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After the fact, in that Washington hotel ballroom, rising from under the table with Boston Globe correspondents, one of the daughters of the late Robert Kennedy, gunned down 60 years ago after his brother, President John Kennedy was killed by a rifle shot, said to Senator Jamie Raskin, "Imagine school children all across the country every single day live with this fear".
The whole country saw the video of the press ducking under tables in their finery. Each one has a personal story to tell about an evening when the White House Press Correspondents expected their annual event would be about the First Amendment until a lone gunmen carrying loaded guns disrupted the dinner laid out on platters and champagne flutes bubbling to the brim.
These mature, seasoned professional adults have written numerous stories about too many other live shootings across the USA---too often in classrooms where children and a few adults are the only ones that come between the shots fired by someone with too much anger to bear---so instead bears arms---claiming that right under the Second Amendment.
"Security" was served up as soup du jour at the press conference hastily held at the White House. Security undeniably was in full view and then some, and pressed (pun intended) into action on a moment's notice. Security worked to prevent a massacre.
Security is second to guns when almost anyone can get one and carry it into any environment where people become sitting ducks---like carnival ducks all in a row---while the shooter has every opportunity to hit at least one duck that moves into the cross hairs of a gun in hand.
Security is not the issue--guns are the issue. Ask the adults who show-up at schools after receiving a fateful text from a child's school if security or guns mattered when that bullet flew through the air at their child. Sure, we have seen some who were in charge of security failing to do what they were there to do, but, security was present in spite of them. If it were not for the guns, those children in school and those church and synagogue goers who died by a bullet could tell the world what it was like to face that fear. After the fact it is too late to blame security. After the fact is time to say THIS IS THE LAST TIME!
On the anniversary of a mass shooting in the tiny school in Dunblane, Scotland, I wrote a blog about how those parents and other responsible adults in the community determined that would be the last. They succeeded in changing the gun laws throughout the entire UK. It was the last school shooting.
Americans turn a blind eye when it comes to the weaker among us. We will see what happens now that the powerful are in the sights of gun-carrying individuals intent on taking a room full of grown-ups to their knees before they get to eat their words, or finish their creme brulee.
Will this be the last time---long overdue?
Every reporter in that room was fortunate to live to write about it. Therefore, I should think the First Amendment gives carte blanch to writing headlines that won't go away until guns go away for good. Laws are needed now to stop the carnival game played by some under the shield of the Second Amendment.
