Live Q&As

That Homeland Security has wasted a great deal of money, is something on which we agree.  That we could do more to secure our schools, is also something about which we agree.  That the kind of security provided at banks, hospitals, and certainly in the NYC office building you mentioned, is any kind of model for securing our schools or preventing last week's massacre, is something about which we do not agree.

None of the examples you sited would be terribly effective in the face of a detrmined murderder armed with multiple semi-automatic weapons equipped with high volume magazines.  Furthermore, the larger, if less obvious, challenge when it comes to securing our schools, lies in the weapons that come in every day -- carreid by students.  But I am not sure that any of that matters right now.

I keep returning to the sense that there is something misguided about policy debates being conducted while many of the dead have yet to be burried.  We will have lot's of that policy conversation today, I can see that, but I hope not at the expense of the compassion that is most centrally needed at this particualr moment.

You are right, on many levels.  Reducing the sale of certain kinds of weapons, while probably helpful, would not address the MORE THAN 250 million guns already on the street.  In fact, there are 89 guns for every 100 Americans.  To put an image with that, you need to picture that there are enough guns so that even most babies could have one in their cribs!  However one feels about gun control, that should be a hard image to make sense of.

We agree about feeling less, not more, safe in a society where everyone walked around armed, but you have pointed out a central feature of the real conversation we need, and it isn't, at least for now, simply about policy or law.  It is about safety, and what makes us feel safe in the world.  Ironically, that is what both many of the most ardent supporters of gun ownership AND most of the most ardent supporters of gun control, both want.

We need to talk about safety, and how we each feel it and need to feel it, and only then can we make policy which will actually have some real impact and have a chance of getting through Congress.

The famiy to whom you are erefering is named Pozner, not Rosen.  And believe me, I am not trying to be picky.  I just think that getting their name right, given the loss of one who carries their name, is important.

You are right about the composure and dignity they displayed, but I would not confuse that with what was going on on the inside, nor would I say that composure is necessarilly more dignified than screaming out in utter agony, or any response in between.

The prayer you mentioned is called in Hebrew, El Malei Rahamim, or in English, God Full of Compassion.  It is the traditonal memorial prayer chanted at Jewish funerals and on the anniversary of a loved one's death.  It's generally hard for me to expeerience God as merciful at a funeral, and pretty darn near impossible when the casket is so tiny, but I think of it as a prayer that we experience Divine compassion at exactly the moment we need it most.

I am with you.  For me, now is a moment to hold those we love close, to expand the circle of those who feel our love, to offer a sense of security to those who are scared, and compassion to those who are wounded.  That, much more than policy debate, is where we need to be -- at least until all of the dead are burried.

If it is true, and I think it is, that all it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing, then I believe it is also true that decency can win out if good people simply commit to do something.  There is no act to small or insigificant when it comes to making a difference, not over the long haul, and certainly not for the one person that is touched by that supposedly small act.  My experiecne is that for the one who is positively impacted, the act is quite large.

You are right, both to feel that more could be done to head off some of these tragedies before they occur, and you are right about the serious downsides of creating a culture of guilt by suspicion and ending our premise that people are innocent until proven guilty.  At such moments it is tempting to minimize those downsides, but I pray that in our panic and pain we do not do so.

These shootings didn't happen when we had racial segragation either, would you like to bring that back as well?  I assume that the answer is "no", and that the larger point you are making is that we need schools to be places which do more than simply transmit information -- that they be places which nurture kids spirits and cultivate compassion and virtue.  About that we agree.  I am not at all certain that public school prayer is the best way to do that, but I appreciate your larger concern.

This has nothing to do with what you call a "kumbaya moment".  though how anyone can so quickly dismiss the centrality of comforting each other in the face of such horror is itself pretty disturbing. 

Your sense that renewed committment to each other is a purely individual act is simply wrong.  That ability is every bit as much a societal and cultural issure as the "action" for which you advocate.  What you fail to realize, I think is that your advocacy is simply another way to comfort yourself.  We need them all, but the order in which we do them can make all of the difference in the world.

You are certainly right about the importance of addressing mental health issues, but it's not either/or, as I think the President has made very clear.  And in all candor, since nobody knows what legislation would actually make us any safer, at least in the short run, all forms of advocacy are simply using this moment to propell a view which the advocate held prior to the murders last week. 

In other words, the more clear you are about what needs to be done now, the less impact the killings actually had on you.  If your really felt any measure of pain about what happened, then you would have to feel even a little bit frozen an uncertain about how to act, what new laws we need, etc.  Anything short of that, from either side of those who are most certain about what to do, sees the murders as a moment of political opportunity, and that is just not right.

I am biased too.  I think gun-ownership in this country is beyond out of control.  I think that we have come to confuse the preservation of a Constitutional right, with the preservation of forms of entertainment.  I think that in a country in which almost 9,000 people died because of gun violence last year alone, the problem we have is far bigger than assault weapons and mass murder, as horrific as that is.

But at the end of the day, if we do not address the animating fears on both sides of this issue, we will never make real progress in solving it.  Fighting about whcih policy can be pushed through at any given moment, and then typically allowed to fall by the wayside when THAT is the politcally expedient thing to do, gets us nowhere.  We need to re-think how we think about these issues, invite people to put their real fears and suspicions on the table, and start addressing them. 

Like you, I belive that if the fears were better addressed, the resulting policies would be both more durable and more impactful.

You are simply mistaken about the clean division that you imagine exists between the personal and the socio-politcal.  Think I am wrong?  How many people are more sympathetic to gun control today than they were a week ago?  Answer, lots.  By the same token, the NRA signs up thousands of new members in the wake of these events and the call for greater gun controll which follows them.  In other words, we are all emotionally effected by such evetns, and in our emotion take politcal action -- a process which has accomplished little. 

As far as quoting sacred texts, my in box has become filled with messages from people quoting texts which justify gun control, and just about as many from other people quoting texts which demand that we not control individuals' access to weapons. 

Even the text you quote, which appears in the Hebrew Bible as "Do not stand by the blood of your brother, or it is upon you as well", gets used by both sides.  One, to proove that we must intervene and take weapons out of peoples' hands, and the other to proove that if we were all better armed, we could protect each other from criminals.

My experience is that moral action can only be taken when there is whole lot less of the morally sanctimony which animates the claimes of too many of those on each side of this issue.  Though to be clear, I do not mean you, or place anything you wrote in that category.

Thank you for those words.  And in the words of a great politcal organizer from the 19th century, "If you will it, it is no dream". 

In other words, if enough of us would take your suggestion to heart, and really only pay attention to those in the media who followed them, the culture would change.  I hope that in today's conversation, I have lived up to the standard you suggested.