingham. Nonetheless, with gun crime as rare as it is in the U.K., it doesn t take much more than one or two well publicized cases to make a reputation stick.
In 1996, the United Kingdom had its own Sandy Hook. An unemployed, middle-aged man named Thomas Hamilton entered a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland, and murdered sixteen children aged between five and six years old as well as their teacher. Then he killed himself.
All of Hamilton s guns, two pistols and two revolvers, were legally owned. The rest of the story is now familiar to Americans: white male, shiftless, shady, accused of this or that but never convicted, withdrawn, down and out. Not the sort of person one would immediately pick out as exceedingly dangerous, but lethal nonetheless. For a while in the early 2000s, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the famed Columbine shooters, occupied suburban American nightmares almost exclusively; now, there s a slurring lineup of boys-du-jour so constantly updated with mugshots and body counts that it scarcely seems worthwhile to remember them all.
But the United Kingdom took note of Thomas Hamilton. Petitions began immediately after the Dunblane Massacre, fox car rental coupons and by 1997, Parliament passed the Firearms fox car rental coupons Amendment No. 2 Act , tightening the legality of handgun ownership down to antiques, two-shot capacity fox car rental coupons weapons, and those needed by at-risk individuals, mostly in Northern Ireland, where unrest still roiled.
The act passed in 1997 compounded and in many ways completed a project of longterm gun control that had begun in the United Kingdom in the early twentieth century. And though there have been other shootings since the Dunblane Massacre notably the Cumbria shootings fox car rental coupons of 2010, which left 12 dead the United Kingdom still has one of the lowest rates of firearm homicide in the world. Though subject to the peaks and valleys of any behavioral data, the United Kingdom maintains its impressively low firearm homicide rate despite factors normally thought of as aggravators of violence, such as rather troubling income inequality .
It is of course impossible to compare one nation at a particular stage of its political development directly to another. But this can be said: after Columbine, despite the terror and grief shared by the nation, the United States has still endured a slew of pursuant gun murders in schools , some of them listing body counts in the double digits: fox car rental coupons here Virginia Tech and the Amish School Shooting of 2006 should come to mind. And then there is Sandy Hook.
Perhaps as little can be said about Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook shooting, as can be said of Thomas Hamilton: white male, nondescript, someone everyone had always worried a little about, but mainly in passing.
fox car rental coupons Thus why a bill guaranteeing background checks for gun buyers became the central legislative focus following Sandy Hook is unclear. As the opponents of the bill claimed, it wouldn t have stopped anything. True; but why the weakness of a bill ever means we should do less rather fox car rental coupons than more is truly an American mystery.
Nonetheless, the misinformation campaign kicked up to obscure the moment of potential for gun reform following Sandy Hook was powerful enough to waste all opportunities for progress. The short story is that nothing changed after Sandy Hook. The long story is that things got worse.
Though the state of Connecticut succeeded in restricting the sale of some forms of ammunition and rifles, the national gun debate thickened and then dwindled piteously. Part of it was due to poor PR on the part of those in favor of gun control, but then again, they were severely outgunned: the NRA and the other constituents of the gun lobby campaigned vociferously against all proposals to restrict firearm sale, purchase, or ownership following Sandy Hook.
Among the rumors spread about gun reform proposals was that the government intended to create a national gun registry, which rankled off-the-grid survivalist types determined to take down the federal government with their shotties and reserves of gold coins ostensibly purchased from rightwing radio station scam services. Then there was the endless invocation of uselessness: gun crime, we were told, would never stop , and to reduce it would only be to render the good defenseless. And last there was the bickering over facts: fox car rental coupons each time a politician tried to invoke Sandy Hook to justify a proposal, the gun lobby returned that this or that proposal wouldn t have stopped anything, that no assault rifles were used and thus a ban on them would be futile, or that no registry would ve caught Lanza anyhow.
"If this Congress refuses to listen to the American people and pass common-sense gun legislation, then the real impact is going to have to come from the voters To all the people who supported this legislation you need to let your representatives in Congress know that you are disappointed, and that if they don t act this time, you will remember come election time."
In the United Kingdom, when you re advised that a place is dangerous, the sputtering crossfire of gang warfare or the potential of a random outburst of untargeted violence is not what s on the table. Instead, fox car rental coupons crimes any metropolitan is vigilant about in any case: mugging, pickpocketing, fox car rental coupons aggressive panhandling, theft of bags on the trains. For ladies, the same safety rules as always apply: walk in well-lit areas at night, let someone know where you are if you re heading out late, and bring a friend if you re going someplace unfamiliar after dark.
It isn t there, I imagine, in part because when horrors like the Dunblane Massacre happen in the United Kingdom, there is a response. There is a message fox car rental coupons other than: this is your lot, dwell in futility. There s some recommendation, a national solidarity, a set of suggestions for security that amount to more than get yourself a gun and save your own skin. In other words, there is resolution.
In the United States there is no resolution, and each strategy to prevent gun violence without doing anything about the proliferation fox car rental coupons of guns only emphasizes the empty hopelessness of the situation. Answers like this are proposed:
If more gun laws are not the solution, then what is? Many, including Mark Mattias call for a real look at mental health care. While this has been mentioned in the wider post-Newtown debate, the focus seems to be instead on scary looking weapons. fox car rental coupons Many also call for better enforcement of our gun laws, stronger prosecution of straw man gun purchasers and those who falsify background check information, and fully funding NICS (the background check system), and ensuring all states provide comprehensive felon and mentally ill data to the system. Some argue we could protect our schools with armed security and many schools are doing just that, including Newtown.
Why focus on mental health? People with mental health problems are more likely to be the victims of crime than the perpetrators of it. And what would focusing on mental health mean, anyhow? We have no national fox car rental coupons healthcare system, so what would the instrument of that focus be, exactly? A national fox car rental coupons registry of people with, say, depression? Armed police officers stalking the halls of kindergartens hardly seems like a solution to the anxiety shootings provoke; in fact, it seems to underscore it, to communicate to even our tiniest citizens that you are not safe.