The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting took the lives of 27 people, including 20 elementary school children. There’s no way I could begin to imagine the pain the parents of those children felt; heartbreaking doesn’t even skim the surface.
It’s impossible not to feel a gut reaction when you hear of something like this. I want revenge for those children, but the coward responsible took his own life before that could happen. However, it seems those in higher offices have found other ways for us to channel our anger.
On Dec. 17, just three days after the shooting, a press release was posted on Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) website announcing her intent to submit an updated version of the Assault Weapons Ban she passed in 1994, which expired in 2004. This bill would ban the sale of “more than 100 specifically-named firearms” and would stop the sale of high-capacity magazines.
“I have been working with my staff for over a year on this legislation,” Feinstein added. “It will be carefully focused on the most dangerous guns that have killed so many people over the years while protecting the rights of gun owners by exempting hundreds of weapons that fall outside the bill’s scope. We must take these dangerous weapons of war off our streets.”
I’m not here to take sides on gun control; what irks me is that Feinstein was directly quoted in the article saying she and her staff have been working on this particular piece of legislation for more than a year.
To me, this says that this bill has been, for whatever reason, sitting on her desk, and here comes the opportune time for it to be publicized: a tragic, mass murder at an elementary school. It seems she was just biding her time.
I’m not harping on Feinstein for politicizing a tragedy. I’m upset she so blatantly pounced on an opportunity to capitalize on it.
Think back to the months following 9/11—another monumental tragedy, which took the lives of thousands, was also used to push a political agenda. The USA Patriot Act was passed a mere 45 days after Sept. 11, 2001 (Fun fact: Feinstein was the Act’s democratic coauthor).
The effects on our lives today from this decision, which took all of 45 days to decide, are more than just ripples. In fact, President Barack Obama signed a four-year extension on three key provisions of the Patriot Act in 2011.
If the Patriot Act had never existed, do you think a bill proposing the three provisions renewed by Obama in 2011 would have a chance of passing in today’s legislature? Would this bill have a chance of becoming a law at any other time other than in the months following 9/11? No way, we would have dismissed the Patriot Act as something straight out of “1984”—a clear violation of our privacy.
We need to stop letting these horrific tragedies control the way our politicians influence policy so dramatically. We can’t afford to keep making reactionary decisions. People aren’t going out on a daily basis and shooting up elementary schools. Gun control isn’t something that requires rushed legislation. So why treat it that way? If anything, it requires a calm, pragmatic debate.
Regardless of the debate’s outcome, it is a grave mistake to so quickly make sweeping policy decisions, such as the ones Obama suggested last week when he proposed what was possibly the most fervent gun control legislation in decades. Just as his predecessor, President George W. Bush, did in his first term, Obama and Feinstein are capitalizing on tragic events to push legislation that would otherwise be dismissed as too extreme.
