On my way to Boston I drove through the empty streets of Sandy Hook, Newtown, Connecticut after the massacre of 20 children and 6 adults in 2012. I could not describe the grief that I saw in the air from the victims who were killed so mercilessly in cold blood. It was the same grief I saw when I visited the town of Balingiga in the Philippines where US soldiers were ordered by General Smith to kill every Filipino over 10 years old in 1902. It was also the same grief I saw when I visited the Vietnam War Memorial in Hanoi during the 50th anniversary of the My Lai Massacre when 504 unarmed older men, women and children were killed by the US military.
Sandy
Hook mourns its dead and continues to seek some form of redress and remedy.
Balingiga is not even a footnote in US history. Americans do not remember or
care what happened in this small island of Samar in Southern Philippines.
Vietnam is still suffering the years of Agent Orange, carpet bombing, napalm,
and mines; there are still children being born with congenital defects and
farmers dying or getting maimed from the mines and poisons in the field.
Nothing much has been done by the US to remedy the situation. Not in Samar,
Vietnam or Sandy Hook.
For some people, grief — and fear — remain even years later and we shudder to
think that lives were snuffed so cruelly at a particular moment. It is called
PTSD nowadays. Perhaps I feel this way because I was born in 1940 and war
broke out between the Japanese and Americans in December of 1941. I spent at
least 4 years of my childhood during the war. The decade of the 1940s was
actually wartime. After the surrender of Japan in 1945, there was the
Hukbalahap rebellion, really a civil war, that lasted for years. Children of
war carry the terrors through life.
Probably not novel but a theoretical question that occurred to me: If the government is responsible for the safety and health of its citizens, why cannot the victims of a massacre and their families be able to sue the state for neglect of its duty? If you have a passenger in your car or plane during an accident, you can sue the driver and/or owner. Or, if you have a guest in your house and she gets hurt, you can be sued for it, right? So at least theoretically there should be a ground for legal action against whomever is responsible – and accountable — for our safety and lives. Besides, it was the government that created the Second Amendment and caused the proliferation of guns and the escalation of gun violence.
Another idea that should be considered: If the Second Amendment brings about so much indescribable pain and death, why is there no move to scrap it? There is really nothing in the civilized world that is similar to it. I do not think there is a country in the world that has a similar constitutional provision. The amendment seems to be considered so sacrosanct that nobody dares to question its validity in civilized life. Is it any more sacred that other rights? At the very least, there should be a discussion for its meaning and validity.