OPINION:
The school shooting in Florida that resulted in the killing of 17 students and staffers was a grievous and tragic act of evil.
But it wasn’t Sen. Marco Rubio’s fault. Neither was it the Second Amendment’s fault.
Yet Fred Guttenberg. the father of one of the students shot and killed, vilified the Florida senator at a recent town hall meeting in Florida for rejecting, in the days since Marjory Stoneman Douglas, deep curbs on gun rights and gun ownership.
Guttenberg’s grieving, seeking to make sense of the nonsensical and searching for answers that won’t come in this lifetime. But this was an unfair attack, all the same.
And it just underscores how hot emotions can lead to illogical conclusions — which in turn can platform to dangerous legislative acts, ones that cut into God-given and constitutionally protected rights of the individual.
Among? The right to bear arms.
“Your comments this week and those of our president have been pathetically weak,” Guttenberg said to Rubio, in front of a town hall crowd of about 7,000, the Huffington Post reported. “You and I are now eye to eye. Because I want to like you, look at me and tell me that guns were the factor in the hunting of our kids in this school this week. And look at me and tell me you accept it and you will work with us to do something about guns.”
He also demanded Rubio specify whether he thought guns were responsible for the death of his daughter and if the senator would return contributions from the National Rifle Association.
And he said: “Senator Rubio, my daughter, running down the hallway at Marjory Douglas, was shot with an assault weapon, the weapon of choice,” Guttenberg said. “It is too easy to get. It is a weapon of war. The fact that you can stand here and can’t say that, I’m sorry.”
Even Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson felt a bit sorry for Rubio, and “tried to throw him a lifeline” and credit the Republican “for showing up,” Politico reported.
But fact is: Watering the Second Amendment to keep the mentally deranged and evil of the world from using guns to murder is irrational.
Guns are not evil. They’re pieces of metal.
Rubio at least had the fortitude to attend the town hall and face this, as described by Politico: “Jeered and booed by the crowd, buffeted by tough questions, Rubio stood alone as the only Republican [among other Democrats] onstage, in purple Florida’s liberal bastion of Broward County.”
So did the NRA and spokeswoman Dana Loesch, who agreed that shooter Nikolas Cruz never should have been able to get a hold of any kind of weapons in the first place.
“This individual was nuts,” she said, Business Insider reported.
And that right there is the heart of the matter: Cruz was a crazed individual. So why would the country’s law abiding cede its Second Amendment rights based on the actions of a crazed individual?
Cooler heads need to prevail.
Seventeen are now dead. And that’s unspeakably and agonizingly sad. But casting out the Constitution is not the solution. Blaming pro-Second Amendment senators is not the solution. Finger-pointing at the president, the NRA, the Republican Party and all those who refuse to ban guns is not the solution. So what is?
First, we have to recognize the problem — the roots of the problem. And that’s not lifeless chunks of metal. That’s the condition of the human heart, and collectively, as a nation, it’s been pretty dark in there in recent times.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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