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The president was right to declare the nation’s flags be flown at half-mast last week. We are indeed in a state of mourning and distress.
We’ve lost our moral prudence and reason when it comes to gun violence. With the public assassination of one of the nation’s most ardent gun supporters, we’ve once again demonstrated how profoundly we’ve lost our way from what our founders envisioned.
With what I see as the NRA’s misguided revision of the 2nd Amendment, we’ve normalized 48,000 deaths in the U.S. every year to gun violence — at a staggering cost to taxpayers of $550 billion a year. And now, we’ve even normalized gun violence as the leading cause of death to our children.
It is appropriate to mourn the public execution of a man expressing his right of free speech, no matter how hateful, and the viral distribution of the video. He was murdered by a man with a gun who decided apparently that he had the right of a god to take another’s life, because he didn’t like what the victim said.
Yes, this is a tragic state of affairs, one that would shock our founders, the writers of the Constitution. Indeed, it is certainly a time for self-reflection and mourning for the values we’ve lost and the gun violence we accept, “so we can have the Second Amendment protect our other God-given rights.”
Steve Kelley
Kennebunk
