I have a six-year-old nephew.

[Brigid]

He is all boy, and looks just like his dad -- who, by the way, owns hunting rifles but doesn't feel compelled to pack heat everywhere he goes. "Kevin" walked at 10 months and is already starting to read. He loves school, and loves the super heroes. Spiderman, Batman, and Ironman are his favorites. He laughs at Disney cartoons and Angry Birds. He wrestles with his big brother and plays with his Tonka Toy earth moving equipment that looks just like the equipment he sees when he visits his dad at work in his concrete construction business. He calls a backhoe an "up-down."

One day "Kevin" will inherit that business, which his "papaw" started back in the eighties, if he wants it. Or maybe he will want to do something else.There is also a piece of land that has been in his dad's family for generations. Whatever his future is, we, his family, should not be having to live in fear that it will be cut short because somebody got hold of a gun who shouldn't have been able to get near one.

So screw you, NRA -- you won't stop us from finally getting sensible gun legislation passed so that no more parents will be burying their kids because of gun violence. It's time, whether you like it or not.

[patrice]

1. I wonder if too many people aren't thinking of "Kevin" too narrowly, that is, they're willing to

take their chances on whether their "Kevin", directly related or not, will encounter the same/similar fate as our Newtown kindergartners. They "make that calculation" and decide to go with the odds, justifying their own passivity and inaction on the issues, 'cause "it ain't goin' to happen" to one of theirs.

Problem is that is the wrong way to think about it: what people SHOULD be concerned with is how these kinds of events, especially those writ large by assault weapons, their sophisticated accessories, and even larger weapons, WILL have indirect consequences on the lives and liberties and happiness of people who never involve themselves in the ownership of weaponry one way or another nor directly experience the violence and those ripples of consequences will only become more and more extreme, affecting the freedoms of more and more people, if we don't try for whatever chance we have of reducing these events to whatever degree possible.