Sandy Hook

For a while, I've wanted to pubilsh some thoughts about the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. This has not been an easy article for me to write, as even a cursory consideration of the subject matter and a check of the calendar would indicate. Plus, I fully recognize that there isn't much new that can be added to the already-extensive discussion of the tragedy itself at this point. Even the minority, secular, rational perspective has been well-covered throughout the punditsphere.

So, with that having been said, I don't want to write directly about the incident. Obviously, it's a horrible, unthinkable thing - we all know that, and I certainly don't need to tell you that. "The Sandy Hook shootings were bad" by Andy Francis is not a worthwhile endeavor. What intrigues me now, and I think deserves some commentary, is the reaction of various individuals and factions to the shooting. So, with some time between us and the killings, I'd like to address what I view as some of the more prominent, irresponsible reactions to the shooting and why I think they make it difficult for use as a society to move forward.


The NRA was conspicuously silent for a week afterwards, and not surpringly so - the nature of the tragedy obviously made them and their cause look very bad, and it seemed a prudent move to lay low for a bit. The flipside of that cautious approach is that their quietness fueled speculation and criticism of the group, something that Wayne LaPierre's paranoid, rambling press conference did nothing to dissuade. Armed guards in schools? Blaming video games? Really? The tone and content of LaPierre's defiant missive really weren't fundamentally different from his earlier press conference in The Onion, published several months prior to Sandy Hook, where LaPierre sets 1 000 at the number of dead kids it would take for the NRA to reconsider their position. Satire works best when it hits this close to the mark. Cleveland comedian Mike Polk summed it up best in a tweet, "In summation, we accept no culpability, we blame everything but guns, we've learned nothing, congressmen, your checks are in the mail."

Also, for the record, I don't care what the technical differences are between various magazines and clips, and what the dictionary definition of "assault rifle" is. This is all utterly irrelevant. I refuse to get caught up in the mechanical details of various tools designed for efficiently killing humans, and pointing out to me specs, definitions, firing rates, etc. adds absolutely nothing to any discussion. If you have ideas that will keep deadly weapons away from lunatic killers, I'm interested, otherwise, keep your enthusiastic flair for specs to yourself.

I don't want to step too deep into the gun argument, because I don't like being compared to Hitler and Mao (yes, Joseph Farah, I saw your batshit-insane comments), but the hard-line tactics employed by the pro-gun side before and after this, and their refusal to take any sort of a balanced view, should be troubling to gun owners and non-owners alike. There must be some solutions that can preserve gun owners' rights without turning schools into war zones, and any productive solution is very likely to include restricting access to the most prolifically deadly of these deadly weapons.


Obviously some politicians waded into the post-Sandy Hook debate, especially the firearms part of it, with the usual nonsense that follows an event like this. I say: blah. It's not even worth responding to the Ann Coulters and Louie Gohmerts of the world at this point. To my mind, one of the other dumbest approaches came from those public figures demanding that Democrats, liberals, and progressives, not "politicize the tragedy." Four quick rejoinders to these ridiculous calls:

1) Do you not realize that by making such a demand that you are yourself politicizing the tragedy? It's all very irony-y.

2) Who are you to tell your political opponents what they can or cannot discuss in the political realm? Seems a tad presumptious.

3) Why would this incident, of all things, be an exempted, off-limits topic for politics? The safety of citizens seems like a reasonable thing to include in politics, no? "Homeland Security" is apparently a fine thing to discuss in political life, even though more Americans died in Sandy Hook than in the entire past decade of terrorism on our shores.

4) Are you aware of how transparent the fact is that you're only making such a demand because the politics are unfavorable to you? I seriously doubt those making these demands would exercise the restraint they counsel, were the political winds of such an incident at their back.


But let's get to the real meat, the battle for "hearts and minds" that I think is preventing people from really addressing a situation like Sandy Hook as seriously and honestly as they should be. In the same way that the modern NRA is going to be the modern NRA, so are religious (and religiously-inclined) leaders going to be religious leaders, consistently offering the most useless drivel in an attempt to "explain" why the events of this awful day even took place.

My first approach was to respond to various aspects of this article from nbcnews.com, where the author reports on a range of theological viewpoints on the utterly idiotic and nonsensical question of "where was god?" during the shootings (spoiler!: nowhere, as always). You won't be surprised to learn that they neglected to check in with anyone from the reality-based community, but such is life in the world's most religious developed nation.

Anyway, I found that even after a few edits, my responses to the insanity permeating the entire peace were too harsh even for this free-flowing forum - and that's even without legendary, world-class douchebag Bryan Fischer making an appearance. Honestly, what am I supposed to say when James Dobson "blames two issues in particular: abortion and gay marriage" and Joseph Farah "wrote that the U.S. should expect 'more Sandy Hooks, not fewer,' because of America's 'secularism' and restrictions on guns? It's not even possible to be civil in the face of such disgusting idiocy, and my unsuccessful attempts to whittle my initial firey reaction to it delayed this piece for quite some time. But while I'm on the topic, fuck both of those guys.

I do want to comment on the harm done by the typical religious responses to the tragedy form both ends of the political world, and the comments of both Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama offer reasonable starting points. Huckabee first:

"We've systematically removed God from our schools...Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage? ... God wasn't armed. He didn't go to the school. But God will be there in the form of a lot of people with hugs and therapy and a whole lot of ways in which he will be involved in the aftermath."

A general question to begin with: why do we keep asking these people these things? Why give them a microphone? They consistently offer the most delusional, crazed responses, and never shed any light or thought on the situation. "God will be there with hugs and therapy" is apparently legitimate political commentary these days.

Huckabee, in particular, has really stepped up his douchebag game since his failed presidential bid in 2008, and these remarks epitomize his evolution perfectly. (Ha! See what I did there? Because he doesn't understand evolution.) There are so many things wrong with these remarks I almost don't know where to start, but I think I'll open with:

- Shut. Up. Even if Huckabee were right (he's not), even if this had anything to do with our schools following the Constitutional mandate not to endorse religious superstitition (it doesn't), the lack of sensitivity is startling. The parents don't want to hear this. No one wants to hear this. We're dealing with a grieving community and a shocked nation, and here comes this self-important windbag barreling in with his nonsense. Just shut up for once?

- God doesn't exist. Always worth making that counterargument, lest it be overlooked.

- The God of the Christian bible is a full-on cosmic psychopath. Read the Old Testament and see if any other conclusion can be drawn. It's not clear to me why having that petty, bloodthirsty tyrant around would have helped matters as well.

- "God wasn't armed?" I'm always amazed by the mental gynmastics religious commentators have to do to rationalize events like this within the context of their omnipotent deity. If your god exists, and he allowed this, then he is a horrible, horrible entity, undeserving of your groveling worship.

- The facts of school shootings lie in direct contradiction to this consistent religious right trope, where commentators like this moron make a dubious logical leap and insist that removing their god from public schools somehow brings about His divine vengeance.

But consider: among developed nations, America is by far the most religious, and also the place where by far the highest frequency of mass shootings like this are taking place. Our peer nations have drastically fewer guns than us and way, way, way less of the christian god in their school and they have far fewer attacks like this. But hey, never let the facts get in the way of a terrible, insane story.


President Obama's celebrated remarks at the prayer vigil held after the shooting were less overtly poisonous than the nonsense being hurled by Huckabee and company, but by the same token was almost as disappointing for those like me who prefer to live in the real world. Commenting on a tragedy that had absolutely nothing to do with the christian bible, Obama mentioned god six times, referenced Jesus twice, and tossed two bible passages in there. Are you a pastor or a President?

Most troubling was the line from the speech, "God has called them [the victims] home." This is disturbing, and I think also reflective of why we as a nation, as a community, don't properly confront tragedies like this.

And here we are to my main concern...religious people don't confront tragedy, and a nation as religion-soaked as ours is never going to take a clear-eyed view of such a horrible event if we keep placating ourselves with lies. This line of wishful thinking, extremely common among Obama's constituents (including, most strongly and ironically, those who oppose him fiercely), simply pretends like the shootings didn't happen, that the kids are up in heaven, and that we'll all join them with angel wings in heaven some day if we observe some arbitrary Stone Age rules and regulations. It's this sort of desperate wish-thinking that prevents us from analyzing situations rationally, from being really impacted by death, from taking shit like this seriously. As a society, we will NEVER make any progress into truly safeguarding ourselves against violence and death, embracing "the better angels of our nature," until we stop this juvenile, delusional coddling of our minds against the harsh reality of the world.

Unfortunately, it's that false security that I think accounts for the persistent popularity of faith in America, in direct opposition to every piece of evidence that exists around us. A lot of believers are simply afraid to face death and the real world - it's much easier to imagine our deceased loved ones (and our ultimate fate) as culminating a happy afterlife in heaven, even though, as Jules Winnfield reminds us, "that shit ain't the truth." Look, we're all going to die. And once we die, that's it. There is no afterlife, there's no Jesus in Heaven plotting his re-takeover of America. That's it. One life. Nothing more. I know, it's tough. Everything we do on Earth should be around making those lives as meaningful as possible, but I worry that it will never truly be that way, because 85% of us believe that this childish make-believe paradise awaits us afterwards, so even when 26 people are gunned down ruthlessly, we don't really have to deal with it.

I say: deal with it. Those kids are dead, and that sucks. They don't go to heaven because there's no such thing. They're done. Forever. It's harsh and unpleasant, but true. I know I admonished Huckabee earlier for offering comments that grieving individuals don't want to hear, but 1) I'm not a public figure, 2) I'm right, and 3) I waited a while.

Until we start thinking about people losing their lives in these stark terms - in real terms - we will never take death seriously and make good decisions about our health and safety. There are many reasons why I feel the need to oppose publicly religious belief; none is more serious than the deleterious effects it has on our public discourse and consequent behavior.