Is Anybody Listening? | Mary Jo Melone

Questions your six-year-old asks you:
Why does a zebra have stripes?
Can I have more macaroni and cheese?
Can you help me with my homework?
Why do I have to go to bed now?
Why did that man in the movie theatre hurt all those people?

Questions your teenager asks you:
Why do I have to do the dishes?
Are you going to buy me a car?
What? Me smoke weed?
Why do you treat me like I’m still a baby? I’m not a baby!
So dude, how many people do you think an AR-15 could blow away?

Questions you ask your husband:
Did you hear they’re getting a divorce?
Do I look fat in this dress?
When will you learn to put the seat down?
Do we really have to go to your parents again?
You hunt. How could anybody say with a straight face that they need an AR-15 to hunt?

Questions you ask yourself:
What does it mean that some people who say they are law-abiding, are better armed than the police?
Should I buy my children bullet-proof vests the way I once bought them car seats?
How could I go on if they were slaughtered?
Do we have the right to still call this a civilized country?
And somebody gave Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize?

When he was running for office and made promises that made so many people believe in him, Obama said that if he was elected he would seek to have the ban on assault weapons that lapsed during the Bush administration reinstated. Instead, under this president, you can pack heat on an Amtrak train and Yellowstone or any other national park. What could he have been thinking? The NRA will always despise him; the nation’s most paranoid lobby is convinced that Obama has let it roll over him because he intends to destroy the Second Amendment in his next term and so has been busy in his first lulling gun-owners everywhere into complacency.

A president leads by setting a national agenda. Even if he is stymied when he tries to do the right and the reasonable, his words make us think, and eventually, ideas once dismissed are taken seriously and carry the day. The notion that African-Americans deserved civil rights was at one time a joke. Some day in the future, every one of us will have health insurance. But when it comes to gun control, this president, not to mention his cowardly party, is afraid. His silence is louder—and more telling—than the crack of any gun.

Mary Jo Melone, former columnist with the Tampa Bay Times, is a writer in Tampa.

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