One of my colleagues wrote to me so passionately about the terrible gun violence he witnesses every day, that I wanted to share it with all of you. You can call it a ‘Guest Blog’ from the Field — a Hospital Security Director in a Major U.S. City.
The gun lobby had several recent legal “wins” for the gun rights advocates in Texas, Indiana, and Tennessee. Apparently lawmakers and gun rights advocates find it a sane and reasonable policy to open up the workplace to armed employees.
It t is also clear that our lawmakers are not satisfied with our current national gun carnage. Currently, we shoot to death about a 100 people a day in the United States, including 25 children killed every three days. And this tally accounts for only those killed by guns.
This doesn’t include all those I see on a daily basis who are shot, crippled, maimed and ruined by the daily shooting gallery in the USA. In order to continue to make money and sell more guns, the gun rights advocates, and the legislators they have paid off, corrupted and stripped of reason, are intent on even greater carnage and human tragedy.
Every day I witness the extreme becoming mainstream, and even commonplace.
Guns are now finding their way into the workplace, brought into churches, brought into our colleges and universities. They are brought to hospitals, and shot off over highway bridges.
The logic is totally missing. We are already a nation awash in fear and loathing. We hate people we don’t know and don’t understand. The answer to this problem is NOT to arm EVEN MORE people and have guns readily available to everyone.
Obviously, the recent horrors of Arizona and the slaughter of innocent people in a Safeway parking lot, has already been forgotten by security professionals and criminologists. There is no condemnation or follow up about a terminally troubled young man and the ease in which he purchased a semi-automatic pistol and 30 shot clips.
There has been no rallying cry to address the ease in which tormented and troubled and dangerous individuals on the margins of our society can easily obtain weapons of human mass destruction. These realities are not relevant and cannot be discussed. And in today’s political climate to even MENTION this makes one a pariah, or a “liberal”, or a “communist”.
I have been in the Security and Prevention profession for over 35 years, so I can easily dismiss the attacks from gun rights advocates and zealots. And in fairness, I have found many gun rights people to be in fact reasoned and decent and willing to engage in reasoned discourse.
What troubles me, and why I wanted to write directly to YOU, is that the vast majority of professionals in the Security profession totally bypass, ignore and in fact, minimize the reality and tragedy that is our national gun slaughter. As a profession, we have done nothing to challenge these trends, or address them, or at the very least, debate the current flood of laws designed to turn American work places into armed camps.
And this in my view is nothing less than a tragedy.