LETTER from SUSAN MOSS

Sandy Hook Memories Still Resonate

To the Editor:

I remember the moment when I first heard about the shooting of first graders in Newtown, Conn. I was driving home from work, on a back road between Cooperstown and Oneonta. My immediate and natural response was to pull over, get out of my car and scream “My God, 6-year-olds! What is happening in this country?” The outrage and pain of it was overwhelming. I can’t even imagine what the families of those children went through.

This is the memory I have in response to Rick Brockway’s idea about Otsego County becoming a “sanctuary” for gun owners. I am a gun owner, and I don’t need a sanctuary. I also don’t need an assault weapon.

I am not worried about “them” (whoever that is) coming to take away my guns. First it was President Obama, then Hillary Clinton, now…who? It hasn’t materialized and just floats around as a paranoid ideation in a cloud of misinformation and fear. If someone is “coming to take my guns,” I hope they call first so I can put on the coffee.

My other response, when I read Brockway’s quote from none other than Adolph Hitler : “To conquer a nation first disarm its citizens,” is to wonder if Hitler knew that there are other ways to “disarm” people which go far beyond taking away their firearms.

You disarm people when you make them afraid; you disarm people when you violate the necessary social contracts which work well (like driving on the right side of the road) and
protect them; you disarm people when you withhold information that they need to carry on.

Most of all, you disarm people when you lie incessantly and make it impossible for them to
know what’s true or false, what’s real or fantasy, what’s right or wrong. Seems we are already disarmed, to me.

SUSAN MOSS
Oneonta