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Health & Fitness

Time to Say Enough

Time for Americans to do better.

On December 14th, 2012, twenty small children were gunned down in their school.  Only two lived long enough to make it to the hospital, only to die a short time later, as their eighteen other schoolmates did.  And so twenty American children who were dropped off for school yesterday will never return to their families. They will not grow up.

Across the world in China, on the same day, twenty-two small children were brutally attacked and stabbed.  Some are badly hurt, all have had their innocence taken too soon by an act of evil.  Their lives have been permanently altered.  But they are all alive.  And God -willing, they will remain alive, return to their families, and heal enough to go on with their lives.  They will get to grow up.

What a tragic example of the difference between guns and knives.  If you believe that there are no coincidences, Americans have been handed a wake-up call and it couldn’t sound any louder.  An individual driven to commit an act of evil will find a way.  If he can’t arm himself with guns he can wield a large knife. If the school is locked down he can break in.  But the physical damage he can do in the period of time before help arrives is more limited, his victims, perhaps, more likely to survive.  A group of unarmed adults has at least a chance to take him down and disarm him.  In contrast, if he carries an assault weapon, those unarmed adults are little more than sitting ducks, cowering in the corners of our childrens’ classrooms.

We’ve been delivered a choice America.  Wake up and protect your children or go back to sleep   until another mentally unstable individual gets his hands on an assault rifle and murders some more.  Whether or not you believe in the right to bear arms, to protect your home and your property, you have the responsibility as an adult human being, to do your part to ensure that your constitutional right does not allow for a man to unload over a hundred rounds of ammunition on our children, YOUR children.  Do your part to give them a chance to grow up in what we so often refer to as the land of opportunity, where by the way, we have more guns per capita then Yemen, YEMEN.  As parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, responsible adults, we have the obligation to protect our children.  We have promised to keep them safe and we are failing miserably. We all need to stand up and do better.  What in God’s name are we waiting for?

I don’t have the answers, I won’t pretend to.  I am not a lawmaker or a politician.  I am certainly not a Martin Luther King or a Gandhi I am an average American parent, terrified for my child.  All I can do is call on those in a position of power and plead with them to make a change.  And in my average American opinion, so should you.

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