Dear Followers and Likers-- if you can't maintain basic courtesy on my page, please allow me to show you the door. This is my page and I do have a right to my beliefs and convictions, as all of you do. I was raised to have the courage to stand behind those convictions and it's too late in life for me to sacrifice my integrity by keeping the most passionate of them secret. Those who tell me to 'stay out of politics and stick to music', or, in other words 'keep your mouth shut' are perhaps so obsessed with the Second Amendment that they haven't noticed the First.

I have as much concern for the safety of my children as any mother alive and if that makes me 'political', so be it. I don't hurl insults because I think some of you have a bewildering attachment to military-grade weapons and a refusal to consider mandatory background checks. I'd appreciate the same civility.

For ten years, I was on the board of PAX- an organization whose sole purpose was to prevent gun violence among children. (PAX merged with Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence several years ago.) After ten years of meeting grief-stricken parents of children killed by guns, I had to quit. I couldn't take the endless parade of innocent people with shattered lives. It was eating at my soul. More pre-schoolers die by guns every year than police officers in the line of duty, and people seem to accept it as collateral damage for 'freedom.' Whose freedom are we talking about? Certainly not a classroom of first-graders lying in a pool of blood. And we're not talking about the freedom of their parents either, whose lives are utterly destroyed.

In 2000, as a representative of PAX, I attended the Million Mom March in Washington, DC with my husband, my year-old baby and my 11 year old daughter. I had a lot of hope that day-- the energy was powerful and the thousands of parents holding pictures of their dead children was a mandate in itself.

At the end of the day, my friend Patty Smyth, who marched alongside me with Bette Midler, Emmylou Harris, Raffi and many, many more, said 'if nothing else, we helped carry the burden of the grieving mothers for one day.' I wrote an article for Rolling Stone about that day. I was full of expectation that our elected officials would rise to the occasion and enact basic gun safety legislation like background checks, safety locks and a ban on military-grade weapons.
It turned out that, in fact, all we did was help carry the burden for a day. Nothing changed.

Several years later, my precious daughter, Chelsea, was held up at gunpoint in the jewelry store where she worked. The gunmen held her for twenty minutes. I'm so grateful she was not killed and I'm also so acutely aware that the difference between me and the moms carrying the photos on the march is a split second. Do NOT tell me that Chelsea 'should have had a gun.' If she had, she'd be dead. She is not physically or mentally able to coolly aim a gun at someone who is already pointing a gun at HER, and fire sharp-shooter style at another human being while terror-stricken. Nor am I. Nor are millions of other people.

The logic that 'if more law-abiding citizens had guns, there would be fewer mass shootings' is confounding to the point of nihilism. What's the end game? Every first grade teacher should have a gun in her desk to prevent another massacre like Newtown? Every pastor in his pulpit? Every movie-goer, mall shopper, night club patron and mom pushing a stroller, until we are reduced to anarchy and violence in every social venue of this country?

If you can make a compelling argument why we have laws requiring safety locks on medicines to protect children, but no law requiring a safety lock on a gun, I'd like to hear it. If you can make a compelling argument why a mentally disturbed youth should be able to easily stockpile military-grade weapons because of loopholes in the law and no background checks, please-- go ahead. I'd like to hear an articulate and reasoned logic behind that thought.

The Constitution is a living document-- if it hadn't changed since its inception, I personally would not be allowed to vote. The language 'well-regulated militia' doesn't equal 'mentally ill person with stockpile of automatic weapons' in my interpretation, but if you believe the amendment extends to that, then I believe Congress needs to amend the amendment, as it has done before in other cases.

Personal handguns and hunting rifles will never be banned in this country. Not a single person talking about the gun issue, that I have heard or read, has suggested that.

If one classroom of first graders can be saved just by requiring background checks and a ban on military style weapons, wouldn't it be worth it? One teenager in a movie theater, one student nurse, one pastor in the pulpit, one little pre-schooler? If the answer is no, or the answer is just more vicious rhetoric, then we should be ashamed. That child could be yours. It was almost mine. So don't tell me to keep my mouth shut.

Thanks to the kind follower who posted this fantastic essay:

https://idlehandsworkshop.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/lets-not-talk-about-gun-control/