Like so many other people these days, I regain my composure only to see it crumble in an instant at the piercing sight of a photograph, Daniel Barden with his impish smile and missing front teeth. At the devastating power of a simple sentence, about Charlotte Bacon’s Girl Scout troop: “There were 10 girls in the group. Only five are left.”
This national wallowing serves a purpose — not only to grieve but to summon the resolve for change. There is talk, finally, belatedly, of reinstating the long-lapsed ban on assault weapons. This is an admittedly imperfect, certainly porous solution, but a useful step nonetheless. Even better would be a companion measure, again lapsed with the expiration of the assault weapons ban, to prohibit the manufacture of magazines of more than 10 rounds. It is testament to our political fecklessness that these restrictions were not reimposed in the aftermath of Fort Hood, or Tucson, or Aurora.
And we need to ask whether changes in technology offer other solutions. For example, requiring guns to be stored in safes with fingerprint recognition locks, or equipped with trigger locks in the form of fingerprint readers.
There are two additional areas we must confront to respond effectively to Newtown: first, the power of money in politics; second, the role of the courts.