Is this really what we’ve come to?

Having kids really changes your life.  Beyond the obvious, you are now responsible for another person, with all that entails.  It’s been a joy for me so far, but there are times when being a parent forces you to confront things that all too often get ignored in the hustle and bustle of daily life, especially in politics.  This morning, the gun control debate hit me at home in a way I wasn’t expecting.

My two-year old is a big Star Wars fan.  His Dad is a big Star Wars fan, so this came as no surprise.  He’s too young for the films, so he’s not seen them yet, but he knows the characters. He’s got a Darth Vader t-shirt and one with Stormtroopers on it.  He’s got Star Wars A-B-C and 1-2-3- books, Yoda underwear, and we even built our own lightsabers together down at Disney.  He’s seen me play Star Wars: The Old Republic, an online game, and he’s seen a few episodes of the Clone Wars on Disney on the weekends.

This morning, he was playing with his blocks and put three of them together.  He started making “pew pew” noises and holding them like a blaster, even going so far as to say “watch out dadda! Bad guys behind you! I’ll get them!” and making his noises.  It was cute.

Then he said he wanted to take the blocks to school (what we call daycare) with him.

Not so cute anymore.

I looked at my wife, and she looked at me, and we found a car for him to take to school instead.  We didn’t even have to speak, both of us thought the exact same thing at the same time:  if a kid can get suspended for biting a pop tart into a gun at school, and a six-year-old can get suspended for pointing his finger and saying “pow,” what would happen to our toddler if he went to school with some blocks and started saying “pew pew” at the other kids?  The rack?

When I was a kid, any chance twig or lego set was easily turned into an imaginary gun.  My mom sewed an “army suit” for me out of some old camouflage hunting gear of my uncle’s when I was five or six and my brother and I would run around with toy guns in the yard playing “war.”  We had every squirt gun you could find, many of which were pretty convincing replicas of M-16s and MAC-10s.  Nobody thought it was odd, and no one ever called the police on my brother and I when we were in the front yard reenacting the Normandy landings.  A kid doing similar things nowadays would likely end up in counseling, and his parents in hot water.

Is this what we’ve come to in America today?  Are we so afraid of the next mass shooting, the next terrorist attack, or the next big whatever that we’ve become so hypersensitive?  The answer is yes, unfortunately.  Any look at the news proves it.  Despite the many layers of law we’ve grafted on to the second amendment to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill, there appears to be no end in sight.

Yesterday, the President demanded Congress act on gun control legislation on the 100th day since the Newtown tragedy.  We’ve seen constant attacks on gun rights from the left, with New York tightening up its already tough laws, and constant proposals from across the country to take similar actions.  As often happens after horrific tragedies, the immediate knee-jerk reaction to over-regulate everything has taken firm hold in many cities across the country, even if Washington seems to have remained relatively immune.

But that’s politics.  I’m talking about real life.  And in the real world, parents are honestly worried about letting their toddlers take a couple of blocks to school.  I’ve brought this up to a couple of friends who are also parents, and not a single person has said my wife or I was crazy for being concerned about this.  All of them said they’d have done the same thing.  “Better safe than sorry,” my wife’s sister said.

This is the new normal in America.  Sometimes I think we, as a nation, have gone slightly insane.  A national tragedy like Columbine or Newtown doesn’t bring us together anymore, it just adds gasoline to the political bonfires. Angry voices yelling at one another don’t stop and listen, they just yell louder.  Instead of working together to find a solution to gun violence, we’re suspending kids from school because of gun shaped pop-tarts (which are only dangerous if you eat them) and pointed fingers.

I wrote after Newtown that it was time for us to get serious about gun violence and mass killings.  Unfortunately, my call to action was ignored.  We haven’t gotten serious about it.  We’re still talking about closing the gun show loophole (which had nothing to do with Newtown), increasing penalties on certain crimes (which are already crimes) and assault weapons and high capacity magazine bans (which do nothing about the millions of those guns and magazines already in existence, and which didn’t work the last time we tried them).  There’s been no fresh thinking, no new approaches – just louder voices yelling for the failed policies of the past.  And all the while, parents are worried about their kids getting locked up or taken away if they so much as mention the word “gun” in an authority figures’ presence.

Our kids aren’t criminals.  Most parents aren’t, either.  What happened in Newtown was a tragedy and an aberration, but it does demand that we start thinking outside of the box when it comes to tackling gun violence.  Curbing the rights of law abiding citizens and making people afraid isn’t going to stop the next Newtown.  Loudly yelling for things that don’t work won’t either.  It’s time for some new thinking on this issue.  As I said in December, I am confident we can fix these things, but not if we keep thinking in the same tired, old way we have thought about these issues.

And that new thinking needs to start at home, where most new thinking begins.

I wish I had the answers, but I don’t.  All I can tell you is that I’m saddened that my son isn’t going to get to have the same kind of childhood I enjoyed, and that the things that I loved growing up aren’t going to be available to him because a crazy criminal took them away from all of us.  I hope that we can find a way to address these issues – heck, just to talk about them – without screaming at each other.   That’s probably naive, I suppose, but I still believe in America and our ability to solve any problem if we truly choose to do so.

Maybe someday, hopefully soon, blocks can go back to just being blocks.