In my 40-year career as a counseling psychologist, I came to understand that some losses are so horrific, so traumatizing, survivors are unable to find closure to their grief.
The grief slowly fades, but it is never entirely resolved. Such traumatic events usually involve the sudden, violent, therefore unexpected, death of someone very dear. The death can be from natural disasters and accidents, but the violent death of a child is the most traumatizing.
This reality is driving the parents of murdered children to coalesce into a movement to prevent such unending grief for other parents.
Unfortunately, their voices are muted by shouts of gun-rights advocates who decry any effort to protect children and others from wanton mass murder as a violation of their constitutional right to be armed whenever and wherever they want. They use claims of personal protection as justification for blocking regulations directed at protecting the most vulnerable in society.
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With a conservative majority on the Supreme Court constituted of justices who claim to be able to read the minds of the authors of our Constitution, backed by a congress constantly fundraising instead of doing its job, any effort at gun control seems futile.
At some point, however, the general public, who already supports various proposed gun laws, will actually demand that Congress enact measures that effectively curtail mass murder in various public spaces and in homes across the country.
Then those complicit in these heinous crimes will be held accountable and laws will change.
Robert B. Harris
Albany