From Parkland to Parkland

Every generation has a date that is engraved in its memory. For my parents it was December 7, 1941. For mine, it was November 22, 1963 and September 11, 2001. For today’s young people it is February 14, 2018-the attack on Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Americans have been faced with a number of shooting attacks in places that should be places of peace and education. Everyone certainly agrees that these mass murders, whether in Colorado, Connecticut, Texas, South Carolina and Florida should never have occurred. Too many people have been killed. The shooters were all young and of questionable mental competence. To these we can add the shooting last year from the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas by an adult. No motive has as yet been determined. The relatives and friends of the deceased will never forget these moments. What can we do about it?

The Parkland, Florida murders have led to massive demonstrations throughout the United States, including a student’s march in Washington, D.C. demanding effective gun control. President Trump has equivocated and the National Rifle Association has, as expected, opposed any controls. The Supreme Court, in the Heller and McDonald decisions clearly indicates that the Second Amendment to the Constitution is the law of the land. Justice John Paul Steves, now retired, dissented in both cases and in both cases the court was split 5-4. In an op-ed published in the New York Times on March 27, Justice Stevens suggested that the gun control demonstrations should instead seek repeal of the Second Amendment, which he calls simple to do. Amending the United States Constitution is anything but simple-it requires a favorable two thirds vote in each House of Congress and ratification by three fourth of the States in a specified period of time.

This will not happen. There remains in the United States a great cultural divide between large urban areas and most of the rest of the United States. This, unfortunately, is poorly understood by both citizens in large urban areas where guns may have little use and citizens of rural states who have a greatly different point of view and have historically enjoyed gun ownership as a Constitutional right. Passage of laws that make honest people into criminals is not the answer.

The problem can be solved. The best solution, in my opinion. is to severely punish all crimes committed with a potentially lethal weapon, whether used in a mom and pop grocery robbery or an act of violence resulting in bodily harm all the way to death. Plea bargaining needs to be discarded in these cases and a mandatory minimum sentence of twenty five years with no possibility of parole should be the sentence upon conviction regardless of the offense and circumstances of the perpetrator as long as a potentially deadly weapon is used. Cases involving death should obviously have more severe penalties.

The Soviet Union banned weapons and required their surrender. So did Nazi Germany. For those too young to know what happened on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He died in Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Texas.

Truly, freedom is expensive. More expensive than we can imagine.

Garry S. Sklar Las Vegas, NV