KINSELLA: If Sandy Hook massacre failed to change U.S. attitude on guns, nothing will

Warren Kinsella - Saturday, June 11,2022
Toronto Sun

Dear America:

For starters, let me say this: I love Americans, and I love America.

Mostly. Sometimes.

There’s lots to love. Your people are open and gregarious and irrepressible. Your country is bountiful and diverse and full of promise.

And some of us Canadians become Americans, or have family and friends in your country. Personally, I lived there, in Dallas, Texas. Can still recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Can still remember my family’s Dallas phone number (FL1-6325). In no small measure, we are part of you, and you us.

For us Canadians, in the big drafty room above yours, we are immensely grateful that you shield us from the despots and monsters found in other places, with increasing regularity these days. You protect us. We know that.

But when it comes to protecting yourselves? You’re not so good at that.

And I don’t just mean the insurrection provoked by Donald Trump, now being documented at the House of Representatives’ House Select Committee investigation of the violent Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Or the cleavage in your politics, wherein Left and Right are orbiting ever-further apart. Or your class wars, which are happening all the time, about everything.

Because we Canadians, if we are being honest with ourselves — and we often are not — have had violent attacks on our places of governance, too. We had one in 2014, when a madman killed Corporal Nathan Cirillo, and stormed Parliament, and shot the place up. And we have a cleavage in our politics, too — with a Liberal Prime Minister who has crafted a crypto-socialist Axis of Weasels deal on one side and, on the other side, a Conservative Party in a headlong rush to the outer reaches of the fringe Right, where conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers and Pierre Poilievre congregate.

And class wars? We have those too. We fight about stupid, inconsequential stuff, too, and we miss out on the big picture. Guilty.

But in one thing, America, you have us beat. In one thing, you are the undisputed world champions. And that thing, of course, is ritual suicide by firearm. In that category, you are Number One — with a bullet, you might say.

Reciting the grim statistics to you is a waste of time. It hasn’t stopped or even slowed down your descent into the slaughterhouse. Appealing to your better nature hasn’t worked, either: forests have been felled in the United States, to print up well-meaning and heart-rending pleas for sanity.

And you keep doing what you do. Which is kill each other.

Ask Jesse Lewis.

Jesse Lewis had wanted to be in the army. He was tough, but with a gentle side. Whenever he could, he favoured ripped jeans and a T-shirt — nothing fancy. He was raised on a farm, after all, with horses, dogs, and chickens. He was brave, too.

When the shooting started, on Dec. 14, 2012, Jesse Lewis saw the killer pause to reload. He yelled at those around him — nine of them — to “run.” They did.

The killer saw, reloaded, and shot Jesse Lewis in the head, killing him.

Jesse Lewis’ name should be familiar to you — because Jesse Lewis was just six years old. He was a student at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut. On the day Jesse was murdered, 19 other first-graders were slaughtered. Six women, too.

Here’s the thing, America: you cannot claim to be the leader of the free world – you cannot claim to be “the land of the free, and the home of the brave” – when something like the Sandy Hook massacre happens, and you do precisely nothing about it. You can’t.

The rest of us mostly admire you and like you. We do. But if you didn’t change after Sandy Hook?

If you didn’t change after that — you never, ever will.

Yours sincerely,

Etc.