Posted 8:31 pm Friday, December 28, 2012
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A Real Killer, December 28
The tragedy of the Sandy Hook School shootings will linger in our hearts for a very long time. As a retired school teacher and the great grandparent of two elementary students and one toddler, I feel a very deep sense of empathy with the students, teachers, administrators, and families touched by this senseless act of violence.
However, I place a great deal of blame for this tragedy on our society as a whole. Millions of lines of news print and thousands of hours of live media have analyzed, reanalyzed, and re-reanalyzed this event and its perpetrator from every imaginable angle. However, I have not seen one line or one minute devoted to a greater American tragedy which reoccurs daily, every year of our lives.
We lose more lives in this country every day due to alcoholic beverages than were killed at Sandy Hook. But not one voice is ever raised in the Congress or the media to ban alcohol. Had the shooter been drunk instead and rammed a school bus and killed that number of children, not one word would have been raised to “ban alcohol”. And yet the alcohol would have been as much a culprit as were the guns which were actually used. In fact, in our infinite lack of wisdom, the citizens of Tyler and Smith County recently elevated this killer to a higher status.
Has sanity left the county?
Charlie W. Rice
Tyler
However, I place a great deal of blame for this tragedy on our society as a whole. Millions of lines of news print and thousands of hours of live media have analyzed, reanalyzed, and re-reanalyzed this event and its perpetrator from every imaginable angle. However, I have not seen one line or one minute devoted to a greater American tragedy which reoccurs daily, every year of our lives.
We lose more lives in this country every day due to alcoholic beverages than were killed at Sandy Hook. But not one voice is ever raised in the Congress or the media to ban alcohol. Had the shooter been drunk instead and rammed a school bus and killed that number of children, not one word would have been raised to “ban alcohol”. And yet the alcohol would have been as much a culprit as were the guns which were actually used. In fact, in our infinite lack of wisdom, the citizens of Tyler and Smith County recently elevated this killer to a higher status.
Has sanity left the county?
Charlie W. Rice
Tyler
