As I watch two U.S. Senators from different parties stand together to announce their plan to enhance firearm background checks, I fear that one will suddenly lean over and lick the ear of the other. That's what our skinny cat Cracker does to the much heavier Slim Jim right before they break into a brawl.
Get these two felines close enough for a tongue swipe,and an ear-lick fueled fight follows.
While the two first-term senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Pat Toomey (R-PA) strive to keep their tongues and ears to themselves, I worry that their example won't hold long enough for the Congress and the Administration to follow suit and work together to pass legislation to make it more difficult for dangerous, mentally ill people to obtain guns.
We can't prevent every tragedy. Naysayers point out that better background checks wouldn't have stopped the delusional young man who killed first-graders at Sandy Hook Elementary School in New Town, Conn. And I believe that holds also for the angry, self-entitled man who murdered my sister-in-law at St. Peters Episcopal Church in Ellicott City, Md. But that's not the point.
Our mission as a thinking people is to do what we can--even if it means starting with a bandage to patch a massive hole in gun misuse. We can do better with background checks. It is not about saving our loved ones, who are lost; it is about saving our loved ones who are still here.
If politicians can behave better than cats poised to brawl, now's the time to prove it. Don't waste the lives we have lost on an ear-lick and a partisan fight.
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