Our inside voices need to get louder on gun control

Another school massacre.

Another letter from a superintendent trying to reassure us that they are doing everything humanly possible to keep our kids safe. 

Scroll through the news: Experts offer suggestions on how to talk to our kids.

Increasingly we feel unable to remain calm as the torturous details of this latest slaughter trickle out. We need our kids to function and remain in good spirits for their next active shooter drill. We need them to stay calm so that we may all carry on.

Cheerleading, perhaps, as we continue to accept such an unacceptable situation.

We heed yet another call from politicians to deliver our thoughts and prayers as they raise their hands and shoulders skyward against an idea that the right to bear arms is unassailable. 

Everything else is fair game, I guess.

We will question all motives. 

Even my husband, a supporter of weapons bans wondered aloud: "Do you think Beto was pandering?"

I tell him that I reject his question's premise ... unless we redefine pandering as begging for much-needed change.

"Beto said what we ourselves think. We should all be so impolite.

My husband apologized for asking. He just wants to be on the same page.

The one not sullied by motive and opportunity.

We will distract ourselves with calls for more security. Maybe we'll consider building metal detectors into every doorway. Maybe we'll require our teachers to be armed. More and more will die, but we will accept the press conference jargon ... that it could have been worse.

It has only gotten worse.  

The only change we'll see is the Gun Deaths line on a graph shoots ever upwards. It's been two years since that line shot past automobile accidents as the Number One killer of children under 18.

Still, the seventy percent of us who want effective Gun Control are unable to thwart the thirty percent who are managing to enact Gyn Control instead. 

None of this is ok. But what can we do? 

Why can't we enforce the "well-regulated militia" part of the second amendment?

Why can't we ban military-style weapons?

Why can't we require insurance and licensing for every single gun? 

We have been effective in creating a system that protects neither life nor liberty. Or ... as thethirty percentt are so fond of telling us ... we live in a Republic not a Democracy. 

It's easy to feel hopeless. 

The gun industry is banking on that despair for its livelihood. a never-ending circle of violence. 

There is so much more we can do to exert political pressure over this status quo. We should remind ourselves that Beto, using his inside voice to speak truth to power, and being shouted down with expletives, should strike a nerve within us all. 

Mamie Till showed the world what hatred did to her child. It is well past time we make our leaders take a long, hard look at what their greed keeps doing to ours.