The Right Day To Talk About Guns

“I don’t think today is that day,” Jay Carney, the White House Press Secretary, said on Friday.
He was responding to a question about gun control and the shooting in an elementary school in Connecticut that reportedly claimed the lives of either twenty-six or twenty-seven people—including eighteen children between the ages of five and ten years old, as well as that of the shooter and, separately, one of the shooter’s parents. Carney’s response was a predictable one. This is the way that we deal with such incidents in the U.S.—we acknowledge them; we are briefly shocked by them; then we term it impolite to discuss their implications, and to argue about them. At some point, we will have to stop putting it off, stop pretending that doing so is the proper, respectful thing. It’s not either. It’s cowardice. It is cowardice, too, the way that Carney and President Obama and their fellow-Democrats talk about gun control, when they finally decide the time is right.

via The New Yorker /more