America is, very appropriately, in deep mourning about Newtown, Connecticut’s recent horror. “Newtown” will forever be etched in our collective memory as a day of fathomless national pain.
The horrific event, however, has the positive effect of forcing us to engage in a serious debate about gun-control issues. It serves, as well, to highlight another moral conundrum, a conundrum of massive proportions.
Consider the moral illogic of the following: the murder of twenty six-or-seven year olds tops all the other news stories of the nation—as well it should— but had those twenty young ones been killed a week prior to their birth, the fact would not have produced a line of reportage. In fact, if known and/or reported, those who had had any part in their deaths would be hailed as avant-garde members of the cultural elite of America.
How is it, in the name of common logic and common decency, that bullets are seen as more vulgar than medical instruments? Who weeps for the millions of pre-born Americans in their tiny graves or incinerators? Who even reports them? To fail to see the moral dissonance between those two facts is to be, let us honestly confess, moral Orwellians.
The admission of our moral lunacy would not solve any problem, in and of itself. It might have the salutary effect, however, of evidencing, at once, both our mental honesty and our moral sanity. Not a bad beginning in ameliorating the growing violence in America.