We must address the violence

Opinion: December 21, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

Sun Herald (Biloxi, Miss.): Something is dreadfully wrong in America.

We have known that, or should have known that, for quite a long time. But each savage attack on a campus or at a shopping mall or in a theater has been rationalized away as the isolated act of one crazed individual.

Our national failure to respond in a meaningful way to this drumbeat of death across the land is a burden that each of us will have to contemplate in the private place where each of our consciences resides.

Always a few have spoken up, but their voices have been lost in the deafening silence and inaction of those who we elect to represent us as a people. So their failure is our failure, their inaction our inaction. That is the way that a representative democracy works and we must own that.

But after the horror that was visited on the children and brave teachers at Newtown we must, repeat must, accept our own responsibility in this too long-neglected national problem, and insist of our president and our Congress that they act quickly in a way that will address all of the contributing causes to the malady that is striking our citizens over and over again. We must hold those whom we elect to accountability in this grave matter.

We are nothing more than a small paper in Mississippi and we have been silent, too, but no more.

We all have some idea about the contributing causes to this great rage that is visited time and time against the unsuspecting and innocent by the succession of killers.

Whatever the causes, singular or combined, that contribute to the killing, they must be addressed and remedies proposed by a national Commission on Violence in America.

Mental illness is clearly a major factor, as perhaps violent video games and other media where so much carnage, so casually depicted, may well inure its spectators to the revulsion that should be attached to the bloody spectre of their evil deeds. And yes, the question of assault weapons, background checks and the capacity of ammo clips and magazines should be on the table, as well as school security.

Put simply, everything should be on the table as the commission studies this advanced cancer in our nation.