A clearer picture is beginning to emerge of the shooter arrested after three people were gunned down in a five-hour siege at a family planning clinic in Colorado Springs last Friday. The dead include a police officer who was responding to the incident when 57-year-old loner Robert Lewis Dear began shooting.
Whatever Dear’s motive or choice of target at the clinic that performs abortions, the simple fact remains that he had access to a high-powered military grade weapon — as is his Constitutional right to bear arms. And once more, that simple, ugly and misunderstood right means that there are more families mourning the loss of their loved ones. What would the Founding Fathers of the US have written then if they could foresee the madness, mayhem and misfortune that guns have wrought on American society?
Even the US President Barack Obama, who has made too many statements of condemnation and the need for meaningful gun control in his seven years in the White House, expressed frustration on Saturday: “If we truly care about this... then we have to do something about the easy accessibility of weapons of war on our streets to people who have no business wielding them. Enough is enough.”
No. It wasn’t enough for the innocent children of Sandy Hook Elementary School, nor for those killed watching a Batman movie, not those at Virginia Tech. If the US public truly had enough, such guns would have been banned decades ago.
